Americanism, Media and the Politics of Culture in 1930s France

transcript

FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE STUDIES

Americanism, Media and the Politics o Culture indd 1 09/02/2016 13 33

Series Editors

Hanna Diamond (University of Bath)Claire Gorrara (Cardiff University)

Editorial Board

Ronan le Coadic (Université Rennes 2)Colin Davis (Royal Holloway, University of London)

Didier Francfort (Université Nancy 2)Sharif Gemie (University of South Wales)

H. R. Kedward (Sussex University)Margaret Majumdar (University of Portsmouth)

Nicholas Parsons (Cardiff University)Max Silverman (University of Leeds)

Also in SeriesAmaleena Damlé and Gill Rye (eds), Women’s Writing in Twenty-First-Century France: Life as Literature (2013)

Fiona Barclay (ed.), France’s Colonial Legacies: Memory, Identity and Narrative (2013)

Jonathan Ervine, Cinema and the Republic: Filming on the margins in contemporary France (2013)

Kate Griffiths and Andrew Watts, Adapting Nineteenth-Century France: Literature in Film, Theatre, Television, Radio and Print (2013)

Ceri Morgan, Mindscapes of Montréal: Québec’s urban novel, 1950–2005 (2012)

FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE STUDIES

Americanism, Media and the Politics of

Culture in 1930s France

DAVID A. PETTERSEN

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS 2016

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to The University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-78316-8507 eISBN 978-1-78316-8514

The right of David A. Pettersen to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77, 78 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Typeset by Mark Heslington, Scarborough, North Yorkshire Printed by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire

Contents

Acknowledgements xi

List of illustrations xv

Notes to the Reader xvii

Introduction 1

Chapter 1: Mass Culture and Leftist Politics in Jean Renoir 26

Chapter 2: The American Gangster in French Poetic Realism 62

Chapter 3: The Rise and Fall of the Gangster in André Malraux’s Revolutionary Novels 109

Chapter 4: White Primitivism in Pierre Drieu la Rochelle 141

Chapter 5: Whitewashing the Transatlantic in Louis-Ferdinand Céline 174

Chapter 6: The Americanist Anti-Americanism of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Chemins de la liberté 206

Conclusion 244

Notes 255

Bibliography 292

Index 305

Notes to the Reader

For this book, I provide citations for French sources primarily in English, with some dual language versions when the precise word-ing is important for the argument. I have used recent published translations where possible, and I cite both the French original and the translation in the notes. All other translations are my own. If I modify a published translation for clarity or style, I indicate that in the notes.

Introduction

Where is my windmill at Place Blanche, My tobacco shop, my corner bistro, When every day for us was Sunday? Where are all my friends, Where are the village dances where we’d meet, With their javas played on accordions, Where are the meals of galettes, That we ate not having any money? Where are they now? – Fréhel, ‘Où est-il donc ?’ in Pépé le Moko, 19371

Towards the end of Julien Duvivier’s 1937 French gangster film, Pépé le Moko, the realist singer Fréhel laments the changing world facing French workers and working-class neighbourhoods during the interwar period. At home neither in the past nor in the future, Fréhel’s worker is caught between vanishing French popular tradi-tions and the seductions of modern urban life: skyscrapers, fancy nightclubs, the wireless radio and the upward mobility of factory and office jobs. As the workers leave traditional markers of French culture behind to chase the promises of America and American modernity, Fréhel’s Paris increasingly exists only in the space of memory and imagination. Indeed, by the late 1930s, French and international big businesses had begun the process of modernizing Paris on the American model. The less discussed opening verse of Fréhel’s song speaks to this new reality: ‘Some people talk about America | They see it at the cinema | They tell you how magnificent it is | Our Paris just can’t compare.’ For Fréhel, the modernization of France is inseparable from the seductive images and sounds of America that circulated through forms of mass media such as film, the phonograph and the radio.

Originally written in 1926, the song appears in Pépé le Moko on the far side of a worldwide economic depression, which might lead viewers to interpret its melancholy as a simple denunciation of

2 Americanism in France

American-style modernity. However, its meaning in Duvivier’s film is not so straightforward. Though actor Jean Gabin’s iconically stylish gangster Pépé sympathizes with Fréhel and feels the same nostalgia for the Parisian past, he cannot resist the consumer goods and sophistication that the American model promises. These temptations hint at a democratic society of mass consumption in which taste is shared across class and even national borders. Indeed, Duvivier’s attempt to make a French version of Howard Hawks’s Scarface (1932), the paradigmatic American gangster film about the violent desire to get ahead at all costs, reveals a fundamental French ambivalence about America as the measure of modernity. These mixed feelings are the subject of this book.

The conventional wisdom about the interwar period generally, and the 1930s specifically, is that French intellectuals and the general public harboured intense feelings of anti-Americanism.2 According to Richard Kuisel, the French worried about American technological prowess, large-scale capitalism and Ford-style factories throughout the 1920s. The spectacular economic downturn of the Great Depression, which did not impact France until 1931, confirmed and exacerbated those anxieties.3 Jean-Philippe Mathy explains that the United States’s rising economic power and cultural dominance fuelled fears about the decline of France’s world stature.4 French intellectuals came to perceive Russia and the United States as two expansionist empires clamouring at the gates of Western Europe, the one steeped in an imperialist political ideology, the other peddling the soft empire of the free market and mass consumption. Philippe Roger goes so far as to call the 1930s the peak of anti-Americanism in the whole of French history.5 Indeed, the 1930s are generally understood as a return to cultural nationalism and classicism and as a repudiation of the freewheeling cosmopolitanism that had characterized the 1920s. In these accounts, anti-Americanist sentiments even unified those French intellectuals, on the right and the left, who looked inward and backward to French traditions as a means of reconciling themselves to modernity.

