Arte France (Arte France)

ARTE is a European public-service cultural television channel. Its originality lays in the fact that it targets audiences from different cultural backgrounds, in particular French and German. It is composed of three entities: the headquarters in Strasbourg and two Members responsible for programme production and delivery, which are ARTE France in Paris and ARTE Deutschland TV GmbH in Baden-Baden.



ARTE France and ARTE Deutschland TV GmbH currently provide three-quarters of ARTE’s programming in equal proportions, the remainder being provided by ARTE G.E.I.E. and broadcasters cooperating with ARTE. The Members are responsible for submitting programme proposals, which have to be approved by the Programme Committee and are subsequently broadcast by the headquarters. They jointly finance and control headquarters operations in Strasbourg while representing their own interests before ARTE G.E.I.E.’s advisory and decision-making bodies.



ARTE begins with a vision

A vision which is bound to the names François Mitterrand, Helmut Kohl and Lothar Späth. The founding fathers of ARTE believed that a joint television channel should bring French and German citizens closer on a cultural level and promote cultural integration throughout Europe. Creating a television channel for two audiences was a first in television’s history and is still an exception in the global TV market to this date.



After years of negotiations, an interstate agreement was signed on 2 October 1990 by the minister-presidents of the eleven Bundesländer of the former West Germany and the French Minister of Culture, Jack Lang. Within just a few months, ARTE (Association Relative à la Télévision Européenne) was established as a European Economic Interest Grouping – E.E.I.G. (Groupement Européen d&rsq