Lowbrow culture and French cultural policy: the socio‐political logics of a changing and paradoxical relationship

Abstract

The polysemy of the phrase cultures populaires reflects the struggles to define the relationship between culture and the people in France. This paper brings out the variety of the social and political uses of this phrase and recalls the issues it raises. It also explains the ambiguities of cultural policy programmes concerning ‘low’ culture, most of these programmes remaining oriented towards a culturally legitimist approach even when they try to promote alternative forms of culture.

Keywords:

• French cultural policy
• cultural hierarchy
• low culture

Notes

1. I will use the terms low or lowbrow culture rather than popular culture for linguistic and conceptual reasons explained in the first part of this paper.

2. (Translated by the author): ‘La culture est populaire par ceux qu’elle atteint, non du fait de sa nature’ (Speech to the Assemblée nationale, 1966).

3. On the history of the MJC and the evolution of their activities concerning culture, see Besse (2008).

4. To avoid any misunderstanding I should clarify how I am using the notion of cultural legitimacy. Here I will remain faithful to Bourdieu’s classic analyses, which do not define the legitimacy of a cultural good according to its aesthetic contents but as the result of the legitimation process consisting in the production of its cultural value by ‘the legitimate agents of legitimation’ of the cultural field (e.g. art critics, curators, experts, cultural experts or institutions, etc.). As a result, when I describe popular cultures of one kind or another as ‘illegitimate’ I do not mean that they are illegitimate per se but only that they have not been consecrated through this symbolic selection process.

5. Because they have not been selected and/or because they adopt a ‘countercultural’ or ‘underground’ attitude rejecting any kind of institutionalisation.

6. The national folklore programme under the Vichy regime is partly linked to these previous experiences (this is a highly controversial point) but with a different political meaning oriented towards the glorification of the ‘real people’ incarnating eternal France and the denunciation of the ‘cosmopolitan elite’ accused of being responsible for ‘national decline’ (Faure 1989).

7. Such as the rapper Doc Gyneco or the comic Jean‐Marie Bigard.

8. To paraphrase Marx’s famous sentence ‘The emancipation of the workers will be achieved by the workers themselves’.