Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture (review)

In their final chapter, Dudley Andrew (Film Studies and Comparative Literature, Yale) and Steven Ungar (French and Comparative Literature, University of Iowa) assert that Michel Leiris' approach to autobiography in L'Age d'homme "permits hidden causes, parallels, and rapports to relate disparate moments" (358). The same could be said of this magnificently interdisciplinary study of France in the 1930s, which reaches to embrace popular expression and urban life along with the work of intellectuals and artists. The authors compare their project to a newspaper layout, which juxtaposes world affairs with sports, entertainment, society gossip, cartoons, illustrations, and faits divers. A second analogy is weather, consisting of events (e.g. storms) mixed with ambiances or "atmospheres." Both these guiding metaphors serve as unifying threads while setting forth the authors' approach to historiography: they understand the Popular Front as the product of a multitude of heterogeneous forces and cross-currents, not as an explanatory or linear narrative. Their goal is "to look into and around what stands front-and-center, in order to thicken the political dimension by bringing out its cultural depth" (5). For according to a third analogy, "it is the orchestra that produces the melody, not the reverse" (11).

The authors set the stage and rehearse their methodology by spotlighting Alain Resnais' 1974 film Stavisky . . ., about the swindler whose 1934 suicide unleashed a scandal, xenophobic riots, a resurgence of the right wing and corresponding leftist counter-attack, in a sequence of events that helped trigger the formation of the Popular Front. Asking at the outset "What kind of access to the past can a feature film provide?" the introduction goes on to outline Resnais' strategies for staging history in a fashion that preserves its ambiguities and its distance.

The chapters that follow are loosely organized into two parts: the "Street Work" of intellectuals and artists who sought to change society through their art as well as in their direct political engagement; and the cultural and socio-political "weather" of Paris as it can be read through the texts of everyday life in and of the city. The choice of texts and their juxtapositions, quirky and idiosyncratic, might in less capable hands have rendered the book fragmentary or anecdotal. Here, however, Andrew's and Ungar's combined erudition and their compellingly orchestrated presentation blend a series of almost autonomous essays into a dense and coherent portrait of an era.

Each of the remaining chapters brings well-known personalities into dialogue with lesser-known figures in a way that illuminates both. Following Regis Debray in perceiving a transfer of intellectual power from educational to publishing institutions, chapter one, "February 6, 1934, and the Press of Direct Action," looks at writers, especially those on the Left, who joined the fray by responding to the riots in such venues as the Nouvelle Revue Française, Marianne, and Vendredi. Attention is also given to tabloids such as Detective and to manifestos and press photographs. Onstage here, among others, are André Gide, Julien Benda, Paul Nizan, and Emmanuel Berl. Chapter two juxtaposes Céline and Malraux as representative, from opposite political poles, of a "literature of discontent." Framed by questions about what role culture plays in political change, close readings permit fascinating observations about the politics of style. The riots having clarified the fascist and anti-fascist positions, chapter three, "Esprit in the Arena of Extremist Politics," explores the middle ground by following the threads of religious faith and "nonconformist" thinking in the work of Denis de Rougemont (characterized as a proponent of "passionate moderation") and in the emergence of the journal founded by Emanuel Mounier. Comparison of Anatol Litvak's film Mayerling with Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion prepares the terrain for a chapter devoted to "Jean Renoir's La Marseillaise: The Arc of Revolution." Anticipating Godard's injunction to "make political films politically," Renoir produced La Marseillaise during the Popular Front's 1936 apogee, and the film's historiography is shown to be populist...