GOURNAY, Bernard <br/><br/>
Un ministère pour la culture :  l'expérience française 

 - Paris :  IIAP,  avril/juin 1982 
<br/><br/> Existing for over twenty years now as a self-contained ministerial department, the former Secrétariat aux Beaux-Arts has eventually turned out a full-fledged administration with relatively comfortable resources with which to embark upon a nation-wide cultural action. Nevertheless there remain weak points explained in parts by teething troubles and the perpetual gap to bridge goals and means, heavy and at times obsolete strucutres, over-centralization, often erratic working methods with a disconcerting mixture of stop-gap and perfectionist approaches governed by precipitation and slowness side by side. These insufficiencies are largely offset by the personal qualities of the men who for over more than twenty years have conceived and directed at various levels within the ministry the cultural action of the State. Thus a remarkable if not spectacular progress has been achieved in most of the fields of arts and culture comparable to respective achivements in other Western countries