An empirical creation in the early 1970s, the cultural meeting centres were born of a combination of political will and opportunely seized circumstances. Their evolution and development cannot be understood without putting them into perspective in relation to cultural policy as a whole, of which they are one of the levers.

When he arrived at the Ministry of Cultural Affairs in January 1971, Jacques Duhamel was determined to carry on the legacy of André Malraux while taking new initiatives. He liked to refer to a definition of action given by the American philosopher William James: ‘first continue, then begin’. He was aware of the paradox of the cultural policy of the Fifth Republic: crowned by the prestige of Malraux and marked by his spectacular initiatives, this policy was nonetheless fragile and in many ways marginal. This was so true that if, in 1969, the new President of the Republic, Georges Pompidou, and his Prime Minister, Jacques Chaban-Delmas, had chosen to close Malraux's brilliant but unusual ‘parenthesis’ and revert to a Secretariat of State for the Arts and Humanities as in the previous Republics, the majority of the time would have been rather relieved and the cultural world, still reeling from the events of May 68, would have resigned itself. This was not their choice, and although, out of caution, they initially entrusted the portfolio to Edmond Michelet, the bearer of a piece of the true Cross of Lorraine, they both sensed that culture was going to become a dimension of any large-scale political project. Since then, the existence of a ministerial department responsible for culture has never been called into question. After an interlude with Michelet, who died in September 1970, and an interim entrusted to André Bettencourt, they called on a politician of stature, the leader of one of the tendencies of the majority, Jacques Duhamel. A graduate of the first class (France combattante) of the ENA, appointed to the Conseil d'Etat, a long-time collaborator of Edgar Faure whose cabinet he headed at Matignon in 1955, Duhamel had chosen a career in politics in 1962. A member of parliament for the Jura and mayor of Dôle, he joined the presidential majority in 1969, along with many of the centrist members of parliament. Initially Minister for Agriculture, at the end of 1970 he expressed the wish to be appointed Minister for Cultural Affairs.

At the handover with André Bettencourt at rue de Valois in early 1971, he declared ‘I will not think like Malraux, I will not live like Michelet, but I will try to manage this ministry, because that is what I know how to do’. And in fact, the only instruction he gave his cabinet was to ‘get the State to take cultural policy seriously’, by making the most of Malraux's lasting initiatives, but also by looking for every opportunity for new initiatives that would illustrate the cultural dimension of public action as a whole, particularly at the level of planning and regional development, at a time when decentralisation was going to increase the responsibilities of local authorities.

The Ministry of Cultural Affairs had been designed, or rather, cobbled together in 1959 for General De Gaulle's ‘brilliant friend’. It had taken over the remit of the traditional Secretary of State for Fine Arts, to which had been added the cinema, which until then had been the responsibility of the Ministry of Industry; but libraries and public reading remained within the remit of the Ministry of Education, and the audiovisual sector was the responsibility of a Ministry of Information concerned above all with exercising political control over the media. To rejuvenate and reawaken an administration that was still very academic and institutional in spirit, Malraux had, in the absence of enarques, who were then reluctant to embark on this uncertain adventure, called on agents made available by decolonisation: administrators of overseas France, imaginative, energetic people with a real sense of State, the best example of whom is Emile Biasini, who, with drive and audacity, conceived, in a resolutely Jacobin spirit, new models of cultural action which they set about equipping the territory with, with the more or less enthusiastic help of the local authorities, such as cultural centres and centres for cultural action. It has to be said that, at the time, culture was seen by many elected representatives as more of a burden than an asset, with the exception of a few cities such as Grenoble, Saint-Etienne, Strasbourg, Avignon and Bordeaux; as for the regions, at the time they were no more than ‘administrative action districts’. The same technocratic zeal was then deployed in other fields, such as music, where from 1968-69 the composer Marcel Landowski devised a ‘ten-year music plan’ designed to create orchestras and opera houses throughout the country; the same thing happened with Bernard Anthonioz for the performing arts. The introduction of the ‘protected areas’ created by Malraux in the early 1960s followed the same technocratic logic, in the noblest sense of the term, consisting of the vertical application of a uniform model throughout the country with the more or less constrained support of local authorities. It was the same logic that Jack Lang applied ten years later when he created the Fonds régionaux d'art contemporain (FRAC).

