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  • Americanism, Media and the Politics of Culture in 1930s France by David A. Pettersen
  • Colin Nettelbeck
Americanism, Media and the Politics of Culture in 1930s France. By David A. Pettersen. (French and Francophone Studies.) Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2016. xviii + 316 pp.

Eugen Weber’s comprehensive study, The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s (New York: Norton, 1994), revealed that particular decade as one of the most complex in France’s modern history. It was a time of multifaceted, persistent crisis, when the nation and its people confronted economic depression; accelerating modernization and democratization; the rise of totalitarian ideologies and decline of religious traditions; the failure of the League of Nations; chronic governmental instability; and generalized uncertainty in respect to the changing global political order. Weber rightly scrutinized the ambiguous relations between France and America: this was a time when admiration for the US and gratitude for its decisive role in the First World War became mitigated by fears of trans-Atlantic economic and cultural domination. The French worried about losing prestige and power, and even their identity: it made for an often gloomy ethos. Yet during the same decade, French culture flourished — philosophy and theology as well as fine arts, poetry, theatre, music, literature, and cinema. These years were certainly tortured but, at least in terms of cultural creativity, they were less hollow than Weber portrayed them. In this new study, David Pettersen undertakes to elucidate 1930s French cultural renewal through the prism of responses from French novelists and filmmakers to the influx of American mass and popular culture. Adopting a case-study approach, he examines different socio-political aspects of his theme through a selection of canonical works and artists: filmmakers Jean Renoir, Marcel Carné, and Julien Duvivier; novelists Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The overarching thesis — that studying the impact of American mass culture is a sine qua non for understanding the [End Page 438] transformations of French culture in the 1930s, and particularly the transition into modernity — is not contentious, although one could argue that his example base is too narrow for its conclusions to be applied to French culture as a whole. He is also right to emphasize tensions between reverence and irony among those French creators who engaged most fulsomely with American jazz, cinema, and crime literature. His work is strongest in the close reading of his chosen texts. This is for the most part fresh, persuasive, and exceptionally well documented. His account of how American gangsterism entered the French imaginary and became a pervasive obsession is especially illuminating. However, his conviction that the French owe more to America than they care to admit leads too often to less plausible speculations: his portrayal of Renoir’s Jurieux (in La Règle du jeu, 1939) as a ‘French Lindbergh’ for instance (p. 44), or the claim that Drieu’s well-established anti-Americanism is actually a form of Americanism. French culture (like many others) has always been magpie-like, garnering for its own nest what it finds attractive, energizing, and stimulating elsewhere. This very traditional appropriation phenomenon is integral to the French cultural relation with American jazz, cinema and prose fiction in the 1930s and 1940s, and Pettersen’s work takes insufficient account of it.

Colin Nettelbeck
University of Melbourne
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