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

David A. Pettersen

Description

Gangsters, aviators, hard-boiled detectives, gunslingers, jazz and images of the American metropolis were all an inextricable part of the cultural landscape of interwar France. While the French 1930s have long been understood as profoundly anti-American, this book shows how a young, up-and-coming generation of 1930s French writers and filmmakers approached American culture with admiration as well as criticism. For some, the imaginary America that circulated through Hollywood films, newspaper reports, radio programming and translated fiction represented the society of the future, while for others it embodied a dire threat to French identity. This book brings an innovative transatlantic perspective to 1930s French culture, focusing on several of the most famous figures from the 1930s – including Marcel Carné, Louis-Fernand Céline, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Julien Duvivier, André Malraux, Jean Renoir and Jean-Paul Sartre – to track the ways in which they sought to reinterpret the political and social dimensions of modernism for mass audiences via an imaginary America.

Introduction
Chapter 1: Mass Culture and Leftist Politics in Jean Renoir
Chapter 2: The American Gangster in French Poetic Realism
Chapter 3: The Rise and Fall of the Gangster in André Malraux’s
Revolutionary Novels
Chapter 4: White Primitivism in Pierre Drieu la Rochelle
Chapter 5: Whitewashing the Transatlantic in Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Chapter 6: The Americanist Anti-Americanism of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les
Chemins de la liberté
Conclusion

Sujets

• Histoire
• History
• France
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: University of Wales Press
• Date de parution: 20 mai 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783168521
• Langue: English

Extrait

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 Series
Amaleena 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
© David A. Pettersen, 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
e-ISBN 978-1-78316-8521
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.
Cover image: Arrest of the Anarchochauffeurs, L’illustré du Petit Journal (1932). Private collection, photograph Leemage/UIG via Getty Images
for Stacey
Contents

Acknowledgements
List of illustrations
Notes to the Reader
Introduction
Chapter 1: Mass Culture and Leftist Politics in Jean Renoir
Chapter 2: The American Gangster in French Poetic Realism
Chapter 3: The Rise and Fall of the Gangster in André Malraux’s Revolutionary Novels
Chapter 4: White Primitivism in Pierre Drieu la Rochelle
Chapter 5: Whitewashing the Transatlantic in Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Chapter 6: The Americanist Anti-Americanism of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Chemins de la liberté
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Series Editors’ Preface

This series showcases the work of new and established scholars working within the fields of French and francophone studies. It publishes introductory texts aimed at a student readership, as well as research-orientated monographs at the cutting edge of their discipline area. The series aims to highlight shifting patterns of research in French and francophone studies, to re-evaluate traditional representations of French and francophone identities and to encourage the exchange of ideas and perspectives across a wide range of discipline areas. The emphasis throughout the series will be on the ways in which French and francophone communities across the world are evolving into the twenty-first century.
Hanna Diamond and Claire Gorrara
Acknowledgements

