Mr. Pointud has thoughts of tourism  charging more to see the lighthouses and using the money for repairs. But the state is not set up for financing of this kind, and the Ministry of Culture, charged with maintaining “le patrimoine,” concentrates on much older, grander buildings on land.

France still has a Department of Lighthouses and Signals in its Ministry of Infrastructure, and there are perhaps 150 lighthouses of distinction in this maritime country, which lacks a coast only on its eastern border.

Philippe Genty, who leads the department in this part of Brittany, called Finistère  the end of the earth  is doing his best to save the famous lighthouse of Eckmühl, built in the 1890s with a bequest from the daughter of one of Napoleon’s marshals, to make up, she said, for the blood her father had spilled.

What was constructed is beautiful: a tower of local Kersanton granite 60 yards above sea level, with a curving staircase of 272 steps tiled in pale blue-green opaline glass, rising to a wood-paneled room with a statue of the marshal and a marble ceiling, with brass finials. Now, many of the opaline tiles, no longer made, are cracked or broken, the iron is rusting, and the paneling and the ceiling have been dismantled to replace the rotted beams. The marshal is kept in a storeroom.

“We see the lighthouses as technical, but they are also beautiful,” Mr. Genty said. “We want to maintain the patrimony, our heritage.”

After pushing his department, and trying to work with the Ministry of Culture, Mr. Genty has $239,000 to begin to caulk the granite and replace the rotting beams and rusted iron.