An examination of the young and rising generation of French writers and filmmakers during the 1930s reveals that cultural historians’ claims about the decade’s anti-Americanism are overstated. This generation included Marcel Carné, Julien Duvivier, Jacques Prévert, André Malraux, Jean Renoir, Pierre Drieu la

Introduction 3

Rochelle, Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Jean-Paul Sartre. All of these individuals drew upon American literature and mass culture to a significant degree in their work, whether or not they were willing to admit it. They evoked American mass culture not just to criticize but also to fantasize, to appropriate and to imagine new forms of social, political and cultural life. The central claim of this book is that the ways in which French literature and cinema negotiated the relationship between modernism and modernity during the 1930s cannot be understood independently of a sustained and complex engagement with the imaginary America that writers and filmmakers encountered through the American literature and mass culture exported into France. From this perspective, I make two major arguments in this book. First, what seems to be a return to realism, classicism and cultural nationalism in the 1930s turns out to be a much richer transatlantic and intermedial network of exchange, one that is inseparable from major international strains of modernism and mass culture. Second, the politicization of art in the 1930s goes hand in hand with the democratization, vernacularization, or as some contemporaneous critics would say vulgarization, of French culture that young writers and filmmakers envisioned through their experience of American films, music, dance, illustrated periodicals and translated novels. This is not to say that there were not other important countries, such as Germany and the Soviet Union, that also offered French writers and filmmakers models of how to rethink national culture in an increasingly interconnected age of mass audiences, media and politics. However, I would argue that American mass culture was the most important for France because it was so widely consumed at all levels of society, from the urban working class to the country’s intellectual elite. Indeed, I contend that the changing landscape of French culture during these years only makes sense within the transatlantic context of American mass culture. What is more, American and transatlantic mass culture came to occupy a prominent though ambivalent place in the politics of culture of the French 1930s: images of America were always perceived to have a political valence, and their power could be harnessed either to the ideologies of the right or the left.

French Americanism in the 1930s

The rise of mass culture in France, of which the arrival of American imports such as jazz, Hollywood films and translated crime fiction formed a part, was inseparable from technological innovations in mechanical reproduction during the 1930s. Throughout this book, I will employ the term mass culture in a non-pejorative sense to refer to individual texts and artefacts produced through industrial-ized means. When I speak of mass culture, I am concerned with the vectors of distribution of the products of mass culture (including media technologies), the practices of consumption surrounding them, and the representations that circulate through them. I use mass culture to describe those objects and works that are usually categorized, in the Anglo-American context, under the term popu-lar culture, which generally refers to works whose pleasures cross class boundaries and which seek as wide an audience as possible. Mass culture is a notoriously polysemic concept, and one further complicated by different histories and usages in French and English over the course of the twentieth century.6 I prefer the term mass culture to that of popular culture or Diana Holmes and David Looseley’s composite term ‘mass popular culture’ because the word popular signifies differently in French and in English and could introduce ambiguities that would be misleading in the context of the French 1930s.

As Holmes and Looseley point out, the twenty-first-century Anglo-American term popular culture has come to index both the popular in the sense of appealing to a broad audience and the mass in the sense of industrially produced and distributed objects.7 In earlier English usage, ‘popular’ referred to something closer to folk culture or the culture of the people as distinct from mass-produced culture, dominant culture or the culture of the educated elite. Cultural historians studying France have shown how the meaning and use of ‘popular’ is even more complicated in French. Culture populaire continues to carry connotations of a culture of and by the people; the French adjective populaire references the undereducated peasant and working classes, as in classes or quartiers populaires.8 The meaning of populaire in the context of the 1930s is further complicated by the Popular Front’s use of it to promote cultural policies that sought to foster French folk traditions and to democratize access to culture, leisure and sport among France’s peasant and working classes.9

Introduction 5

Twentieth-century usages of the term mass culture in French public discourse are similarly complex. Indeed, Popular Front Under-Secretary for Sport and Leisure Léo Lagrange preferred the term popular to mass in order to characterize his youth policies because for him, ‘mass’ connoted the regimented and militaristic rallies of fascist Germany.10 In the twentieth century, culture de masse generally referred to the manufactured objects produced by the culture industries. Brian Rigby has shown that French intellectuals used it up until the 1970s with significant pejorative connotations of artistic inferiority and industrial vacuity.11 These pejorative connotations were often crystallized in public discourse by exteriorizing mass culture onto a feared and despised American other. Rigby argues that it was not until the 1980s that French intellectuals began to equate the Anglo-American sense of popular culture with mass culture in a non-pejorative way.12 I follow the post-1980 usage in this book, and as I shall demonstrate, the French 1930s were a key period of struggle over the shifting meanings, connotations and possibilities of mass culture in France.

The debates about mass culture in France during the 1930s accompanied changes in technology; mechanical reproduction in many different forms became part of the everyday texture of life for people of all social classes.13 According to historian Pascal Ory, technological innovations in radio, cinema and image printing inaugurated a true era of mass media in France during this decade.14 American culture and American cultural products enjoyed wide distribution in French markets, and intense competition developed between new and established forms of media. Simon Dell has shown how print journalism gained the capacity to reproduce photographs at low cost, thanks to the new high-speed rotary printing press and improvements in heliogravure. Magazines began to incorporate increasing numbers of images in their pages, and illustrated weeklies like Vu, which began publishing in 1928, quickly became popular.15 Ginette Vincendeau has analysed how inexpensive printed images enabled a national and international star culture in France during the 1920s and 1930s, and Dell notes that radio news broadcasts and film newsreels participated in this culture by increasing their production of entertainment-oriented content.16 Newspapers responded to competition from radio, newsreels and illustrated magazines by innovating a layout strategy called the rubric that organized articles around subject areas such as entertainment, film

reviews, fashion, sports and leisure activities.17 In addition, although they cannot be considered a new form of media, literary translations increased in number and availability in the interwar period, enabling ideas and texts to cross borders and circulate in France at a pace more rapid than in previous decades.18 For film historian Pavle Levi, who draws on the work of Walter Benjamin and French sociologist Edgar Morin, the cinema functioned as the fundamental machine and metaphor to describe, understand, manipulate and critique ‘the emerging condition of universal mediation’ and the general ‘cinefication of reality’ that came into being during the 1920s and 1930s.19 Levi defines cinefication as the sense ‘of reality at large being increasingly understood as a sort of “spontaneous” cinema’.20 The notion of cinefication, for which the chapters in this book provide ample evidence, explains why the literary field during the 1930s cannot be considered independently of the cinema and other media that helped create and expand cinematic spectatorship, including radio, phonographs, popular serials and film magazines. Writers and filmmakers alike tended to view cinema as increasingly inseparable from everyday life and from other forms of art and media.

