The political science researcher has mapped the some 6,800 French festivals. According to him, the interest of audiences for these events is a lasting trend.
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Emmanuel Négrier has been working on the issue of cultural festivals since 2005. Director of research at the CNRS, head of the Center for Political and Social Studies at the University of Montpellier, he recently published, with the sociologist Aurélien Djakouane, Festivals, Territory and Society (Co -edition of the Ministry of Culture and Presses de Sciences de Sciences PO, 260 p., 22 euros).
With the Department of Studies, Prospective and Statistics (DEPS) of the Ministry of Culture and the France Festivals Network, he has carried out a vast work of mapping aimed at measuring the importance of the festival -goer.
How was the idea of mapping France of festivals?
This world remains extremely diverse and it is this diversity that has long discouraged researchers. The idea of cartography was born after a speech by our colleague Emmanuel Wallon, professor of political sociology at Paris-Nanterre University, during the first day of the States General of Festivals, in October 2020. He said that in France , there were about 2,000 festivals, 3,000 for optimists, and up to 6,000 for the slightly scared minds. The Hurluberlus, it was us. Because when we counted the existing festivals at the scale of a department and compared this figure to the festivals panorama, designed in 2018 by the referent of the Ministry of Culture, Serge Kancel, we found it twice as much. In the dynamics of study (launched by France Festivals in 2019), Roselyne Bachelot, then Minister of Culture, told us an enlargement of the investigation to all festival disciplines. Thanks – if we can say so – in confinement, we had a lot of feedback and we extended with an investigation targeting completeness. We have reached around 6,800 festivals, all disciplines combined.
This “festivalization” of France, what is it due?
As often in France, the example came from above. Before Jack Lang, the development of the festival world was made in a scattered way, it seemed linked not to territories, but to people who create their festival or to local considerations. For example, historically, there are festivals in all cities in Casino, because 25 % of their revenue must be spent in favor of culture. From the 1980s, Jack Lang put on the event – the music festival, the heritage days, etc. Why ? Because he knows that the effect of his policies in favor of the building and annual programming will take much more time than the political mandate. So the event was there to give both a taste and attract the public to a practice to which many were not used to. It was a logic of democratization through the offer, a festival offer with all that could cause decompartmentalization and relaxation in the relationship to culture. What Jack Lang did had cascade repercussions on local authorities. The latter said to themselves that offering a festival to their population had only advantages for the brand image of the city or the region, and vis-à-vis voters.
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