Villepin and culture, a battlefield with no enemy at home

On 15 September 2026, Dominique de Villepin presented the most ambitious cultural programme yet put forward by any contender for the French presidency in 2027. A former prime minister, still without a formal candidacy, he proposes more than a hundred hours of artistic practice a year for every child, five thousand artists in residence and a tax on content generated by artificial intelligence. The diagnosis has the precision of a man who has known the salons of the State and the elegance of one who knows how to write. What the speech leaves unsaid, however, weighs as much as what it says.

A statesman without a mandate from the ballot box

For a Latin American reader, the name evokes at most a single image. On 14 February 2003, before the United Nations Security Council, a French foreign minister opposed the invasion of Iraq that Washington was preparing. He recalled that after winning a war one must build the peace, and the chamber applauded, something that almost never happens there. Twenty-three years later, that speech is still all that much of the world remembers of him. His whole career was built in the shadow of Jacques Chirac, the conservative president who governed France from 1995 to 2007, as secretary-general of the Élysée, foreign minister, interior minister and finally prime minister from 2005 to 2007.

Born in 1953 in Rabat, a career diplomat, Villepin has never held elected office. In 2012 he sought to stand for the presidency and withdrew after failing to gather the five hundred sponsorships from elected officials that the law requires.

Colombia knew him differently. In July 2003, as foreign minister, he decided to send a military aircraft to Manaus, in the Brazilian Amazon, carrying French secret service agents to collect Íngrid Betancourt, held hostage by the FARC since February 2002, whose release was thought imminent. According to available accounts, neither Brasília nor Bogotá had been informed. The release never happened and the aircraft flew home empty. It is worth remembering when the same man speaks of sovereignty.

As prime minister, his defining moment was a defeat. In 2006 he imposed the first employment contract, which gave employers a two-year trial period for workers under twenty-six during which they could be dismissed without reason. He had it adopted without a vote, through Article 49.3 of the Constitution, and after weeks of protests by students and trade unions his own government buried it on 10 April. The man who now wants to shape the gaze of French youth was, when he governed, in open confrontation with it.

For nearly two decades he remained on the margins, among lectures, books and a certain aura of the sidelined sage. In June 2025 he founded his own party, La France humaniste. It is from this ambiguous position, that of an aristocrat of the State without an electoral base, that he now speaks of culture.

An abundance that does not nourish

Villepin finds a happy image. He speaks of a «fossil culture», of attention burnt as oil is burnt, of an abundance of content that leaves the viewer emptier than before. In these pages I have already described how the platforms of Silicon Valley turned the human capacity not to be alone into an extractable resource. The contender reaches a similar conclusion by another road, and that must be acknowledged.

He is also right to attack the Pass Culture, a credit the French State grants young people to spend on books, cinema or concert tickets. The idea seemed generous. The results are modest.

According to the Cour des comptes, the French court of auditors, the budget of the Pass Culture rose from 92 to 324 million euros between 2021 and 2024, while only 68 % of young people from working-class backgrounds activated their credit, against 87 % of those from well-off backgrounds. (Cour des comptes, report of 17 December 2024)

The same report notes that barely 38 % of beneficiaries continue a cultural practice once the money is spent, and concludes that the scheme only «partially» succeeded in reaching the young people furthest from culture. Villepin sums it up with a cruel formula, handing cultural purchasing power to eyes that nobody has trained is like watering sand. He is right. The problem is that French sociology demonstrated this sixty years ago, and he presents it as a discovery.

A genealogy with twenty years cut out

The story has an almost schoolbook symmetry. In 1959 General de Gaulle creates a Ministry of Cultural Affairs for André Malraux and launches the maisons de la culture, local arts centres, and this is culture for all. In 1981 comes Jack Lang, who according to Villepin recognises rock, comics and the Fête de la Musique, and this is culture of all. Then twenty years of nothing. And now «culture by all», which would arrive with him.

The symmetry hides a more awkward history. In 1966 Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel showed in L’Amour de l’art that museum attendance depended not on supply but on the educational capital of visitors. Opening the doors was not enough.

Two years later, on 25 May 1968, the directors of public theatres gathered in Villeurbanne adopted a declaration whose drafting they entrusted to the philosopher Francis Jeanson. The text coined the «non-public», the mass that culture never reaches because nothing in its life prepares it to receive it, and it challenged the privileged character of bourgeois culture.

Villepin’s thesis, that a child who has sung listens differently, has authors he does not cite. Nor does he cite what, for Bourdieu and at Villeurbanne, lay at the heart of the matter, social class. With the authors erased, the division they described disappears, and «culture by all» becomes a national cause without an internal adversary.

The «twenty years of nothing», moreover, begin just when Villepin left Matignon, the prime minister’s residence, in May 2007. On 20 October 2005, while he was prime minister, UNESCO adopted in Paris the Convention on the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, which gave an international legal framework to the cultural exception defended by France. It is absent from the speech. My reading is that the story needed a void, and a void tolerates precedents badly, including one’s own.

