reservation required to enter upon reopening

Debates on the pricing policy of museums, churches and cultural monuments are recurrent. Thus Rachida Dati has just fed it again in the columns of Figaro : “Is it, for example, normal for a French visitor to pay the same price for entry to the Louvre as a Brazilian or Chinese visitor? ». And to add “I would like non-EU visitors to pay more for their entry ticket and for this supplement to finance the renovation of national heritage”. What does the law say?

Article 18 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union provides that “prohibits any discrimination exercised on grounds of nationality”. The European judge thus ruled on January 16, 2003 that the granting of tariff advantages by Italy to its nationals constituted a restriction on the right to free provision of services which foreign tourists who visit archaeological and cultural sites can avail themselves of. Italians and discrimination based on nationality. But this article 18 only concerns EU nationals, which Rachida Dati made clear.

On the French side, the Defender of Rights considered on September 13, 2010 that the application of a price difference between nationals and foreigners legally residing in France would be discriminatory and contrary to the principle of equality. From then on, no differentiation on visiting rights between French people and Europeans would be possible, but, once again, it would be possible for non-Europeans.

On the other hand, according to the doctrine, nationals of countries third to the European Union must be treated in a “fair” manner, they must be granted rights “comparable” to those of citizens of the European Union, which means that they do not have access to equal treatment but can benefit from a privileged regime characterized by the absence of discrimination, particularly in social matters. Could it not be the same in matters of culture?

This differentiated pricing would encounter a particularly penalizing technical difficulty in busy national museums: it would force guards to verify the nationality of ticket holders at the risk of considerably slowing down an already very congested flow. On the other hand, if the entrance ticket were increased by €3 to the Louvre for example for non-EU foreigners, this would represent a gain of €5 million.

So apart from the consequences on the comfort of visitors, a different price of entry into national museums for non-Europeans does not really pose a legal problem.

Which is not the case with the other proposal from the minister who wants entry to Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral to be chargeable for everyone because “with just 5 euros per visitor, we would raise 75 million euros per year (to save) all the churches in Paris and France”. Here the law is even clearer since article 17 of the law of 1905 on the separation of Churches and State is clear: “The visit to the buildings and the exhibition of classified movable objects will be public: they will not give rise to any taxes or fees”. In fact, free access to places of worship is the corollary of freedom of worship and the illegal proposition. Above all, it is not without raising difficulties of concrete application: how to differentiate the visitor from the simple faithful who comes to worship?

Several religious buildings have circumvented this prohibition by establishing a right of visit to the “Treasury”, the terms of which are provided for by article L. 2124-31 of the General Code of Property of Public Persons and of which the Council of State was able to specify the limits by a ruling “Abbé Chalumey” of November 4, 1994. It is also possible to charge to climb the towers as at Notre-Dame.

As we can see, the law is partially opposed to ministerial ambitions, but nothing would prevent the legislator from creating new legislative provisions. However, the parliamentary path is particularly crowded these days.

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