We Thought a Cultural Budget Would Drive Teens to Museums: What Fills Their Baskets Fits on a Single Bookstore Shelf

Two hundred and forty-four million euros. This is the amount the State committed in 2024 for the individual share of the Pass Culture, a credit intended to reconcile teenagers with museums, theater, and live performance. The result? Beneficiaries’ baskets look more like a shelf in a generalist bookstore: novels, mangas, and youth literature. The report published by the Cour des comptes in December 2024 delivers a frank assessment of this flagship instrument of French cultural policy, and the figures tell a story quite different from the one presented at launch.

A public gateway that exploded in three years

The Pass Culture was no modest, one-off boost. The budgetary expenditure for the individual share of the Pass Culture stood at €93 million in 2021 and is projected to reach €244 million in 2024. A trajectory that the financial magistrates deem poorly anticipated, since the scheme is funded by the State, far from the original objective of 20% funded by the State and 80% by other resources, and it resembles, in their own words, a cash-desks’ expense.

In practice, uptake is massive. 84% of 18- to 20-year-olds are beneficiaries of the Pass Culture, but the program remains more cautious with the audiences who needed it most. Three young people out of four activated their credit, and did not spend the entire €300 envelope, but on average a little over €250. A figure that hides a genuine social fracture: among young people from working-class backgrounds, i.e., whose parents have little or no higher education and work in manual or clerical occupations, only 68% activated their Pass. Those who already had a foothold in culture seize it more readily than those whom the policy aimed to reach.

The book dominates, manga recedes (a little)

Here is the core of the matter: where does the public money actually go, in practical terms? Since the generalization of the device, books represent between 42% and 55% of the amounts spent each quarter. This overwhelming dominance confirms the intuition implied by the headline: what fills the adolescents’ baskets sits on a bookstore shelf, not on a museum ticket.

However, the Court of Auditors tempers the caricatured image of a young person blowing all their credit on manga. The Pass Culture is not solely for buying mangas! The share of manga purchases in total books bought fell from nearly 40% of books in 2021 to 20% in 2024. General literature has taken the lead: since 2024, it accounts for 40% of book purchases, including novels, youth literature, poetry, and theater. Behind the book, two other categories capture the bulk of the remaining expenditure: cinema (21% by value) and recorded music (23%), with museums and live performances lagging behind. Live performance, intended to be one of the scheme’s showcases, weighs almost nothing: live-show bookings account for only 2% of expenditures by young people.

To me, this seems less a failure of the youths than a failure of design. Giving €300 to spend via a general consumer app reproduces existing consumption habits, rather than challenging them. The Minister of Culture herself had anticipated this before the report’s publication, fearing that “the pass culture would merely reinforce the reproduction of consumption habits” rather than broaden cultural horizons.

Escape Games, Reform, and Blind Spots of the Scheme

Some uses raise questions beyond the simple books-versus-museum debate. The Court of Auditors discovered that €16 million were used to participate in escape games, although they do not fall within the device’s planned framework. An expenditure that the magistrates deem simply improper, as escape games were never intended to appear in the catalogue of eligible offers. Sixteen million euros spent locking oneself in a room for an hour instead of financing a policy of cultural democratization, the anecdote alone sums up the governance difficulties highlighted by the report.

In response to this finding, the Court’s recommendations are anything but modest. It advocates a recalibration of the scheme, for example by reducing the individual credit or targeting publics according to social and territorial criteria, and it suggests integrating the Pass Culture entity within the Ministry of Culture to strengthen its governance, while also improving the quality and diversity of offerings. A polite way of saying that the current structure, a SAS almost entirely funded by public funds, deserves to be reconsidered in its governance as well as in its operation.

The Ministry of Culture, for its part, did not brush off these criticisms. It stated that the Minister shares the Court’s concerns, which have also been identified in several studies and evaluations conducted to date, and the ministry has already begun several actions to respond. The Pass Culture SAS, meanwhile, defended its record by recalling that the scheme, in its view, helps reduce inequalities in access to culture, while acknowledging the need to adjust certain parameters.

One question remains that the report does not clearly settle: should we really blame teenagers for buying books with their Pass Culture credit? Reading remains a fully-fledged cultural practice, and the decline of manga’s share in favor of general literature suggests diversification rather than entrapment. The real debate may hinge less on what young people choose than on the scheme’s inability to reach those who, precisely, never step through the doors of a bookstore or a museum.

Sources: culture.gouv.fr | pass.culture.fr | vie-publique.fr