French Ministry of Culture budget conference: good news and bad news

1. Rima Abdul Malak, Minister for Culture, at the presentation of the 2024 budget.
Photo: Didier Rykner

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French Culture Minister Rima Abdul Malak presented the Ministry of Culture’s budget on Wednesday (see the conference here). As we have often written, a budget can only be fully judged once it has actually been spent. In the past, there have often been big differences between the forecasts and what was actually spent. While we don’t currently know what the budget for 2023 will be, as the year is not yet over, we do recognise that, as we write in our forthcoming book on Notre-Dame de Paris[Didier Rykner, Notre-Dame. Une affaire d’État, Les Belles Lettres] that since the health crisis, and particularly in 2022, the budgets voted and those executed have been fairly close. If this trend continues, the 2024 budget presented by the Minister is objectively quite good. It takes inflation into account and even goes a little further, increasing by around 6% for an inflation rate this year of around 5%. The undeniable progress - we are of course talking about heritage, not public broadcasting, which is totally outside our scope - made in recent years has therefore been consolidated. After significant falls (particularly under François Hollande), the budget for historic monuments has recovered and is now higher than it has ever been, rising from 433 million (payment appropriations) in 2022 to 467 million in 2023, and now a forecast of 507 million in 2024. This is certainly welcome progress, even if it still remains far short of what is needed.

It should be noted, however, that despite the increase in funding for museums, one item has been sacrificed for more than ten years: acquisitions (which is consistent with the disastrous policy pursued in this area by the Ministry, to which we will return shortly). Halved in 2012 compared with 2011, it has never recovered from this drastic cut. In 2009 it was around €20 million, and this…