French Politics, Culture & Society

By the 1920s, the physical transformation in the urban space of Montmartre led two groups of artists to "secede" from the city of Paris, at least in spirit. Calling themselves the Commune Libre de Montmartre and the République de Montmartre, these painters, illustrators, poets, writers, and musicians articulated a distinctive community-based identity centered around mutual aid, sociability, and limiting urban development. They also reached out to the poor of the neighborhood through charity efforts, thus linking their fates with those of other area residents. Through these organizations, neighborhood artists came to terms with the changes taking place in the city of Paris in the 1920s by navigating between nostalgia and modernism. They sought to keep alive an older vision of the artists' Montmartre while adapting to the new conditions of the post-World War I city.

In early 1937, French radio owners participated in elections for governing boards of their local public stations. The election, which had occurred once before in 1935 to little fanfare, became a locus of political and social debate about the state of both government and radio in France. Two parties emerged; one, Radio-Liberty, was supported by the Popular Front and had an overtly democratic and political mission and slate of candidates. The other, Radio-Family, was supported by a coalition of right-wing groups and claimed to champion French listeners and families in a nonpolitical fashion, protecting listeners from far-Left political rhetoric and immoral broadcasts. Radio-Family handily won the election, and state radio responded to the conservative message by producing radio plays like France, a miniseries that espoused a conservative vision of French history, seemingly at odds with the left-wing coalition in government.

The May 1948 issue of Les Temps Modernes published three short essays entitled "Nés en 1925." The young authors were Jean-François Lyotard, who was to become a philosopher of international distinction; Paul Viallaneix, his generation's outstanding Michelet scholar; and Pierre Gripari, the author of a wide variety of works including popular books for children. They had been comrades (along with the future sociologist Alain Touraine), at the khâgne of the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, which prepared a student elite to compete for entrance into the École normale supérieure. Their contributions reflected the experience of an intense traditional education under the pressures of war and the Occupation. Their subsequent careers reveal the relation of the permanent stamp of a common formation and the individual experience of particular circumstances.

This forum of brief essays derives from a day-long gathering held at NYU’s Institute of French Studies to discuss Debora Silverman’s prizewinning Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000). Silverman’s groundbreaking book shows how the deeply religious and spiritual environment in which both Gauguin and van Gogh grew up helped to shape, in important ways, their perceptions of the world, perceptions fundamental to the making of their art and to our own understanding of it. Despite the two painters’ ostensibly secular views of the world,Silverman argues, their respective religious educations remained with them and underpinned their art. Religion affected not only the subject matter of their paintings but texture, surface, color, and composition as well.

This article praises the methodology used by Debora Silverman in her book Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art, in particular her exhaustive exploration of the two artists' religious and cultural formation, seeing this as a long-overdue reinstatement of the value of what are inescapably and quite properly biographical concerns. Silverman's book demonstrates that, taken over the long term, such considerations, far from being extraneous to and distractions from the works of art, offer valuable new ways of explaining them. The author considers the usefulness of applying a similar model to a different artistic pairing, the relationship between Gauguin and his first mentor and teacher, Camille Pissarro, and sees good reason to suppose it would yield similarly illuminating results. Considering the issue of comparative studies more generally, however, the author perceives certain dangers in allowing their built-in imperatives and momentum to skew the researcher's findings. She illustrates this point with two examples of ambiguous documents that point up the potential for over-eager biographers to find significance in every chance piece of data and to force connections for the sake of the overall pattern.

This essay seeks to extend Debora Silverman's distinction between van Gogh's project of "spiritualizing the material" and Gauguin's related but opposed one of "dematerializing the world" to a wider range of modernist and avant-garde projects. It employs this distinction in connection with Astradur Eysteinsson's analysis of the problems of using such terms as modernism, the avant-garde, and postmodernism in relation to realism and the various revolts against it that have taken place since the age of romanticism. Eysteins-son's general approach is followed, but also in part questioned and given a different direction through discussions of Duchamp, the surrealists, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud.

Silverman's intent is to emphasize the "critical role of religion in the development of modernism." As an addendum to that pursuit, it should be pointed out that, well into the twentieth century, religion remained crucial to artistic innovation and development (and still is). We now recognize how important apocalyptic imagery was to Wasily Kandinsky's abstraction. In the wake of the Second World War, and French occupation by the Germans, religion made a powerful reappearance in the art of the avant-garde. Henri Matisse's Chapel of the Rosary at Vence is one of the great works of this period; it is worth briefly examining the ways in which Matisse understood the intersection between modern art and his reengagement with Catholicism.

It is very gratifying, at the end of the long journey this book entailed, to have responses generated from two fields and from some of the scholars whose writings have inspired me along the way. What I’d like to do in my comments is not to rehash material in the book—I hope those of you who haven’t yet will get a chance to read it. (It is now available in a paperback edition.) Rather, I’d like to raise some broader issues for our future work relating to the position of navigating between the disciplines of art history and cultural history as we try to write in the links between biography, society, and style in specific national contexts, and the particular benefits of comparative analysis as we do so.

Belief in the possibility of a revolutionary transformation of French society sustained much of the political and cultural ferment in France in the quarter century following the end of World War II. Perry Anderson, in two articles published in the London Review of Books, argues that the decline of this faith has cast a pall over France, and he traces this decline in large part to the work of historians François Furet and Pierre Nora. It is argued here that Anderson neglects broader economic, societal, and cultural forces that combined to undermine belief in the transformative power of revolution and is therefore led to an unduly pessimistic interpretation of the cultural turn of the 1970s.

The last four years have seen the rise of a movement on the French radical left positing a fundamental conflict between economic growth and ecological sustainability and calling for a reversal of growth (décroissance) against the current consensus around the concept of sustainable development. This challenge to the growth imperative and, more widely, of the ideology of progress, represents a return to the explicitly antiproductivist approaches that emerged in the early 1970s with the rise of radical political ecology. This article charts the birth of the décroissance movement, which is comprised of two components: anticonsumerist and antidevelopment. It also contrasts the movement with other closely-related ideological elements of the French antiglobalization and anticapitalist movements, elements that belong to the dominant, mainly Marxist tradition, whose anticapitalist struggle builds on the legacy of the Enlightenment period. The article concludes that, by placing antieconomicist and antiutilitarian thought drawn from social sciences on the agenda of the French radical Left, the décroissance movement could potentially generate a major paradigm shift founded on a critical evaluation of the heritage of modernity.

Timothy B. Smith, Creating the Welfare State in France, 1880-1940 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003).

Janet R. Horne, A Social Laboratory for Modern France: The Musée Social and the Rise of the Welfare State (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002).

Paul V. Dutton, Origins of the French Welfare State: The Struggle for Social Reform in France, 1914-1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

James R. Lehning The Pride of Place: Local Memories and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century France by Stéphane Gerson

Alain Chatriot Le Patricien et le Général: Jean-Marcel Jeanneney et Charles de Gaulle 1958-1969 by Eric Kocher-Marboeuf

Andrés Reggiani Bringing the Empire Back Home: France in the Global Age by Herman Lebovics 146

Michael S. Lewis-Beck Parties and the Party System in France: A Disconnected Democracy? by Andrew Knapp

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