H-France Review Vol. 1 (March 2001) No. 6
Marjorie A. Beale, The Modernist Enterprise: French Elites
and the Threat of Modernity, 1900-1940. Stanford, Ca.: Stanford University
Press, 1999. ix + 231 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $49.50 (cl).
ISBN #0-8047-3511-5.
Robin Walz, Pulp Surrealism: Insolent Popular Culture in Early
Twentieth-Century Paris. U. of California Press, 2000. xii + 206 pp.
Notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00 (cl). ISBN#0-520-21619-9.
Review by Charles Rearick, University of Massachusetts/Amherst.
The surrealists would have liked the strange juxtaposition of these two
very different books in one review--the strange juxtaposition wrought
by such mysterious forces as chance or the timing that brought the books
together on a review editor's desk. On the one hand, Robin Walz's Pulp
Surrealism focuses on some edgy popular culture that rejected mainstream
morality and all manner of respectable tradition in the early twentieth
century. On the other, Marjorie Beale's book examines technocratic and
social Catholic elites who tried to shore up hierarchical society and
traditional morality in the era of the world wars. Walz presents a mass
culture that was imaginative and "insolent," and he puts the spotlight
on famous surrealists who considered that kind of popular production congruent
with their own work as an artistic elite. The Modernist Enterprise,
in contrast, features sober thinkers who saw mass culture as a "threat"
and who searched for ways of countering it. They wanted order and "progress,"
relying heavily on an instrumentalist rationality. The surrealists went
in another direction entirely, prizing mass culture's potential to destabilize
normal consciousness and society--indeed to revolutionize both. Unreason
and reason, revolution and order--the oppositions seem stark.
Yet some common themes and unexpected convergences emerge from these
two monographs. To begin with, the surrealists and the modernizing elites
sought a sweeping transformation of French society. They all saw dramatic
modernization already under way in technology and mass culture, markedly
so during and even before the "Great War." They all wanted to direct and
shape the changes themselves, leading the masses into a better society
without working through the established political system. Yet none of
them embraced everything "modern." The surrealists disliked Haussmann-style
urbanism, for example, judging it ruinous to flânerie and the free
play of offbeat pleasures. Beale's business elites were even more bent
on preserving basic values of traditional culture, modernizing it enough
to save it.
Walz introduces the surrealist sensibility in a chapter on Louis Aragon's
description of a run-down nineteenth-century arcade, the passage de
l'Opera. In Walz's reading of that part of Le Paysan de Paris,
Aragon was repudiating not only urbanist destructiveness, but also the
standard guidebook approach to Paris, two prongs of a repressive set of
forces that produced a desiccated bourgeois order. As Baedeker-in-a-new-key,
Aragon saw in the Opera passage a survival of a colorful, vanishing
Paris, offering rich possibilities of un-mediated pleasures.
Drawing on Stephen Kern's Culture of Time and Space (among others),
Walz observes that around the turn of the century such innovations as
the telephone and the mass penny press (actually one-sou dailies)
were transforming everyday experience and conveying strangely juxtaposed
perceptions and sensational news reports--in particular, detailed accounts
of suicides and murders. Some forms of mass culture, that is, were tantamount
to "surrealism before the letter," providing glimpses of an exciting new
existence free of old stable frameworks. Consumers of the new cultural
products were, before the surrealists, sampling the delights of disorienting
experiences and a novel mix of time-and-space perceptions, subject to
eruptions of the bizarre and the marvelous in everyday life. As partisans
of that subversive potential, writers like Aragon had only to follow those
veins of mass culture to lead the masses into still more enjoyment of
the surreal in the everyday urban world. The self-conscious surrealist
elite assumed the role of "alchemists," who would guide the people into
a poetically rich new life.
The enormously popular novels featuring the master-criminal Fantômas
are the best example of "pulp surrealism." With the many masks, the quick
changes and endless escapes, the rebellion against established order,
amazing gadgetry and gratuitous violence--the Fantômas stories were clearly
overflowing with fantasies. Walz neatly elucidates the plot devices, especially
the motif of changing identities, and gives us an excellent exegesis of
the written narratives as works of fiction. Walz also situates Fantômas
in a context of popular literature (stories of the "gentleman burglar"
Arsène Lupin and American detective Nick Carter, for example). One could
further consider affinities between the ever elusive "Genius of Evil"
and staples of entertainment as magic-act metamorphoses and Georges Méliès's
magical films, but Walz's Pulp Surrealism is limited to print culture.
A historical question worth further discussion concerns the appeal of
Fantômas stories in a particular time, difficult though the problem of
historical interpretation is: did certain fantasies respond in some specific
ways to the special conditions and mentalities of the prewar period? For
students of history, it seems to me, the author's fascinating comments
on the meanings of Fantômas for the determinate period 1911 to 1914 (or
later if movies are included) are a bit scant.
The elites of Beale's The Modernist Enterprise, in contrast to
Walz's sources, explicitly addressed what they saw as a particular conjuncture
for French society, and they clearly articulated their ideas for change.
They belonged to a tradition that the surrealists scorned--that of the
Enlightenment as well the social-reform tradition of Saint-Simonian and
Social Catholic theorists. Although none of them wholly embraced reason
and the Enlightenment project of modernity, they tended to favor mechanistic
theories and "scientific" techniques for all areas of life. Eager to rationalize
commercial life and advertising, they advocated strong state regulations
and corporatist controls--indeed, a whole new system based on "scientific
rationality." Some of the leading theorists, such as Jean-Marie Lahy and
Henri Fayol, however, sought to adapt Frederick Winslow Taylor's "scientific
management" to French cultural traditions, giving more attention to the
worker's life (social, moral, and spiritual) beyond the workplace. Their
way to modernity was to be a distinctly French way.
