Renegotiating French Identity: Musical Culture and Creativity in France during Vichy and the German Occupation by Jane F. Fulcher (review)

Scholarship from various fields— including history, Vichy studies, sociology, and musicology—have concentrated on dissecting myths surrounding the occupation of France (1940–44), which fall into two generalities of total collaboration or total resistance. The reality of the situation lies somewhere in the middle, as many individuals participated in resistance or collaboration in a variety of ways. Jane Fulcher's Renegotiating French Identity: Musical Culture and Creativity in France during Vichy and German Occupation expands on this conversation by closely examining the activity of several of the most prominent French musicians of the period. Focusing on the first two years of the occupation and trajectory of Vichy France into further collaboration, Fulcher analyzes how musicians reacted to the cultural policies of the Vichy regime and how they participated in the creation of a new national identity. Her aim is to demonstrate how musicians subjectively interpreted the policies and constraints of the regime to define their own identity and symbolically define the future of France.

Fulcher divides the text into six chapters, beginning with an incredibly thorough and necessary historical background of Vichy's cultural policies and the developing relationship with Nazi Germany. One particularly helpful contribution she makes to Vichy studies is the term ultracollaborationist to describe particular actors within the Vichy regime (p. 31). Wary of creating a direct binary, scholars have been cautious in prescribing the terms collaborator or resistant to explain the activities of the French. Philippe Burrin posits that for the most part this binary was more of a continuum that people traversed across. By labeling some individuals as "ultracollaborationist," then, Fulcher delineates the very extreme of the collaboration side of this continuum, in which the person's political ideologies line up with that of fascist Nazi Germany. Outside of this, "collaboration" may apply to a variety of scenarios, from working within Vichy cultural institutions to actively supporting and furthering the mission of the new regime. With this in mind, Fulcher explores these degrees of collaboration in how the musicians and composers Roger Désormière, Pierre Schaeffer, Arthur Honegger, Francis Poulenc, and Olivier Messiaen (chaps. 2–6, respectively) reacted and worked around Vichy's cultural policies.

The breadth of Fulcher's research into all of these subjects is impressive, especially in how she links policies of the Vichy regime and its changing power dynamics in relation to Nazi Germany to the activity of the musicians in her study. This was particularly fascinating in the case of Schaeffer, whose musical activity during the occupation is only just now being explored by music scholars such as Karine Le Bail and Alexander Stalarow. Schaeffer, like many other French Catholics, originally supported the Vichy regime because of Philippe Pétain's commitment to the religious institution and his emphasis on traditional French values. As it became clearer, however, that Schaeffer's artistic vision could not match the propaganda that he was asked to espouse, and as Vichy's collaboration increasingly supported Germany, Schaeffer could not neglect the path toward resistance any longer.

By focusing on reactions to Vichy's policies, Fulcher does a great service to music scholarship by parsing common narratives about certain composers, especially Honegger and Poulenc. For a long time after the liberation, Honegger was lauded as a resistance figure as evidenced from his composition Chant de liberation (1942), when in reality he actively promoted Vichy and German propaganda, and the composition itself was rebranded as a resistance piece only in April 1944 (p. 234). Although Poulenc did join the resistance organization Front national des musiciens, Fulcher questions whether his famous ballet Les animaux modèles (1940–42) was as resistant as has long been believed, or if such symbolism was placed upon it afterwards.

Instead of placing blame on these...