Culture as an attribute of power

Villepin announces a third model, culture as a common good, set against the total market and against the control of empires. The instruments belong to another grammar, that of power. China invests billions, Russia has made culture a weapon, the British have supposedly written the BBC into their defence doctrine, South Korea would export nearly 70 % more cultural content than France. The quotation that closes the speech, attributed to Malraux, defines culture as the self-defence of the community. This is the vocabulary of sovereignty, in which culture counts as a strategic resource before it counts as a shared good.

The Korean example contradicts the model he claims to defend. After the Asian financial crisis of 1997, the government of Kim Dae-jung turned culture into industrial policy. In 2000, according to the researchers Tae Young Kim and Dal Yong Jin, the cultural budget exceeded 1 % of the national budget, and campaigns to promote the country abroad were organised in close partnership with conglomerates such as Samsung, LG and Hyundai. The result is spectacular, and its figures are public.

According to South Korea’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, the country’s exports of cultural content reached 14.08 billion dollars in 2024, of which 60.4 % came from video games. (The Korea Times, 27 February 2026)

That export machine, in which video games outweigh cinema, music and television combined, is the opposite of a common good. Villepin admires it without saying so.

His figures stand up poorly to verification, precisely where he invokes war. I found no export figure comparable to the Korean one in the publications of the French Ministry of Culture, so the 70 % gap could not be independently verified. The British National Security Strategy of June 2025, for its part, does not name the BBC. It mentions culture as a source of soft power, the power of attraction a State wields without force, and announces a council to steer it. The speaker inflates the threat to magnify the response.

The enemy who lives in Paris

The speech is full of platforms «mostly American», of algorithms that «were not written for us», of empires that tell stories. The adversary always comes from outside. The French owners of French cultural production never appear.

In these same pages I documented, on 14 July and 3 September, how a handful of fortunes came to own a large share of the media and publishing in France. The Bolloré group holds around 30 % of Canal+, owner of the news channel CNews, and an equivalent stake in Louis Hachette Group, which according to the observatory ÉquiLibre gives it de facto control over the publisher Hachette, the radio station Europe 1 and the weekly Le Journal du Dimanche. A contender who speaks of dictated imaginations cannot ignore that part of the confiscation takes place at home, with national capital. That he says nothing about it tells us something about where he speaks from.

His proposals on artificial intelligence follow the same logic. Pay the works that trained the models, label machine-generated content and tax it to fund human creation. «Let the machine finance what it competes with», he says. Labelling is already part of European law. Since 2 August 2026, Article 50 of the European Union regulation on artificial intelligence has required the public to be told when certain content has been generated or manipulated by machines. What is new is the tax, and a tax redistributes without touching ownership. The companies that concentrate models, data and catalogues would remain the same, only paying a toll.

The same holds for the artist’s status he proposes, with a guaranteed income and a solidarity fund. France already has a specific unemployment insurance scheme for performing arts workers, the intermittence, tightened in 2003 by an agreement between the employers and three minority unions that triggered a strike and the cancellation of several summer festivals. The promise deserves to be taken seriously. Its funding remains up in the air.

What the speech cannot say

Villepin asks the right question, what nourishes a people and what raises a child. His answer stops at the exact border where the ownership of capital begins. He can attack Washington, Beijing and Moscow, because the Gaullist rhetoric of sovereignty allows it. Gaullism also had its own social third way, «participation», which an ordinance of August 1967 imposed to associate employees with the fruits of company growth. It associated them with profits, never with ownership. To go after those who, from Paris, bought channels, publishing houses and newsrooms, one would need a critique of capital that this tradition never formulated.

The cultural exception he invokes with pride, wrested in 1993 during the GATT trade negotiations, held that works of art are not commodities like any other. Three decades later, within France’s borders, those works are bought, sold and concentrated like any other commodity. Seen from here, the State that defended the principle in Geneva seems to have abandoned it in its own market.

One observation remains, more uncomfortable for the left than for Villepin himself. The most coherent cultural programme of this pre-campaign comes not from those who claim the legacy of Villeurbanne, but from a former prime minister of Chirac who reinvents it without citing it. Until the French left reclaims that legacy with its class content intact, it will keep watching its own ideas being taken up by others, with better prose and less memory…

*G.S.*

Sources

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Dominique de Villepin turns culture into a battlefield and leaves off the map the enemy he has at home

A statesman without a mandate from the ballot box

An abundance that does not nourish

A genealogy with twenty years cut out

Culture as an attribute of power

The enemy who lives in Paris

What the speech cannot say

Sources

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A statesman without a mandate from the ballot box

An abundance that does not nourish

A genealogy with twenty years cut out

Culture as an attribute of power

The enemy who lives in Paris

What the speech cannot say

Sources

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