The Economic and Democratic Paradox of France as a “Cultural Power”
Judging by aggregate figures alone, France has every reason to present itself as a “cultural power.” When national and local government spending are combined, public expenditure on culture has long hovered around 2% of GDP, well above the EU average and higher than in most OECD countries. In political discourse, this figure is frequently framed as a civilizational choice: a society willing to devote substantial public resources to culture must, by definition, be more democratic and more advanced.
Yet it is precisely from within this apparently generous framework that a deep contradiction emerges. In exhibition spaces, in curatorial processes, and in the daily operations of cultural institutions, what becomes visible is not a system that encourages experimentation and creativity, but one that is highly cautious and overwhelmingly oriented toward preserving existing positions. Curators formally operate within a high-budget environment, yet in practice they command remarkably little discretionary funding. Many institutions are less concerned with producing new cultural experiences than with ensuring that the same organizational structures and often the same people, remain in place the following year.
From an economic perspective, the problem is not the overall level of cultural spending, but the way in which that spending is converted into curatorial action. In France’s national cultural system, a large share of funding is structurally locked into fixed costs: permanent salaries, pension schemes, the maintenance of historic buildings, collection conservation, and an extensive apparatus of administrative compliance. These expenditures are politically untouchable and generate strong path dependency. As a result, while headline figures suggest abundance, only a small fraction of cultural budgets actually reaches the level where curators can meaningfully shape exhibitions. High cultural spending does not translate into high curatorial freedom.
This helps explain a reality that is widely acknowledged within the cultural sector but rarely discussed publicly: in France, high budgets do not necessarily produce high-quality exhibitions. By contrast, Germany operates with a slightly lower cultural spending ratio, yet its federal structure leaves substantial resources at the regional level, fostering institutional competition and granting curators greater autonomy. In Japan, where cultural spending as a share of GDP is significantly lower, exhibition budgets are more tightly focused on the exhibition itself. The success of an exhibition, whether it works, whether it is worth seeing, tends to matter more than institutional positioning. In both cases, the “budget-to-curation conversion rate” is often higher than in France.
Taiwan’s recent biennials offer another instructive comparison. Despite operating with resources that are modest by French standards, these exhibitions have demonstrated a level of artistic coherence, intellectual ambition, and curatorial density that is increasingly difficult to find in major French museums. The explanation is not mysterious: clear curatorial objectives, concentrated use of resources, and institutional trust that prioritizes artistic risk over administrative risk management. Once again, cultural quality appears less as a function of total expenditure than of how power and risk are distributed within the system.
Within France’s national institutions, exhibition priorities themselves reflect this structural logic. Curatorial decisions tend to be guided first by academic positioning and intellectual lineage, then by the institution’s status within the cultural field, followed by adherence to prevailing frameworks of political and cultural legitimacy, postcolonial discourse, gender politics, memory studies, and European cultural narratives. Audience experience frequently comes last. This hierarchy is not the result of individual curatorial preference but of a deeply embedded cultural power structure. Over time, exhibitions become conceptually correct yet affectively thin, leaving visitors with a familiar reaction: I know this is important, but why should I come back?
The Louvre exemplifies this paradox at its most extreme, but it is far from alone. At the Louvre, vast collections coexist with largely static permanent displays, shrinking temporary exhibition spaces, and countless works confined to storage. The Musée d’Orsay and the Jeu de Paume, though very different in scale and mission, exhibit similar structural tensions: strong institutional identities, heavy symbolic capital, and limited room for curatorial renewal that might unsettle established narratives. From a cultural-economic standpoint, this is a form of asset misallocation. Collections function primarily as reservoirs of symbolic capital that reinforce national and institutional authority, rather than as resources continuously reinterpreted for contemporary publics.
Underlying these patterns is a highly self-referential cultural economy. Public funding circulates through subsidies, permanent positions, and symbolic recognition among large institutions, senior curators, academic networks, and cultural administrators. Evaluation committees and administrative requirements are not explicitly exclusionary, yet they systematically favor familiar actors, shared aesthetic languages, and predictable forms of risk. Crucially, this structure rarely becomes an object of democratic debate. Culture is moralized and sacralized; questioning its internal distribution is easily dismissed as anti-cultural or neoliberal. When a policy domain can no longer be discussed in terms of data, allocation, and opportunity cost, it quietly exits the democratic agenda and becomes the preserve of technical elites.
The budgetary tensions of 2025 made these priorities even more visible. Under fiscal pressure, central authorities sought to protect national institutions and flagship cultural brands, while the real costs were shifted to the local level. Small and medium-sized cities saw festivals canceled and community-based programs disappear, precisely those forms of cultural activity most closely tied to everyday life. This was not a question of efficiency, but of distribution: who is protected, and who absorbs the shock.
At its core, this is a democratic issue. France’s cultural resource allocation increasingly appears to favor specific groups: on the one hand, an implicit elite of institutional insiders and professional cultural networks; on the other, highly visible cultural initiatives linked to refugee and migrant populations that carry strong symbolic and political value. Caught between these poles is the tax-paying middle class, those who fund the system, seek stable lives, and hope for a high quality of public services, yet often feel that cultural policy is no longer designed with them in mind.
When public expenditure already exceeds 57% of GDP, cultural budgets are no longer merely symbolic gestures. They represent concrete trade-offs that affect living standards and social cohesion. If these resources primarily serve to stabilize institutional hierarchies or to support narrowly defined constituencies, rather than addressing the cultural needs of the broader citizenry, then the idea of France as a “cultural power” begins to resemble less a democratic achievement than a refined configuration of privilege.
A genuinely people-centered cultural policy would not treat cultural budgets as sacred and beyond question. It would allow citizens to ask, in the plain language of economics and democracy: where does each euro go, what opportunities are foregone, who gains creative freedom, and who remains a passive consumer? Only when such questions can be openly posed and seriously debated can cultural policy move beyond maintaining positions and once again become a public choice in the service of democratic life.
