Jack Lang, in front of the Carousel Bridge in Paris, on January 29, 2005, in a tribute to Mitterrand.Jean-Francois DEROUBAIX / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
Jack Lang is 81 years old, but he has not lost the energy that one day, long ago, led him to be the most powerful Minister of Culture in Europe, and perhaps the world.
Lang continues to lead the Institute of the Arab World, one of the many cultural institutions built in those golden years in France under the presidency of the socialist François Mitterrand.
He has not stopped taking part in the debates, sometimes listened to but also criticized at other times as a representative of the so-called left caviar, a dinosaur from another era.
And, as he did with Mitterrand 30 or 40 years ago, he usually sends messages to the President of the Republic - now Emmanuel Macron - with ideas and advice.
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The former Minister of Culture recalled a few days ago that, once, after a change of government, Mitterrand told him smiling: "There is something that I will not miss: your written notes."
"But I do not subject Emmanuel Macron to the same bombardment as François Mitterrand," he added during a conversation on the top floor of the Arab World Institute, a building by Jean Nouvel that at the time wanted to embody the image of a France open to the world.
The views over Paris are impressive;
Notre Dame almost seems close at hand.
Lang, with Mitterrand in May 1982 during the annual Solutré rock ascent.Bertrand LAFORET / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
On April 15, 2019, Lang watched the cathedral burn from this terrace, a cultural catastrophe.
He couldn't resist.
He explains, with a pinch of pride, that he sent two suggestions to Macron.
The first: "Set a deadline."
The second: "You must appoint a commander-in-chief."
And then he remembers that Macron set the date for reconstruction at 2024, and appointed Jean-Louis Georgelin, a general, to lead the efforts.
A year ago, another catastrophe, infinitely greater, struck the planet.
Sanitary and economic.
But also cultural.
And again, Lang couldn't resist.
He sent a memo to Macron, an echo of those with whom, several times a day, in the 1980s, he bombarded Mitterrand.
"A major plan announced by you would give meaning to our collective struggles again," Lang recently wrote to Macron.
"Mr. President, I have allowed myself to tell you to what extent I would dream of the President of the Republic asserting himself as the president of a
cultural
new deal
," begins the short letter, dated April 27, 2020. In it, Lang It refers to the vast program of assistance to the arts and letters that was launched during the 1930s by the President of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt. "In the current historical period we could once again demonstrate imagination, enthusiasm, will, ambition," writes the former minister. "A major plan announced by you would once again give meaning to our collective struggles."
"Emmanuel Macron has a unique opportunity, both because of the crisis and because France will preside over the European Union [in the first half of 2022]," he added during the conversation at the Arab World Institute.
For now, however, there has been no response: theaters, cinemas and museums are still closed.
The times of pharaonic projects and cultural revolutions seem a thing of the past.
Lang and Gabriel Garcia Marquez in Cannes on May 16, 1982.Micheline PELLETIER / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
The letter is included in
Jack Lang.
Une revolution culturelle.
Dits et écrits
(Jack Lang. A cultural revolution. Sayings and writings), a volume edited by cultural journalist and university researcher Frédéric Martel.
It has just been published in French by the Bouquins collection, coinciding with the 40th anniversary of Mitterrand's first electoral victory.
Martel dived into the archives of the old cultural czar, and dug up oil.
The result is more than a thousand pages of abundant unpublished documents, including the confidential notes that Lang sent to Mitterrand that offer a behind-the-scenes look at the last great experiment in cultural politics in a modern democracy.
French state interventionism
That this happened in France is no accident.
The idea of the benefactor monarch of the arts and letters dates back to Louis XIV.
The centralism that brings together power in a city and a person allowed the king and then the emperor or the president to decide the projects alone, and execute them quickly.
The inventor of the modern Ministry of Culture was the writer André Malraux, appointed by General de Gaulle after regaining power in 1958.
"You see things the way I do," Mitterrand told young Lang.
“On the one hand, art centers, places of life, must be born throughout France.
On the other hand, I would like a certain number of monuments and institutions to be built in Paris that would leave an imprint, which at the same time would shape the history of the capital and the country.
Reflect and present me with a list ”.
No sooner said than done. The Bastille Opera and the François Mitterrand Library emerged from that initial impulse. Also the Grand Louvre, which Lang proposed in a note to Mitterrand in 1981. Mitterrand wrote by hand next to the text: "Good idea but difficult by definition, like all good ideas."
The
langismo
was more than great works.
Lang quotes Jean Vilar, creator of the Avignon festival: "Culture should be a public service like water, gas and electricity."
In part it was about democratizing high culture, but also about recognizing the new popular expressions with initiatives such as the Music Festival.
And there was some protectionism or nationalism.
"The announcement of Walt Disney's arrival in France fills me with sadness," Lang wrote to Mitterrand in 1985, alluding to the Disneyland project in Paris.
To listen to Lang today is to peer into a time that does not exist, with super ministers of Culture, presidents with pharaonic ambitions and overflowing optimism
It was the famous cultural exception: French state interventionism, a response to American hegemony. Some of the most discussed and later celebrated measures were the single price of the book, which has served to preserve the largest fabric of independent bookstores in the world, or the tax on cinema tickets to finance indigenous productions with the proceeds of the blockbusters of Hollywood.
In his time, some accused Lang of being a "showman" or a "king's jester." One of the most devastating criticisms was made by the
sage
Marc Fumaroli in the essay
The Cultural State
and in other texts. Fumaroli denounced “an administration that had set itself the objective of
democratizing culture
with public money, but that, despite the rock,
tag
, hip-hop and
techno
demagoguery
of Jack Lang, and the current efforts to popularize everywhere an official art called
contemporary
, he only managed to scandalize the bourgeoisie, occupy the free time of the public of National Education [young people] and create a wide clientele of subsidized artists ”.
To listen to Lang today is to peer into a time that does not exist, with super ministers of Culture, presidents with pharaonic ambitions and overflowing optimism. In the conversation, he evokes his friendship with Gabriel García Márquez, and his link with Spanish theater: he remembers a representation of
Fuenteovejuna
in the sixties at the festival that he directed in the city of Nancy, and in which one of the actors was a certain Alfonso Guerra; or the passage of Lluís Pasqual through the Odéon Theater, when he was already a minister.
Often accused of being anti-American, Lang looks forward to the United States. "I have the impression of living what we lived here in 1981. Joe Biden is a guy who goes for everything, who accelerates, who speaks clearly," he says in reference to the arrival of the Democrats to power. And he jokes: “I wish there was a French Biden. An old man, like me ”.