Why France Might Copy America's New Deal, in a Very French Way

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http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/02/why-france-might-copy-americas-new-deal-in-a-very-french-way/252546/



Should France get a New Deal of its own? How about a "French dream"? Americans watching the French presidential election and listening to Socialist Party candidate François Hollande, Nicolas Sarkozy's leading challenger, are likely to find a lot of his terms and ideas strangely familiar.

"Culture is part of the French dream," Hollande declared at an event in Nantes in January, echoing a familiar campaign slogan. The French Dream is also the title of his collection of speeches, released last August. "Culture is not a cost, not an expense, but an investment," Hollande continued at Nantes. Culture is the antidote to the current "fear of the other, the sense of decline," and "French culture abroad is a way to make our language, our production, and paradoxically our economy more prominent," he said.

The notion of cultural revival as stimulus has plenty of precedent in American history. A gloss on the current "French dream" discussion, written by director of public radio institution France Culture, Olivier Poivre d'Arvor, for Le Monde, links the two explicitly:

An effective cultural policy involves continual reinvention. In the 1930s, in the midst of the Depression, America invented the New Deal: as the crisis and unemployment raged, far from sacrificing the arts budget of his country, President Roosevelt proposed to raise the nation's morale and boost employment with a new cultural package. Through an ambitious program, he ordered dozens of thousands of public works and financed artistic creation in theatre and music.


Of course, there are other examples of this approach throughout history, but there's a way in which Hollande attaching himself to Roosevelt in particular, insofar as that's what he's trying to do, makes a lot of sense. As Yale political science professor David Cameron pointed out to me a few months ago, the French left has struggled in the past year to come up with a coherent response to the fiscal crisis. It's hard to be a Socialist Party candidate when austerity and a sharp, even magical, economic upturn are the flavors of the day. Hollande has frequently come under fire for the costs of some of his proposed programs.

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1. Liberté, égalité, fraternité !!!

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