On a dark, cutting-cold night in January, a well-heeled crowd was listening to a piano recital at the Institut Français in London’s South Kensington. Alexandre Tharaud started with a lilting Debussy Prélude before giving Ravel’s “Une barque sur l’océan” its full measure of listing and swaying. But the audience — wealthy French people resident in the city — were not principally here for the programme of impressionist music.
Afterwards, they repaired to the Institut’s elegant double-height library for speeches and presentations about philanthropy. The French ambassador, Hélène Duchêne, switching between host and native language, talked of the UK as a country “where the philanthropy tradition is most highly developed”. She called Gift Aid, which allows charities to claim 25 per cent extra on donations, “un instrument formidable”.
Axelle Davezac, director-general of the Fondation de France, followed Duchêne. The Fondation is a French government agency set up by Charles de Gaulle in 1969 to encourage private philanthropy. It is also a national umbrella organisation, co-ordinating financial support for everything from social exclusion and violin virtuosi to rebuilding Notre-Dame cathedral and the hurricane-struck French overseas territory of Mayotte.
The event in South Kensington was to launch the Fondation’s UK chapter, the start of a search for donors based in the country to support French charities. Davezac spoke about “a vision of mutual enrichment and shared progress” for the two countries, which had a “tumultuous” yet “rich and radiant” history.
The language of the evening was about drawing together two countries, divided by Brexit and a deeper history, with good works and generous spirits. Underlying it, though, was a recognition that as the French state, facing a severe budget deficit, retrenches, France needs to learn to love philanthropy, with all the financial and cultural adjustments that requires. To do this, its charities are coming to the UK, to find both money and method.
‘The UK is one of the biggest and most generous countries in Europe. But in France, it was not the case,” says Davezac shortly before the performance when she talks to the Financial Times. She has the figures to prove the disparity: despite similar population sizes and GDPs, the UK public, including wealthy individuals, gave £21.9bn to charity in 2023, the French €5.4bn (£4.5bn) in 2022.
With its large French-origin population, the UK is a natural spot for Davezac, philanthropic largesse aside. Nearly 276,000 French nationals applied for the country’s EU Settlement Scheme between August 2018 and September 2024, according to Home Office data.
The francophone community is not the only reason for Davezac to open a new branch in the UK: the French government, which ran a 5.8 per cent deficit in 2024, is aiming for €50bn of spending cuts and tax hikes, including reductions for social, educational and charitable organisations. Local councils, which tend to be core supporters of these bodies, have lost €2.2bn in funding; the culture ministry, €150mn. The situation is “not so good”, says Davezac.
London-based philanthropist Jean-Baptiste Wautier, who was at the launch, says France’s “nanny state” is one of the most extensive among developed countries, “so people have always viewed charity as being the job of the state”, where you pay high taxes and the state, in return, takes care of you.
He says even the legal framework for philanthropy is lacking: France has associations, but these are for “any lawful activity except for the ‘sharing of profits’”, according to the Council on Foundations, rather than specifically for charitable ends, and so are not comparable to UK charities. “The charity sector is close to nonexistent and therefore big donors are not very numerous,” says Wautier.
He adds that France’s culture, in part deriving from religious-cultural strictures on the evils of wealth — “it’s probably poorly digested Catholicism” — means overt dealing with money has negative connotations. Therefore, he says, “being seen as giving large amounts of money to a good cause, which would be seen as socially great in the UK or US, is seen poorly, at best neutral, in France”.
That was proved true even with the rare recent example of large-scale philanthropy in France, the reconstruction of Notre-Dame, severely damaged by fire six years ago. Within a week, France’s richest families had pledged more than half a billion euros: €200mn from the Arnaults and LVMH, the same from the Bettencourts and L’Oréal, €100mn from the Pinaults and Artémis. It was not long before an outcry: unions and leftwing politicians complained that these companies had found money for Notre-Dame, but not their workers, and that they would be eligible for tax deductions on their donations. At least two families renounced them.
After Duchêne and Davezac’s speeches, there was a presentation to the audience from Institut Imagine, a Paris-based centre for care, education and research into genetic diseases. The Institut Imagine team were hoping to meet new donors and, speaking after the event, Professor Bana Jabri, executive director and a specialist in paediatrics and immunology, is full of praise for the Fondation and says the launch offered promising leads.
