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

By David A. Pettersen

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: May 20, 2016
• ISBN: 9781783168521

Book preview

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.

ISBN978-1-78316-8507

e-ISBN978-1-78316-8521

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?

– 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 traditions 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 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 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 industrialized 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 popular 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

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 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 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 sanguinary 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 present 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 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

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

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 concentration 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 afford to purchase wireless receivers. Radio advertising, 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 sensitive 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 experience’.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 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 it.48 This rhetoric can be found in key individuals from the time. Victoria De Grazia recounts how Woodrow