Member of the French Academy and professor at the Collège de France, Marc Fumaroli revealed himself in 1991 as a brilliant and provocative polemicist when he published The Cultural State, a historical investigation of the roots of modern French cultural policy. The work, which sparked heated debates, narrates the strange fate of an area, that of culture, which served Gaullism to compensate for the aggrieved greatness of France and socialism to gratify a defeated ideology. With prose that breathes the heritage of Montaigne and Bossuet, between jovial erudition and admonitory polemic, Fumaroli warns in The Cultural State of the disastrous results of an invasive and ideologizing cultural policy. Taking into account its importance in European cultural policy, this book acquires extraordinary relevance and relevance.