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by Jackson, Julian

  Post-war anxieties about women were epitomized in the reactions to Victor Margueritte’s novel La Garçonne which was the succès de scandale of the 1920s, causing Margueritte to be stripped of his Légion d’honneur. Selling a million copies by the end of the decade, the novel also spawned a doll, a perfume, a play, and a film. It tells the story of a girl of bourgeois origins who discovers that her fiancé has not been faithful. She breaks off the engagement and throws herself into a life of frenzied independence, taking male lovers, experimenting with lesbianism, cutting her hair short, smoking, taking opium. What shocked the book’s readers was that these adventures happened to a middle-class girl, not a member of the demi-monde. In fact the denouement is eminently moral. The heroine’s pursuit of pleasure brings her no satisfaction, and ultimately she discovers fulfilment by marrying and caring for a war veteran.37

  The heroine of La Garçonne had wanted to bear a child, but discovered she was sterile. Eventually her sterility turns out to be a symbolic reflection of the aridness of her life, since in the book’s sequel, Le Compagnon (1923), she succeeds in having children once she is married. In Clement Vautel’s satire Madame ne veut pas d’enfant (1924; Madame Doesn’t Want a Child), the hero’s wife will not have children for fear of spoiling her figure and ending her life of pleasure. Her parents are Esperanto-speaking vegetarians, and ardent Malthusians. She dances the foxtrot with blacks, listens to jazz, eats new-fangled dishes like lobster à l’Americaine, and furnishes her flat with cubist paintings and modern furniture. In desperation, the hero finds a mistress who serves him traditional pot-au-feu in a flat which is an oasis of French bourgeois calm, furnished in faux Henri III style. His wife finds out, but the mistress tells her how to recover her husband: offer him a baby. The wife discovers the joys of motherhood and is congratulated by the doctor who warns that if more women do not follow her example France will disappear ‘unless the barbarians come to make children by our pretty girls’.38

  America: Scenes of the Future

  In Vautel’s heavy-handed satire, the wife’s predilection for things American demonstrates her repudiation of a woman’s traditional role. This was one example of France’s growing obsession with America after the war. Generally the French attitude to America before 1914 was one of mild condescension.39 When America joined the war, it took time to appreciate that she might have an independent policy, contrary to French interests. France was made brutally aware of her diminished influence at the Paris conference when English was for the first time treated as a diplomatic language equal to French.

  American cultural power was reflected in the displacement of France by America as the dominant force in world cinema.40 In 1910, French cinema enjoyed the supremacy of Hollywood today. This position, already under threat before 1914, was finally destroyed by the war. French studios closed in 1914, expecting a short war. When they reopened a year later, the first Keystone films had arrived in France, and Chaplin was about to become a cult. During the 1920s, it was feared that America was destroying the French film industry. In 1928, the government imposed a quota on foreign film imports. This was largely ineffective, and one politician in 1930 deplored the fact that ‘Joan of Arc might be played by a young Californian, and a native of Illinois with the features of his region might play Napoleon’.41

  Publicists and politicians visited the States and wrote their impressions. Even strip cartoon characters crossed the Atlantic: the Breton maid Bécassine in 1921; Tintin in 1931. Three books that played a significant role in forming views appeared in 1927: André Siegfried’s Les États Unis aujourd’hui, André Tardieu’s Notes sur l’Amérique, and Lucien Romier’s revealingly titled Qui sera le maître: Europe ou Amérique? Siegfried wondered whether ‘traditionalist France’ had any future: ‘What is at stake in essence is France’s individuality itself, the original character of a whole civilisation.’42 Romier contrasted European harmony and individualism with American excess and uniformity.

  These authors were at least open to the idea that America also had something to offer Europe. This was not true of the most celebrated anti-American tract of the decade, Georges Duhamel’s Scènes de la vie future (1930). Previously best known for his war book Civilisation, recounting his experiences as a doctor, Duhamel came from the progressive and pacifist left, committed to a vision of European humanism. The war had represented one threat to this; America represented another, hardly less pernicious. One was a nightmare that had occurred; the other a nightmare that loomed. Duhamel attacked every aspect of American life: cinema was an entertainment of submissive helots; jazz was barbaric; American food tasted industrial; baseball was a savage game without elegance. In short, Americans were obsessed by work and health, enslaved to machines, tyrannized by moral conformism, and brainwashed by advertising. How different was France with her little local bistros, her sense of harmony, her innumerable cheeses.

