French President Nicolas Sarkozy, shown here in February, has pledged $1.16 billion Cdn to digitize France's cultural treasures.French President Nicolas Sarkozy, shown here in February, has pledged $1.16 billion Cdn to digitize France's cultural treasures. (Thibault Camus/Associated Press)

France will spend nearly $1.16 billion Cdn to digitize its national treasures, President Nicolas Sarkozy told reporters in Paris on Monday.

The money is part of a $54-billion stimulus package the president announced to boost France's economic growth and competitiveness.

The plan to scan French literary works, audiovisual archives and historical documents by computer underscores the Sarkozy government's push to maintain control of its cultural heritage in the face of online giant Google's global drive to digitize the world's literary works.

"We are going to launch a big public-private partnership" to digitize national holdings such as archives and museum pieces "while still staying in charge of our heritage," the French president said. "There is no question of letting this heritage go."

In August, the French National Library announced it was in discussions with Google over digitization of its collections.

Uproar from officials

That provoked an uproar among French officials and the country's publishing industry, and discussions have been suspended.

"We won't let ourselves be stripped of our heritage to the benefit of a big company, no matter how friendly, big or American it is," Sarkozy said last week.

The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York is assessing the legality of Google's digitization plan. In a September submission to the court, the French Ministry of Culture wrote that the plan did not conform to intellectual property law or to competition law and threatens cultural diversity.

But National Library president Bruno Racine told the New York Times that the cost of digitizing the National Library's collections alone, which include more than 14 million books and several million other documents, will run to more than $1.6 billion Cdn.

He stressed the need of a partnership with the private section to secure the capital for the projects.