the RN ready to do anything to rearm heritage culture

Multiply the budget allocated to heritage by three, reduce taxes a little more for castle owners… The RN’s cultural program exalts the past and combats multiculturalism.

LCulture is going through this lightning election campaign like a ghost. No party with the exception of the New Popular Front has taken the trouble to update its presidential program. The National Rally (RN) no more than the others. Its leaders are content to haunt the TV sets with the sole antiphon of the privatization of public broadcasting. For the rest, please refer to the 2022 program. There, if you like old stones, there is consistency and consistency.

Marine Le Pen has always made heritage the keystone of her cultural policy. In the 2022 presidential election, she even followed her logic to its logical conclusion: it served as a single program. As a natural extension of national preference for culture. The assumed demand for an ideology where the safeguarding of historical monuments, the exaltation of popular traditions and the sacralization of the past would serve as a bulwark against despised multiculturalism and wokism. “Heritage is the perfect expression of French civilization”, the candidate then explained. “I will give it a major place in the country’s moral recovery program. » For the RN, old stones, like the earth, do not lie.

An unbelievable speech

The promotion of heritage does not only respond to ideological criteria, it also has economic aims. If historical monuments are “the crucible of a great thousand-year-old nation”, they are also “the primary reason for tourism” in France. The RN therefore concluded that it was urgent to imagine a single Ministry of Culture and Tourism. A novelty whose benefits to either are hard to see.

This heritage rearmament would also involve enlisting young people, encouraged to engage in a six-month National Heritage Service, renewable once, open to volunteers aged 18 to 24. Money, the sinews of war, is not forgotten. Marine Le Pen proposed in 2022 to triple the budget allocated to the restoration of historical heritage (1 billion euros). For their part, owners of castles and manors could benefit from even more favorable taxation and the Heritage Loto could be exempt from taxes.

Will this financial debauchery impact the artistic creation carried by public stages? The party wants to be reassuring, promising that it will not touch it any more than the regime of intermittent workers in the entertainment industry. A speech that breaks with the past but is hardly credible. What weight do these declarations have in the light of a populist ideology that has always been morbidly hostile to certain forms of novelty and cultural diversity? What protection can we expect from a Ministry of Culture in the hands of the RN when attacks on creative freedom perpetrated by small far-right groups or fundamentalist Catholics continue to increase?

If there is therefore one promise that the RN leaders want to keep, it is the privatization of public broadcasting – without us knowing which channels or radio stations would or would not be privatized, due to the cacophony on the subject at hand. inside the party. The maximalists want it to be complete, with the exception of France 24 and RFI to embody the voice of France abroad. Others would like to keep France Info and/or the local branches of France 3 and France Bleu in the public domain. Nothing more absurd. When we claim to fight against the hegemony of the giants of American entertainment, we are not depriving ourselves of such a creative tool. The RN, which likes nothing more than to set itself up as the defender of the working classes, quickly forgets that public service is precisely the heritage of those who do not have it.