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Major restoration projects
In application of Article L 141-1 of the "Code du Patrimoine" (Heritage Code), modified by Article 48 of the Initial Budget for 2007, and by its statutory decree of 26 April 1995, modified by a decree of 6 April 2007, the Centre des Monuments Nationaux has had its remit enlarged to include additional competences. As a result it shall now be responsible for the conservation of national monuments (state-owned monuments endowed to it and those that are its own by rights) and shall be the contracting authority for any restoration, maintenance and major investment work carried out on these monuments.
This broadening of its remit, which until now involved the presentation of monuments and their collections to the public as well as promoting an understanding of them and their development, now confers overall responsibility for these monuments on the CMN, under state supervision, enabling it to improve consistency in the programmes of work, and reconcile the imperatives of conservation with the objectives of development.
Until such time as the CMN has sufficient in-house staff resources to act as contracting authority for work on all the national monuments, the state departments responsible for historic monuments (divisions of regional cultural affairs and the "service national des travaux" - national works department) will continue to administer such operations on behalf of the CMN according to the schedule decided by its president, within the framework of agency agreements entered into between the Ministry of Culture and Communication and the institution.
Already, the programme decided on for 2007 and the draft programme for 2008 combine strictly conservation operations with those aimed both at conserving and restoring a building, and its development in the context of the monument project decided on by the institution.