Introduction

Abstract

This book is about governmental policies for shaping culture in France between 2002 and 2012. It understands culture as denoting embodied clusters of attitudes, values and references, and it looks at policies as institutionalized courses of action for acting upon these, paying particular attention to the symbolic and discursive means deployed. This is, of course, just one approach among many to governmental activity, but it should not be construed as simply marginal to ‘harder’ accounts based on socio-economic and geo-political relations of force. As Gramsci and many others since have noted, such relations of force are not directly perceived but mediated through interpretation (Gramsci & Forgacs, 2000, p. 46). The battles to impose the most persuasive or resonant interpretative frames are cultural battles.