This paper analyzes French and British competition for control of Cairo’s cultural institutions in the interwar years. Documents from the French and British Foreign Offices along with local and foreign newspapers in Egypt illuminate the specific sites of contestation between the two countries and highlight the fear that British administrators had of potentially losing control over Egypt’s art, antiquities, and, ultimately, it's educational systems. I argue that British officials interpreted French cultural activity in Cairo as a “cultural campaign,” a deliberate bid for predominance, and that this posed an existential threat to British hegemony in Egypt just as much, if not more, than Egyptian independence did. The interwar era is largely understood as a period when Britain and France divided the Middle East between them. Even before that, the 1904 Entente Cordiale ended nearly a century of antagonisms between the two countries and clearly demarcated each of their colonial possessions. British-French tensions in interwar Egypt, however, suggest that those agreements did not put suspicions and tensions to rest. Concerns shifted from the overtly political to the cultural as Egypt became nominally independent and struggled to develop its own institutions of power and culture. In this dynamic context, Egyptian artists, performers, audiences, and consumers were not bystanders but intimately engaged in debates over what Egyptian art and culture was, who controlled it, and the extent of its liberatory potential.