On Monday, the actress Dominique Blanc, a member of the Comédie-Française, handed back her Légion d’honeur, the highest distinction the French state can bestow on one of its citizens. She did so in protest over Rachida Dati still being in post as culture minister, despite an impending court case in which she has been charged with passive corruption and influence peddling during her time as a member of the European Parliament. Dati is accused of accepting €900,000 in legal fees in 2010–12 from Renault-Nissan, not for any work she did as a lawyer but as a lobbyist. Such activity is forbidden in Brussels. Dati denies these charges, as well as the accusation of failing to declare 19 pieces of jewellery worth €420,000 among her assets when she took up her ministerial position.
Dati not only plans to fight the court case, which is set for 16–28 September 2026, she also intends to run in the March 2026 elections for what has long been her dream post: mayor of Paris. Is a looming corruption trial a problem for her campaign? Not for Dati, but it is all too much for Dominique Blanc, whose action comes shortly after the announcement of the 2026 budget, which includes a substantial cut to culture. ‘The only power Ms. Dati wields is the power to cut budgets everywhere,’ Blanc told L’Humanité in an interview explaining her decision. Artists, museums and small towns with cultural initiatives will all suffer. ‘The tap is turned off, and culture is being suffocated.’
The French culture ministry is not a serene place at the moment. One might just say, plus ça change, of course, for the dramas at the Rue de Valois have been coming, one after another, for more than two decades. In the last 25 years there have been 13 culture ministers. This is musical chairs compared with the stability of previous decades, notably Jack Lang’s two half-decade-long stints starting in 1981 and Malraux’s unbroken decade of 1959–69.
In the budget for 2026 proposed to the senate last week, culture faces a second successive year of cuts, this time a trimming of €216 million. It may seem a small dent in a total of €4.2 billion total but in France such a cut is taken by many as a sign of a decline in the government’s commitment to artists and the arts.
Cultural heritage will be among the biggest losers in 2026, which is unfortunate given the recent heist at the Louvre has reinforced longstanding calls for greater investment in security. Anticipating she would be pressed on just this point, Dati began her presentation by saying she had ordered an internal inquiry and accepted that ‘the fact the spectacular theft took place does indeed represent a failure. Security flaws did exist, and they must be addressed’. Trying to make the cuts sound less like cuts, Dati referred to them as a process of ‘smoothing’ rather than ‘withdrawing [funding]’.
Another casualty in the 2026 budget is the Culture Pass, a flagship policy of President Emmanuel Macron. Once a €300 voucher handed out to 18-year-olds-to spend on culture, next year it will be half that amount. (Fifteen and 16-year-olds will have their smaller sums cut altogether, although 17-year-olds will have their €30 allowance increase to €50.)
It is worth remembering why Dati’s predecessor was shown the door. Appointed in 2022, Rima Abdul Malak put her foot in it two years into her tenure by speaking critically of French the actor Gérard Depardieu, who at the time was facing charges brought by actresses of sexual assault. Macron considered Malak’s comments an unacceptable ‘manhunt’ of an actor who, he believed, ‘made France proud’. (In May, Depardieu was found guilty of sexually assaulting two women on a film set in Paris in 2021; several other women have made similar allegations.)
It is now Dati, with her own judicial troubles, who is turning artists against the ministry. If she wins in March – even though her own political faction is backing a different candidate – she takes her personal drama with her to the mayor’s office. But the unrest in and around the Rue de Valois will not disappear with her. Its roots run deeper than a single minister.
Making this all too clear was a speech by the film director Justine Triet at the Cannes Film Festival in 2023. After collecting the Palme d’’Or for Anatomy of a Fall, she called out the government for what she considered a commercialisation of culture and the negative consequences this was having on France’s exception culturelle. She would not be collecting the prize without it, she pointed out. Malak, minister at the time, was ‘gobsmacked’ by the speech and treated the Palme d’Or winner as a spoilt brat. However the episode captured what is causing these successive dramas. Here was an artist who had benefited from the government’s investment in culture saying: yes, we have been spoilt – and let’s fight to keep it that way. Many in government see the exception culturelle differently: far too expensive to maintain without sufficient return on the investment, to use the kind of terms that inspired the counter-attacks by Triet and by Blanc. This division will fuel many more dramas.