Contenu du sommaire : Les pouvoirs publics et la culture.

French cultural policy. This paper presents a large overview of French cultural policy, discussing its main trends and shifts of emphasis and problems encountered since the ministry of Andre Malraux. The main chapters hence cover national monuments and traditions preservation policy, liberal approaches to cultural policy, emphasis on national and local idiosyncratic values, musical policy, cinématographie policy, and decentralization.

The ministry of culture : the french experience. Existing for over twenty years now as a self-contained ministerial department, the former Secretariat aux Beaux-Arts has eventually tumed out a full-fledged administration with relatively comfortable resources with which to embark upon a nation-wide cultural action. Nevertheless there remain weak points explained in parts by teething troubles and the perpetual gap to bridge goals and means, heavy and at times obsolete structures, over-centralization, often erratic working methods with a disconcerting mixture of stop-gap and perfectionist approaches governed by precipitation and slowness side by side. These insufificiencies are largely offset by the personal qualities of the men who for over more than twenty years have conceived and directed at various levels within the ministry the cultural action of the State. Thus a remarkable if not spectacular progress has been achieved in most of the fields of arts and culture comparable to respective achievements in other Western countries.

Development of cultural policy in Egypt. This paper discusses the 1954 founded Egyptian ministry of culture's activity which has evolved along two main lines : the development of audio-visual media, radio and TV, and the collection and preservation of national monuments and inherited works of art. This has in particular contributed to the introduction of an important change in rural modes of life and thinking. The promotion of living arts has led to the establishment of Egyptian cultural centres abroad to présent both Egyptian culture and traditions.

Arts in the U.K. : financing outside the state. A former chairman of the Arts Council once said that one of the great liberties enjoyed by a British subject is his right to abstain from the arts. This best outlines the tradition on which cultural policy is based in the U.K., governed by the principle that the majority has no right to decide on behalf of individual taste which may differ from whatever doctrine of national interest. This pragmatic approach is set against French dogmatics pinpointing the originality of the British concept of cultural policy and its inherent problems.

The italian cultural centres abroad, an impossible mission, Sergio Romano. After the second world war, Italian cultural policy abroad was radically changing by discontinuing to serve political window-dressing purposes while upholding, nevertheless, the general trend towards recuperating the great literary and artistic tradition for determining and upbuilding Italian cultural presence worldwide as inherited from the Unità movement. As the authors States, this policy is dictated both by its past and by parallel endeavours by its rivais, in particular the French and German Cultural Centres whose performance is taken as a yardstick for self-evaluation purposes.

Cultural policy in Sweden. During the ‘70's, Sweden adopted a genuine cultural policy evolving along the following main criteria : major opportunities for self-expression, creative and community development, decentralization and financial efforts in favour of the underprivileged. Since State finance does not reach the local level, the implementation of such a policy remained within the exclusive terms of reference of local govemment. This accounts for wide discrepancies among boroughs. The 80ties witness a cut in public expenditure with serious effects on cultural policy which had not yet reached its full development and still lacked strong local structures. Therefore, future cultural policy is as yet uncertain. It will largely depend on societal options taken : privatization and commercialization or cultural welfare and creativity.