Jabri says the Institut is focused on “valorisation”: turning ideas into patents and then into start-ups and industrial products and technologies. Just as one never focuses solely on the organ affected by a disease but looks at the entire body, says Jabri, Institut Imagine generates progress by having all its groups and stages under one roof.
To support its €80.3mn budget in 2023, Institut Imagine received €34.5mn from public funders and raised €7.2mn from private donors; it aims to sustainably increase that in the next few years to €10mn. It has been unusual for France in its approach to philanthropy, hosting charitable galas featuring art auctions and running a €40mn fundraising campaign, which has required looking across the Channel (and the Atlantic): it is “inspired a lot by the Anglo-Saxon system”, says Jabri.
“We are where the US was 100 years ago and where the UK was 50 years ago,” adds Laurent Mellier, Institut Imagine’s development and international philanthropy director.
Those US/UK-led innovations include allying with private equity. The Raise Group, an asset management firm, announced an initial closing of €25mn in 2023 for its Invest for Childhood fonds de partage (shared fund), which will give 50-80 per cent of its capital gains to Institut Imagine and Espérance Banlieues, a network of independent schools for children in deprived areas.
“Lots of organisations are not very comfortable with this way of raising funds,” says Mellier, but he sounds pleased when he confirms that the fund has now reached its €40mn target.
The battle is about more than cash. Since the state has been so supportive, says Jabri, it is a new thing for individuals to be asked for money: “It’s not in the culture of French charity to invest in a big building and put your name on it. We have to take into account the French mentality and how we go about philanthropy here.”
“We come from a culture where King Louis XIV was making decisions for everybody,” says Mellier. “We are far from those times but we are still functioning the way they did in the past.”
The subject was ostensibly uncontroversial, the perfect thing to attract some France-friendly female philanthropists to a breakfast talk at Colnaghi gallery in St James’s last October. Frédéric Dassas, chief curator in charge of decorative arts at the Louvre, would speak on “Marie Antoinette, Queen of the Arts” while showing slides of ancien régime marvels: a painting, a console, a bedroom at the Petit Trianon. The Fonds de dotation du Louvre (Louvre Endowment Fund) was hoping to meet potential donors.
But about halfway through, the lectured turned lecturers. One grande dame erupted with thoughts on how the queen was portrayed differently in one of the biographies she had read compared with Dassas’s claim. Another, when Dassas said something about how one of Marie Antoinette’s rooms would have been furnished, piped up: “I had a private tour, it was not like that at all.” Dassas said it certainly would have been back in the queen’s day. “But I had a private tour!”
Dassas was impeccably polite, but the Louvre Endowment Fund was learning something UK charities have long known about dealing with the rich when you want to ask them for money: a certain amount of biting your lip is essential. The converse is that there is an Anglo-American openness, indeed flashiness, around giving which France forbears.
The Louvre Endowment Fund, like the Fondation de France, is on the pioneering side of French philanthropy. It was established in 2009, following “Anglo-Saxon models”, says its website, thanks to the €400mn it is receiving over 30 years from licensing its name to a museum in Abu Dhabi. Its portfolio, which stood at €337mn at the end of 2023, has half its money in equities, but also investments in private equity and infrastructure, such as Colombia’s largest hydroelectric plant.
Philippe Gaboriau, the endowment’s executive director, says it has held events in Switzerland, Monaco and the UK. “Each time it’s always the same logic: all these countries are full of French people who have been moving [there] for fiscal or professional reasons. And there are huge communities of French wealthy people in these countries.” The French in London are the bridgehead: next come British francophiles and the broader international rich.
Gaboriau is less convinced than Axelle Davezac of the difference in generosity between the UK and France: “The degree of philanthropy for Americans has no equal in the western world,” he says. “The sphere of philanthropy in the UK is somewhat similar to the one we find in France — not that bad.”
It might not be bad, but it is clearly no longer sufficient for French charities. The UK was the Fondation de France’s second new international arm in the past year, having established an Asian branch based in Hong Kong in July 2024. (In 2000 it launched a friends organisation in charities’ happy hunting-ground, the US.) But the British chapter will be closest to home and comes after years of strained cross-Channel relations because of Brexit. Davezac is explicit that this move is a chance for the UK and France “to reshape our links”.
The philanthropist Wautier sees charity not just as a way of improving UK-France relations, but also as a harbinger of something bigger too: “Europe is sinking and neither France nor the UK on their own can turn their destiny around, and there would be so much in collaborating more.” Alongside defence and migration management, perhaps philanthropy will become one of the ties binding a new Europe.
