Culture and the arts in France have traditionally been seen as sacrosanct, and thus considered immune to the state funding cuts sweeping the rest of Europe. But all that may be changing
Navigating his way through packing boxes and instructions on where to hang famous masterpieces, the curator Stéphane Guégan toured the rooms of what promises to be Paris's biggest art show of the year. Manet, The Man Who Invented Modern Art, which opens at the Musée d'Orsay on 5 April, is the first retrospective in 30 years of the 19th-century painter who refused to join the main impressionist movement, but revolutionised modern subject matter such as French femininity.
Guégan stresses that the Edouard Manet show isn't just the "traditional blockbuster" romp through masterpieces that Paris is becoming famous for. "That would be boring. We are telling a story, changing a vision," he says, dismantling the myth of Manet as the tragic syphilitic painter rejected by the Paris salon. "He became more and more famous after the Franco-Prussian war and had no reason to join the impressionist movement. He wanted to be seen as the leader of modern painting, seducing the public with new subjects, especially modern woman, the evolution of femininity, clothes, hair and make-up in Paris."
In recent years, Paris has become synonymous with stratospheric blockbuster art exhibitions where visitors cram like sardines and crane for a view of famous works. The impressionist Claude Monet at the Grand Palais recently attracted a staggering 920,000 visitors and eventually had to open all night to accommodate the crowds. France had seen nothing like the queues since 1.2 million turned out to see the treasures of Tutankhamun in 1967.
Meanwhile, French museums had more than 26 million visitors in 2010, a figure more or less stable for three years. Theatre ticket sales are up, cinemas are full, the books industry is growing and French audiences are responding to the financial crisis by spending less on holidays and more on the arts. Major new building projects are under way – despite rows and setbacks – including the Paris Philharmonic and Marseille's MuCEM, the Museum of Civilisations from Europe and the Mediterranean.
Nicolas Sarkozy, despite carrying a copy of Proust under his arm and watching classic Italian cinema on DVD with Carla Bruni, still can't shake his reputation as the first French presidential philistine. But he boasts that France, unlike any other European country, and notably the UK, has avoided making heavy cuts to the arts and has protected cultural output. On paper, the French culture budget has even slightly increased this year, to €2.7bn (£2.3bn) – 1% of the French state's entire budget.
In Britain, where arts cuts have hit hard – Arts Council England will see its annual budget reduced from £449.5m to £349m by 2014 – culture supremos may look over the Channel with envy. But morale in the French arts world is hardly high. "At one arts conference in London, the English were saying: 'At least you're protected in France.' I thought, hang on a minute, it's not that rosy," muttered one French arts administrator.
In the French arts world, there is a rebellious mood. Last month, the country's curators – not normally known for stepping out of line – published a scathing critique of the state of French museums. They warned that cuts to regional and local administration budgets meant small museums were in a "precarious" state, decaying and threatened with closure. One third of France's curators are due to retire in five years, and the government policy of making savings by not replacing all retired workers meant that museums would suffer.
They also warned against the state adopting free-market economics for the arts, saying state intervention must protect art for art's sake. "There's a huge gap between Paris and the provinces, between big and small museums," said Christophe Vital, head of the curators' association. "But that doesn't mean the big establishments don't have problems too."
Last year, the heads of the country's most important museums, the Louvre, the Pompidou and the Musée d'Orsay, warned the government against a "short-term" mentality of cost-cutting that could put their museums at risk. Meanwhile, Marseille, which will be European capital of culture in 2013, is in the throes of an arts world revolt as smaller venues warn that key theatres and arts organisations are faced with collapse because of poor local funding and bad management.
At the heart of the issue is the French cultural exception. French arts funding is very different from the UK's. From the Renaissance king François I to the Sun King, Louis XIV, and then during the postwar years, France has prided itself on the massive state intervention that keeps culture afloat. These state initiatives include paying special benefits to actors between jobs, which are controversially under review, to fixing the price of books to protect independent sellers from hypermarkets, to a strict government-enforced quota system on showing French films to stop American cultural imperialism.
The private patronage and sponsorship so rife in the UK is almost unheard of in France, although it is beginning to grow. France prided itself on setting up the first real culture ministry in Europe in 1959 and saw state cultural policy as a way of uniting the nation after the war. At the same time, towns, local areas and regions play a massive role in funding. Because of Sarkozy's general tax cuts and funding cuts to local administrations – many of which were already suffering from bad financial management and the financial crisis – the knock-on effect is that a growing number of towns and counties can no longer spend local money on the arts.
Michel Orier, head of the successful and well-funded MC2 culture complex in Grenoble, said: "Unfortunately it's not true that we're totally spared the reality of economic cuts. The government's other regional and budget reforms mean regions and towns have less money to spend. The government can say it hasn't cut culture, but in reality we're all feeling the squeeze as the local pot shrinks."
The arts economist Françoise Benhamou said: "The state budget is kept very high, but at the same time the culture world is worried. There's a fear about how long local arts funding will last. The morale is not good." But France is still the number one tourist destination in the world, she added. "France as a country is very sensitive to the culture question and the government is prudent."
Of all the eye-catching French protests over the years, the culture sector's has been one of the most creative and determined, skilled at hogging the airwaves. In 2003, the theatre world went on strike and shut down several festivals, including the Avignon theatre festival and the Aix-en-Provence opera gathering – the equivalent of plunging the whole Edinburgh festival into darkness. "We're good at protesting," said François Le Pillouër, of the Théâtre National de Bretagne and head of the Syndeac union. "We're capable of massively mobilising and really capturing the public's imagination."
Antoine de Baecque, a film and culture historian and biographer of the film-maker Jean-Luc Godard, said: "In France, culture and civilisation is state policy. We have had 50 years of cultural politics, and culture is seen as a kind of state sanctuary, which means cuts like getting rid of the [UK] Film Council would be unthinkable in France. People would take to the streets."
But De Baecque, and others, envy the UK in one important way. "You have a link between culture and education which is nonexistent here," he said. Arts bosses warn that without a proper dialogue between Paris's labyrinthine education and culture ministries, it is impossible to win over new audiences and the next generation of French youth.
And that, they say, is the real secret to the future of the arts.
French arts projects
Paris Philharmonic, Paris
After a funding row which saw the north Paris building site at La Villette abandoned for a year, the structurewill open in 2014 as a home for the Orchestre de Paris.
Louvre-Lens
After the Pompidou-Metz, this is the second-biggest regional outpost for a Paris museum giant. In the centre of the northern industrial town, the low, sprawling architectural structure is described as "two boats on a river delicately floating into a huddle". It will show pieces from the Louvre's permanent collection when it opens in 2012.
MuCEM, Marseille
The Museum of Civilisations of Europe and the Mediterranean, which overlooks Marseille's old port, has been beset by delays and is racing to open in time for 2013, when the city is European capital of culture. It will house ethnological and anthropological pieces gathered from other collections in Paris.
Musée des Confluences, Lyon
A new science and ethnographic museum in a futurist building on the waterfront – variously likened to an insect, a spaceship and a train crash – is expected to be ready in 2014.