Riding the New Wave: Youth and the Rejuvenation of France after the Second World War (review)

The fate of “today’s youth” has long been a popular and powerful way to talk about things other than the youth themselves. In this impressively researched, clearly written, and persuasively argued study, Richard Ivan Jobs demonstrates how French young people came to symbolize the whole of France as the nation recovered following World War II. For French politicians, policy makers, intellectuals, educators, religious leaders, and pundits, investing in the moral and civic education of adolescents and young adults could guarantee the revitalization of a people scarred by war and collaboration. Rebuilding the young meant rebuilding France itself.

Jobs argues that “youth” and “generation” were far from the same thing, as youth came to represent not necessarily those born at a certain point in time, but those with an attitude for change. Some politicians and intellectuals latched onto this idea in order to reinvent themselves and appear as reformers. Indeed, “youth” came to be the catch-all code word for the making of a new France.

While revealing the power of youth as a concept that some used to talk about the future, many of the policies aimed at the young were actually continuations of previous French trends and practices, including several under Vichy. Indeed, one of the central tensions of Jobs’ story is between the potential for modernization which youth represented and the desire to inculcate a traditional sense of Frenchness, drawn from earlier eras, into the next generation.

But while showing these broader connections, Jobs astutely situates his story squarely within the historical moment of the 1950s and 1960s to link the question of the young to the particular concerns of the post-war period. He frequently reminds us that one of the great fears of the era was that the youth had been “damaged” by the experience of the war and the horrible example set by adults who had collaborated with the Nazis. This recent history shaped attitudes toward young people just as much as older notions of national identity.

The category of youth had been created by adults to satisfy their own post-war needs, but the youth themselves soon came to attack the authority of age. In a particularly rewarding discussion, Jobs points to growing disaffection with the Algerian war as pulling youth away from the rest of society. The creation of a distinct youth culture (through mass media, entertainment, education) widened the gap further.

He also discusses how the youth, in whom so much hope was placed, also became a subject of worry, threat, and danger long before 1968. Delinquency, sexuality, cynicism, and rebellion were the darker faces of adolescence. Whether in Brigitte Bardot films, Tarzan comics, or Genet’s novels celebrating the “criminal child,” the youth offered just as much anxiety for their elders as they did promise. Along with modernity versus tradition, hope versus threat is the story’s other central tension which Jobs illuminates brilliantly.

In many respects, this story of the growing gap between innocence and experience is very familiar. But Jobs is careful to draw out what is distinctively French within the story. For instance, the Fourth Republic’s creation of government-sponsored youth agencies and programs emerged out of a longer-term concern with population decline and pro-natalist policies dating back to the anxieties of the late nineteenth century. Highlighting such continuities provides an important new perspective on the close relationship between welfare state and citizens and the subsequent efforts that took on a particularly French shape to manage an economy and a society, especially in the post-World War II years. That management assumed the form of educational institutions including the ENA, youth organizations, military service, and cultural centers, all of which attempted to act in loco parentis within a distinctively Republican framework. As Jobs puts it, “Increasingly, the state envisioned itself as a surrogate father whose job was to...