"The Ministry of Culture is a field of ruins"

Didier Rykner is a journalist and historian of French art. Committed to the defense of heritage, he regularly publishes his surveys and analyzes on The Art Tribune.

"You entrust to me a consolidated and consolidated ministry" . This is what Roselyne Bachelot said to her predecessor during the handover. This testifies either to a great sense of humor of the new minister (and there is no shortage of it), or to a deep ignorance of the situation of the Ministry of Culture. For years in fact, and Franck Riester has also participated, the ministry has continued to shrink like a grain of sorrow, both in terms of staff, means and willingness to act. We will talk here about what we know, heritage and museums, but the observation seems identical in all its components.

Decentralization, and we are told that it will further increase, coupled with a deconcentration which makes a large part of the regional directorates of cultural affairs escape its minister, has transferred most of the decisions to the local level. The national policy of historic monuments and museums becomes a memory. The minister is almost useless, and the director general of heritage no more. On the one hand, there are public establishments which live their lives almost independently, and sometimes for the worse as in Versailles, whose drifts Mediapart has just denounced, or at the Louvre which we demonstrate in La Tribune de l'Art , article after article, disastrous politics. On the other, we find the territorial collectivities, regions, departments and communes, with at their heads elected officials sometimes enlightened, but more often ignorant and subject to local economic interests, which rarely go in the direction of the protection of heritage. Abandoned by the state, citizens must organize themselves to take direct charge of the defense of the territory, as was recently the case to prevent the deviation of Beynac, or to protect this or that historic monument from the indifference of a mayor.

The regional directorates of cultural affairs, most often entrusted to people with no knowledge of monuments and museums, are subject to the increasingly significant authority of the prefects who have even less and who are themselves even more concerned with pleasing local politics than protecting heritage. Even some architects of buildings in France are now appointed without the slightest knowledge of historic monuments, while town halls appoint directors of museums who are not art historians or do not have the experience necessary for their missions. The heritage inspection, which existed since 1830, long before the Ministry of Culture, and which was at the heart of the State's missions in this field, already weakened, is now threatened.

The Ministry of Culture is therefore closer to a field of ruin than to a "consolidated and reinforced" structure. The challenges awaiting the new minister are immense, and even more so with a President of the Republic who has endeavored with constancy and obstinacy to accentuate this slope. Just recently, the latter issued - without any reaction from the ministry - a decree allowing prefects to derogate from many provisions of the heritage and town planning (and environment) codes. We could also cite, for example, the way in which it promotes the anarchic development of wind power. By continuing to dismantle the laws protecting heritage, Emmanuel Macron has amply demonstrated his disinterest in heritage.

Will Roselyne Bachelot have the opportunity to slow down or interrupt this movement with this omnipresent president? Will she even have the will when his past at the Ministry of Health who saw him shut down the AP-HP Museum without return does little to argue in his favor? Besides the need to interrupt or even reverse the movement that we have described, the files are innumerable: from the restoration of Notre-Dame (new example of the erasure of her ministry) to the management of the crisis due to the Covid- 19 which has hit museums, private and public historic monuments, restorers, tour guides and more broadly all heritage trades.

We can only wish the new minister good luck, without any real illusions. In less than two years another will succeed him, who will probably inherit an even worse situation.