Through a comparison of France and Germany, this article investigates why the overall conception of multilingualism promoted by the education systems of the two countries favours the teaching of "useful" European standard languages over that of minority and migrant languages that are conceived in merely cultural terms. Adopting a theoretical framework of historical institutionalism, I will argue that the tension between the utilitarian and the cultural dimension characterizing contemporary multilingual education policies in France and Germany results from the separate institutionalization of general foreign language education policies on the one hand and language-of-origin, regional and minority language courses on the other hand. The demonstration builds on an analysis of policy documents, press archives and interviews conducted with education officials, policy-makers, language teachers' associations and parental organizations. The paper will show that despite trends towards their incorporation and unification of these two sectors of language education after the diffusion of the paradigm of multilingualism since the beginning of the 1990s in Europe, it is the historically more deeply entrenched utilitarian logic of the sector of general language education that remains prevalent in the conception of contemporary multilingual education policies in France and Germany.