Emmanuel Macron wants French electronic music to receive UNESCO world heritage status

Emmanuel Macron has said he wants French electronic music to be awarded with UNESCO World Heritage status.

The country’s contributions to the genre, which is often referred to as French touch, includes landmark work from the likes of Daft Punk, Justice, Air, Cassius, Phoenix, Étienne de Crécy, M83 and Alan Braxe.

UNESCO, the United Nations agency that promotes peace and security through culture, arts and sciences, publishes a list of intangible cultural heritage that aims to protect “practices, representations, expressions, knowledge and skills that communities recognise as part of their cultural heritage”, and in the past this has been bestowed upon music genres such as Jamaican reggae, Mexican mariachi and Cuban rumba.

Berlin techno was another music tradition that was added to the UNESCO list in 2023, and in a recent interview with radio station Fréquence Gaie, the French President suggested that French touch should also be added to the list.

“We’re going to do that too,” Macron said (via Euronews). “I love Germany – you know how pro-European I am. But we don’t have to take lessons from anyone. We are inventors of electro. We have that French touch.”

Some traditional French musical styles are already on the UNESCO protection list, including Gwoka, the Guadeloupean song and dance practice, and the musical art of horn players in the country and their vibrato breath control technique.

Daft Punk are the seminal French touch artists, with Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo having formed the act in Paris in 1993. Their blend of house, funk, techno, synth-pop and disco made them major global stars, with albums such as ‘Homework’ (1997) and ‘Discovery’ (2001) being considered as all-time classics of dance music.

Their final album was 2013’s ‘Random Access Memories’, which included the giant hit single ‘Get Lucky’. They announced their official split in February 2021 with a video titled ‘Epilogue’, in which one of the robots self-destructed while the other walked away into the desert.

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