The changing media landscape of the French 1930s is not, strictly speaking, a case of American invention or imitation. However, for interwar writers, America often represented the media-saturated society of the future, a cliché bookended by Georges Duhamel’s 1930 description of an American hotel room with its wireless on a six-foot cord so he can shave, write, read and sleep while listening to the radio, and Sartre’s commentary about the omnipresent loudspeakers playing music and talking at citizens during his trip to America in 1945.21 For the individuals discussed in this book, an interest in American mass culture went hand in hand with a reflection on the impact of mass media in general. I do not mean to suggest that the idea of America is always linked to the omnipresence of media, as counter-examples could surely be found on both sides of the equation. However, mass media, whether in its American or French form, certainly formed part of the modernity that Americanism was helping French writers and filmmakers to navigate.

This correspondence between an interest in rethinking traditional forms of French culture and a fascination with America, its literature and its mass culture further suggests that the social impacts of mass media cannot be separated in this period from the

Introduction 7

specific genres and representations that circulated through them, and it is for this reason that I examine both phenomena together in this book. Throughout the interwar period, French and American artists engaged in a tacit competition to see who could innovate the most commercially viable forms of mass culture.22 Richard Abel’s work has shown how Hollywood cinema dominated at the French box office, such that it was difficult to think about French cinema in the 1920s independently from American cinema; however, I would argue that in other areas, autochthonous French traditions converged with, appropriated and transformed American cultural products.23 Miscellany is the governing principle for the reception of American mass culture in France, and French responses to foreign cultures and media range from enthusiastic appropriation to a nationalistic desire to dissemble the origins of borrowed figures and tropes. The writers and filmmakers considered in this book take a range of approaches to their American intertexts, all of which represent typical responses to American mass culture in the interwar period.

Jazz is the best example of an American form of mass culture that entered into French culture as fully American but progressively became more ‘French’ as French composers and musicians processed and transformed it. Jazz came to France along with American (including African American) troops in 1917 at the end of the so-called Great War.24 As Matthew Jordan argues, French veterans during the interwar period found similarities between the thundering vibrations of mechanized artillery fire and new, supposedly non-Western cultural forms like the syncopated rhythms of jazz and the jerky movements of the cakewalk, the shag, the Charleston, the Black Bottom and the Lindy Hop. They believed these forms to be appropriate for the new regime of sensation that they had experienced at war.25 Yet jazz did not stay American. Jeffrey Jackson has shown how French composers like Darius Milhaud eventually combined jazz rhythms with French classical music traditions. This orchestral French jazz, as opposed to hot jazz, lost the countercultural charge and foreignness it had evoked in the 1910s and early 1920s.26 The fascination with jazz on the part of audiences and composers included an interest in breaking down class boundaries and expanding the reach of art beyond elite circles. As French music and later film critic Émile Vuillermoz noted in 1923, jazz offered new expressive means through which an overly

highbrow French music could reconnect with a wider, more popular audience.27

The American Western, in its filmic, literary and popular serial incarnations – as well as the frontier imagery in which it traded – similarly became a part of the French cultural landscape. Newspaper accounts of the United States’s wars with Native Americans in the late nineteenth century and the novels of Zane Grey and Jack London, which were regularly translated during the 1920s and early 1930s, fuelled popular taste for wide open spaces and violent conflict.28 Belle Époque Western serials like Buffalo Bill were reprinted during the interwar period, and French viewers enjoyed the Hollywood pictures Tom Mix, Bronco Bill, Arizona Bill and Rio Jim during the late 1910s and throughout the 1920s.29 The American Western is the explicit background for Jean Renoir’s 1936 film Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, and Jean-Paul Sartre, in his autobiography Les Mots (1964), cites the importance of silent Hollywood Western films and pulp Western serials like Buffalo Bill for his own burgeoning understanding of the powers and illusions of literature.30 While the gunslinger and the frontier landscape remained iconically American, French writers and filmmakers produced numerous French imitations of the genre. For example, actor Joë Hamman played Arizona Bill in a series of Gallic Westerns produced between 1907 and 1913 in the suburbs of Paris and in the Camargue. Of this corpus, only one film has survived, Pendaison à Jefferson City [Hanging in Jefferson City] (1910).31 Christopher Frayling writes that in this particular film viewers see much of the Western’s traditional iconography transposed from American to French locales; for example, the saloon looks suspiciously like a French café.