  Duhamel’s contrast between French humanism and rootedness, on one hand, and a society of deracinated nomads, on the other, was the theme of another tirade, Le Cancer américain (The American Cancer) published a year later by Robert Aron and Armand Dandieu. In the 1930s, after America had been hit by the Depression, American values seemed less threatening, but this only confirmed that France had been right to avoid excessive industrialization and mass production. The moral was noted by one organizer of the 1937 Exhibition: ‘the world is at present suffering from exaggerated standardisation in that quality is being sacrificed to cheapness, and good taste to mass production’. It was time to return to the ‘glorious tradition of France’s artisans’.43

  Le Rappel à l’ordre: The New Classicism

  The critique of America did not so much describe a reality—Duhamel only spent six weeks in America—as invent a foil. Expressing a sense of the fragility of European culture, it was also a means of defining the essence of Frenchness: quality, moderation (mesure), and harmony.

  The idea of mesure was central to the revival of classicism in the arts after the war.44 This revival, dubbed the rappel à l’ordre, was a repudiation of the supposed excesses of the pre-war avant-garde, notably cubism.45 Already before 1914, cubist painters had been accused of being Germanic: cubism was sometimes spelt by its detractors with a ‘k’ to emphasize the point. The war placed the avant-garde on the defensive: pre-war cubists retreated from experimentation. Robert Delaunay, who had previously had important links to the German avant-garde, now castigated ‘cubist hoaxes’ imposed on the French by ‘foreign mystificators’—a barely concealed reference to Picasso. Picasso himself, although not entirely abandoning cubism, also returned to representational portraiture, and embarked upon some Ingres-like drawings. These explicit classical references echoed wartime propaganda depicting France as the defender of Mediterranean classical purity against Germanic gothicism, civilisation against Kultur. Classicism was the presiding reference of the new artistic climate: it became fashionable to paint Harlequins. Between 1921 and 1924, Picasso produced a whole series of neoclassical works; Braque painted a homage to Corot which was praised by one critic for a ‘sense of proportion and severe grace which are born only in France’.46

  No painting style is of course intrinsically progressive or reactionary, but the contemporary debate about the avant-garde was cast in such terms. The critic Bessières, who had been the first to use the term rappel à l’ordre, argued in 1920 for the need to aspire to the order and certainty represented by Raphael. Symbolic of the new post-war mood was the publication at the end of 1918 of Après le cubisme by Amédée Ozenfant and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (the future Le Corbusier). They characterized cubism as ‘the troubled art of a troubled and self-indulgent epoch, the final flowering of romantic individualism which should now give way to a more intellectual art emphasising line over colour, structure over decoration.’47

  The new cultural climate saw a negative revaluation of impressionism. ‘Down with Renoir’, proclaimed Jean Cocteau in 1919. Cocteau, in a bid to become the cultural impresario of the decade, wrote a co
llection of essays called Le Rappel à l’ordre which defined the new cultural agenda. The first essay, with the ‘Gallo-Latin’ title of ‘The Cock and the Harlequin’, called for a ‘French music of France’. This was an attack on Debussy for being too mistily foreign (‘Debussy translates Monet into Russian’), and a defence of Erik Satie for his French clarity: ‘Satie speaks of Ingres’. Cocteau became the spokesman of the post-war generation of French composers known as ‘Les Six’ who represented a reaction against Debussyan impressionism, and sought, to quote Darius Milhaud on Satie, a ‘French music freed of any foreign influence’.48 Standing apart was Stravinsky, but his own return to classicism in this period was favourably noted by Cocteau. He commented that Stravinsky was putting his ‘eastern romanticism … in the service of Latin order’.

