Context and challenges:

Following the Grand Débat National launched in December 2018 by the President of the Republic, Beaux Arts Magazine, Le Quotidien de l’Art and the Fondation du Patrimoine joined forces to organize a major citizen consultation on culture. The aim, thanks to an open consultation format, was to gather the opinions and proposals of the French on cultural issues.

Our role:

Beaux Arts Consulting was involved in organizing and collecting citizens’ proposals on culture, facilitating the online and face-to-face debate, and synthesizing and analyzing the proposals:

• Identification of three major themes around which to structure the debate (culture for all, arts education and heritage) and identification of initial lines of thought for each theme to launch the debate,
• Creation and management of a participative platform for online consultation,
• Organization and moderation of two face-to-face debates, at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Paris and 104 Paris, bringing together professionals from the cultural sectors and the general public,
• Collection, on the platform, of reports on debates held in other French cities,
• Analysis and synthesis of the proposals, and drafting of a report showing in particular the categorized proposals and the expected benefits and points of vigilance for each proposal.

Impact and follow-up:

In total, the participative platform “granddebatculture.fr” set up by Beaux Arts Consulting brought together almost 6,000 participants, nearly 4,000 contributions and almost 20,000 votes. The face-to-face debates organized by Beaux Arts Consulting in March 2019 were each attended by around 500 people.

All the contributions collected have been used to publish a report of more than eighty pages, submitted to Frank Riester, Minister of Culture, and available on our website (French only): https://beauxarts-cie.com/consulting/actualites/