Culture and political power: from a marriage of convenience to a consummated divorce

Culture is no longer the theater of power. Once an instrument of political influence, it now struggles to justify its public funding. How can we renew democratic dialogue in a context where cultural practices have profoundly evolved, under the effect of social, economic and technological transformations?

The observation of a crisis: when elected officials desert culture

French cultural sector professionals are going through a period of profound questioning in the face of significant budget cuts decided by local elected officials from all political sides. If we make a comparison, in the campaign for the 1977 municipal elections, culture occupied a preponderant, even paramount place in the programs of all candidates, across all political tendencies. This centrality of the cultural question in local political debate already contrasted with national campaigns, but it testified to a consensus on the symbolic and social importance of public cultural action.

Today, in 21^st-century electoral campaigns, whether municipal, regional or national, the subject of culture is almost systematically not even mentioned. This absence is not a simple oversight or negligence: it reveals a profound transformation in the relationship between culture and political power. How should we interpret this shift? Who bears responsibility for this evolution? More fundamentally, is this truly a problem to be solved, or might it not rather be an opportunity for a renewed understanding of the mutations affecting the roles and functions of culture and cultural professionals in a world that has undergone radical transformations?

Antonio Gramsci writes in his Prison Notebooks (1951): “the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born: during this interregnum the most varied morbid phenomena are observed”. His analysis perfectly illuminates the current situation of the subsidized cultural sector, caught between an exhausted historical model and an uncertain future.

It is appropriate to consider these changes, certainly violent and destabilizing for the actors in the sector, as a moment of crisis, in the etymological sense of the term (from the Greek krisis, meaning decision, judgment). This crisis could be an opportunity for collective learning to reshape practices and relationships differently, rather than mobilizing for a corporatist and backward-looking « fight », which is known to be doomed to failure. Indeed, citizens no longer feel concerned by the « defense » of this sector, now considered « non-essential » since 2020, and recognized as such by the majority of the professionals themselves, due to the almost total absence of mobilization against the liberticidal political measures of that recent period. Thus, instead of seeking scapegoats among the elected officials, accused of political choices that constrain creative freedom, it seems to me richer in terms of action perspectives to adopt a sociological perspective, in order to start by trying to deeply understand the social phenomena at work that are transforming the positions of all the actors involved.

Of course, we can only understand and sympathize with the dismay of artistic teams and cultural venue managers who see their subsidies drastically reduced, often brutally and without prior consultation, forcing closures of venues, companies and other layoffs. It is precisely this brutality that characterizes a moment of crisis. Let us recall Michel Foucault, who wrote in The Will to Knowledge (1976):

“Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power.”

“There is therefore no, in relation to power, place of the great Refusal — soul of revolt, focus of all rebellions, pure law of the revolutionary. But resistances that are special cases: possible, necessary, improbable, spontaneous, savage, solitary, concerted, rampant, violent, irreconcilable, quick to compromise, interested or sacrificial; by definition they can only exist in the strategic field of power relations”

In my view, this resistance can and must, if it wants to be transformative in reality, take the form of creative reinvention rather than simple defensive opposition.

Culture as an instrument of power: a French history

To understand the deep reasons for the disappearance of culture from the political concerns of local, regional or national elected officials, we must first deconstruct a founding myth. Contrary to what one might believe, this eclipse is not the result of a despotic project by the right driven by far-right ideas, aimed at destroying a culture that would potentially disturb their conservative values. The explanation is both simpler and more complex: subsidized culture has never had the primary function of citizen emancipation, even if this justifying narrative has imposed itself since the creation of the Ministry of Culture in 1959 under the aegis of André Malraux.

Pierre Bourdieu, in Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979), already demonstrated very well how “taste classifies, and classifies the classifier”. He also wrote:

“Objectively and subjectively aesthetic position-takings, the choice of furniture, clothing or makeup, are so many occasions to experience or affirm the position occupied in social space as a rank to be held or distance to be maintained.”

Bourdieu’s analysis reveals the real social function of culture: a tool of social reproduction, of reaffirmation of the symbolic places of power and of exclusion through well-meaning contempt for those who do not master legitimate cultural codes.

