France’s president Emmanuel Macron and its prime minister Sébastien Lecornu have named Catherine Pégard as the country’s new culture minister.
Pégard replaces Rachida Dati, who is running to be Paris’s mayor in the country’s municipal elections in mid-March.
Pégard led the Château de Versailles for 13 years and has served as Macron’s culture advisor since 2024. She has also worked as a political journalist—rising to editor of the political magazine Le Point—and a speechwriter for the former French president Nicolas Sarkozy.
Rachida Dati leaves a ministry struggling with budgetary cuts and badly shaken by the stunning theft of the French crown jewels from the Louvre in October. An ongoing parliamentary investigation has underlined the responsibility the ministry bears for the museum’s security failings. One day before Dati’s resignation, the Louvre’s director Laurence des Cars stepped down.
The conservative Dati spent 25 months as culture minister, surviving four government reshuffles. Many however feel she left little to show for it. “Two years of noisy inefficiency”, ran a headline in the French weekly magazine Télérama on Wednesday (25 February).
Dati belatedly launched a bill for the restitution of colonial goods during her tenure, though did not promulgate any new laws. Another controversial bill, aimed at orchestrating the merging of public broadcasters, is now in limbo.
Dati is a combative personality who, while promoting cultural development in rural areas, framed many artists in France as being part of a capricious cultural elite. Artists “are afraid of her”, a columnist of the daily Le Monde, Michel Guerrin, wrote last year, adding that “never before has a minister so fiercely lambasted the cultural circles they are supposed to represent”. “Now that she is gone, artists can finally breathe”, wrote Marie Guichouz in Nouvel Observateur magazine. Last summer, Dati triggered an uproar when she refused to visit a theatre festival in Avignon, the biggest annual cultural event in France.
Her interactions with the media have been even more hostile, in the wake of a series of investigations into hundreds of thousands of euros she allegedly received from major companies before entering the government. In September, she will appear in a criminal court to face charges of illicit lobbying for the car maker Renault while serving as a member of the European Parliament. Dati has denied any wrongdoing.