The suspended order?

This article lays the groundwork for a socio-historical analysis of the financing of national cultural policies. Using two emblematic cases – the doubling of the Ministry of Culture’s budget in 1982 and its increase by more than half during the health crisis (2020-2021) – it attempts to identify the conditions that make “budgetary disorder” possible, understood as a break with the normal course of sectoral expenditure financing. For a ministry of modest size and with fragile legitimacy in budgetary decisions, these disruptions are real enigmas. The article attempts to resolve them by drawing on a corpus of archives and semi-structured interviews with budget advisors, given the pivotal – but paradoxically relatively little studied – position they occupy in the decision-making process. On a theoretical level, the article draws on the sociology of configurations and field theory, developed by Norbert Elias and Pierre Bourdieu respectively, to better understand the workings of the “decision-making machinery” in budgetary matters.