This is not about questioning the sincere generosity of many artists who aspire to share their creation with as many people as possible. However, we must acknowledge that this generosity is often accompanied by ambiguity: the desire to share mingles with the need for recognition and admiration. As Rousseau already said in his Letter to d’Alembert on Spectacles (1758), theater can be “a school of morals” but also a place of vanity where “one goes less to see than to be seen”.

This ambivalence does not invalidate the real emancipatory effects that certain works or certain cultural experiences can produce. But we must recognize that these moments of authentic emancipation constitute more the exception than the rule in the overall functioning of the French subsidized cultural system.

From Louis XIV to the Fifth Republic: culture in service of national glory

Contemporary justifications for public funding of culture, democratization, emancipation, social cohesion, are only a posteriori constructions intended to legitimize, within the framework of a post-revolutionary democracy, a practice whose historical foundations are quite different. Historical reality, which traverses political regimes, from absolute monarchy to the current Republic, reveals that culture has always been supported, encouraged and subsidized because it constituted a privileged instrument of national and international influence, in other words, an eminently political, identity and diplomatic issue.

Marc Fumaroli, in The Cultural State. Essay on a Modern Religion (1991), traces this genealogy:

“French cultural policy, invented by Richelieu and systematized by Louis XIV, was in service of the glory of the king and the kingdom. It was the first and for a long time the only one in the world to conceive culture as an instrument of power.”

This instrumental conception of culture was not hidden: it openly displayed itself as participating in monarchical grandeur. Under Louis XIV, the creation of the French Academy (1635), the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture (1648), the Royal Academy of Dance (1661), the Royal Academy of Music (1669) and the Royal Academy of Architecture (1671) constituted a coherent system of control and promotion of the arts in service of royal power. The French language itself became an instrument of influence: spoken in all European courts, it conveyed a vision of the world, an aesthetic and, consequently, political power.

It is important to understand that culture supported by power is not limited to shows or novels: it encompasses language itself, the representation of the world it carries, the intellectuals who think and transmit it. Culture transcends simple artistic production to become a global system of representation and legitimization of power.

But today, cultural actors and artists, frightened, want to defend “creative freedom” against political decisions that harm it, notably censorship. What exactly is this so-called freedom? The example of Molière in the 17^th century perfectly illustrates the subtle dialectic between power, allegiance, freedom and transgression, which is a strategy of true-false freedom, still at work today, yet in the process of breaking down. Molière’s plays, which explored with remarkable freedom the social criticism of his time while touching on universal questions, were financed by the very king whose autocratic power they seemed to criticize. This apparent contradiction actually reveals the great political intelligence of power holders, whether divine right monarchs or elected officials by universal suffrage: their capacity to integrate transgression into the very heart of their legitimization system.

As Michel de Certeau analyzed in The Practice of Everyday Life, Volume I: Arts of Doing (1980):

“If we want to identify the force and ways of doing of power, we must look twice, because it marks itself all the better as it conceals itself more. The visibility of power is inverse to its effectiveness: the more subtle it is, the more it imposes itself without noise, the more it invades daily life under the cover of evidence or neutrality. [...] The property of power is precisely to mask its procedures under the appearance of nature, common sense or necessity.”

Thus, the grip of power is not manifested only by visible constraint, but especially by the installation of norms that seem natural. By financing its own critics, power demonstrates its magnanimity and openness, thus reinforcing its legitimacy. This instrumentalization does not cancel the aesthetic or critical value of works, Molière’s plays remain masterpieces of universal scope, but it reveals the historical complexity, up to today, of relationships between artistic creation and political power. We know how much the appointments of artists to the direction of major cultural institutions are far more political than artistic choices.

This echoes Michel Schneider’s analysis in The Comedy of Culture (1993), where he vitriolicly analyzes the mutual interests between artists and cultural institutions (after resigning from his position as director of music at the Ministry of Culture):

“There is in France a Ministry of Culture, a singularity in a democracy. Since 1981, its interventions have multiplied: events, merchandise, consumption, culture seems diverse and lively. Isn’t it the opposite? Fever indicates malaise. Beyond a critique of court culture, with its customs, grimaces, flaws and ridiculous aspects, we must analyze the tensions that always exist between art and politics, culture and power. For, conducted by the left or the right, cultural policy conceals risks. The arts perhaps have the ministry they deserve, and the ministry the artists who justify it. That art divorces from meaning, form, beauty, that it no longer says anything to anyone, that there are no longer works or audiences, what does it matter, as long as there are still artists and politicians, and they continue to support each other: a subsidy for a signature at the bottom of an electoral manifesto. The curtain falls, we must judge the play. Ministry of Culture? No, government of artists. But we do not govern culture, and it is not a means of government. Nothing is worse than a prince who takes himself for an artist, except an artist who takes himself for a prince.”