  Cocteau represented the fashionable literary world of the Paris right bank. Very different was the austere seriousness of the left-bank literary periodical, the Nouvelle revue française (NRF) which entered after the war into its period of cultural dominance. Any writer who wished to be taken seriously aspired to publish in the NRF. Although attacked by conservatives as a cradle of immorality, the NRF was itself concerned to rediscover artistic order in the turmoil of post-war society. In 1919 its editor Jacques Rivière wrote that the age of romanticism was over; he predicted a ‘classical renaissance’. A similar idea was expressed by one of the newest NRF recruits, the young novelist Marcel Arland who in 1924 wrote a celebrated article diagnosing a ‘new mal du siècle’ against which it was necessary to set a ‘new harmony’. Arland dramatized this dilemma in his 1930 novel L’Ordre whose hero, ambitious for literary success and spiritual values, dies a wreck eaten up by drugs and alcohol, a victim of his obsession with self.

  Modernist Nightmares: Morand and Céline

  This oscillation between ‘order’ and ‘anxiety’ was the theme taken up by another NRF contributor, the critic Benjamin Crémieux, in a 1930 survey of the literature of the post-war decade.49 The anxiety took several forms: the iconoclastic irreverence of Dada and surrealism; the literature of exoticism and escapism (Paul Morand, Pierre Macorlan); the flight into morbid introspection (Pierre Drieu la Rochelle); the search for certainty in Catholicism (Julien Green, François Mauriac, Georges Bernanos).

  Of all these writers it is Paul Morand (1888–1976) who is most identified with the decade of the 1920s and best illustrates its cultural ambivalence. Morand leapt to fame after the publication of his first collection of stories Tendres stocks in 1921. These stories are often viewed as the embodiment of the spirit of the 1920s, and Morand posed as the chronicler of his age by grouping four of his novels between 1925 and 1930 under the collective title Chroniques du XXème siècle. He was widely read: Ouvert la nuit (1922), his second collection of stories, was in its 135th edition by 1931.

  Morand’s father was a successful dramatist who had written the translation of Hamlet so famously performed by Sarah Bernhardt. In 1912 Morand entered the diplomatic service, moving easily in the beau monde of London and Paris. During the 1920s, he travelled widely, and in 1927 he married a Romanian princess. It is this cosmopolitan politico-artistic milieu which forms the subject of Morand’s writing. It is a world of wagons-lits, parties in London, cafés in Vienna, hotels in Istanbul, a world of social flux and disintegrating boundaries, peopled by arrivistes, fallen aristocrats, and victims of history. Reflecting the fragmented and turbulent 1920s, Morand’s style, much admired by the surrealists, is allusive and elliptical, his descriptions fizzing with unexpected images. The tone is always knowing, detached, and cynical.

  But the veneer of worldliness, cosmopolitanism, and stylistic virtuosity is misleading. The smart chronicler is prey to social and cultural anxieties, and more nostalgic for the stable past than at first appears. One theme of Morand’s writing is the modern woman. The first collections of stories contain six portraits of women, mostly ‘modern’ women, who are threatening and inaccessible. A favourite theme is female homosexuality. In the story La Nuit de Babylone a man is seen in a car between two women who are kissing each other across him. He is worrying that his mistress had been seduced by another woman. In the story Madame Fredda the protagonist is a conservative journalist who looks back nostalgically on the past. He meets a Dutch woman, who makes it clear that she wants to sleep with a Frenchman. She is a modern woman, lacking modesty or inhibitions.

  Another of Morand’s themes is race. The protagonist of Madame Fredda is not convinced that France has won the war since Paris has been ‘surrounded and captured’ not by the Germans but by an influx of foreigners. The body of France is described as suffering from ‘periodic eczema of Italian emigration; suspect spots of Romanian origin; colonies of American boils; levantine pus’. Morand was prone from his earliest writing to racial stereotyping, especially of Jews and blacks. His bedside reading on a 1927 visit to the West Indies was Gobineau’s Essai sur l’inégalité des races. In the story Baton rouge a black singer, clearly modelled on Josephine Baker, is suddenly, in the middle of a triumphal Parisian tour, ‘repossessed by ancestral fears and superstitions’. Racial mixing and modern women were symbols of threatening modernity. America was another. In New York (1930) Morand writes: ‘Once I wanted Paris to … resemble New York. Today I no longer want this … I wrote a few years ago that France had no other chance than to become American or Bolshevik, but now I believe that we must avoid these two precipices with all our strength … The genius of Paris is precisely that of a meticulous peasant.’50

