Writing in last week’s Time, Don Morrison lamented how parochial French cinema, books, painting and music have become — despite the vast state subsidies deployed in defence of the country’s “cultural exception”.

“Once admired for the dominating excellence of its writers, artists and musicians, France today is a wilting power in the global cultural marketplace,” Morrison wrote. He described most French films as “amiable low-budget trifles for the domestic market”, observed how “only a handful” of new novels find a publisher outside France, said Paris had long been supplanted as a visual arts centre by London and New York, and — mourning the absence of a new Debussy, Piaf or Charles Trenet — urged readers to “name a French pop star who is not Johnny Hallyday”.
No redder rag could have been waved before the grand old man of French letters, 89-year-old novelist and French Academy member Maurice Druon, who in a blistering retort accused Morrison of confusing “culture and entertainment”.

“Culture is not determined by this week’s box-office returns. Culture takes place over the duration,” said Druon, who noted that it was the “fourth or fifth” occasion on which he’s taken up arms over the years to disprove an alleged “Death of French Civilisation”. A similar counterblast came from Teresa Cremisi, head of the Flammarion publishing house, who deplored the “mercantilist” view that sees culture solely in terms of immediate returns.
In the Left-wing magazine Le Nouvel Observateur, commentator Didier Jacob said the American view of France could be reduced to a simple formula: “De Gaulle + Sartre + the baguette + Sophie Marceau’s breasts = French culture. Whereas — as we all know — it is infinitely more rich”.

The debate over France’s cultural contribution to the world is of course an old one, and can be boiled down to a simple proposition: “Just because a work of art finds no takers, does it mean it is worthless?” For the French, the notion that popularity (read money) is the only criterion for valuing creativity is deeply noxious. As art-dealer Anne Faggionato put it in a withering attack on Morrison’s article, “these pseudo-analyses are based purely on graphs and numbers. But you can’t measure art like that: these econometrics are absurd, and the future will prove it”.

But for France’s critics, the difficulty with discarding popularity as a benchmark is that there is nothing left to replace it — except the often self-serving arguments of a state-subsidised artistic “elite”. And that — the argument goes — is very much the problem of France today. Even Liberation — normally the house journal of intellos and literati — conceded that all is not well: “Our country has indeed descended into a certain navel-gazing at a time when the rest of the world is changing fast. We find it hard to produce popular culture”.

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