Theater as symbolic place of power: a political architecture

To understand why, in 1977, all candidates for municipal elections placed culture at the forefront of their programmatic concerns, we must analyze the social and political function of cultural venues in France during the Thirty Glorious Years. Influential constituents, those who could be called “influencers” before the term existed, assiduously frequented cultural venues. More significantly, the elected officials themselves, regardless of political affiliation, were regulars at these spaces.

This attendance was not motivated by a disinterested love of theater, dance or cinema, but by acute awareness that these places constituted privileged spaces for the exercise and representation of power. The very architecture of the Italian-style theater materialized this political function: the organization into lateral boxes and the hierarchization of audiences according to the height of seats created a social microcosm where public and private affairs were negotiated, all enhanced by the pageantry of high-quality artistic productions.

Richard Sennett, in The Fall of Public Man (1977), analyzes this function of theater as public space par excellence, and brings nuances to its modalities:

“18^th-century theater was indeed a place where society came to look at itself, a mirror of social life, where rank distinctions were both ostentatiously present — through reserved seats, dress, customs — and, paradoxically, momentarily abolished in the collective experience of the spectacle. The audience, by sharing the performance, lived a moment where individuality gave way to collective belonging, where social distance was replayed and neutralized in apparent sociability. Thus, theater was not only entertainment, but a stage where society experimented with its own accord and tensions.”

The symbolic place of political power was therefore cultural space, and more specifically the theater hall. An apparent paradox was also played out there: on stage, actors could sharply criticize the powerful, who applauded them from their boxes. This configuration benefited all actors in the system: the artist gained recognition for their critical engagement, the politician demonstrated their open-mindedness and capacity to accept contestation, thus legitimizing their power within the democratic framework.

This is why culture occupied a central place in political programs almost 50 years ago: it constituted the symbolic place par excellence of power, the space where political legitimacy was negotiated and represented in a democratic society. In 50 years, the world has been transformed, and the paradigm that structures the function of culture in society has indeed changed.

The golden age of cultural democratization: between emancipatory utopia and social reproduction

The baby boomers, the generation born in the immediate post-World War II period, benefited from the exceptional economic conditions of the Thirty Glorious Years to experience unprecedented social advancement. Cultural practices constituted an essential marker of this social elevation, which transcended traditional political divisions.

It is important to note that this aspiration to elevation through culture concerned just as much, if not more, popular milieus, politically organized, notably around the French Communist Party. Communist municipalities were among the most ardent promoters of ambitious cultural policies, driven by a conception of elevation that was not primarily economic but intellectual and moral.

Jack Lang, in A Cultural Policy for Europe (1987), testifies to this era:

“In the 1960s and 1970s, culture was perceived as a fundamental right, a tool of collective emancipation. André Malraux’s houses of culture coexisted with popular education initiatives, creating a territorial network unique in the world.”

The ideal was that working classes could access theater and thus broaden their sensible and intellectual horizons, discover universes escaping both their laborious daily life and the nascent grip of television, which remained a luxury good for many modest households. The feeling of intellectual and moral emancipation provided by frequenting artistic works in these progressive municipalities validated, in the eyes of citizens as well as elected officials, the merit of voluntarist and costly cultural policies.

Citizens encountered their elected officials during shows, openings, festivals. Culture thus wove a network of political sociability, creating what Jürgen Habermas called in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) an enlarged “bourgeois public sphere,” where the different components of local society met and dialogued. This dynamic combined vertical approaches of academic cultural democratization, major shows presented to spectators, and more horizontal approaches of popular education, what we today call cultural democracy, in fruitful complementarity.

