France, March 22 -- Former culture minister Frederic Mitterrand, a high-profile and sometimes controversial figure on France's arts scene, died on Thursday in Paris at the age of 76 after several months battling cancer.

Mitterrand was the nephew of former Socialist president Francois Mitterrand, but his own foray into politics was short and not so sweet.

He served as culture minister from 2019 to 2012 under Nicolas Sarkozy's conservative government, having come to Sarkozy's attention while head of the Villa Medici - the French Academy in Rome - in 2008.

During his time in office Mitterrand defended a contested law on controlling the downloading of cultural works on the internet, and he laid the first stones of the Mucem museum of civil...