It is not in the heart of the immense galleries of the Bringasses and Grands-Fonds quarries, where Jean Cocteau filmed several sequences of his Testament of Orpheusbut in Paris on the Île de la Cité where the criminal aspect of the fight led by Jean Montaldo and the Cathédrale d’Images company against Culturespaces has just ended.
In 1976 the commune of Beaux-de-Provence (Bouches-du-Rhône) entrusted the organization of audiovisual shows in its quarries to Cathédrale d’Images founded by Albert Plécy. Thirty-two years later the municipality withdrew management of the site from it by terminating the commercial lease concluded in 1989 and carried out a public service delegation for the benefit of Culturespaces.
Believing that it had been illegally chased from the site by the municipality and dispossessed of the cultural and artistic activity that it had created, Cathédrale d’Images then initiated multiple procedures to enforce its rights.
The entrance to the Cathedral of Images near Les Baux de Provence in 2008.
This Wednesday, June 3, 2026, the criminal chamber of the Court of Cassation definitively rejected the appeals filed by Bruno Monnier and the company Culturespaces against the judgment of the Paris Court of Appeal which had condemned them on March 6, 2025 in the context of the irregular allocation of the public service delegation relating to the Baux-de-Provence quarries.
Under the terms of a sixteen-page judgment, the Court of Cassation validated the offense of “conceal of favoritism” which consisted of obtaining an unjustified advantage due to obtaining privileged information from Culturespaces about other candidates.
Bruno Monnier is definitively sentenced to six months’ suspended imprisonment and a fine of 60,000 euros and the company Culturespaces is fined 100,000 euros on account of “conceal of favoritism”. Michel Fenard, the former mayor of Baux-de-Provence who had not filed an appeal, had accepted his conviction on the grounds of “favoritism”.
For Jean Montaldo, the Cathédrale d’Images company finally sees recognition “the seriousness of the actions of which she was the victim” and rejoices that “the company Culturespaces is legally subject to legal prohibitions (…) particularly with regard to participation in public markets and concession contracts of the same type for a period of five years”.
However, this is not the end of this saga since the Paris Court of Appeal will have to re-judge the requests for compensation for the economic damage suffered by the global duplication, by Culturespaces, of its immersive audiovisual shows activity. An appointment has been made for the pleadings hearing which will take place on February 11, 2027.
