Stardom in Postwar France
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Stardom in Postwar France

John Gaffney, Diana Holmes, John Gaffney, Diana Holmes

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Stardom in Postwar France

John Gaffney, Diana Holmes, John Gaffney, Diana Holmes

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The 1950s and 1960s were a key moment in the development of postwar France. The period was one of rapid change, derived from post-World War II economic and social modernization; yet many traditional characteristics were retained. By analyzing the eruption of the new postwar world in the context of a France that was both modern and traditional, we can see how these worlds met and interacted, and how they set the scene for the turbulent 1960s and 70s. The examination of the development of mass culture in post-war France, undertaken in this volume, offers a valuable insight into the shifts that took place. By exploring stardom from the domain of cinema and other fields, represented here by famous figures such as Brigitte Bardot, Johnny Hallyday or Jean-Luc Godard, and less conventionally treated areas of enquiry (politics [de Gaulle], literary [Françoise Sagan], and intellectual culture [Lévi-Strauss]) the reader is provided with a broad understanding of the mechanisms of popularity and success, and their cultural, social, and political roles. The picture that emerges shows that many cultural articulations remained or became identifiably "French, " in spite of the American mass-culture origins of these social, economic, and cultural transformations.

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Year
2008
ISBN
9780857450098
Edition
1
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CHAPTER 1
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STARDOM IN THEORY AND CONTEXT
John Gaffney and Diana Holmes
Stardom
A star is a performer on a public stage whose image, produced through the available media, appeals to and fascinates a mass audience. To qualify as a star, the scale of celebrity must be such that the performer’s name and image are familiar not just to those within their specialised field (for example, film enthusiasts, sports fans, intellectuals), but to the general public. For a society to produce stars, and for stars to play an important role in the definition of values and identities, certain conditions are required. Not all human cultures have privileged individualised personality over social function in a way that fosters a culture of celebrity, but as Richard Sennett argues, from the mid-nineteenth century on, the industrialised Western world developed a strong tendency to envisage public, collective issues in terms of the personal. In response to a public world of uncontrolled capitalism, rapid urbanisation and growing secularity, Sennett argues, the public sphere became devalued, the private space of the home and personal life correspondingly idealised. Politicians and other public figures came to be judged less in terms of their effectiveness, than in terms of perceived personal qualities. This personalisation of public life, and the ‘transmut(ation of) political categories into psychological categories’ (Sennett 2002: 259) is certainly one of the social trends that feeds into the modern phenomenon of stardom. But for individuals from a range of fields to occupy that central place in the public imagination defined as stardom, there must also be a mass media to transmit their image and stories about their lives, and a political and economic system that can make ideological use of the extreme celebrity of selected personalities. ‘The star system’, Edgar Morin wrote in 1957, ‘is an institution specific to advanced capitalism’.1
Morin was writing as France underwent an extraordinarily rapid transformation from a predominantly rural, economically conservative, Catholic, colonial nation into an urban, largely secular, decolonised and highly industrialised one: the star system was one element in that process. The swiftly developing, mass consumer culture provided both the means to disseminate star images, news and gossip, through a range of media, and a complex but coherent set of motivations for doing so. At the simplest commercial level, star figures functioned to sell newspapers, magazines (such as the new postwar Paris Match and Elle), books, films and all kinds of other products that could play on the consumer’s desire to acquire something of the star’s aura. At a broader ideological level, a culture of stardom works to promote belief in the supreme importance of individual qualities and choices, rather than the determining power of class or income, and in the free, perfectible individual (‘you too can be like the star’) who is the ideal consumer. Or, in the case of star politicians or intellectuals, the individual’s compelling aura may work to legitimate political choices, or to popularise (and sell the books associated with) intellectual movements. Consumer capitalism and the liberal democratic regimes that, at least in the West, have accompanied it, have had a clear stake in the promotion of a star system; stars became a central element of the collective imagination during the mid-years of the twentieth century, at a time of rapid economic growth, urbanisation and the development of a consumer economy.
