The Politics of Cultural Policy in France offers a lively and iconoclastic account of cultural policy-making in France. Focusing on the policies of the Socialist governments of 1981-86 and 1988-93, the book suggests that policy towards the arts was shaped less by an all-powerful state than by influential professional interest groups. In addition to presenting unusual insights into a policy area which has rarely been studied by political science, The Politics of Cultural Policy in France thus provides significant revisions to conventional views of relations between the state and civil society in France.