However, even if this model presented undeniable virtues and created a virtuous circle of mutual enrichment, we must not obscure its also intrinsically politicking dimension: these cultural spaces, these quality shows and these enriching sociocultural activities remained supported by political leaders precisely because they constituted places of exercise and representation of power.

The great disconnection: the progressive exclusion of working classes

The idyllic picture I have just painted now belongs to the past. Two concomitant movements have progressively eroded this model of consensual cultural policy. The first is remarkably documented by Marjorie Glas in When Art Chases Away the Popular (2023). She analyzes the progressive loss of the social vocation of public theater in favor of aesthetic distinction logics. She illuminates the processes of professionalization, institutionalization and hierarchization that participate in the symbolic eviction of working classes from cultural venues and questions the capacity of theater to fulfill a true social role today.

“Founded on the belief in the social utility of theater, its political function and its openness to all audiences, public theater has progressively refocused on itself and its internal issues. The heroization of the artist has gone hand in hand with the marginalization of the profane. To result in the erasure of the popular audience — and even of the audience altogether — in professional and aesthetic issues.”

A gap has therefore progressively widened between subsidized cultural venues and their potential audiences, also accentuated by the multiplication of television channels and the emergence of new forms of popular entertainment. New citizens, whether children of working families who had not experienced the social advancement of the previous generation or populations from recent immigration, found themselves structurally disconnected from cultural proposals perceived as foreign to their reference universe.

Didier Eribon, in Returning to Reims (2009), testifies well to this fracture:

“The world of legitimate culture appeared to me as a hostile universe, where everything reminded us that we were not in our place: the way of dressing, speaking, holding oneself, up to the implicit references that dotted conversations and referred us to our ignorance.”

These new cultural outcasts do not even feel legitimate to cross the threshold of places whose codes completely escaped them, and which painfully reminded them of the school institution, itself experienced as a space of stigmatization behind its democratic proclamations. Progressively, subsidized cultural venues maintained their funding while losing their real social anchoring, particularly visible in left-wing municipalities, which had made popular culture their standard. Today, many citizens are not even really aware of the existence of these places, which seem completely foreign to them.

In parallel, a new generation of elected officials emerged, from different social milieus and not having internalized the frequenting of subsidized cultural venues as a marker of political respectability. These new political leaders found other spaces of activism and sociability, more directly political and less mediated by cultural practice.

Faced with this disaffection, subsidized cultural venues paradoxically accentuated their disconnection by proposing increasingly smooth, consensual and depoliticized works, in the illusory hope of seducing a broader audience. This “please everyone” strategy had the opposite effect: by losing their critical and provocative force, these cultural proposals also lost their political and social relevance.

The digital revolution: the emergence of disintermediated culture

The second phenomenon, more recent but with even more radical effects, has completed the transformation of the French cultural landscape. The appearance of Minitel at the beginning of the 1980s timidly inaugurated the era of online cultural and communicational practices. The arrival of the Internet in the 1990s, then the explosion of social networks from 2004, now twenty years ago, have provoked a Copernican revolution in cultural practices.

Henry Jenkins, in Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2006), prophetically described this transformation:

“We are witnessing the emergence of a participatory culture that transforms the passive experience of media consumption into active production of content and meanings. The circulation of media content now depends on the active participation of the public, which no longer merely consumes media but also contributes to their creation, distribution and interpretation.”

Today, majority cultural practices unfold in digital spaces. We watch films there, listen to music there, interact with our peers there, create there, perform there. The boundaries between amateurs and professionals blur: anyone can potentially become an artist, develop an audience, even make it their profession. These digital sharing spaces embody a radical form of cultural democracy, where perseverance and work allow anyone to build their place in a disintermediated ecosystem.

Symbolic value no longer resides in institutional validation but in links woven between peers, in mutual recommendations, in belonging to communities of interest. These communities, formerly mainly anchored in circumscribed geographical territories, are now recomposed in digital spaces according to affinity logics that transcend national, generational and sociocultural boundaries.

To illustrate this with a specific example, lovers of baroque music on period instruments can now meet, exchange, share their practices and discoveries, whether they reside in Tokyo, São Paulo or in a village in the Massif Central. Culture, thanks to these digital networks, experiences unprecedented vitality. Artistic creation has never been so abundant, creation and diffusion tools never so accessible, possibilities for alternative economic models never so diverse. So what crisis are we talking about?

