Word: langs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...personal fiefdom for 30 years; Finance Minister Jacques Delors, who was running in the Paris suburb of Clichy, a safe Socialist seat for 50 years; and Premier Mauroy, who has controlled the northern industrial city of Lille since 1973. In Paris the Chirac steamroller overpowered both Culture Minister Jack Lang and Socialist Leader Lionel Jospin...
Such spectaculars have become a hallmark of France's lavish new investment in the arts, and the personal signature of Mitterrand's flamboyant and popular Minister of Culture, Jack Lang, 43.* Dapper in his close-cut suits, possessed of boyish good looks and dark curls that seem to stir women, Lang has ambitious plans for the arts in Socialist France. "Our goal," he says, "is to transform all of France into a cultural work site." The transformation of the budget has been dramatic. In 1981, under President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the Ministry of Culture...
Whatever the merits of Lang's efforts, they have certainly been visible-and audible. Last year, for example, he decided that the French should mark the summer solstice with a national "musical festival" in which everyone would simultaneously pluck, pound, tingle and bow musical instruments as church bells rang and neighborhood salsa bands played. Right on cue, 5 million French joined in an exuberant celebration that banged on from 8:30 p.m. until well past midnight. Lang has filled the once empty courtyard of Paris' staid Louvre museum with exhibitions of new French fashions, displayed to the thump...
...Lang's evangelizing has boosted him to fourth place in popularity among the Mitterrand Cabinet's 35 ministers. That appeal, however, is due in part to his often gratuitous attacks on U.S. influences. For two years in a row, Lang has bypassed the American film festival at Deauville, a major annual event, to visit more obscure French art projects in provincial towns. In a burst of chauvinism that seemed calculated to stir Third World sympathies, Lang called, at a UNESCO conference last summer, for a crusade against U.S. cultural "imperialists" who "want to impose a uniform...
...polemical style comes naturally. A lawyer by training, Lang founded the experimental World Festival of Theater in the northeastern city of Nancy when he was only 22. In 1972 he was called to Paris to revitalize the musty Chaillot theater. In the process of gutting he building's ornate interior during renovations, Lang created huge cost overruns and caused a scandal. Recalls a colleague Utterly: "He turned a great theater into a garage." Then Minister of Culture Michel Guy fired Lang, who capitalized on the insult by joining the Socialist Party. In 1978, Mitterrand, who was still leader...