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chapter 5 D Défense d’afficher . . . Steven Laurence Kaplan France had no place in my Brooklyn childhood, which was drenched in schmaltz rather than sauce béarnaise and framed by deeply ambivalent memories of another Europe from which my grandparents and parents had fled in the wake of World War I. France was one of numerous exotic encounters I had in my first year at Princeton in 1959. I took a “Renaissance-to-Revolution” European survey, small class format, taught by a reasoned and refined yet passionate Francophile, Charles Gillispie, whose rigor and generosity would deeply mark my life in personal as well as intellectual terms. He awed me because he was everything that I was not: ultra-Waspy, ultra-tweedy, ultra-cultivated . He wore a beret and drove a strange bathtub-looking vehicle called a Citroën DS. In those pre-inflationary days, Princeton graded from a lofty 1 to an ignominious 7. Gillispie cruelly accorded me a 6 on my first paper, a prematurely postmodern reading of Montaigne that he found hollow and ahistorical . That set the tone for the rest of my career: an urgently upward climb, tonically Sisyphean. Two years later, I traversed the Atlantic for the first time, thanks to a Princeton summer-work program. On my first morning in Paris, famished, I wandered into a prosaic bakery on the rue du Cherche-Midi. Only later did I learn that it belonged to Pierre Poilâne, not yet the celebrated founder of the dynasty of the miche (round sourdough loaves) who would one day open his oven room to me. Oracular moment? On a whim, I bought a squat, golden loaf with a somewhat pugnacious bearing called a “bâtard.” I have a vivid memory of my inaugural mouthful, a Proustian inscription: a voluptuous, buttery crumb fused with a crackling, caramelized crust, a toasted nutty impression between sweet and savory on the palette with an intense persistence of flavor after swallowing. This turned out to be the inconspicuous beginning of a long apprenticeship in taste and an unremitting liaison with bread, sensual and cerebral. Several days later I began a job that would last three months and socialize me, sometimes brutally, into some basics of French life as it was actually lived. I worked in a large wine factory located in the Communist-run city of Ivry-sur-Seine. Called Vins du Postillon, the potion we produced, a coarse California-style mix of Algerian and Languedocian cépages, was the preferred beverage, according to our publicity, of “nine Parisians out of ten,” proof that France had not yet reached the hedonistic pinnacle of the Trente Glorieuses. Wine and bread, my Eucharistic summer! I had listened to my leftist father inveigh against capitalism, I had read some Marx and a bit of Max Weber, but it was here that I discovered social class. I witnessed bitter confrontation between management and labor, subversion of the assembly line, terrible work accidents. I met a worker priest on the job even as I was reading Gilbert Cesbron’s gripping novel on these priests, Les Saints vont en enfer. Initially I was stunned by the incandescence of the (what I would come to see later as a kind of formalized or ritualized) hostility to the United States. I was beaten up by a handful of young Communist (CGT) union members who did not like my “sale tronche d’amerloque.”* My very assailants subsequently invited me to many party and union political and social events. The tension in behavior between tolerant fraternity and violent sectarianism was mirrored by a tension in attitude between Plutonian pessimism (alienated resignation) and utopian fervor (faith in “struggle”). For some the rapturous perspective of le grand soir—the climactic moment of revolutionary apotheosis—was therapeutic consolation, while for others it was a veritable political program. Now that the Front National is France’s leading workingclass party, it is easy to forget how much influence the Communist Party exercised , politically and culturally, in the fifties and sixties, and how deeply la France ouvrière marked the modern landscape. I do not know why I did not pursue this newly kindled interest in contemporary France when I returned to Princeton for my last year. Partly because I did not have the tools to take critical stock of the mélange of enthusiasm and turmoil I felt. Partly because I did not find a faculty member who evinced a passion for twentieth-century France. Surely also because...

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