Paris’s glittering new museums

How do you manage a dictatorship? By producing ‘a succession of miracles’, according to Louis-Napoléon, that ‘dazzle and astonish’. In 1852 he inaugurated his Second Empire regime with a strategy of soft power predicated on the assumption that the loyalty of politically volatile Paris was to be won not by violent repression but by visible magnificence and grand designs. This wasn’t an original idea: it followed the policies of le Roi Soleil and Bonaparte, not to mention the Roman emperors. It worked again for Louis-Napoléon because, as well as such jaw-dropping follies as Charles Garnier’s extravagant opera house, it extended to Haussmann’s lavish investment in socially useful boulevards, sewers, housing and parks.

Subsequent incumbents of the Élysée Palace have seldom been able to resist this tendency to splash out on spectacular gestures, and the past half-century has seen taxpayers’ money showered on the capital’s cultural sector in particular. The high-tech ‘miracle’ of the Pompidou Centre, opened in 1977, started a fresh wave of state-sponsored public treats that no other nation can match – among them the Opéra Bastille, I.M. Pei’s ‘pyramid’ at the Louvre, the reinvention of the Gare d’Orsay, Jean Nouvel’s Quai Branly, the ‘music city’ at Parc de la Villette, plus a wealth of top-to-bottom renovations, all trumpeting la gloire de la France. Berlin has recently played catch-up, but London looks stingy in comparison – the British Museum’s feeble new exhibition wing and inadequate air-conditioning being only one egregious embarrassment.

Yet many feel that billions have been squandered – a view on which Marine Le Pen and Éric Zémmour have capitalised – and that we Brits have got better bang for our buck, not least as so many of our lollipops have been financed by the Lottery rather than the Treasury. And some of Paris’s most prestigious new monuments are widely disliked and ineffectual; the Opéra Bastille, for example, has poor acoustics and all the allure of an airport lounge.