France’s President Emmanuel Macron said giving every 18-year-old in the country $480 would mark a “formidable victory” and stop young people saying: “This work of literature, this movie is not for me.”
Imagine what you would have spent given $480 at 18. It wouldn’t be a ticket to the symphony orchestra or the ballet, or Manning Clark’s book A Short History of Australia. Today’s French teenagers are no different.
Despite being encouraged to visit the Musée d’Orsay, the Palais du Louvre or buy Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, the teenagers bought manga, the Japanese comic books and graphic novels.
This month, books represented over 75 per cent of all purchases since the scheme was introduced nationwide in May with about two-thirds of those books manga, according to the organisation behind the $480 gift – known as the Culture Pass.
Noël Corbin, a Culture Ministry official who oversees the project, said the pass gave France’s newly minted adults the opportunity to taste nearby cultural offerings – the app has a geolocation feature – and encouraged them to indulge their cultural passions.
It also uses incentives to push teenagers toward new, more challenging art forms, he said, a type of curation to “bring young people to discover the realms of possibility of cultural life.”
The naivety and sheer stupidity of our political leaders knows no bounds.
