The Modernist Enterprise: French Elites and the Threat of Modernity, 1900-1940 (review)

The Modernist Enterprise: French Elites and the Threat of Modernity, 1900-1940. By Marjorie Beale. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000. Pp. ix+231. $49.50.

Although The Modernist Enterprise can be appreciated by scholars in a variety of fields, it is situated squarely within French history and cultural studies: Marjorie Beale writes that this is "an empirical study of the cultural practice of modernity" in Paris between 1900 and 1940 (p. 4). She examines the ways in which French elites began to "rethink the relationship between culture, commerce, and government," arguing that they hoped to discover "some ideologically neutral technique for resolving the social conflicts and political crises that had plagued the Third Republic" (p. 71). At the same time, elites were "deeply suspicious" of the emergent industrial world because it might threaten "the wholesale dismantling of time-honored French cultural traditions" (p. 71).

Each of Beale's chapters explores a different arena for tensions embedded in this modernist "threat." She considers advertising; the press, public opinion, and journalistic reform; the culture of business, especially scientific management; the role of social Catholics in developing a science of communication; and one reformer's attempts at social engineering. She concludes that French elites often challenged and embraced modernity at the same time, celebrating changes only through the process of making them "French."

Historians of technology will be especially interested in the chapter titled "The Culture of Business," in which Beale examines reactions to Taylorism and scientific management. She maintains that "the impetus to modernize in France frequently grew out of its opposite: the wish to preserve what the French idealized as 'traditional' relations between the social classes and to protect the artisanal traditions of the past" (p. 73). This chapter complements existing literature on scientific management while connecting the ideas articulated by advocates of the "French" version to Beale's larger thesis about elites' ambivalence about the relationship among government, mass culture, and science and technology.

Indeed, the ideological and political positioning of science and technology and technical experts in French society plays an essential, if often only implicit, role in Beale's study of modernity. Scholars in technology studies may be especially intrigued by her analysis of the advocates of advertising reform, who invoked scientific models of perception to justify their claims and began to identify themselves as techniciens to boost their social position. Although several chapters hint at the authority gained from invoking technical expertise, they beg for further development.

Beale's analysis could have been strengthened in several other ways. Fundamental terms and concepts are generally not defined. Who exactly are these elites? And who are "the French"? Beale refers to technocracy and technocrats loosely, a problem since part of her argument highlights the shifting relationship between politics and science and technology. Most importantly, she never offers a sustained analysis of what she means by "modernity" and "tradition."

The looseness of Beale's analytic framework raises an even larger question: did her historical actors invoke these terms or has she adopted them to frame her analysis? Beale slips easily between using these terms as objects of study and categories of analysis. Moreover, modernity takes on a life of its own. When Beale asserts that "modernity presented itself in the form of a series of questions about France's place in a newly competitive industrial world" (p. 4), she casts it as a self-evident object with its own agency, not as a cultural construct and a complex set of cultural, economic, and technological practices, institutions, and changes. Beale's representation of "modernity" is especially ironic since she shows that the relationship with "tradition" became more complex as some elites invoked traditional culture as a way to adopt and yet also modify industrial practices. These links between the (re)construction of "Frenchness" and changes in the press, factories, and other arenas suggest that Beale might have engaged...