French Politics, Culture & Society

This article discusses the circulation of francophone news, information, and literary content between Western Europe and North America in the nineteenth century. During this period, big metropolitan cities (Paris, Brussels, Montreal, New Orleans) were forming a dense media network. For the western Atlantic region, New York City and the Courrier des États-Unis (1828–1938) served as the hub of this network. Francophone readers on both sides of the Atlantic shared a large common corpus, including works such as Eugène Sue’s Mystères de Paris (1842–1843), which was distributed in North America by the literary supplement of the Courrier. By providing a general overview of this French-speaking network, this article invites scholars to explore how texts, and literature in particular, operated through an interlinked dynamic system of publication rather than as independent unconnected works.

This essay explores Siegfried Kracauer’s journalistic work and urban miniatures of the late 1920s and the early 1930s, using the conceptual frameworks developed by Géraldine Muhlmann in Du journalisme en démocratie (2004), Marie-Ève Thérenty in La Littérature au quotidien (2007), and Guillaume Pinson in L’Imaginaire médiatique (2012). It argues that, in his capacity as publicist, “feuilletoniste,” and sociologist, Kracauer embodies Kant’s critical ideal of the public sphere, which Muhlmann identifies with the “journaliste-flâneur.” Featuring the everyday in its various social and cultural facets, Kracauer’s feuilletons not only focus on the ephemeral and fragmented nature of the everyday, but also foster the awareness of a modernity in crisis through the de-familiarization of surfaces, spaces, and objects. Published in the bottom of the Frankfurter Zeitung, Kracauer’s urban miniatures and reportages deploy rich interventions on the crisis of Western phenomenological, cognitive, and sociopolitical space.

“Spreading the News: The Illustrated Press,” focuses on the new concept of the illustrated universal survey periodical that appeared early in the 1830s, first in England, then in France. It was enabled by technological advances such as the steam press, cheaper paper, wood engraving and stereotypes, as well as greater literacy among the citizenry. The earliest illustrated periodicals were published by social reformers in both countries who were attempting to raise the status of the working classes, but the medium soon attracted wealthier, more educated strata as well; within decades the illustrated press had spread throughout the world.

During the nineteenth century, not only did the extraordinary development of the printed press transform the cultural environment, but it also brought about major formal changes in literature. This article explores these trasnformations through a focus on the contemporary use of the concept of “modernity.” The word dates back to 1688 at least, but it was mostly employed during the nineteenth century to describe post-revolutionary France and especially to criticize its consumerism and materialistic “bourgeoisie.” Nineteenth-century media culture embodied the triumph of “modernity,” especially in the form of the petite presse (“small press”). Born in a world where censorship still compromised the freedom of speech, the petite presse was an illustrated, satirical, ironical, and wisecracking medium. It aspired to a generalized non-seriousness which would, for a long time, be viewed as the “Parisian spirit.”

This article deals with women stunt reporters—French journalists Maryse Choisy, Marise Querlin, and Odette Pannetier—who chose to investigate under cover in the 1930s. Using various disguises, they made investigations into brothels, tricked their way into politicians’ home, and performed interviews under fake identities. Undercover reporting compensated for their difficulties in asserting themselves in a press created by and for men. It gave them a way to compete with male colleagues who were famous for sensational reportage all over the world. By focusing on such episodes, this article brings to light three heretofore unexplored facets of the history of the French press: immersion investigation, the history of women journalists, and the poetics of the 1930s press.

In this article, Patrick Modiano’s 2014 Nobel Prize acceptance speech serves as a springboard to consider the lieu commun that “disruptive technology” is killing both literature and the contemporary press. Modiano’s depiction of himself as part of an “intermediate generation,” trapped between the intense focus of great nineteenth-century novelists and the many distractions of contemporary writers, cleverly invoked millennial anxieties related to new technology in order to establish his own place within literary history.

This article analyses how the “digitizing” of the press transforms the writing of news in France, through the case of a recent trial, the “Carlton affair” in February 2015. The example chosen is that of Le Monde, which dedicates a blog to legal affairs that is overseen by an experienced journalist who also covers the same questions for the print version of the paper. How does the author take advantage of this double space of publication? Which kind of writing is the freer and the more literary or sophisticated? It appears that web newswriting does not give much importance to the dialog with the reader, but is rather an opportunity to try out ways of telling the story before giving it to the print version. In court journalism the print press still commands the greater prestige and gets more editorial support, whereas blogs or other digital content are used to compensate for the lack of space in the daily press.

How do purist Salafist communities frame the issue of politics? Known to display a reluctance towards political engagement and activism, unlike Islamists and Jihadists, purist Salafists, especially those who live within a non-Muslim-majority country such as France, highlight that Islam has nothing to do with classical political activism. Consequently, a major issue that needs to be examined is how purist Salafists reconcile their desires to preach and shape society through a process of public involvement and their efforts to refrain from engaging with political institutions. This article explores to what extent the notion of militant apoliticism is useful in describing this strategy of public engagement.

Michel Houellebecq has an unusual gift for revealing the nervous underside of modern life, so when his “futuristic” novel about an Islamic France, Submission, was released on the very day of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, the coincidence was both horrific and apropos. Most criticism focuses on the anti-Muslim and anti-Enlightenment elements of the novel, but in this article I argue that Submission should be seen primarily as an engaged work of cultural politics. Houellebecq, measuring the temperature of today’s France, presents a culturally collapsed nation of the near future and focuses on women and Jews as the victims—sacrificed, as it were, by the secular elite. In so doing, I maintain, he pulls heavily from current events, all the while drawing on the memory of Vichy and the Occupation. The novel’s premises, topical at the time of its publication, are even more so today.