Cannes, with its red carpet and its film-stars dressed by top fashion houses… Avignon, with its courtyard in the Palais des Papes… Saint-Malo with its “Astonishing Traveller” writers… Marciac and Juan-les-Pins with their American jazz musicians… Many a French town has made its name with its festival.

In Cannes, the festival has been held for 63 years: film directors from all over the world dream only of being there for those ten days of May when sequins and bling vie with the pictures and the music of the films. Winning the Palme d’Or? Wishful thinking for most, but what does that matter! The main thing is to be seen and to make the most of the terrific springboard to notoriety that the festival represents.

Another annual get-together is the Avignon Festival in July. This event has been the undisputed high-point of international French-language theatre for 65 years. Here, the audience is the winner just as much as the great playwrights. Large numbers of people from all walks of life throng the town, filling theatre venues, but also schoolyards and stages improvised in the streets or in the back rooms of cafés.

The Avignon Festival in figures: Nearly 500 French and foreign journalists are accredited by the Festival’s press service. The official Festival puts on 35 to 40 performances in some 20 venues, usually historic buildings and outdoors, hugely varied in their architecture and in the number of seats (from 50 to 2,000); 100,000 to 150,000 tickets are sold every year. 3,000 live theatre professionals perform as part of its fringe, the Festival “Off”. The website logs over 800,000 hits (http://www.festival-avignon.com/fr/).

A nation with many centuries of culture behind it, France has managed with its festivals to invent the art of bringing that culture to the world, but also of democratising it and spreading it wide, literally, by taking it to all different kinds of audience. This characteristically French approach allows events on an international scale such as Cannes and Avignon to exist alongside more locally focused events, in which contemporary culture vies with folk traditions before giving way to tourism.

Ever since the first “Chorégies d’Orange” (1869), an opera festival that historically sparked off the festival phenomenon, the types of event and their content have changed considerably and today these festivals are so many and various that they are beyond count! Not only is cinema celebrated, but specifically detective films and thrillers (in Cognac), American films (in Deauville), African films (in Amiens) or the festival of “pocket” films taken on miniature cameras or mobile phones (Pocket Films, Paris).

When it comes to music, every style is represented, from classical music to jazz, from song (“Francofolies” at La Rochelle) to opera (Aix-en-Provence). Dance is celebrated in Montpellier, photography is all over the town in Arles while a literary outing can lead you from the “Paris en Toutes Lettres” festival to the “Quais du polar” festival of crime thrillers in Lyon. In recent years, even civic concerns have come to the fore: for instance, the “Festival de l’Oh!”, all about water, in the département of Seine-et-Marne and the ecology film festival in the city of Bourges.

As the vast majority of these festivals rely on the energy and enthusiasm of groups of people wanting to share sincere passions, they defy these difficult economic times. A few days of festivity can breathe a youthful air of conviviality into things and sometimes revive forgotten corners of France… bringing true meaning to France’s “exception culturelle” – the protection of cultural diversity.

Kidi Bebey