PARIS LETTER:A new-found interest in high culture has been central to the French president's attempts to refashion his image in the past year, writes RUADHÁN Mac CORMAIC
NICOLAS SARKOZY’S favourite director is the Dane Carl Dreyer, whose 1955 film Ordet recently brought the president to tears. François Hollande is a voracious reader of history and essays, and has a soft spot for Éric Rohmer and the Nouvelle Vague.
The centrist François Bayrou likes nothing more than to sit on the terrasse of his farmhouse in the south of France with some wine, cheese and a classic novel. So too the left radical Jean-Luc Mélenchon, whose speeches are filled with references to the French classics and the great works of republican history.
On the far-right, Marine Le Pen of the National Front despises “cultural elitism” and modern art. Braveheart and Gladiator are among her favourite films.
Asking politicians about their cultural tastes can be akin to an employer asking a job applicant to identify his weaknesses. We know the answers will be carefully weighed, possibly invented – or, at worst, compiled by a committee of advisers – but hearing what they want us to think can be instructive all the same.
In France, where cultural policy comes with a special cachet and plays an important role in how leaders are remembered, the presidential candidates have spent quite a lot of time setting out their views on the arts.
When Sarkozy spoke at length about Dreyer on a recent TV show, it was a reminder of how central culture has been to his attempts to refashion his image in the past year.
When he came to power in 2007, Sarkozy proudly advertised his love of cop shows and broad comedies, distancing himself from the “cultural catechism” set down by the Parisian elite. “A politician who doesn’t watch television cannot understand the French people,” he said.
Some commentators have sniffed at the president’s new-found interest in high culture and linked it to his aides’ attempts at “re-présidentialisation” – adjusting his image to fit the traditional mould of French head of state in the hope of winning back popularity.
Whatever the reason, there is no mistaking the change. He speaks passionately nowadays of his favourite poets and novelists (Dostoievsky and Stefan Zweig among them). At a rally in Paris on Sunday, he quoted or name-checked Hugo, Péguy, Molière, Voltaire and Zola, and in the past year he has regularly invited writers and intellectuals to dine at the Élysée.
Given the severely constrained national budget, recent debates on the arts have been limited to two subjects: how to support book publishing (several candidates want to reduce VAT on books) and to balance copyright protection with internet culture (nearly all want to abolish a Sarkozy-era law that punishes those who download illegally by suspending their internet access).
How important is it that a president be cultivé? The French don’t put much store by their leaders’ proficiency in foreign languages, nor do they demand that they sound informed about science. But knowledge of history and literature, or at least the hint of that knowledge, is a prized quality. Lacking it is akin to a footballer not singing La Marseillaise, remarked Erik Orsenna, the writer and one-time speechwriter for the late socialist president François Mitterrand.
Indeed, Mitterrand – along with Charles de Gaulle – are the political reference points on right and left in these matters.
De Gaulle, who was passionate about history and had a flair for writing, appointed another writer, André Malraux, to the culture ministry.
Mitterrand famously put aside time in his weekly diary to read novels, and was in power when the loi Lang, the law that regulates book prices, was enacted.
Each president has had his pet interests – for Georges Pompidou it was modern art, for Jacques Chirac the cultures of Japan and China.
Each also left his artistic monument to the nation: the Beaubourg modern art museum for Pompidou, the Musée d’Orsay for Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the National Library for Mitterrand and the Musée du Quai Branly for Chirac.
Sarkozy hopes his will be the Maison de l’Histoire de France, a museum that will consolidate the holdings of a number of sites devoted to different periods and offer a long narrative of French history.
But does a sure grasp of culture and history automatically make for a better leader?
Did Mitterrand’s close reading of cold war politics not make it harder for him to see that the Soviet Union was about to collapse? Does a classical education, as Sarkozy once implied, leave you cut off from those who don’t have one? Putting the case for cultivated presidents, Erik Orsenna remarked that culture was, for Mitterrand, a way of “having time”. How better to reflect, he argued, in a line of work that demands reflection and yet leaves so little time for it, than to sit in a quiet room with that ultimate long-view lens: a good book?