Notions of popular culture in cultural policy: a comparative history of France and Britain

Abstract

The Devlin and Hoyle report, Committing to culture: arts funding in France and Britain, argues that the cultural policies of these two European neighbours have been steadily converging since the mid‐1990s but that their social and economic contexts are now quite different (e.g. youth unemployment, GDP, disposable income). The paper addresses this convergence‐within‐divergence by comparing how policy discourses have conceptualised popular culture in the two countries. It investigates the hypothesis that, in both, an engagement with popular culture has in fact been an important driver of change, albeit at different times and with different taxonomies. And it asks what light this comparison might shed on cultural policy thinking in the twenty‐first century.

Keywords:

• popular culture
• France
• UK
• cultural policy
• history

Notes

1. PCRN's website: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/smlc/Popularculturesresearchgroup.htm. By ‘contemporary histories’ I mean from 1945.

2. As we will see, terminology is a problem in a comparative enterprise such as this. French commonly uses ‘cultural’ policy for what in English is usually called ‘arts’ policy, though neither label is entirely limpid or watertight. Of necessity given the bi‐national perspective adopted here, I shall use both terms, though ‘cultural’ policy should be understood to mean arts policy: I shall not include in my purview wider areas of policy‐making such as education, television, etc. For a fuller analysis of French policy terminology in the context of popular culture particularly, see Dubois, this issue.

3. The term ‘non‐public’ was coined by Francis Jeanson in May 1968, but it subsequently became, as Ahearne points out (2010, p. 166) ‘a stock reference in cultural policy debates’. I use it here merely in this ‘stock’, negative sense, as a shorthand for those denied access to the established arts, though as Ahearne argues, Jeanson's own usage was more nuanced and included its more positive potential: see Ahearne 2010, pp. 164–167 and pp. 184–185.

4. France was not of course the first to introduce policies for popular arts.

5. For further analysis of both Jowell and McMaster, see Street, this issue.

6. The idea that creativity in rock music always stands on its own two feet commercially may be disputed, as my work in progress on popular music policies in Britain and France suggests (see also Cloonan, this issue).