Freedom and Cultural Rights

Cultural rights, seemingly guarantors of human dignity, are emptied of their meaning when they fail to forcefully articulate the question of freedom. Their full recognition requires renewed vigilance, particularly against any authoritarian temptation under the pretext of the common good.

Cultural rights, a democratic ideal facing managerial drift

Cultural rights are fundamentally based on respect for the dignity of each individual. They guarantee every citizen the possibility to participate in cultural life, to recognize it and access it in its broadest diversity. This recognition shapes democracy not as an imposed unanimity, but as the space where all differences can be expressed, each contributing to enriching, or even challenging, the common foundation. According to the Fribourg Declaration of 2007, principles such as the rights to participation, cooperation, respect for one’s identity, diversity, access to heritage, information, education, and the right to communities, must irrigate all projects funded by public money.

This perspective confers a major ethical responsibility on cultural actors. From the moment a project is funded by the common good, it is imperative to place human rights at the center of decisions. Let us never forget that this public money comes from the trust of the community, collected through taxes and fees. Every daily purchase, even for those who are said to be “non-taxable,” for example, is subject to VAT: on a 10-euro item, 2 euros return to the community. So everyone pays taxes, all the time (various taxes represent more than 50% of the expenses of the majority of French citizens, with the wealthy paying a much smaller share). This reality demands a rigorous allocation of funds aligned with principles of justice and respect. Cultural rights thus appear as a valuable tool for directing public spending toward purposes that give it its full meaning.

However, this ideal clashes with a dominant societal paradigm. In many Western societies, we have been socialized to competition, the struggle for domination, and the maximization of particular interests. As historian Johann Chapoutot brilliantly documents in his book Free to Obey: Management, from Nazism to Today (2020), certain managerial models, justified under concepts like “human resources,” draw their roots from Nazi experiments. Chapoutot demonstrates that Nazism invented a management style that makes obedience a supposedly liberating virtue, a model that persists in our modern structures. Faced with this paradigm, cultural rights offer a valuable alternative, provided they are effectively respected in their spirit.

Freedom, the unthought aspect of cultural rights

It jumps out at me, however, that a fundamental element is often missing when thinking about or applying cultural rights: that of freedom. Through my exchanges and the working groups I participate in, I have observed how freedom finds itself relegated outside the field of application, a major blind spot, when it should be the cornerstone. If the founding texts of cultural rights leave the notion of dignity implicit, that of freedom remains even more in the background. Yet no democratic society can be understood without the inseparable combination of these two concepts, as defined in Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948): “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights”.

This disconnection became brutally clear to me during the Covid period (2020-2021). I participated during this period in several working groups composed of professionals engaged in promoting cultural rights. However, while restrictions on freedom of unprecedented scope, and in my view unconstitutional, were being imposed by a government acting under a military state of exception, a deafening silence on this subject reigned in these circles. We debated the technical modalities of applying cultural rights, completely obscuring the fact that citizens were subjected to a regime of forced obedience, under penalty of losing their job, their status, their place, in short their human dignity. I observed with amazement the puzzled looks when I brought up this subject, which seemed to me to be a blatant contradiction: how could we talk about cultural rights while accepting, without the slightest debate, in the present, the suspension of the most elementary freedoms?

How can we explain this anesthesia of critical thinking? Fear, massively instilled in minds, is undoubtedly a first element of response, and it is, as always, a bad counselor. Added to this was, for many, an economic dependence on public authorities, which placed any dissenting voice under the threat of professional sanctions. The technical framework of the eight cultural rights, where neither freedom nor dignity appear explicitly, became a sort of comfortable refuge to avoid facing reality. This silence, this form of self-censorship, betrayed an unconscious slide toward accepting exception and marginalizing contestation, which is nevertheless essential to democracy.

What was at stake went far beyond the framework of this crisis. The succession of emergency laws, the criminalization of any divergent thinking under cover of public salvation, and the infantilization of citizens gradually undermined the foundations of a living democracy. In certain aspects, moreover, during the Covid period, the limitations of our fundamental freedoms were more severe than during the Occupation. As shocking and presumptuous as this comparison may seem, it reflects a factual and verifiable legal reality. Accepting to durably restrict freedom in the name of an order deemed superior is nothing other than opening the door to authoritarianism. However, without freedom, cultural rights are emptied of their substance: democracy becomes a facade, culture a tool of normalization.

History as political struggle of the present

This situation perfectly illustrates what Michel Foucault theorized under the name of “biopower,” that moment when the State seizes the management of the biological life of populations to make it the alpha and omega of politics. In this framework, individual freedoms become simple adjustment variables, they no longer matter. Let us remember, during the Covid period, contesting government speech was criminalized, presenting any alternative thinking not as a contribution to debate, but as a threat to the nation. Those who dared to contest decisions were treated as public enemies, not because they represented a health danger—it is proven today that a large part of their criticisms were perfectly founded—but because they challenged a political and financial order that knew how to draw considerable profit from the situation.

This collective silence marked me because it involved a negation of the fundamental principles of democracy. This is why we must remember. History is never an objective narrative or a fixed truth, but a permanent political battle for the meaning of the present. What we choose to remember or forget determines the values we defend. Memory is an act of resistance.

Dignity and freedom, new inseparable pair to guarantee cultural rights

This is why I propose that we no longer content ourselves, in the future, with the eight cultural rights formally enumerated following the Fribourg Declaration. I call for explicitly formulating two additional and fundamental rights: the right to dignity and the right to freedom. These rights, broader than the others, are not simple abstractions; they are on the contrary the measure against which all our collective actions must be evaluated. In their absence, any cultural policy risks amnesia or, worse still, passive complicity with what it claims to combat.

One might object that freedom is not absolute and must compose with security. But it is precisely this dialogue, this permanent tension between principles, that founds democracy. Those who prefer “less freedom and more order” do not defend democracy, but an autocracy under a democratic mask. It is up to us to remain vigilant and make cultural rights a lever to “make democracy,” and not to install routines that drift, in torpor, toward the negation of freedom.

I throw stones at no one here: the gear of fear, the pressure of urgency, and the culture of institutional obedience can make anyone waver, myself included. But this is the whole challenge of the power of cultural rights: they must serve as an ethical compass, not as a posteriori justification. By explicitly integrating dignity and freedom into the list of rights to protect, we give ourselves a chance not to blindly repeat the errors of the past.

It is about refounding democracy on its fundamentals: pluralism, respect for the person, and emancipation of minds. In the spirit of Hannah Arendt, let us remember that: “Freedom is the very political space in which everything becomes possible”. Let us therefore work so that cultural rights are never the alibi for their own betrayal, but rather, constantly, the occasion for a lucid and demanding new beginning of the democratic ideal.