by Xavier Laurent, Comité d'histoire/ École nationale des Chartes, La Documentation française, 2003, 384 p.
1.Presentation
In the decree establishing the powers of the new Minister for Cultural Affairs, André Malraux wrote: "The Ministry’s mission is to ensure the widest possible audience for the cultural heritage of France" (OJ of 26 July 1959).
However, in the eyes of some historians of architecture and urban planning, the period from 1958 to 1973 would not have a good press: it would be "concrete years", those of "large groups", those of "urban renewal".
How has the rue de Valois, heir to one hundred and thirty years of administrative traditions in the management of historic monuments, been able to reconcile its duty of conservation with its deliberate support for the avant-garde? In the France of the Glorious Thirties where the spirit of modernity triumphed, what attitude to adopt in the face of the heritage of past centuries?
To answer these questions, Xavier Laurent highlights three priority areas of discovery:
- How did historical monuments, sites and archaeology fit into André Malraux’s cultural policy vision?
- How to reconstruct the link between urban planning and architecture as well as between modernity and heritage? Xavier Laurent examines this difficult synthesis in the light of specific examples.
- Finally, the author has chosen to highlight the common thread that tends to gradually widen the field of heritage.
By treating these questions with great elegance, the author runs to the essential, but not without relying on large excavations through concrete archives recently exhumed, as befits a Chartist.
Augustin Girard
Chairman of the History Committee
(1993-2007)