However, star theory within film studies has been at pains to avoid a simple ‘top-down’, exploitation model of the relationship between a capitalist film industry and the public who consume the star image. In this, the conceptualisation of celebrity has followed Morin rather than Barthes for, as Susan Weiner demonstrates below (Chapter 2), Morin’s work on stars develops the model of an active and individualised encounter between spectator/fan and star. Morin’s approach captures the complexity of relations between stars and audiences more adequately than does a view of the public as merely passive and mystified. Stars do not simply function to maximise consumption and support the political and economic status quo. In order to achieve stardom, celebrities have to appeal to a range of different audiences, and it can be precisely their representation of opposition and contestation that gains the allegiance of dispossessed, marginalised or simply rebellious social groups. Despite the recuperative power of advanced capitalism, and its capacity to harness subversive forces to its own ends, the relationship between the star’s image and the public that consumes it remains a complex, interactive one. What a star signifies for her or his public is not simply predetermined. Like the film spectator, the consumer of the star image brings his or her own hopes, desires and dreams to the encounter, and plays an active role in selecting which aspects of the star matter. At a period of intense and conflictual social change, the capacity of a star to give expression to different, and often contradictory, fears and aspirations may be what determines their success.
As we shall see, all of the conditions for stardom outlined above pertain strongly to 1950s and 1960s France. France was part of a capitalist, industrialised Western world that had long fostered a culture of celebrity: Paris, in particular, had produced stars in theatre, sport, music hall and the ‘higher’ arts for a century and a half before the 1950s. These were, by and large, stars with a restricted audience of Parisian elites,2 but nonetheless, they existed, were particularly marked in French society and, in the twentieth century, became more universal with the emergence of media celebrities such as sports heroes (in boxing, for example), cinema idols (of specifically French cinema), nationally known music-hall and radio and recording artists, such as Charles Trenet and Edith Piaf, and writers such as Colette. Moreover, France, perhaps more than other comparable countries, has a very strong tradition of personalisation in all aspects of social and political life, from the absolute monarchy, through revolutionary adventurers, to imperial and war heroes. Even throughout its many republics, individuals often encapsulated the impersonal res publica itself; in politics as in art, France teems with the lives of its heroes (and occasionally heroines) and villains. The dramatic expression of many social, political or cultural moments in the form of a person is a quintessentially French characteristic.
The development of a consumer culture and the growth and diversification of the mass media now provided the conditions that would foster the emergence of star figures in a range of different cultural fields. If initial qualities or talents are the starting point for stardom – physical beauty or skill, intellectual or artistic originality, political acumen – they are not, of themselves, sufficient. The star persona must be constructed by a process that interweaves the performer’s achievements in their specific fields with the dramatisation of their own lives and persons. Publishers, publicists and agents, together with an expanded and diverse new media, were very much part of the new France, and it is through their interventions that localised renown in a specific field spread through what we might term ‘concentric circles’, to reach a national, and often international, public.
The secularisation of society may also help to explain the vital symbolic role played by stars in conceptualising and coming to terms with new forms of modernity. France had long been profoundly Catholic, and had personalised religion through Madonna and saint worship: the postwar decades saw a vertiginous drop in church attendance (only 25 percent of the population attended Church regularly in 1955, 15 percent by 1970). Religious disenchantment coincided with the elevation of secular figures to the position of national icons. Like the saints, star figures could embody ideals, providing a form for dimly perceived aspirations to better forms of selfhood; but as flesh-and-blood individuals with continuing life stories, they could also act out the risks and conflicts of an age of sudden change.
France from the Liberation to May 1968: reconstruction of a nation
The two decades that followed the end of World War II were a period of unprecedented change in France. During the war, France had lost 600,000 lives in battle, and an estimated further 500,000 from unhealthy living conditions and poor medical care. By 1945, the country had seen the destruction of fifty thousand factories and 300,000 buildings, all of its ports, one quarter of its trains, most of its ships, over one hundred railway stations, nearly ten thousand bridges, and half of its motorised vehicles (Berstein and Milza 1991: 90). In the aftermath of war, a divided and weakened nation was totally dependent on US and UK support (ironically, the two countries largely responsible for the destruction as they freed France from German control). But reconstruction was rapid: by 1950, France had already reached the same levels of economic activity as in 1938. At the beginning of the 1950s, an economic boom began which only slowed down some twenty-five years later. In the period 1959–1970, France had a higher average national growth rate (5.8 percent) than any country in the world, apart from Japan. This economic boom was accompanied by social and cultural changes of great magnitude. In 1945, France’s population of forty million was virtually the same as it had been in 1900, but over the next decade it was to grow to forty-five million, and then to fifty million by the end of the 1960s. Demographic expansion supported the development of an economics of consumption, which in turn contributed to an accelerated move to the towns and cities with their opportunities for employment and new forms of leisure. Statistics tell the story clearly. In 1946, with a ruined economy, there were 700,000 private cars in France, many of them old and in disrepair. In 1957, there were four million. In 1945, nearly half of the population still lived on the land rather than in a town – and the definition of ‘town’ included communities as small as two thousand inhabitants. In most rural households, three generations or more had lived together in one household, or in very close proximity, the situation unchanging down the centuries. Over the next thirty years, the rural population would halve, with the urban population now also living in much larger towns (Paris went from one tenth of the national population to one fifth), and on the whole in nuclear family units. The psychological significance of this will be discussed below, for it was not simply that rural France disappeared, but rather that the ‘rural imagination’ was itself carried suddenly forward into the ‘new France’.
