Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture (review)

Dudley Andrew and Steven Ungar have written a diverse, disparate, protean book that is well worth heeding. They know that the so-called Popular Front was never an entity but a diversity—in fact a cacophony whose political drama "has kept off the page, and off the stage, aspects essential to the character and tone of the period" (9). They set out therefore "to thicken the political dimension by bringing out its cultural depth" (5). Which means that, in practice, they shortchange the political dimensions of the time to offer instead an agile montage of "cultural" activities in the broadest sense of that term.

They begin, appropriately, by focusing on Alain Resnais's Stavisky: a film of 1974 about a scam and scandal of the 1930s that culminated in the bloody riots of February 1934 which, in turn, ushered in the coalitions and the blunders of a much-sundered and decreasingly popular Front. "The historical dissonance of Stavisky sets the complexity of the past into play . . . " (51). Neither dissonances nor complexities will be lacking in the pages that follow.

Andrew and Ungar review a variety of politico-literary periodicals, and the passionate, rejectionist, committed, conflicted intellectuals opposed to fascism but also to rearmament against fascism. They depict what they term "The Literature of Discontent" (ch.2), represented in chief by bleak, caustic Louis-Ferdinand Céline who affirmed not revolution but revulsion; and by André Malraux, who deftly reconciled art and activism. "Esprit in the Arena of Extremist Politics" (ch.3) etches Emmanuel Mounier, of course, but even more the incandescent nuttiness of Georges Bataille and the religio-philosophical minuets of Denis de Rougemont and other intellectuals who railed against "the mindless proliferation of material goods" (113), affronting to sensitive souls, less so to the beneficiaries of the alleged proliferation. On to the rhetoric of revolution as social spectacle in Jean Renoir's La Marseillaise; to the energy that crowds unleashed, and to the evolution of demonstrations from protest to celebration and fête de famille (bring the children).

It is a pity that authors so aware of the discordant, jarring aspect of conflicted times have chosen to focus largely on their left profile. It was unfair of Gide to claim that fine feelings make for poor literature. But more attention paid to less exceptional novels, less ideologically-oriented publications (Canard enchaîné?) could provide more balance. The Maigrets of Georges Simenon, for example, are mentioned but not mined for their trove of social history.

In the shadow of economic depression at home and fascist bluster abroad, France of the 1930s was already a train wreck aggravated by gerontocracy, mediocracy, and bureaucracy. The young and not so young who still nursed hope or passion gravitated to communism, or else to one of many fascist or proto-fascist movements vying for attention. Which side they joined was a matter of chance, circumstances, connections. In Louis Malle's Lacombe Lucien, released in 1974 like Stavisky, a peasant lad who sets out to join the Resistance ends up working for the Gestapo. In the everyday reality of the 1930s, rebelliogenic young like Marcel Déat and Jacques Doriot could easily pass from one extreme to the other. Both featuring virulent tub-thumpers reacting against infirmity of purpose, celebrating action opposed to resignation, stressing the revolutionary struggle, emphasizing mass, power, energy, spectacle, fascism and communism were frères ennemis. Sensitive to so many nuances, Andrew and Ungar do not appear aware of such promiscuities.

They do better in the second part of the book, promisingly entitled Atmosphères (after Arletty's famous replica in Marcel Carné's Hôtel du Nord). There are engaging chapters on daily life (flashy cars, flashy women, rare bathrooms, Jean Gabin); popular entertainment (music halls, café concerts, cabarets); architecture (including the vogue of Le Corbusier, but not his indifference to the convenience of the masses supposed to dwell in his structures); photography, atmospheric painting, exhibitionist avant-gardes, and scatty...