While writing does involve many hours of solitude, the long course of producing and publishing a book has taught me just how deeply interconnected the process of creating a book is. In the notes, I’ve expressed my gratitude to the many people whose scholarly work has inspired and influenced my thinking. In this space I would like to thank the many colleagues, friends and family members who have supported the book or the human behind the computer – and in many cases both.
This book would not have been possible without the generous financial support of the Richard D. and Mary Jane Edwards Endowed Publication Fund, the European Union Center of Excellence, the European Studies Center, and the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh, the Université Lumière Lyon 2 and the Rhône-Alpes Regional Government. I’m very grateful to Sarah Lewis and the team at the University of Wales Press for their enthusiasm for this project and for shepherding it from proposal to published book. Many thanks also to series editors Hanna Diamond and Claire Gorrara and to the many readers, both known and anonymous, who gave me such wonderful feedback. Any remaining errors are of course my own.
I would like to thank my dissertation director Suzanne Guerlac for her support and mentorship over the years. Her belief in this project has been unwavering. I still remember our conversation about choosing a dissertation topic; she told me to pick something I could live with for at least a decade. She was right about that, as she was about so many other things. For the intellectual training that helped launch this project, I’m grateful to David Carroll, Tim Hampton, David Hult, Tony Kaes, Michael Lucey, Anne Nesbet, Nicholas Paige, Debarati Sanyal, Kaja Silverman, Ann Smock and especially Carol Clover. Her seminar on film noir changed my life in ways that continue to resound down to the present some thirteen years later. I’m deeply appreciative of the example she set, and I strive to do the same with my own students. I’m also thankful for the wise counsel of Larry Kritzman and Nelly Furman early in my career.
Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Jennifer Branlat, Elisabeth Hodges, Lina Insana, Giuseppina Mecchia and Todd Reeser all read portions of this manuscript. I’m especially grateful to Maggie Flinn and Dan Morgan who read early versions of chapters multiple times and never failed to offer helpful suggestions. Thank you for seeing the things I couldn’t. I’d also like to thank the graduate students at the University of Pittsburgh who allowed me to try out many of the ideas from this book over the course of several seminars. Their generosity and tough questions undoubetdly sharpened this work.
I’m thankful to all my colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh, including Mark Lynn Anderson, Susan Andrade, Nancy Condee, Lorraine Denman, Neil Doshi, Jane Feuer, Lucy Fischer, Jen Florian, Randall Halle, Chloé Hogg, Lisa Jackson-Schebetta, Marcia Landy, Dennis Looney, Monika Losagio, Adam Lowenstein, Josh Lund, Colin MacCabe, Neepa Majumdar, Tom McWhorter, Gayle Rogers, Francesca Savoia, Terry Smith, Jen Waldron, John Walsh and Brett Wells, for their advice, for their support, and for the ways they make me feel at home.
In addition to those mentioned above, Grace An, Dudley Andrew, Hélène Bilis, Tina Chen, Irene Chien, Órlaith Creedon-Galli, Vanessa Davies, Sam Di Iorio, Chris Dumas, Scott Ferguson, Rémi Fontanel, Olivier Goldschmidt, Cathy Hannabach, Jonathan Haynes, Araceli Hernandez, Jean-Louis Jeannelle, France Lemoine, Sharon Marquart, Lowry Martin, Charlie Michael, Libby Murphy, John Paulas, Désirée Pries, Sarah Rackley Olson, Amy Rust, Laurel Simmons, Françoise Sorgen-Goldschmidt, Vinay Swamy, Kristen Templeman, Alice Tillier Chevallier and Christophe Wall-Romana were wonderful colleagues and friends along the way. I always look forward to seeing you at conferences, at working groups, at dinner parties, and in the reading rooms at the BNF.
A big thank you to my parents, Brian and Barbara, and my sisters, Holly and Tracy, for their patience, love and understanding while I was in the thick of writing. I’m also very grateful to Revd Jisen Coghlan and Revd Kyoki Roberts and the communities at City Dharma and Deep Spring Temple for offering me a place to sit quietly with the many ups and downs of this process. Finally, this book would quite simply not exist without the love and support of Stacey Triplette. Thank you for the long walks, silly conversations and expert copy-editing. This book is for you.
David Pettersen March 2015
An earlier version of part of chapter 1 appeared as ‘The Politics of Popular Genres in Jean Renoir’s Le Crime de Monsieur Lange ’, Studies in French Cinema 12/2 (2012): 107–22. An early version of part of chapter 3 was published as ‘Fragments of Affect: A Pragmatics of Imaginative Engagement in André Malraux’s Revolutionary Novels’, Romance Studies 28/1 (January 2010): 57–68. I am grateful to these publications for permission to reprint them here.
List of illustrations

Figure 1: Détective ’s first issue at Gallimard: ‘Chicago, Capital of Crime’
Figure 2: Lange’s imaginary America. Jean Renoir, Le Crime de Monsieur Lange , Films Obéron, 1935
Figure 3: The Marquis and the Trocadéro Esplanade at Geneviève’s Apartment. Jean Renoir, La Règle du jeu , Nouvelle Édition Française, 1939
Figure 4: The different clothing styles among Pépé’s gang. Julien Duvivier, Pépé le Moko , Paris Film Productions, 1937
Figure 5: Lucien finally gets to be the gangster. Marcel Carné, Quai des brumes , Ciné-Alliance, 1938
Notes to the Reader

For this book, I provide citations for French sources primarily in English, with some dual language versions when the precise wording 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?
– Fr