If the gunslinger cowboy represented the brutal and barbaric American hero on the plains, gangsters and criminals played that role in the savage ‘urban jungles’ of the American metropolis.32 American gangsters were ubiquitous on French screens, and French distributors released American gangster films like Little Caesar (1930), City Streets (1931) and Scarface (1932) with the original English-language soundtrack and French subtitles. In her 1960 autobiography La Force de l’âge [The Prime of Life], Simone de Beauvoir attributes the shift in Hollywood films from the cowboy to the gangster to the arrival of sound cinema:

At first [America] had been a world of cowboys, riding over the vast and empty plains; but now the advent of the talkies had practically

Introduction 9

driven them out of business. The scene now shifted to New York and Chicago or Los Angeles, with their gangsters and cops: during this year (1932) Scarface, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, and The Big House were all shown in Paris. We read numerous news items dealing with Al Capone and Dillinger, not to mention the sangui-nary thrillers which their exploits inspired. We did not actively sympathize with these racketeers, but we did derive considerable pleasure from watching them slaughter one another and defy the forces of law and order.33

Beauvoir’s recollections indicate that American gangsters were not only the personae of fictional films; they were also omnipresent in the French press and popular novels. New sensationalist weeklies like Gallimard’s Détective satisfied a popular hunger for stories of the American underworld.34 The inaugural 1 November 1928 issue featured a cover image of Chicago with the title ‘Chicago, Capital of Crime’. According to Sarah Maza, Détective’s principal readers were lower-middle-class families looking to rise in society, precisely those to whom American myths of social mobility and mass consumption would be the most attractive. Consequently, the magazine featured copious advertisements for self-improvement products and consumer goods, including mass media technologies like wireless radio sets and phonographs.35 Détective’s focus on educating readers for a burgeoning consumer culture dovetails with the American gangster film’s representation of the dapper criminal with a taste for fine things and the genre’s narratives about the darker side of social advancement at all costs.

The French fascination with American forms of criminality also extended to pulp literature. Some of these trends predate the gangster film, as with the American pulp serials Nick Carter and Nat Pinkerton, which were so popular in France before and after World War I that they inspired the pseudo-American French imitations Harry Dickson and Tip Walter.36 During the 1930s, many prominent American hard-boiled crime novels by writers like Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Raoul Whitefield, Jonathan Latimer and William Riley Burnett appeared in French translations. Like the American hard-boiled novelists, French crime writers in the 1930s, including Jean-Toussaint Samat, Joseph-Louis Sanciaume, Francis Didelot and Yves Dartois, began to challenge the deductive and investigative conception of the crime novel that had characterized the genre in the nineteenth century.37 For Jacques Dubois, the

Figure 1: Détective’s first issue at Gallimard: ‘Chicago, Capital of Crime’

Introduction 11

American hard-boiled style, along with the novels of French crime writers like Georges Simenon, went hand in hand with an attempt to raise the literary prestige of the crime genre.38 André Malraux’s preface to the French translation of Sanctuary, William Faulkner’s contribution to the hard-boiled detective genre, hailed the novel in 1933 as the fusion of Greek tragedy and the roman policier, or crime novel, indexing the genre’s increasing visibility among France’s intellectual elite. French workers also voraciously read crime novels, including those by American writers, causing the literary critic Maurice Charny to wonder in 1932 whether it would be better for the French government to subsidize a Crime Novel Organization rather than the traditional home of classical French theatre, the Comédie française.39

French readers also admired the literature of American high modernism. French translator and commentator Maurice Coindreau introduced France to a whole generation of American modernist writers during the 1930s, translating no fewer than ten novels by John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell and John Steinbeck, all of which were published by interwar giant Gaston Gallimard. These novels were regularly discussed in Gallimard’s Nouvelle revue française, ensuring that they were well advertised among the cultural elite. Leading interwar writers and intellectuals, including some considered in this book, prefaced Coindreau’s translations. For literary critic Émile Bouvier, writing in La Lumière in August 1936, the release of Coindreau’s translation of Faulkner’s Light in August represented a new development in American culture: only then did the American language spoken by gangsters find its literary expression.40 The irony of course is that Faulkner’s novel is not about urban gangsters, but rather race crimes in a rural setting; however, Bouvier’s comment is revealing because it suggests the complex and often confused network of miscellaneous associations through which French writers and intellectuals consumed American literature and mass culture during the interwar period.

Americanism, modernism and modernity

What linked these disparate American genres, novels and mass cultural forms was the sense that they were more in tune with the changes of modernity than traditional forms of French culture. For

these writers and filmmakers, Americanism was inseparable from modernism’s aesthetic project of inventorying the past and looking to the future. Modernity and modernism are complex terms, and it will be useful to establish parameters for my use of them in this book. With the word modernity, I reference a set of social, economic and political shifts confronting France – and much of the world – in the early twentieth century. Eugen Weber has shown that at the end of the nineteenth century, two-thirds of France’s population lived in rural areas, whereas that ratio reversed by 1930, with a two-thirds majority living in towns.41 France experienced massive waves of foreign immigration during the interwar period, ranking only behind the United States in the number of immigrants it received. Elisa Camiscioli offers the useful reminder that these newcomers were of all races, ethnicities and colours, including so-called ‘white’ Europeans.42 Taylorist management practices and the concentra-tion of capital started to transform French factories and labour, fuelling conflict between small and large businesses.43 The society of mass consumption also began to arrive in France. French consumers bought refrigerators, telephones and cars, despite the country’s inadequate electrical and road infrastructure, and by 1936 even urban workers could purchase cheap wireless receivers. Radio adver-tising, moreover, peddled the national brands that heralded the standardization of mass-produced commodities.44 Ideas about and images of America were key interlocutors in mapping the contours of the modernity coming to France, not only because the United States offered one powerful vision of a mass society, but also because, as Miriam Hansen has argued, its mass culture was particularly sensi-tive to the large-scale social and technological reorganization that characterized early twentieth-century modernity.45 For Hansen, American mass culture ‘played a key role in mediating competing cultural discourses on modernity and modernization’ because ‘it articulated, multiplied, and globalized a particular historical experi-ence’.46 The French version of the transformations wrought by modernity will emerge more fully in the chapters that follow.

