This article deals with French cultural policy from around 1960 to the early 1990s. Is point of departure is the establishment of a French ministry of culture and the first minister of culture, André Malraux, 1959. The roots of French cultural policy after World War II are traced back to the cultural programme of the Popular Front government in France the late 1930s and situated within the frames of UNESCO and Council of Europe initiatives after the war. In addition to an analysis of French cultural policy under the Malraux’ regime in the 1960s, the article presents an analysis of the writings and the role that the top bureaucrat for more than thirty years, Augustin Girard, played in French and international cultural policy from the early 1960s to the first half of the 1990s. There is a big paradox with Girard and French cultural policy: France is known for having a centralised state organisation, and this is also the case with cultural policy – the minister of culture and even some presidents «take it all». Decentralisation in many other European countries means «deconcentration» in France, i. e. instead of delegating decisional power to regional and local political bodies, the French state stretches out its arms by building state bureaucracies in the regions. It is therefore quite surprising that at the same time as he was a civil servant of a research unit in the French ministry of culture, Augustin Girard was a well known international spokesman for decentralisation, community culture, amateur culture and even cultural industries – and he was constantly criticising French intellectuals to be elitists in cultural questions. Internationally Girard was one of the strong fighters for cultural democracy and the «new cultural policy» of the 1970s. The article is finished by a brief analysis of the expanding cultural policy under Jack Lang in the 1980s, and concludes that French cultural policy has been resistant to rapid international changes, although in the later years even French cultural policy has to some extent been influenced by the winds of new liberalism. However, compared to England for example, the French state still plays the role of «the architect» in cultural policy.