Reassessing Mitterrand's Legacy : Of Monuments — and Monumental Errors
By Katherine Knorr
Published: May 3, 2001
PARIS— Nearly 20 years ago Francois Mitterrand was elected president of France with a platform that, at least subliminally, promised to make France the Cool capital of the world. There was an explosion of cheering, honking and partying in the streets of Paris, particularly at the Place de la Bastille, that symbol of regicide. People power was the message.
Twenty years later, in considerably less giddy times, Mr. Mitterrand's cultural megalomania and some of the pharaonic building projects, les Grands Travaux, that it spawned (not least at the Bastille) have left a mighty bitter taste.
Billions of francs were spent, not always wisely, in the building of these mega-institutions, which in many ways represent the most significant disruption in the architectural facade of this city since Baron Haussmann razed a lot of old churches in the name of police security and bourgeois grandiosity.
Michel Fleury, an archaeologist (among other things) who is prominent in the defense of French monuments and was involved in the excavations of the Louvre foundations, said, "It's the habit now for presidents each to have their rattles, but this one really had a prodigious quantity."
Many more billions are committed to running the institutions, but the facades are falling off the Grande Arche at La Defense outside Paris and at the Bastille Opera. French and foreign scholars have been deeply unhappy with the architecture and the organization of the new National Library, whose four towers rise starkly on the east side of the city.
Cultural decentralization also was declared a national goal, but many cultural commentators say that the Grands Travaux robbed the provinces.
At the same time, great monuments of the past are neglected because so much of the cultural budget is eaten up by the big projects, or are sabotaged by government architects who "update" them in sometimes shocking ways. The victims include many churches, manor houses and castles around the country, but also, with bitterly ironic symbolism, Versailles.
Although there is much less criticism today over the aesthetics of the I.M. Pei Pyramid in the Louvre courtyard, there are few defenders of the architecture of the opera (a hospital, one critic called it; an elephant, said another) or of the library.
Even among the people who run these institutions, complaints are rife. Jean-Pierre Angremy, a prolific writer and high civil servant who runs the National Library, said, "The real structural problem is the architecture. The real problem is that it's crazy to make a rectangular library with a garden in the middle, which is where you ought to find the researchers, and which causes the books to have to travel so far."
Hugues Gall, the wry director of the Opera, who was often quoted as having said in the early 1980s that the Opera-Bastille was the answer to a question that no one had asked, calls much of the building a disaster.
There were lots of winners and losers among the hangers-on of power during the 14 years that Mr. Mitterrand was president, but one big loser was the taxpayer, who shelled out approximately 35 billion francs ($4.78 billion in the current value of U.S. dollars) for the Grands Travaux — counting conservatively — and will go on paying indefinitely for enormous upkeep and operating budgets.
To be fair, the taxpayer gained some things. Some of what the Socialists accomplished is envied in many other parts of the world; there was a serious effort to look beyond French borders and to reward talent internationally, and some of the results are widely seen as more than satisfactory.
Nevertheless, the question remains: Was all of this building necessary, and what caused it to be so controversial and so wasteful?
The Mitterrand government came out charging, and in the cabinet no one seemed more energetic and enthusiastic than the highly media-savvy culture minister, Jack Lang. He had the president's ear and enshrined the era of culture as the state religion, as one prominent critic called it. Mr. Lang succeeded immediately in increasing the budget of the Culture Ministry by vast amounts.
What seemed at the time only the understandable rush of enthusiasm after so many years of rightist power, actually hid other, more important concerns: the president's worry that he might not win a second term, the legislative elections that caused him to "cohabitate" with opposition cabinets on two occasions and, more darkly and perhaps most importantly, his very real fears for his health, dimmed by a fatal illness that he skillfully kept from the public.
The whole saga is an object lesson in the perils of government involvement in culture, one of interest to European governments such as Britain and Germany, who have their own arts funding debates.
The great French experiment has shown, not terribly surprisingly, that incompetence and paralysis are more common than honor and efficiency, that the avant-garde art establishment tends to advertise its contempt for people with expertise and that bureaucracies take on a life of their own, much like Hal the computer. The "Mitterrand exception," to parody the much discussed "French exception" in cultural matters, was that everything had to be done with haste. That, along with the hubris his government demonstrated in wanting to change the face of Paris, are arguably the main culprits for the architectural failure of the buildings and their shaky organization.