  Traditional Paris was also a preoccupation of the writer Louis-Ferdinand Destouches, better known under his pseudonym, Céline. On the face of it, no one could have been more different from the sophisticated and urbane Morand than the asocial and eccentric Céline whose first novel, Voyage to the End of the Night, erupted on to France’s literary scene in 1932. When the book appeared, its 38-year-old author was an unknown figure, earning his living as a doctor. Céline had been brought up in central Paris where his mother had a lace shop in the Passage Choiseul, one of those nineteenth-century covered passages of small shops, where time seems to have stopped. This world of Parisian petit commerce, precariously surviving into the twentieth century in the face of the combined forces of capital and labour, was the subject of Céline’s second novel, Mort à crédit (1936).

  The defining moment of Céline’s life was the war, in which he played a briefly heroic role before being invalided out in October 1914. After the war he trained as a doctor and then worked for the League of Nations as an expert on hygiene and social medicine. In this capacity he visited America to study conditions in the Ford factory at Detroit. Leaving the League he became a doctor in the working-class Paris suburb of Clichy. Many of these events were incorporated into Voyage to the End of the Night. It begins with the war where its picaresque hero, Bardamu, discovers a universe of futility and horror. His only concern is to avoid getting killed, and it is a matter of complete indifference to him whether the Germans or French win providing he remains alive. Much of the war he spends convalescing from his wounds, marvelling at the propaganda lies which keep the conflict going: ‘the mania for telling lies and believing them is as contagious as the itch’. Next Bardamu goes to Africa where he encounters the corruption and brutality of colonialism. Escaping Africa, he heads for America. His ‘isolation in the American anthill’ turns out to be even more soul-destroying than his loneliness in Africa. He sinks into a ‘terrifying, sickly sweet torpor’. Having got a job in the Ford factory, where he is told that ‘all we need is chimpanzees’, he becomes reduced to the status of an automaton, crushed by the din of the factory: ‘you give in to noise as you give in to war’. Eventually he returns to Paris, and sets up as a doctor in a suburb of unbelievable squalor.

  This brief summary is enough to make clear that Céline’s vision is one of unrelieved pessimism although the story is told with a sardonic black humour. His novel was also shocking for its stylistic unorthodoxy, using popular language and slang instead of formally correct usa
ge. Voyage to the End of the Night was admired more by the left than the right: Sartre used a quotation from Céline as the epigraph to his first novel Nausea. Trotsky, however, was quick to see that there was nothing for Socialists in Céline’s coruscating social criticism: his nihilism offers no prospect that the human condition can ever be improved. The book is a howl of rage against the world born out of the catastrophe of war: ‘While the war was still on, the seeds of our hateful peace were being sown. A hysterical bitch, you could see what she’d be like just by watching her cavorting in the dance hall of the Olympia. In that long cellar room, you could see her squinting out of a hundred mirrors, stamping her feet in the dust and despair to the music of a Negro-Judaeo-Saxon band.’

  Of the world before the catastrophe, there is only a glimpse. The novel opens with a few moments of innocence when Bardamu is still a ‘virgin in horror’. He and a friend are sitting at the terrace of a café in the Place Clichy in Montmartre in August 1914. A few hours later they have joined the army and there is no turning back: ‘They’d quietly shut the gate behind us civilians. We were caught like rats.’ The choice of the Place Clichy to open the novel is highly significant. In the inter-war years Montmartre functioned in the French literary imagination as a trope of immobility, security, and tradition with its picturesque village-style squares, its vineyard, and its associations with the late nineteenth century. Montmartre was Utrillo’s Paris: it was the antithesis of the cosmopolitan, gleaming chrome bars of Montparnasse, the centre of artistic life in the post-war years. Although in Voyage to the End of the Night the war forms the barrier between ‘before’ and ‘after’, in Mort à credit Céline pushes his diagnosis of the evils of the modern world even further back—to the Exhibition of 1900 where the petty bourgeois parents of the narrator are confronted with the sense that the world is passing them by. It was no coincidence that Céline took as his pseudonym the name of his grandmother, who had lived almost her entire life in the nineteenth century.51