Modernism as an artistic and cultural phenomenon is inextricably tied to the changes of modernity, and as a term, it is no less multivalent. In this book, I use the word modernism to index the artistic styles, movements, practices and individual works that responded to the seismic economic, social, political and cultural shifts of early twentieth-century French modernity. Modernist works

Introduction 13

are marked by a relationship of ambivalence, which manifests itself through an engagement with competing temporal modes. On the one hand, modernist works register what is lost with the changes wrought by modernity, dramatizing the way in which the circulation of bodies through modern forms of transportation disconnected individuals from traditional temporal and spatial coordinates. At times, they lament the fact that the global flows of culture through mass media increasingly dislocated people from local cultural references in favour of national and international frames of experience. Modernist works track, in both formal and thematic ways, the losses occasioned by the expansion of social mobility, the collapse of traditional social hierarchies, the fragmentation of neighbourhoods and the new fluidity of class distinctions. On the other hand, modernist works may also celebrate the utopic, revolutionary aspects of modernity: they inventory the ways in which modernity represents progress in the form of scientific, economic and political development and advances toward social equality, especially with respect to women. Modernist works celebrate and explore new forms of technology and mediation through formal experimentation, stylistic innovation and artistic self-consciousness. New artistic possibilities track new social possibilities like the being together of the masses in the public spaces of the city and the interconnected world of global travel through the planes and automobiles represented in radio and film newsreels. As much as modernist works and artistic practices can be about loss, they are just as much about the energy and excitement of the new.

These two valences often go together. For Jonathan Flatley, modernism is precisely the variegated cultural practices that respond to the gap between the utopic promises of modernity and the imperfect realization of those promises, including nostalgia for older forms of social organization.47 Or, as Hansen argues, American mass culture in the interwar period did not simply offer a negative vision of modernity, that is, horrifying images of mass production, dehumanization and alienation: it also showed the ‘promises of mass consumption’ and the ‘dreams of a mass culture’, including the spread of democracy and equality, that exceeded the boundaries of and even conflicted with the industries that produced them.48 This rhetoric can be found in key individuals from the time. Victoria De Grazia recounts how Woodrow Wilson evoked these promises and dreams during the First World War when he suggested that the

nationalistic and imperial conflict between European nations was not the result of ideology or politics, but of a lack of understanding among different and contrasting lifestyles. For him, mass-produced consumer commodities could create shared experience, habits and fashions that would foster understanding and peace between classes, peoples and nations.49 The key term in American mass culture, then, is precisely the masses that its cultural products and consumer goods sought to embody, foster and flatter.

Modernism, especially Anglo-American versions of modernism, has had a conflicted relationship with the masses and mass culture. Tim Armstrong writes that for American and British circles during the 1920s, modernists often defined themselves against mass culture and understood modernism’s artistic vocation as one of criticism with respect to modernity.50 The French context differs in important ways given that the best-known modernist movement in France, surrealism, was deeply interested in mass culture as a mythological imaginary of crime through which people could, as Jonathan Eburne puts it, ‘come to terms with the social arrangements of the modern world’.51 Nevertheless, the turn toward political commitment and realism around 1930 and the deep and broad interest found among 1930s artists in engaging the masses is often understood as a caesura or intermission in the history of French modernism, which would not resume until after the Second World War.52 However, in my view, it is more useful to approach the decade by considering how political commitment drove artists away from negative critique and elitism towards a search for positive and inclusive visions of a society transformed. 1930s writers and filmmakers were no longer content to produce modernist works in difficult, inscrutable styles that coded for a vanishing sense of individual freedom and artistic autonomy; rather, they wanted their works to be accessible to readers and viewers beyond a narrow, educated cultural elite. Indeed, the novels of André Malraux and Jean-Paul Sartre are cases in point for an expanded, inclusive conception of modernism. While enthusiasts of modernist art and literature might not consider them part of the modernist canon because of their political engagement, their seeming ‘realism’ or their didacticism, these novels are experimental and intermedial in significant ways. They employ narrative montage as well as fragmented chronologies, voices and points of view while nevertheless seeking to reach a broad, non-elite readership.

Introduction 15

For Malraux, Sartre and other writers and filmmakers, mass culture became a key interlocutor in artistic efforts to rethink modernism with the masses in mind not only because it implied a mass audience, but also because it offered a set of genres, figures, tropes and emotions that were shared widely by audiences transcending the borders of class, language and even nation. American mass culture was especially important because of its ubiquity and its popularity in interwar France. French intellectuals processed its tropes, images and motifs in their work even when they sought to avoid this influence. Often, the form that processing took was opposition, but homage and assimilation existed alongside it. Nicolas Di Méo argues that French intellectuals and writers felt ‘ambiguous fascination’, ‘anxious hope’, and ‘embarrassed expectation (une attente confuse)’ with respect to the ethnically diverse, hypermodern and cosmopolitan society that America’s literature and mass culture exported to France.53 Though the writers and filmmakers discussed in the following chapters came from many different points on the political and artistic spectrum, they all grappled with the meaning of American genres and forms, experimenting with the ways in which they could be harnessed to specific political ideologies or combined with autochthonous French cultural traditions both high and low.

In this book, I am not concerned with telling a straightforward history of Americanism in France during the 1930s. Rather, I am interested in exploring the ways in which individual French writers and filmmakers responded to, appropriated, and resisted contradictory images and ideas about America in their work. Americanism, Media and the Politics of Culture in 1930s France is the story of how American modernity functioned in France as an internationally defined discursive field, and I tell this story through the analysis of individual novels and films.54 I focus on several of the decade’s most canonical novels, films, writers and filmmakers, including André Malraux, Jean Renoir, Julien Duvivier, Marcel Carné, Jacques Prévert, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Jean-Paul Sartre, in order to highlight the importance of Americanism at the centre of the decade’s artistic and cultural preoccupations.

