Louis Hautecœur, directeur général des Beaux-Arts (1940-1944)

Abstract

Louis Hautecœur, Directeur des Beaux-Arts (1 940-1944) This article highlights the main features of the activity as a « Directeur des Beaux-Arts » of the art historian Louis Hautecœur under the Vichy government. The cultural project which motivated Hautecœur from the 1920s. concerning various fields : the teaching of art and architecture history, museography, museology, preservation of the Heritage, discussions about contemporary architecture led to the governmental experience of the 1940s. To keep up this feeling of continuity, the article shows the parallelism between the cultural project of which Hautecœur was at last an actor, and the historiographic project of which he was himself the creator, dealing with the strict reconstitution of the cycle of the history of classical French architecture. Hautecœur who deals with « beaux-arts » as an historian, is now going to do it as a civil servant. So is underlined the role he attributed to the relationship between Art and the State. The stakes of Hautecœur’s. cultural project, that is mainly the idea of the defense of French beauty, are at the same time linked to the specificity of the Vichy period, when the overlapping of his own intellectual and professionnal career with the cultural policy of the Vichy State did not exclude political compromise.