Promoting cultural patrimony: France versus Germany

Abstract

Abstract The role played by the West in aiding the process of democratisation through generous subsidies has been especially important in the cultural sphere, in particular for creative arts, as well as the humanities and social sciences properly speaking. One of the first countries to seize the opportunity presented by glasnost was France. In 1989, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, together with the French Embassy in Moscow, launched the ‘Pushkin programme’, and in July 1991 — just as the Soviet Union was in its final hours — the Chancellery for the group of Paris universities signed an agreement with the Rector of Moscow State University to set up the College Universitaire Fran~ais. Described in the French press as an achievement no less than ‘revolutionary, the creation of a network of French faculties in Moscow and the provinces not only seemed to privilege France's cultural role in the new Russia (phrases such as ‘cultural mission’, ‘cultural benefactor’ abounded in the press), it also brought to a successful conclusion ambitions once nurtured by Voltaire and Diderot to convince Catherine the Great of the pertinence of a French style education for Russian youth. At that time, however, Catherine was less inclined to implant a French educational institution on Russian soil and opted-instead for the German school model — a choice which ultimately dictated the pattern of development in Russia's secondary and higher educational structure throughout the nineteenth century.