In the pages that follow, I track a series of American genres, tropes, narratives and stylistic elements across a selection of some of the best-known novels and films from the 1930s. The level of

engagement with American mass culture varies among the different writers and filmmakers considered here, and it also differs between cinema and literature. The canonical films analysed in this book imitate some elements of American mass culture, and they serve as a kind of laboratory where images and tropes drawn from French and American culture can be tested against one another. For the novelists I examine, the images, sounds and styles that crossed the Atlantic during the 1930s play a significant role in helping them transform their sense of what French literature could do. While the discussions that follow will be filled with references to the gangster, the Western, the aviator, hard-boiled crime fiction, tough-guy masculinity, negrophilia, primitivism, jazz, consumerism and mass media, these are secondary terms for this book. By secondary, I mean that they are the terms through which French writers and filmmakers are negotiating the meaning and import of modernity in France through an imaginary of America and American mass culture that is at once commonly shared and thoroughly miscellaneous. Imaginary here means, as Claudio Fogu puts it, ‘a relational field and an inventory of images, which … may be best visualized as akin to a “medieval bestiary” – a never-ending collection of mental and represented creatures irreducible to either reality or fantasy [that] reveal instead the rhetorical codes that underlie the combinatory operations of our historical imagination’.55 Indeed, Edgar Morin argued that the spread of cinema in the first half of the twentieth century fundamentally changed how the modern imaginary worked, creating a world in which imagination and perception were no longer distinct and in which everyday people were both producers and consumers of images.56 Any scholarly account of a historical imaginary is always an approximate construction, one that comes into view only through the complex networks of citationality and reference that link authors and readers, filmmakers and viewers in the struggle to appropriate, resist and define the meaning of certain figures and tropes.

Rather than working from outside in, that is, employing a priori criteria and periodization to situate the texts and individuals under examination, this book approaches its subject from the inside out, using what writers and filmmakers themselves say about other writers, filmmakers, literature and films to understand the processes taking place. Artists do not always feel beholden to the kinds of linguistic, cultural and medial borders that interest scholars,

Introduction 17

intellectuals and policy makers; the individuals considered in this book are first and foremost opportunists, both in ways they do and do not understand. The specific formal and stylistic allusions I track, when considered together, constitute an alternative history of Americanism in 1930s France.57

My approach is two-pronged. In some cases, French writers and filmmakers make explicit reference to specific people, genres, styles, authors, films or novels that can be understood as important for a particular text or passage. In others, the references to it are often in an imitative mode and thus indirect. While I track the interplay between direct and oblique citation of American tropes, I do not seek to give an exhaustive history of any single phenomenon during the French 1930s. Rather, I present the cultural and historical background necessary to contextualize each of the specific secondary terms for the French imaginary of America as they relate to the texts and films under examination, drawing on scholarship in French cultural history where appropriate. This approach allows the complexity of the terrain between modernism and modernity to come into view, especially as French modernism measures itself against a global frame.

From reverence to irony

Rather than opting for a chronological or thematic structure, I have organized each of the book’s chapters around an individual writer, filmmaker or film movement’s relationship to American mass culture. I focus in particular on Jean Renoir, poetic realism as embodied by Marcel Carné and Julien Duvivier, André Malraux, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Jean-Paul Sartre. The widely accepted narrative about interwar French Americanism is usually told in terms of a shift from optimism, euphoria and fascination among modernists during the 1920s to disappointment, scorn and rejection at the outset of the 1930s. I complicate this narrative by tracking various shifts between rever-ence and irony in the writers and filmmakers examined in this book throughout the 1930s and continuing into the post-war period. Broadly speaking, I open with those who approach their American intertexts most reverentially and then move towards those who engage with them more ironically or critically. However, many of these individuals changed their relationship to America and

American mass culture over the course of the decade in response to personal, political and historical developments, and the spectrum of reverence and irony can also be found within individual chap-ters. The writers, filmmakers and texts discussed here ultimately demonstrate that in the interwar period, neither Americanism nor American forms and styles transparently belonged to any particular political or ideological position; American tropes could be adapted by either the right or the left.

The relations between the left and the right, and between ideology and aesthetics, are especially complex during the 1930s. Previous scholarship on the decade has often treated the right and the left separately, and much more attention has been devoted to the right than the left. However, for both sides of the political spectrum during this decade, literature, cinema and mass media were important ways of battling over the collective future of France. The relatively smaller amount of scholarly attention devoted to writers on the left has to do with the predominance of realism as an aesthetic doctrine during the 1930s and its falling critical fortunes after the Second World War. John Flower has chronicled at length the debates and disagreements among writers on the left during this decade. French Communists adopted and adapted the doctrine of Soviet socialist realism with its presumption that all art should be imbued with a thoroughgoing Marxist interpretation of the world and should serve as a potential weapon in class conflict. Others on the left, like working-class writer Henry Poulaille, known for his notion of proletarian literature, or the bourgeois writer Léon Lemonnier with his conception of literary populism, sought to sketch out less peremptory ideas about what a leftist literature should look like, what it should be about and who should write it. Poulaille advocated an authentic and humanistic literature by, for and about the French working class, whereas Lemonnier sought to update nineteenth-century naturalism with unsentimental representations of working-class life that offered a moral if not political perspective.58 All three of these positions stressed the importance of realism and represented a departure from the stylistic experimentation that characterized French artistic circles in the 1920s. According to Philippe Roussin, the centrality of realism during the 1930s was one reason why subsequent historiography came to think about the decade as a ‘tragic parenthesis between the historical avant-gardes of the

Introduction 19

1910s and 1920s and post-war art that returned to the unalloyed purity of modernism in good taste’.59

