On 14 July 1989, on the Champs-Elysées, at the heart of the parade organised by Jean-Paul Goude to mark the bicentenary of the French Revolution, over a thousand people of all ages marched past playing a march by Wally Badarou on traditional instruments: hurdy-gurdies, bagpipes, galoubets and fifes. These musicians bear witness to the success of the processes of institutionalisation, but also of “defolklorisation”, implemented by an associative movement in the 1970s. During President François Mitterrand’s first seven years in office, it benefited from the support of Maurice Fleuret, director of music at the Ministry of Culture. Recognition of amateur practices and the “equal dignity of musical aesthetics” made it possible, for a few years of co-management, to support collecting activities and the emergence of a network of traditional music centres in the regions. However, the turn towards events that cultural policy took after 1990 showed the limits of the recognition that folk music from rural areas could hope for. This is illustrated by the episode known as the “great traditional music event”, an inverted symmetry of the Goude opera: although it was commissioned by the minister of culture Jack Lang, it ended up in indifference, less because of cabinet intrigues than because of its illegitimacy. This Carnet looks at the three-decade journey of the folk revival generation, which conceived and carried forward “great expectations” in terms of educational revolution and artistic professionalisation, but failed to break through the glass ceiling of cultural categories that, in France no doubt more than elsewhere, relegated folk music to the back burner.
This Carnet is the tenth volume in the “Carnets du LAHIC”, a collection published electronically by LAHIC and the “département du Pilotage de la recherche et de la politique scientifique de la Direction générale des patrimoines” (French Ministry of Culture).
François GASNAULT is a historian. He is a member of the “Laboratoire d’anthropologie et d’histoire de l’institution de la culture” (LAHIC), part of the IIAC, UMR CNRS/EHESS. After working on the dancing practices of nineteenth-century Parisians (Guinguettes et lorettes, Paris, Aubier – collection historique, 1986) and then on the university populations of Bologna during the Risorgimento (La cattedra, l’altare, la Nazione, Bologna, Clueb, 200), he spent three decades managing central and regional archive services. Now a full-time researcher again, he is studying the legitimisation processes implemented by traditional music and dance associations since the Liberation, as well as the institutional history of ethnomusicology in France (in partnership with Marie-Barbara Le Gonidec).