France's first report on disabled people's access to cultural jobs puts intermittents at 1 to 1.5 percent

On 9 September the journalist Lætitia Bernard handed a report on disabled people's access to cultural employment to Catherine Pegard, France's Minister of Culture, and Camille Galliard-Minier, the minister responsible for autonomy and disabled people. ARTCENA describes it as the first report devoted to the question.

Bernard is a journalist at Radio France and has been blind since birth. The Minister of Culture gave her a mission sitting across three areas of public policy at once: employment, disability and culture.

The headline figures are three numbers counting three different groups. Disabled staff make up around 5.5 percent of the workforce at the Ministry of Culture and its operators, under 3 percent at private cultural companies with at least 20 employees, and 1 to 1.5 percent among intermittents du spectacle.

That last figure is the one covering most circus artists working in France.

The report carries 17 recommendations, grouped around opening professional prospects for young disabled people in the arts, making the working environment accessible, and changing attitudes inside live performance and cultural institutions. Accessibility here covers training, transport and infrastructure, and it also covers the fears recruiters bring to hiring.

Some of the measures cost very little and need coordination instead, like making amateur artistic practice available to every disabled person, or putting disability properly into professional training in fields such as architecture and design. Others are expensive and, Bernard argues, unavoidable: support through working life, and an adaptation of the intermittence regime itself.

She ends on the point that none of it happens without real political will. The report runs to 82 pages and is dated June 2026.