On the right, writers and intellectuals were concerned with how to secure and regenerate the French nation. Unlike in Italy and Germany, a fascist party never took power in France; however, Alice Kaplan argues that this fact makes French literature and thought all the more important for understanding the utopian aspects of fascism in general.60 Much scholarly work on right-wing writers and artists has sought to consider the relevance for France of Benjamin’s famous thesis that fascism enacts an aestheticization of politics.61 For David Carroll, literary forms of fascism harness fiction’s powers of fabrication in order to unify the discordant elements of a society and culture into a political totality modelled on the organic work of art.62 In a related vein, Sandrine Sanos has charted the many ways in which right-wing writers and ideologues sought to secure the French nation by excluding a series of gendered, sexualized and racialized others.63 In terms of the artistic styles favoured by right-wing writers, Mark Antliff explains that while the post-Second World War period saw fascism and modernism as antithetical, in the interwar period fascism shared certain anti-Enlightenment, anti-rationalist and anti-capitalist values with some strains of modernism. Antliff’s flexible conception of fascism as ‘a movement full of internal contradictions, with an unstable “base” composed of individuals and constituencies who endorsed fascism for a variety of reasons, and whose allegiance to the cause may have been transitory’ allows us to account for both the neoclassicism advocated by right-wing figures like Charles Maurras or Thierry Maulnier and the various conceptions of modernism found in Drieu la Rochelle and Céline.64 Fascism was just as much a celebration of some elements of modernity, such as technology and mass media, as it was a rejection of others; Kaplan, for example, discusses the ways in which French fascist writers and ideologues sought to manipulate media technology as a means of exerting control over the public imaginary and transmitting a sense of mastery over the world.65

While much scholarship on the 1930s has isolated the right and the left, Dudley Andrew, Denis Hollier, Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle and Steven Ungar have mapped and theorized the points of contact and shifts in allegiance among writers and intellectuals variously on the left and the right.66 Americanism, Media and the Politics of Culture in 1930s France takes its cue most strongly from

these studies, tracking how French anti-Americanism and Americanism in the 1930s are a key point of convergence for French writers and filmmakers across the political spectrum. In the first half of the book, I deal with individuals associated with the French left: Jean Renoir, Marcel Carné, Julien Duvivier and André Malraux. Carné and Renoir in particular were considered committed, politically engaged leftist filmmakers in the 1930s, a historical fact that is often elided when their works are treated as classics of the French canon. Despite making one of the most famous Popular Front films, La Belle Équipe [They Were Five] (1936), Duvivier’s alignment with the left is less certain; he could be considered right-leaning at some moments. However, I pair him with Carné as both combine poetic realism with the figure of the American gangster. Malraux, for his part, sympathized with the communist left in the 1930s and even fought alongside the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. I have chosen Malraux to bridge the gap between cinema and literature in this book, as his novels are self-consciously cinematic and he even adapted his novel L’Espoir into a film that he directed.

Nowhere is the contrast between reverence and irony more stark than in the two films that bookend Jean Renoir’s committed, leftist phase: Le Crime de Monsieur Lange [The Crime of Mr Lange] (1936) and La Règle du jeu [Rules of the Game] (1939). In the first chapter, ‘Mass Culture and Leftist Politics in Jean Renoir’, I examine the ways in which these two very different films explore the role of mass culture and mass media in imagining social change at two crucial moments in the 1930s: the heady optimism of the Popular Front’s early days in 1936 and the eve of another world war following the Popular Front’s collapse. Lange represents the vital potential of mass culture, specifically popular serials and the American Western, for a democratic politics. Through a self-conscious engagement with genre, Renoir attempts to transform the murder of a capitalist into a revolutionary act. Made only three years later, La Règle du jeu shows the dark side of that hope, dramatizing the utter uselessness of mass culture for political change. The film’s Lindbergh-esque transatlantic aviator, a celebrity of radio and newsreel, crashes up against the ossification of a thoroughly bored bourgeoisie, resulting in a meaningless and accidental murder. I conclude that Renoir’s interest in mass culture is isomorphic with his leftist phase: at the

Introduction 21

same time that Renoir gave up on leftist politics, he also gave up on mass culture.

The second chapter, ‘The American Gangster in French Poetic Realism’, continues to explore pessimism on the French left in the late 1930s, and it expands the discussion of American media figures that impacted leftist filmmakers to include the American gangster. Here, I investigate the relationship between French and American criminal stereotypes and the representation of the French working class in the decade’s best-known film movement, poetic realism. While the gangster’s acquisitive nature and consumerist desire for fine things signalled a potentially revolutionary break with stifling traditions and social hierarchies, his penchant for excessive violence was also antithetical to the French working-class values of community and solidarity. I examine the reception of American gangster films in French newspaper reviews to demonstrate not only a French attraction to the brutal violence of the gangster, but also a desire to imbue this ‘hard’ character archetype with ‘properly French’ sentimentality and fatalism. Through analysis of Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le Moko (1937), Marcel Carné’s Quai des brumes [Port of Shadows] (1938) and Carné’s Le Jour se lève [Daybreak] (1939), I show how poetic realism combines American gangster film tropes with imagery from French populist and proletarian literature about working-class neighbourhoods to imagine what a Gallic gangster might look like and how he might embody the concerns of the French working class. While poetic realism in general is often thought of as an apolitical movement, I demonstrate how these three films’ use of gangster tropes anchors a leftist critique of media representations of the working class. As the decade wears on, poetic realist filmmakers increasingly reduce the American gangster to a shallow visual style, but they remain obsessed with the trope of the gangster’s final showdown and suicide as a politically and socially significant act.

In the third chapter, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Gangster in André Malraux’s Revolutionary Novels’, I consider the many similarities to cinema in Malraux’s novels. I explore the importance of two media figures, the gangster and the aviator, in Les Conquérants [The Conquerors] (1928), La Condition humaine [Man’s Fate] (1934) and L’Espoir [Man’s Hope] (1937). Like Renoir’s films, Malraux’s novels map their use of American literature and cinema onto the changing fortunes of the French left, especially the communist left, over the

course of the 1930s. Modern forms of spatial mobility and violence, namely the cars and guns he found in American films and the crime fiction of Dashiell Hammett, initially reflected for Malraux the kinds of heroism, militancy and even terrorism that he judged appropriate to modern forms of political revolution. However, as the decade progresses, Malraux’s novels evince an increasing pessimism about the gangster figure and the crime novel that mirrors his own political shift from a left-wing anarchist position in the 1920s and early 1930s to a dogmatic communist position at the time of the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s. Despite this shift, I argue that Malraux does not turn his back on American literature and mass culture entirely. Instead, he changes genres. Malraux’s last revolutionary novel, L’Espoir, exchanges the gangster and the detective for another popular figure found in French and American incarnations throughout the 1930s, one already familiar from my discussion of La Règle du jeu: the aviator.