In both books, mass-circulation newspapers figure as a major force of
modernization--for better or worse. Walz takes us back to the fin-de-siècle
for the emergence of the sensationalist mass press and its reporting of
murders and suicides. In this account the popular newspapers appear in
a positive light, as they prefigured surrealism, breaking with what was
considered normal, introducing new perceptions of modern life and unexpected
juxtapositions of events. In reporting faits divers above all,
Walz shows, the popular papers were surrealist "before the letter," conveying
a sense of a world that was mysterious and irrational, violent and bizarre,
devoid of moral and logical anchors. Two kinds of stories serve as cases
in point--the crimes of the alleged serial killer Landru and the reporting
of suicides. The story of Landru loses none of the sensationalist punch
of the original sources as Walz explains how the press created a macabre
legend out of meager shreds of information, feeding fantasy and peppering
it with morbid humor. In the chapter on suicides as faits divers,
Walz shows the popular papers and the surrealists taking bizarre pleasure
in contemplating suicide--with a number of surrealist writers carrying
out the act themselves. (By coincidence, suicide comes up at the end of
both books: Beale's final protagonist, Jean Coutrot, took his life in
spring 1941).
Beale, in contrast, forcefully presents the shortcomings of the press,
as elites saw them--venality, deception, corruption, and vulgar sensationalist
reporting. During and after the First World War, she recounts, advertising
and business elites proposed bold new ways of overhauling product promotion
and publicity, drawing on scientific work in psychology. She also deftly
traces a genealogy of those ideas and thinkers back in the nineteenth
century, generally lesser known thinkers working in diverse fields. Some
of the early twentieth-century ideas about advertising came strikingly
close to notions held by the surrealists--ideas about communicating directly
through the visual arts, bypassing the conscious mind and thought processes,
commanding a kind of "automatic" attention and touching off "spontaneous"
behavior. One of the advertising theorists, Paul Dermée, even used the
word surreal and promoted the idea before the surrealists did.
Au bout du compte, the two histories under review illumine two
sharply divergent currents of French culture. The story of Beale's elites
and their efforts to find a French way of modernizing (without Americanizing
or otherwise losing national distinctiveness) leads to Vichy and concludes
with the Vichy career of Jean Coutrot. But she briefly points to the work
of post-1945 technocrats and dirigiste planners as the continuation
of her story. Her book is a welcome contribution to the prehistory of
those postwar programs. Walz's study also points us toward a much bigger
story than he has told. Although he has restricted his study to four "microhistories"
of popular culture and their overlap with the surrealists' interests,
the popular fiction and journalism that he examines led to much more than
the surrealist movement. His book leaves us with the 1930s surrealists'
judgment that popular culture was no longer vibrant and "insolent." It
is not entirely clear why that was so, if it was. Surely the significance
of the four microhistories could be enhanced by some commentary on "insolent
popular culture" beyond the 'twenties, pointing out recurrent surrealist
and "insolent" features in pulp fiction, popular song, film, and advertising.
Such commentary would further strengthen the argument about the creative
importance of popular culture and the continuities between the popular
and avant-garde surrealism. Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces fills
out some of the subsequent story, albeit not in the same popular-culture
genres that Walz has singled out.[1]
Modernization has often been associated with disenchantment and a sense
of loss, as Marjorie Beale's introduction (following Max Weber et al.)
reminds us. The books by Beale and Walz bring out more forward-looking,
complicated, and creative responses, forged by groups in France that found
exciting possibilities in the modern. Surrealists, Social Catholics, and
technocratic elites in their diverse ways looked forward to a more richly
humane social order. While the aesthetic avant-garde put hope in the liberating,
exalting effects of subversive fantasy, technocrats pursued "fantasies
of control" and an aesthetic of machine-like order. One side sought to
control public opinion, while the other wanted to free the public imagination.
Those divergent ways of reinventing life come across clearly and cogently
in the engaging studies under review. Although each of the two books has
plenty to offer on its own, you might read them in tandem, as I have,
to see in a striking new light the range of rifts and fruitful tensions
that beset French encounters with modernity.
NOTES
[1] George Melly's Paris and the Surrealists (New York: Thames
and Hudson, 1991), a highly personal photographic essay, brings out the
continuing presence of Surrealist touches in everyday life around the
city today. For print culture and "shadowy" themes, Michael Miller's Shanghai
on the Seine: Spies, Intrigue, and the French between the Wars (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994) supplements Walz's
history (and bibliography). For popular songs and surrealism, see Lucienne
Canteloube-Ferrieu, (Paris: A. G. Nizet, 1981). My own recent
book (1997) on the era of the world wars emphasizes a mainstream culture
of songs and movies to which the "insolent" and surrealist productions
could be viewed as an important counterpoint.
Charles Rearick
University of Massachusetts-Amherst
rearick@history.umass.edu
Copyright © 2001 by the Society for French Historical Studies, all rights reserved. The Society for French Historical Studies permits the electronic distribution for nonprofit educational purposes, provided that full and accurate credit is given to the author, the date of publication, and its location on the H-France website. No republication or distribution by print media will be permitted without permission. For any other proposed uses, contact the Editor-in-Chief of H-France.
H-France Review Vol. 1 (March 2001) No. 6
ISSN 1553-9172