However, and this is the central paradox of our era, all this cultural effervescence completely escapes the control and influence of traditional political power, and is even often voluntarily unknown and despised by subsidized culture actors, who refuse to legitimize it, because they feel in danger (even though they are also consumers of it). It relies on infrastructures developed and controlled by digital capitalism multinationals that have perfectly understood the fundamental anthropological need for culture and that provide tools to satisfy it, while capturing the economic value thus generated.

The Rachida Dati symbol: chronicle of a consummated rupture

The summer of 2024 offered an amusing illustration of this rupture between culture and political power. Rachida Dati, then Minister of Culture, was sharply criticized for not going to the Avignon Festival, breaking with an uninterrupted tradition since the creation of the ministry in 1959. All her predecessors, without exception, had made this summer visit an obligatory ritual of their function.

Let us adopt a sociological gaze to analyze this absence: if Rachida Dati did not deem it necessary to go to the Avignon Festival, it is not out of personal contempt for theater or ignorance of the symbolic importance of the festival, it is because she intuitively understood that the Avignon Festival, despite its intact prestige, is no longer today a place of political power. It remains a prestigious space for artistic diffusion, but it has lost its structuring political function.

In her logic as a minister, and not as an art lover, Rachida Dati prioritizes her presence in the true contemporary places of political power, which are no longer theaters and festivals. Her absence is therefore not an act of defiance but the simple recognition of a fact: institutional culture is no longer the privileged symbolic place of political power. She has moreover announced, without specifying a date, that she would go to the Avignon festival during the 2025 edition, a symbolic concession that changes nothing to the fundamental diagnosis. She will go “for pleasure,” one could say, and not out of political necessity. This distinction is capital for understanding the transformation underway.

Refounding the democratic pact: cultural rights as a new compass

Faced with this diagnosis that might seem desperate, what perspectives are offered to defenders of public funding for culture? For I remain, despite this lucid analysis, a fervent supporter of public support for arts and culture, not out of nostalgia for a bygone model, but out of conviction that culture can and must play a refounded role in our democratic societies.

The Fribourg Declaration on Cultural Rights (2007) offers a precious conceptual framework for this refounding: “Cultural rights aim to guarantee everyone the freedom to live their cultural identity, understood as the set of cultural references by which a person, alone or in common, defines themselves, constitutes themselves, communicates and intends to be recognized in their dignity.”

This approach through cultural rights allows us to go beyond the traditional political instrumentalization of culture to place it in direct service of citizens and their emancipation. As Jean-Michel Lucas writes in Cultural Rights, Stakes for Public Policies (2017): “Cultural rights are not rights to consume culture but rights to make humanity together, by recognizing everyone’s cultural dignity.”

Subsidized culture must therefore undergo its transformation: abandon its historical role as an instrument of power legitimization to become a tool of horizontal democratic construction. This transformation requires a revolution in practices and representations. The disintermediation at work in digital spaces must inspire parallel disintermediation in physical and institutional spaces.

The most lucid elected officials understand this necessity. Their role is no longer to instrumentalize culture in service of their personal or partisan power, but to support the construction of a democratic society carrying humanist values. Many political leaders sincerely carry these values and are ready to accompany this transformation. But to do so, they need artistic teams and cultural leaders ready to make the same mutation.

Narrative as new legitimacy: rethinking the evaluation of cultural action

What cultural actors and elected officials mutually need is a new grammar to think and evaluate the social impact of artistic creation. We must understand that the objective is no longer to produce prestigious shows that enhance political power, this era is definitively over. Subsidized culture must reinvent itself in social connection, in scrupulous respect for cultural rights, in active inclusion of all.

To do this, we need new narratives of cultural experiences supported by public power. But what is the contemporary narrative of a cultural project?

• For a show in a theater, it is no longer only the description of the artistic quality of the proposal or the talent of the performers, it is the narrative of transformative experiences lived by spectators, of how the work modified their relationship to the world, to others, to themselves.
• For territorial action conducted “outside the walls,” in peripheral neighborhoods or with populations distant from cultural institutions, the narrative necessarily becomes collective. It is built with residents, listening to them, respecting their own cultural references. It can include the evolution of the project itself, the questioning it has aroused among artists, the way the encounter with otherness has transformed and enriched the initial artistic proposal.

