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At the beginning of March 1982, François Mitterrand announced, during his first electoral mandate, a major programme of architectural construction which aimed at laying the foundations for a “new urban civilization” ; one year later, this programme was called into question by the austerity policies of the Mauroy government. This article, resting on the analysis of archives and interviews, investigates the atypical decision-making on the basis of which the architectural programme was implemented, as well as the institutional resistances which appear in the “stringency turn”. The study shows that the analysis of cultural projects is an interesting angle to understand the presidential institution.