Whereas the first three chapters establish the meaning and utility that American literature and mass culture carried for the French left, the following two chapters examine the relationship between American literature and mass culture and French writers on the extreme right. These chapters on right-wing authors invoke two other expressions of the French fascination with America: jazz and hard-boiled crime fiction. While French Americanism could certainly be placed in the service of leftist causes or points of view, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle and Louis-Ferdinand Céline show how it could also be used as fuel for fascist and anti-Semitic ideologies. One would expect these writers to get their power from a reaction against America, and indeed there are significant anti-Americanist invectives in both their writings. However, both Drieu and Céline also adapt recognizably American tropes and could be considered Americanist in certain aspects of their style and treatment of genre. What is so surprising is that, for these two writers, Americanism itself becomes a potent engine for the expression of a right-wing politics.

In the fourth chapter, ‘White Primitivism in Pierre Drieu la Rochelle’, I consider the unlikely Americanism of France’s arguably best-known fascist writer, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle. While many of Drieu’s political essays are ambivalent about America, he was nevertheless fascinated by the pseudo-‘Nordic’ bodies of the American women that populate his novels and the savage American

Introduction 23

landscapes he celebrates in his preface to Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Drieu despises the mechanization and industrialization he associates with the American metropolis, but he also admires those aspects of American culture that evoke for him ‘primitive’ states of nature and violence. Drieu’s most important novel, Gilles (1939), features an extended affair with a married American woman intertwined with a meditation on the ways in which mass cultural genres like the faits divers or the gangster film seek to embody political revolution. I analyse how Drieu critiques French surrealists’ penchant for faits divers by writing a miniature failed crime novel and then advocating the virile genres he deems more appropriate to a fascist politics, namely gangster and war films, in his epilogue. Drieu’s discussions of America and his use of American mass culture demonstrate these tropes’ ideological mutability in the 1930s, for appropriations of American culture were not incompatible with an avowedly fascist politics. Indeed, as Renoir, Carné and Malraux turned away from the violence of the gangster, Gilles reveals how Drieu turned toward it.

French relationships to Americanism on the extreme right are also central to the fifth chapter, ‘Whitewashing the Transatlantic in Louis-Ferdinand Céline’, in which I examine Céline’s engagement with America and American mass culture in his first novel Voyage au bout de la nuit [Journey to the End of Night] (1932) and his three anti-Semitic pamphlets from the late 1930s and early 1940s. As with Drieu, women both real and imagined are crucial mediators for Céline’s relationship to America. In this chapter, I examine Voyage’s dialogue with the cultural forms that presented American modernity to French audiences and readers, including jazz, the literature of the American modernists, commodified images of women in film and advertising, and the myths of social mobility peddled by Hollywood cinema. As much as Céline sought to criticize American tropes and styles, his first novel nevertheless reproduces and even imitates them, suggesting an ambivalent relationship to America and American mass culture. This ambivalence also extends into his anti-Semitic pamphlets. While Céline is now infamous for his racism, anti-Semitism and collaboration during the French Occupation, he was viewed favourably in the early 1930s and even considered a potential leftist based on his first novel. When Céline decided to distance himself from the perception that he was leftist by publishing three anti-Semitic pamphlets beginning in 1937, he

resorted, among other strategies, to a vicious critique of transatlantic mass culture through racist and anti-Semitic invective. I argue that the pamphlets’ composite figure of the Negrified Jew allows Céline to divorce the formal innovations of transatlantic mass culture like cinema, jazz and the literature of American modernism from their transatlantic and black cultural contexts, thereby enabling him to reclaim them for an ‘authentically French’ modernist literary tradition.

Céline’s double game of Americanism and anti-Americanism can also be found in the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre. In the sixth and final chapter, ‘The Americanist Anti-Americanism of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Chemins de la liberté’, I move beyond the 1930s in order to examine the fate of French Americanism in the immediate post-war environment. Here, I analyse Sartre’s shifting relationship to the progressive potential of American mass culture in Les Chemins de la liberté [The Roads to Freedom] (1945–9). While the publication of the four-novel cycle post-dates the war, Sartre began writing it in 1938, and the cycle is in many ways tied to the historical and cultural context of the 1930s. Indeed, Sartre came of age while reading many of the novels and watching many of the films analysed in earlier chapters, and he even expressed admiration for some of them at particular points in his life. While Sartre made famously anti-American statements after the Occupation and increasingly moved towards a dogmatic communist position in the early 1950s, this chapter argues that during the late 1930s and 1940s he drew on the topoi of interwar Americanism, primitivism and the jazz craze in order to imagine the ways in which French leftist intellectuals might shed their bourgeois social conditioning and achieve genuine solidarity with the working class. Les Chemins appears to interpolate its American intertexts in an ironic and even critical manner; however, I demonstrate that the extant fragments of its unfinished final volume, La Dernière Chance, return favourably to certain tropes and themes from 1930s Americanism. Sartre’s undetermined relationship to Americanism in Les Chemins suggests that some of the Americanist positions from the 1930s persisted beyond the Occupation and Liberation into the post-war moment. Sartre, a key mediator between the interwar and post-war periods, is thus a fitting writer with which to end this book.

The conclusion brings the writers, filmmakers and texts considered in this book together, highlighting their connections

Introduction 25

and points of contact both during the 1930s and during the French Occupation and post-war periods. It also continues the work of the sixth chapter, tracing several links between interwar Americanism and the post-war intellectual climate. I discuss selected late twentieth-century returns and rediscoveries of America by Claude-Edmonde Magny, Éric Rohmer, Julia Kristeva and Philippe Sollers that take place through key ideas, tropes and strategies found in French Americanism of the 1930s.

Americanism, Media and the Politics of Culture in 1930s France

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