MARTELL on French and American Culture

No, not the Cognac, but the author.

Martel, 39, a former French cultural attaché in Boston, has set out to change this. In "Culture in America," a 622-page tome weighty with information, he challenges the conventional view in Paris that (French) culture financed and organized by the government is entirely good and that (American) culture shaped by market forces is necessarily bad.

And that leads him to the crucial role played by nonprofit foundations, philanthropists, corporate sponsors, universities and community organizations, which in practice do receive indirect government support in the form of tax incentives.

"If the Culture Ministry is nowhere to be found," he writes, "cultural life is everywhere."
He felt reassured by this. He first visited the United States in 1999 — to promote an earlier book, "The Pink and the Black: Homosexuals in France Since 1968" — and he was still very much a neophyte when he arrived in Boston in 2000. After studying the history of American culture in libraries and private archives, he set out to discover American culture as it is being lived today.
"I spent all my vacations traveling," he said. "I counted up over 700 interviews in 110 cities in 35 states. American universities were a revelation: French universities don't play an important cultural role. I reached out to gays, feminists, Latinos, avant- garde, counterculture. I gave priority to visiting black communities in every major city, attending associations, street theater, poetry clubs."

Yet, Martel noted, the same country that embraces this extraordinary cultural diversity is itself accused of imposing cultural uniformity on the world. The United States was almost alone last year in voting against a French-sponsored international convention on cultural diversity that was adopted overwhelmingly by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, which is based in Paris.

This apparent contradiction had a simple explanation at Unesco: Washington was bending to pressure from Hollywood studios, which claimed that the convention threatened their movie and television exports. But Martel also sees inconsistencies — actually, he prefers the word hypocrisy — in the French position.

"Americans defend cultural diversity at home and deny it abroad," he said, "while France defends cultural diversity around the world and refuses it at home."
And it is here that he most wants France to learn from the United States.
"What really annoys me is the way our cultural elite uses ideology to protect its privileges," he said. "It says that our culture defines a certain idea of France, that the alternative is Americanization. But it's really only defending itself against the popular classes. We cannot have 10 percent of our population stemming from immigration and deny them their culture.