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domin ated the way it fun cti ons-this in a countr y where grass and
gardens are LO be looked a t rather th an wa lked in , where mos t public
movement except walkin g in the s treets is severely regimented.
In
comparison to the Beaubou rg the Maisons de la Culture in the
provinces, so dear LO Andre Malraux, are stuffy and formal redoubts of
the middl e class.
The Beaubourg draws a much wider range of visiLOrs, including
the French themselves , than all the o ther major tourist a ttraction s of
Par is combined. Its g lassed-in fl ow o f verti cal traffi c is already being
imitated in the expansion o f the Museum of Modern Art in New York .
Yet the building 's fl exibl e, loftlike spaces , with their movabl e pa rti–
tions, tend
to
domin a te mos t of wh a t is exhibited in them , even where
horizontal partiti ons are used to lower th e ceilings and crea te a grea ter
sense of enclosure. Like New York 's Guggenheim Museum, the
building itself usuall y overwhelms its contents.
If
the Beaubourg were being pl ann ed today it would be less likely
to become the same fr ee-wh eeling, experimental opera tion . The build–
ing was des igned by an Eng lishman and an Itali an aft er an intern a–
tional competition , a t a time wh en th e usuall y xenophobic French
were trying LO propel their lagging cultural institutions up to world
class with an infusion o f foreign talent. The astonishing appo intment
of a German , Ro lf Liebermann , to run the Opera in 1973 was a prime
example. But recentl y bo th th e retirin g Li ebermann and the departing
museum director o f the Beaubourg , a Swede, have been succeeded by
more dependabl e Fren ch bureaucra ti c types. (The effect on the Opera
was already no ti ceabl e in the thinn ess of the 1980-81 season. ) Yet this
cultural chauvinism recurs a t a time when French intell ectu als- and ,
indeed, the gen eral public- are becoming less insul ar than ever. The
most audibl e sign is the wides pread knowl edge of Eng lish , which the
government has encouraged for th e sake of Fren ch business, scien ce,
and techno logy, but whi ch a lso has proved a boon for American studies
in the uni versiti es . For decades th e French refused to no tice th at
English had repl aced French as the interna tion al language; now man y
jobs demand bilingual competence, without whi ch man y busin esses
would be cut off from th e world market.
On the intell ectu al scene the same impulse LO keep in the game has
made the French much more curi ous about foreign ideas, largely
because there are no powerful new ideas currentl y being genera ted
in Paris. No t long ago th e fee ling was: if it didn 't happen in France, it
didn 't happen . But now Marxi sm , structuralism , and deconstruction
have largely los t their ho ld on Fren ch intell ectu als, who have redis–
covered bo th history and subj ectivity and whose methods have become
