An innovative scheme: the Incentive and Partnership Fund (FIP)

  • Historical monuments and heritage sites
  • - France as a whole -
  • Cultural professionals
  • All audiences

The FIP, established by the Ministry of Culture in 2018, is primarily intended for rural communities, often deprived of the challenge of preserving their historic monuments. This fund, which has been endowed with €61 million since its creation, has enabled 577 operations to be launched in the regions on monuments mainly belonging to municipalities with fewer than 2,000 inhabitants.

 

The objectives of the fund

The small municipalities concentrate on their territory the majority of historical monuments without having, in most cases, sufficient resources to ensure maintenance, restoration and development alone.

The Ministry of Culture has set up an incentive, targeted and partnership mechanism to finance increased State intervention, on the one hand, through increased subsidy rates, and on the other, by the regions, for works concerning historical monuments in rural territories.

The objectives of the fund are to encourage new projects or to enable projects to be carried out which have not been able to find all their funding, but also to make the regions important partners of the municipalities in terms of heritage preservation, encouraging them to take part in restoration work on historical monuments belonging to small municipalities.

Under the FIP, the State can accompany projects up to 80% or even 90% in the Overseas Territories for classified buildings (against a usual rate of 30 to 50%), and up to the legal limit of 40% for registered buildings (against a usual rate of 10 to 20%).

The Regional Directorates for Cultural Affairs (DRAC), in close liaison with the regions, identify the projects eligible for assistance from the Fund, define the most appropriate method of agreement and envisage, where applicable, the accompanying measures to be implemented by the selected beneficiaries (pedagogical project accompanying the project, arts and cultural education actions, public access, etc.), according to different criteria:

  • size of the commune : fewer than 10,000 inhabitants (20,000 inhabitants for the overseas territories); however, municipalities with fewer than 2,000 inhabitants are targeted as a priority;
  • municipal resources : Municipalities with low resources are mainly concerned;
  • types of transactions operations involving monuments in danger or in poor condition;
  • types of buildings : any type of building protected under historical monuments (including monuments belonging to private owners) located in these small communes;
  • regional participation rate 15 % minimum (5 % for overseas territories). 

Balance sheet

This fund has been allocated €61 million in commitment authorizations and €48.2 million in payment appropriations since 2019.

Since 2018, 577 FIP operations have been launched. The vast majority are religious buildings (85%), owned by municipalities (88%). This scheme fulfils its objective of giving priority to municipalities with fewer than 2,000 inhabitants, since 77% of the projects concern municipalities in this category.

From 2018 to 2020, the leverage effect was 1.10: for €1 invested by the State, €1.10 was mobilized by local authorities and other partners (including owners).