Taking stock of the actions underway, Jacques Duhamel told me in the early weeks of the risk he foresaw of a divergence or splintering of cultural policy: a heritage policy of a conservative nature and a cultural action policy drifting towards protest. Concerned about the unity and coherence of cultural policy, he invited me to look for opportunities to turn heritage sites into centres of excellence in the field of creativity and living culture.

This intuition gave rise to the Centres culturels de rencontre - not by imposing a predefined concept, but by spotting initiatives or intentions on the ground that could serve this merely sketched-out purpose. It's important to stress this point: we didn't just decide one day to create cultural centres of encounter, but to seize opportunities to experiment with making certain monuments something other than ‘old stones’ accessible, for an entrance fee, to a docile public guided by guards in caps mechanically spouting out a text learnt by heart.

Two such opportunities presented themselves shortly afterwards, and might well have come to nothing had we not been on the lookout. The first was the Chartreuse de Villeneuve-lez-Avignon. On hearing that Jacques Duhamel was due to visit the Gard region to attend the wedding of one of his sons, the local MP, Jean Poudevigne, insisted that I arrange for the minister to visit the Chartreuse, as the mayor of Villeneuve was unhappy that the State, despite owning this monument from the time of the Avignon popes, had lost interest in it. Back in Paris, having visited the Chartreuse, Jacques Duhamel asked me, in the spirit of our previous conversation, to see what could be done with it. I immediately spoke to Jean Salusse, director of the Caisse Nationale des Monuments Historiques, a purely accounting body that collected admission fees for monuments belonging to the State, which we intended to turn into an administration with a mission that would compensate for the vertical compartmentalisation of the ministry's departments. A study mission was entrusted to Bernard Tournois, a television journalist specialising in theatre issues, whom Paul Puaux, Vilar's successor at the Avignon Festival, had sent to visit the Chartreuse, alerted by Salusse. Tournois‘ project, based on artists’ residencies in restored Carthusian houses, led to the creation of CIRCA in 1973.
The second opportunity, in the months that followed, was of a completely different nature: the Ministry of Justice closed the prison that had been set up in the Royal Abbey of Fontevraud, giving the Ministry of Cultural Affairs responsibility for this splendid monument, in which Olivier Guichard was interested and which drew Jacques Duhamel's attention to this high place near Chinon and the Loire Valley. Once again, the Caisse des Monuments Historiques was tasked with exploring the site.

7 January 2012 - In both cases, Jacques Duhamel had in mind two ‘precedents’ with which he was familiar and which, in his eyes, had the value of a model or, in any case, a benchmark; these were experiments that owed nothing to the State, but from which it could draw inspiration: Royaumont Abbey, where the Gouin family, the owners, had already organised a number of prestigious conferences before the war - and the Saline royale at Arc-et-Senans, which the Doubs département had bought and which avant-garde minds such as Serge Antoine wanted to turn into a centre for thinking about foresight, a new fashionable concept.

La Chartreuse and Fontevraud, deliberately inspired by Royaumont and La Saline, served as examples for other initiatives in high places of various kinds, with very different land tenure systems, legal and financial arrangements and missions, but all dedicated to living culture.

Having been involved in this trial, the fruit of circumstances but also of political will, as I said at the beginning, I can attest to the fact that this is how the cultural meeting centres came into being, in a very pragmatic way. They owe everything to Duhamel and Salusse, as well as to imaginative elected representatives, to men like Tournois or Serge Antoine and to architects of historic monuments who dared to adapt august monuments to contemporary uses that were far removed from their original purpose, but where creators, artists and writers find a silence, a peace and a memory of the centuries that can inspire them. I would be lying if I said that, in these early days, we conceived or even just sensed what the posterity of these high places and of those who have joined them in the family of the CCRs would be. The sole purpose of this account is to remind the living of what we owe to those visionaries of forty years ago.