FRANCE: From the Côte d'Azur to Brittany, hundreds of summer cultural festivals are threatened with cancellation across France, as the right-wing Raffarin government puts into question decades of generous subsidies for the arts.
The entertainment section of the communist trade union CGT is fulfilling its threat to "blow everything apart" rather than accept an accord on reduced unemployment benefits for freelance actors, musicians, dancers and technicians, agreed by the employers' group MEDEF and three smaller unions on June 27th.
The Montpellier dance festival has been cancelled entirely, while the director of the Aix operatic festival annulled premiere performances and "suspended" the remainder until further notice. The Marseilles documentary festival was expected to be cancelled last night and two Celtic gatherings in Brittany are also in danger.
Technicians at the Avignon theatre festival, the biggest event of the summer season, have announced they will observe a day-to-day renewable strike from July 8th, when Avignon was due to open.
The rash of cancellations mean economic catastrophe for regional hotel and restaurant industries, which benefit from more than 650 summer festivals. And organisers will find it difficult to recover from ticket sale losses. "A cancelled festival means future bankruptcy and firings; the following year, the festival will not take place either, because any subsidies will have to be used to pay off debts," Mr Bernard Faivre d'Arcier, the director of the Avignon festival, warned in Le Monde.
Though a socialist who has been sacked by France's right-wing government, Mr Faivre d'Arcier advised actors and others against the "suicidal" shutting down of festivals. Ms Ariane Mnouchkine, a theatre director famous for her defence of left-wing causes, pleaded with fellow entertainers on France-Inter radio not to destroy their own livelihoods.
The entertainment workers' strike is widely viewed as a continuation of teachers' and transport workers' strikes that crippled France for much of May and June. That conflict was motivated by the reform of the pension system. The entertainment workers are known as "intermittents" because they work on short-term contracts. They gained special status in France in 1969.
The conflict has taken on the attributes of class warfare, with Mr Jean-Paul Montanari, the director of the Montpellier festival, denouncing the Prime Minister, Mr Jean-Pierre Raffarin, and Mr Jean-Jacques Aillagon, the Minister for Culture, as "the enemy". When the privately run Vienne jazz festival attempted to go ahead despite protesters blowing foghorns outside, the audience split between those chanting "CRS au boulot" (Riot police, get to work!) and others shouting down disgruntled members of the public as "Fa-chos!" (fascists).
Under the old system, any entertainer who worked 507 hours (about three months) was guaranteed unemployment benefits for the entire year. Nowhere in Europe - or the world - did artistes enjoy comparable security.
But these conditions attracted more and more young people to performing arts, and the number given "intermittent" status quadrupled in the past decade to nearly 100,000. The system ran up an €828 million deficit last year.
The employers' union, MEDEF, points out that on average, 40 per cent of a French entertainer's annual earnings consist of unemployment benefits. But employers - including state-owned television networks - have turned the system into a racket financed by taxpayers. "Intermittents" employed year-round are often paid the minimum number of days by the opera house or television station which employs them, with unemployment insurance used to pay the balance of their salary.
Under the new agreement, benefits will be paid for eight months instead of 12, after an entertainer clocks up 507 hours of work under short-term contracts. And the hours must be accrued within ten and a half months, compared to 12 under previous regulations.
