FRANCE: Jacques Chirac has left one worthy monument to his 12 years as president, writes Lara Marlowe
When he inaugurated the Musée du Quai Branly yesterday, the only monument to his 12 years as president of France, Jacques Chirac's personal guest list spoke volumes about his vision of the world: the UN secretary general Kofi Annan; Abdou Diouf, the head of the international organisation for "Francophonie"; Rigoberta Menchu Tum, the Guatemalan human rights worker who won the Nobel Peace prize in 1992; and Paul Okalik, the prime minister of Nunavut.
Nunavut? The presidential press corps scrambled for their atlases. In 1999, Mr Chirac was the first foreign head of state to travel to the Inuit territory in the far north of Canada.
The Chirac who inaugurated the museum yesterday is happier meeting with Lula the Brazilian or Evo Morales the Bolivian than with George W. Bush.
He is Chirac the alter-mondialiste, defender of international law, the oppressed and cultural diversity, enemy of unilateralism and what he yesterday decried as "the worldwide expansion of the law of the market".
The goal of Mr Chirac's museum is, he said, to "offer a different view of the genius of the peoples and civilisations of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas" - what was, in less politically correct times, known as primitive art. The French deemed the term pejorative and now call it "art of the first peoples" or simply "first arts".
To avoid these linguistic pitfalls, the museum has been named after its address by the Seine. Mr Chirac told French television it would be "a great honour" if it one day bears his name.
Unlike his predecessors, presidents Pompidou, Giscard and Mitterrand, Mr Chirac swore he would not write his name in concrete.
But the late art dealer Jacques Kerchache persuaded him that "all masterpieces are born equal". Chirac has said the art of west coast north American Indians means as much to him as 17th century French painting.
Mr Chirac sees western civilisation as the mother of genocides: against the native peoples of the Americas; against the Jews during the second World War.
When he decided to create his museum, he wanted "to pay homage to peoples to whom, throughout the ages, history has all too often done violence", he said.
"Peoples injured and exterminated by the greed and brutality of conquerors. Peoples humiliated and scorned, denied even their own history. Peoples still now often marginalised, weakened, endangered by the inexorable advance of modernity. Peoples who want their dignity restored," Mr Chirac continued.
He rejected "ethnocentrism" and "the indefensible pretension of the West that it alone bears the destiny of humanity".
The idea that some peoples were backward, their cultures "primitive", constituted "absurd and shocking prejudices", the French president said.
At the age of 13, Mr Chirac reportedly skipped classes to wander through the Asian art collection at the Musée Guimet. A Sanskrit professor introduced him to Indian, Persian and Chinese culture.
Today, he is consulted as an expert on ancient Chinese porcelain. His office is decorated with African, Mexican and Inuit statues.
And the French thought their president liked only detective novels, westerns and Corona beer.
A mask from Gabon sold at auction at Drouot last weekend for a record €5.9 million. "First arts" are back in fashion. French television has scheduled 30 documentaries on the subject.
Le Figaro called Mr Chirac's museum "the noble gesture that a great nation addresses to the peoples of the world". Le Monde said it is "perhaps the only truly positive legacy that Mr Chirac will leave us".
Architect Jean Nouvel's museum is "a hybrid, mysterious, colourful and joyous building", which "adds a touch of innovation to the Parisian landscape", Le Monde says.
Nouvel didn't want the museum to stand out, and it is an amorphous, ship-like form which hugs the curve of the Seine. A vertical garden grows from one facade; glass is stained with a jungle print on another.
The main gallery stands on stilts, above a garden.
It will take time for the treasures of "the first arts" to become as recognisable as a canvas by Leonardo or Monet.
But already the Chupicuaro statuette, a terracotta Mexican fertility goddess from between 600 and 100 BC, chosen as the museum's emblem, is becoming familiar.
So too is the humorous Tolaï sculpture of a dancing man, from late 19th century Papua New Guinea, which adorned the front page of Libération newspaper yesterday.