ABSTRACT
Contemporary France remains strongly dominated, on the one hand, by the universalist ideology inherited from the philosophy of the Enlightenment, but increasingly open, on the other hand, to a wide diversity of cultural norms and habits which challenge the traditional contrast between highbrow and lowbrow culture. Contemporary France, like many western countries, is affected by the kind of symbolic divide that Pierre Bourdieu described in Distinction. In contemporary France is probably more the in tensification of pre-existing tendencies than a complete renewal of class and power relations. The sociology of culture has long been dominated by the assumption that social class structure was linked isomorphically to the structure of an individual's cultural practices and aesthetic preferences. Indeed, a great amount of empirical evidence supports the growing eclecticism of upper-class cultural consumption. Eclecticism may therefore be understood as a generic disposition toward culture and an openness to diversity.
