The development of a social exclusion agenda in French cultural policy

Abstract

The article argues that developing a social exclusion agenda has, in various guises and terminologies (‘democratization’, ‘cultural democracy’, ‘cultural development’), been the driver of French cultural policy thinking and debate since the creation of a Ministry of Culture in 1959. Addressing exclusion has in fact been a perennial problem for the French ministry, because of a founding and apparently irrepressible conviction, from Malraux in the 1960s to Lang in the 1980s and 1990s, that art speaks for itself without mediation; and because of the consequent structural separation of (to use the standard French terminology) the ‘cultural’ from the ‘social’. This conviction was contested in the late 1960s—partly with the help of Bourdieu's notion of cultural capital, although since then policy agents have mostly attempted to move on from Malraux's position by taking up positions against Bourdieu. The article traces the history of these attempts, then examines in more detail the principles, problems and paradoxes of the exclusion agenda in French cultural policy today.