Enfants Terribles: Youth and Femininity in the Mass Media in France, 1945-1968 (review)

Susan Weiner's exciting work on France in the period following the Second World War explores the emergence, between 1945 and 1968, of a new definition of what it meant to be young and female in France. Through her examination of women's and girl's fashion magazines, popular novels and films, and the new phenomenon of the public opinion poll, Weiner traces the evolution of the "enfants terribles," the precocious, sexualized, bad girl of postwar France. Juxtaposed with the French mother, who represented reconstruction and recovery, and the angry young man damaged by the Occupation and angered by the current challenges of French social and political life, teenage girls remained untouched by history and uninvolved in current events. Instead, they reveled in their flagrant sexuality and disregard for bourgeois societal norms. Gone was the jeune fille, the virtuous young girl who came to represent a vanishing world. As Weiner sees it, the unarticulated anxieties of a France both eager and reluctant to embrace change are apparent in the discursive creation of young women challenging the restrictions of French society, but ultimately unable to fully escape the strictures of patriarchal control.

The phenomena that Weiner discusses were part of a change in the discursive representation of teenage girls, not in the lives of real girls. The relatively small number of young women in universities, the professions, and public life between 1945 and 1968 do not explain the discursive creation of girls eager to flout social and sexual norms. By way of explanation for the magnitude of this creation, Weiner argues that the government-directed youth programs of the interwar period and Occupation gave way to an attitude of "benign neglect" on the part of the government toward youth, leaving the terrain open to the mass media. Advertising, movies, the popular press, novels, and eventually television, both created and presented the new category of the teenage girl. While this creation was discursive, Weiner asserts, it did have social effects in "entering the lives of real young people whose participation, rejection, or deformation of these models generated new behaviors along with new definitions of what it meant to 'be young' in post-World War II France" (13).

The most common general characterizations of "youth" in post-World War II were masculine. The behavior of middle-class boys was diagnosed in terms of the horrors of the Occupation. Misbehaving girls, on the other hand were "startling, inexplicable, and titillatingly dangerous" (14). Weiner notes that at times of crisis, the Symbolic breaks down, and "a certain inarticulateness makes itself elliptically available for detection" (17). The image of the teenage girl is important for its relation to the unarticulated anxieties of post-World War II France. The divisions of the Occupation, the Cold War, the loss of French Algeria, the rural exodus, Americanization, and the decline of the traditional French way of life were all evidence of the possible unraveling of the social fabric. Teenage girls provoked anxiety by threatening to break the bounds of patriarchal society. Significantly, they were always punished in the end. The sexual power of the enfants terribles proved unable to break the bonds of the jeune fille and the social fabric that contained her.

In her analysis of the discursive creation of teenage girls, Weiner examines diverse forms of mass media and traces the evolution of several different identities, some of youth in general, some specific to young women or young men. Among the identities that Weiner finds significant are the "existentialists," the J-3s (originally a ration category during the war, but a name that was later applied to young people with a dark side linked to the horrors of the Occupation), the tricheurs (from the 1958 Marcel Carné film), the Nouvelle Vague (from the title of a 1957 opinion study), and the copains (American influenced pop-stars). Weiner consistently...