French Identity in Flux: The Triumph of Honegger's Antigone

Why did the Paris Opera stage Arthur Honegger's Antigone in 1943, sixteen years after rejecting it for being too modernist? Recent theories of modernism reveal how the later production was able to penetrate the cultural "spaces" inadvertently created during Vichy's collaboration with Germany. The opera appealed not only to the German- and French-authorized press but also to the public, which viewed it as a work of existential examination, free from political and cultural propaganda.