These narratives require time, attention, humility. They demand accepting to also tell failures, misunderstandings, unconscious prejudices that may have been deconstructed through encounters. As Édouard Glissant writes in Poetics of Relation (1990): “Act in your place, think with the world.”

Today’s elected officials have a vital need for these narratives to justify, to their constituents and their elected peers, the maintenance of public funding for culture. Without these narratives, they can no longer legitimize an investment in what appears as a sector disconnected from immediate social and political utility. They need to understand how culture today serves to build the democratic common. The Ministry of Culture equipped itself in 2021 with a delegation to cultural democracy, which will become a directorate, so there is support in these approaches. There is anyway necessity, beyond funding questions, that subsidized culture continues to serve a democratic common good and no longer only the space of bourgeois reproduction it has become, despite hypocritical discourses that claim the contrary, to receive their subsidies. For this, its forms must imperatively reinvent themselves.

Towards a new alliance: culture and democracy

There is urgency to recognize with lucidity that institutional culture is no longer intrinsically linked to political power. This awareness, far from being a defeat, opens new perspectives. If culture is subsidized by public money, that is, by tax levied on all citizens, each cultural actor benefiting from this funding has the ethical and political responsibility to demonstrate how their action serves the democratic common good.

Many artistic teams already magnificently embody these values and develop exemplary approaches on the ground of inclusion, co-creation, recognition of everyone’s cultural dignity. The resource exists, collective intelligence is there. But we are going through a moment of crisis, of painful transition between an old world that never finishes dying and a new world that struggles to be born fully.

Certainly, some cultural venues will continue to function according to the old model, serving as markers of social distinction for a bourgeoisie concerned with its cultural reproduction. These places will not disappear and will probably continue to receive funding. But they will have lost their political centrality to become conservatories of socially situated cultural practices.

The real issue is elsewhere: in the invention of new forms, new practices, new places, not necessarily physical, where the cultural democracy of tomorrow will be built. If cultural actors persist in defending only the traditional model, if they are content to denounce subsidy cuts without proposing a new vision, they will confirm in the eyes of elected officials their disconnection from contemporary democratic issues.

From instrumentalization to emancipation

The history I have just retraced, from Louis XIV to our days, reveals the permanence of a consubstantial link between culture and political power in France. This link, forged under the Old Regime and perpetuated in various forms until the end of the 20^th century, has today broken under the combined effect of profound sociological transformations and the digital revolution.

This rupture is neither an accident nor a catastrophe: it is the symptom of a broader mutation of our democratic societies. Culture can no longer be the instrument of legitimization of political power in a world where sources of legitimacy have diversified and complexified. But it can become, and this is the contemporary issue, a privileged space for building the democratic common.

For this, cultural actors must accept to radically rethink their practices, their objectives and their evaluation methods. They must move from a logic of descending cultural supply to a logic of co-construction with citizens. They must substitute for the search for abstract artistic excellence the quest for concrete social and democratic relevance, enter into an aesthetics of relation as an artistic requirement, which is much more difficult than simple aestheticizing requirement.

Elected officials, for their part, must understand that support for culture no longer falls under power strategy but the patient construction of a more just, more inclusive, more democratic society. Hannah Arendt describes well the process between culture and politics in Between Past and Future (1961), without yet integrating cultural democracy, which follows from it if we translate her argument to contemporary reality:

“Culture, which is what subsists in the world in the form of works, needs a public space to appear and be transmitted. For culture and politics belong to each other: it is not knowledge or truth that is at stake, but judgment and decision, the judicious exchange of opinions concerning the sphere of public life and the common world. Without spectators — citizens disposed to judge — there is no judged culture, no living politics. Works like human actions need to be seen, discussed, evaluated, carried by collective memory, and this is what founds the reality of the common world.”

If cultural actors assume this new responsibility, if they become the patient artisans of the democratic narrative of their actions, then many elected officials will remobilize to support a refounded culture. No longer to establish their personal political power, but to bring about, together, a living and inclusive cultural democracy.