For much of its history, France has played a central role in European culture. With the advent of colonialism and global trade, France reached a worldwide market, and French artistic, culinary, and sartorial styles influenced the high and popular cultures of nations around the globe. Today French customs, styles, and theories remain an influential export, as well as a point of great national pride, even as French intellectuals worry that the rise of globalism has prompted, in the words of the historian Pierre Nora, “the rapid disappearance of our national memory.”
French culture is derived from an ancient civilization composed of a complex mix of Celtic, Greco-Roman, and Germanic elements. Monuments, especially from the period of Roman occupation, are numerous and include the amphitheatre at Arles, the arènes (“arenas”) in Paris, and the aqueduct at Pont du Gard.
During the Middle Ages a rich culture developed, fostered in particular by monks and scholars in monasteries and universities and encouraged well into the 18th century by a system of royal and aristocratic patronage. Important trade fairs in growing cities such as Paris, Nancy, Strasbourg, and Lyon enabled the spread of artistic ideas and cultural trends to and from other regions, placing France at the centre of a nascent European high culture that would reach its greatest expression in the Renaissance. From the early 1700s and with the development of a middle class, the bourgeoisie, culture became more generally accessible. This was the age of the Enlightenment, of inquiry and question. Cultural activity remained largely centred in Paris, but smaller cities such as Aix-les-Bains, Grenoble, and Lyon were vital in their own right. The culture of the Enlightenment was built on reason and analytic argumentation, mirrored, as political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville remarked, in the French Revolution’s
attraction for general theories, for general systems of legislation, the exact symmetry of laws…the same desire to remake the entire constitution at once following the rules of logic and in accordance with a single plan, instead of seeking ways to amend its parts.
Among its tenets was the idea of meritocracy, or an aristocracy of ability and intelligence, which accorded a central place to intellectuals unknown in most other societies and opened France’s schools to students from the provinces without regard for social class.
With free primary education compulsory by the late 19th century, basic literacy ensured that the general cultural level was raised. This was further aided by the increase in the number of newspapers and, later, by the development of radio, cinema, television, and the Internet. After World War II the intellectual and social development of lower-income groups benefited from the decision to make free secondary education compulsory up to age 16. Cultural literacy expanded as newspaper circulations rose, lending libraries proliferated, and in 1954 a revolution began in paperback books (livre de poche). This last development met with enormous success, providing people of all ages and classes with much greater access to literature and other forms of specialized knowledge.
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The Ministry of Culture and Communications oversees the major cultural institutions of the nation. The department, first led by novelist André Malraux, seeks to redouble arts awareness among ordinary people, support the creation of new art, and protect existing French forms and properties as wide-ranging as monuments and language. The cultural map of France remains firmly centred on Paris, despite increased expenditure by local authorities on cultural activities following the decentralization legislation of the early 1980s. Yet, while serving, often self-consciously, the interests of the whole nation, the capital is aware of its own internal differences. Most of the city’s arrondissements (municipal districts) have groups actively researching their history and traditions, and local art exhibitions and concerts are encouraged. In the rest of the country, provincial culture is strong and often fiercely defended—for example, in Brittany, parts of the south, and Alsace.
French culture has felt the impact made by immigrants, especially those from North Africa beginning in the 1960s. The Muslim communities that have formed, notably in Paris and Marseille, have not escaped discrimination, but there is a widespread acknowledgment of their contributions to cuisine, music, dance, painting, and literature. Verlan, a slang of standard French that reverses and reshuffles French syllables and spellings, traces its roots to the 19th century but was revived by postwar immigrant communities and in recent decades has made inroads into mainstream society. Beginning in the 1980s, second- and third-generation North Africans were often referred to as les beurs, and beur cinema, beur comics, and beur radio, among other forms of expression, have found a large audience. The label beur is itself a Verlan term for arabe, the French word for Arab. In addition, Asian and sub-Saharan African immigrants have attained prominence as artists, writers, and musicians in France’s increasingly multicultural society.