Just 41, a novelist who turned away from the Greens to join the larger Socialist Party, she has survived a tough first year as France’s minister of culture and communication, sitting in a chair once occupied by notables like André Malraux, Françoise Giroud, Jack Lang and most recently, Frédéric Mitterrand, the nephew of the former president.

It was Mr. Lang who said, “economy and culture — it’s the same fight,” and that has never been more true than now, when President François Hollande is struggling, against all the instincts of his Socialist Party, to bring down public spending and government debt.

Given the emotional and economic importance attached to French culture, it has always been a politically delicate job allocating the state’s largess, but it is especially tough to cut it. Ms. Filippetti has lately been deluged with criticism, much of it vague, for lacking leadership, imagination and vision. Mr. Mitterrand, who served in the center-right administration of President Nicolas Sarkozy but whispered to friends that Mr. Hollande would win the presidency, has been particularly harsh.

Ms. Filippetti “has a totally dogmatic approach to culture,” he told the newspaper Le Figaro at the end of June. “I have the sense of a dogmatic grid,” he said, especially in filling key posts at museums and theaters, which he compared to “feudalism.” The Socialists “are in denial of democracy and decide arbitrarily” on projects, Mr. Mitterrand said, while criticizing Ms. Filippetti simultaneously for an obsession with “democratizing” culture, making it more popular, which he likened to the snake in the Garden of Eden.

“The Socialists just don’t have a cultural vision,” he said. “Mr. Hollande is not interested in culture; it’s not in his DNA.”

In response, Ms. Filippetti said she found the accusations “inexplicable” and “a little sad.” It’s politics, she noted, a world of “low blows,” but “it’s a pity that Frédéric Mitterrand acts like that.” She accused him of seeking publicity, saying dismissively: “He’s preparing to launch his next book.”

Controversies over prestigious appointments come with the job. She was criticized, for example, for saying that she preferred to replace Henri Loyrette as head of the Louvre with a woman, suggesting Sylvie Ramond, director of the Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon. In the end, Mr. Hollande chose Jean-Luc Martinez, head of the Louvre’s antiquities department.

And the news media have tended to focus on her youth, her looks, her hair and her dress, and on some explicit sex scenes in her second novel.

In an interview, Ms. Filippetti asserted that she did have a vision of a more representative national culture, one that was less “extravagant,” tried to reach France’s poor and forgotten in the ghetto-like city suburbs and concentrated less on “prestige” projects so beloved by previous French presidents.

“We must radically alter this slightly too extravagant image of cultural policy, to awaken deep within all our regions an attachment to culture and the promotion of culture as a lever of economic attractiveness for our country,” she said.

Culture is an existential need and should be both protected and accessible to everyone, she said, especially given the growing uniformity of choices. “In this hour of globalization many people are lost,” she said. “We can’t find our identity alone in a silent world — it’s culture that allows the world to speak to us.” Why do people love Paris — or Florence or Venice — she asked. “Because when we walk there, the houses, the buildings speak to you.”

In the same vein, she is a fierce defender of France’s “cultural exception” — its system of quotas and subsidies for domestic production — in order to preserve “diversity” and an important French industry. France insists on excluding such subsidies from a proposed European-American free-trade agreement.

Part of the focus on her stems simply from the importance of the ministry she runs, and of the ideology behind it.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/30/world/europe/filippetti-mediating-as-french-culture-and-economics-collide.html?partner=rss&emc=rss