Facing the Music: French Cultural Policy from a British Perspective.

The article examines the French experience of socialist cultural policy since 1981. Unlike Great Britain, France has always taken culture seriously. After at least four centuries of state patronage, arts and education in modern day France are tightly linked with the country's sense of itself as a unified, republican nation-state and with its partly self-created prestige as the cultural fortress of the Western world. Since the 1980s, pop, an American-style mass entertainment par excellence, has increasingly been constructed at government level as a way of resolving the binary oppositions which have affected French policy-making.