User:Pahpaha/Culture

Culture
France has been a center of cultural creation for centuries. Many French artists have been among the most renowned of their time, and France is still much recognized and admired in the world for its very rich cultural tradition.

The successive political regimes have always promoted artistic creation, and the creation of the Ministry of Culture in 1959 helped preserve the cultural heritage of the country and make it available to public. The Ministry of Culture has been very active since its creation, granting subsidies to artists, promoting French culture in the world, supporting festivals and cultural events, protecting historical monuments. The French government also succeeded in maintaining a cultural exception to defend audiovisual products made in the country.

France is the country that receive the highest number of tourists per year, largely thanks to the numerous cultural establishments and historical buildings implanted all over the territory. It counts 1,200 museums welcoming more than 50 million people annually. The most important cultural sites are run by the government, for instance through the public agency Centre des monuments nationaux, which have around hundred national historical monuments at charge. On the 43,180 buildings protected as historical monuments, 50% are of private ownership, 43% are owned by communes and cities, and 4% by the government. These monuments include mainly residences (many castles, or châteaux in French) and religious buildings (cathedrals, basilicas, churches, etc), but also statutes, memorials and gardens.

Literature
French comics are also a notable French production, considered as a distinct art. Famous French comics writers and artists include René Goscinny, Moebius and Enki Bilal. Some series as Asterix, Valérian and Laureline, Michel Vaillant and Blueberry have reached great popularity among local fans and abroad. Comics books make up 10% of total book sales in France.

Music
     

Newspapers and magazines
Best-selling daily national newspapers in France are Le Monde, and right-wing Le Figaro, with around 300.000 copies sold daily, but also L'Équipe, dedicated to sports coverage. The other dailies distributed in the whole territory are Aujourd'hui en France, left-wing Libération, former communist publication L'Humanité, catholic daily La Croix, La Tribune and Les Échos, both dedicated to economic news. In the past years, free dailies made a rapid breakthrough, the sector being currently dominated by Metro, 20 Minutes and recently launched Direct Plus, the three of them being distributed at more than 650.000 copies respectively. However, the widest circulations are reached by regional daily Ouest France with more than 750.000 copies sold; among the 50 other regional newspapers those with the highest circulation are Le Parisien, Le Dauphiné Libéré, Sud Ouest, Le Progrès, Dernières Nouvelles d'Alsace, L'Est Républicain, La Voix du Nord, with sales above 200.000 daily copies.

The most influential news magazine are left-wing Le Nouvel Observateur, centrist L'Express and right-wing Le Point (more than 400.000 copies). Investigative and satirical papers Le Canard Enchaîné and Charlie Hebdo are also among the most influential weeklies, as well as magazine Paris Match. The sector is diversified with more than 400 specialized weekly magazines published in the country. The highest circulation for weeklies is reached by TV magazines and by women’s magazines, among them Marie Claire and ELLE, which have foreign versions.

Like in most industrialized nations, the French written media have been affected by a severe crisis in the past decade. In 2008, the government have launched the "General State of written media", an initiative to help the sector reform to be financially independent. However, in 2009 the government gave 600.000 euros to help the print media cope with the economic crisis, in addition to existing subsidies.

Radio and television
In 1974, after years of centralized monopole on radio and television, the governmental agency ORTF was split into several national institutions, including the three already-existing national TV channels and four national radio stations owned by the new broadcasting group Radio France. However these institutions were still kept under strict control by the Sate, and it was only in 1981 when the government allowed free broadcasting in the territory, ending state monopole on radio. French television was partly liberalized in the decade with the creation of commercial channels Canal+ and M6 and the privatization of TF1. Several commercial channels appeared in the 1990s thanks to cable and satellite television, and in 2005 the national service Télévision Numérique Terrestre introduced digital television all over the territory, allowing the creation of other channels.

The four existing national channels are now run by state-owned consortium France Télévisions and has been directly funded by the state since the suppression of advertising in 2009. The state agency Conseil supérieur de l'audiovisuel has regulated since 1989 the whole sector of audiovisual media, controlling the institutions and the contents. The most popular TV channels remain the older one, TF1, France 2 and France 3 with more than 50% of audiences. It is the same with radio stations, the most listened to being long-established commercial stations RTL, Europe 1 and state-owned France Inter.

The government has run Radio France Internationale, which broadcasts programs in French all over the world, and franco-german TV channel TV5 Monde for a long time. In 2006, it created global news channel France 24.

Language
After having been a influential language for centuries, being used for instance in diplomacy, the French has suffered from the increasing use of English in the world. However, the French language is still spoken in most former French colonies, but it is also learned in other countries. The Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie (OIF), created by the French government and now supported by the United Nations and the UNESCO, is the organization responsible for the promotion of the French language in its 55 member countries and in the world. Beside its 55 official members, the OIF has two associate countries and 13 observers countries. In France the language is regulated by the Académie Française, founded in 1635.