Change was dramatic, sudden, deep: France seemed to be transforming before its population’s very eyes. Cities not only grew, but were also redesigned, with older districts being demolished in the name of progress and their populations frequently being moved out (as in Paris) to new, more salubrious if soulless suburbs. In terms of the acquisition of consumer goods, and the changing lifestyles they engendered, the gradually accumulating changes of the 1950s turned into an avalanche in the 1960s. Already between 1950 and 1960 the consumption of personal hygiene products (soaps, shampoos, deodorants) had risen by 86 percent (Ross 1995: 86). Between 1954 and 1957, household ownership of refrigerators went from 7 percent to percent, washing machines from 7 percent to 18 percent and vacuum cleaners from 14 percent to 22 percent. Ten years later, by the end of the 1960s, all of these were close to universal.
The essential socio-economic and psychocultural background to the 1950s and 1960s, therefore, is one of fast-paced change, with an underlying sense of vulnerability inherited from both dislocating social change and France’s still vivid collective memory of the disasters of the two world wars. Moreover, the nation’s developing and sustained economic prosperity and growth were accompanied by political uncertainty and instability. The year 1944 saw a raft of historic social reforms, a national economic plan, family policies, the nationalisation and the modernisation of banks, gas, electricity, car manufacturing, coal and steel, and the creation of Air France (the world-renowned Caravelle aeroplane came into production in 1955). These were followed by a huge, new nuclear programme, both civil and military. All these changes, however, were accompanied by inflation and a weak currency, and dependence on massive US aid. This was a very unusual phenomenon in any country: two processes, one restoring and one undermining the healthy self-confidence France needed so badly. In 1946 (and this after the dramatic resignation of de Gaulle in January, as if he were abandoning the country3), the new Fourth Republic constitution was voted in by referendum by only nine million people. Eight million voted against the constitution and another eight million did not bother to vote at all, so unloved was the new republic only one year on from the heady days of national liberation. Between 1946 and 1958, no government lasted for any length of time; there were sometimes two, even three in one year, and chronic political instability stumbled on until the regime broke upon the catastrophe in Algeria, when de Gaulle was called back again to power, in May 1958. De Gaulle’s immense appeal to the national imagination owed much to his capacity to incarnate a positive, unified sense of Frenchness, however much division and conflict this in fact concealed.
French identity was threatened not just by political instability and economic dependence on the USA, but also by the massive influx of American films, goods, music and fashions, with all of the new and foreign values that these implied. Postwar Europe as a whole experienced the onslaught of US culture – pervasive, optimistic, glittering – as also a deep and difficult experience of the new entering the old. And France, with its anti-Americanism, its rural, small-town identity and sense of wounded pride (France would accept huge Marshall Aid like all western European countries, but with a sullenness unseen elsewhere), would experience US culture in a particular way. In one sense, France was as enthusiastic as any European country, as the short-lived but ecstatic welcoming of GIs into liberated Paris showed. Pop singers like Johnny Hallyday and Eddy Mitchell would become devoted ambassadors for US culture in the 1950s and 1960s.4 Nonetheless, the US was experienced as a far more alien (and also utopian) culture in France than it was elsewhere. For the whole of western Europe, the US represented everything that was both glamorous and missing from a world of postwar gloom, from nylons to fridges, brightly coloured cars and neon signs.5 In postwar (western) Europe generally, including the UK, the US became a truly mythical, other place. But in France – the French being among the least travelled Europeans, particularly to the United States – this mythologisation was doubly the case (as was the diabolisation of the US by the highly influential Communist Party). In the arena of the everyday, the relationship between established French cultural traditions and the mingled threat and promise of the American Other remained uneasy, and the capacity to signify a distinctly French identity whilst embodying the energy, style and openness to modernity associated with the USA was one determining feature of stardom. Bardot’s style of beauty connoted a guilt-free eroticism that drew on a very French vision of l’amour whilst capturing a sense of as yet scarcely articulated sexual emancipation. Bardot both shocked and delighted US audiences, to the extent that her iconic status could rival that of Marilyn Monroe.6 Her refusal to go to Hollywood confirmed her capacity and will to embody a distinctly French version of the modern. The New Wave – and notably Godard – fused the conventions of Hollywood genre films with their own innovative and stylish cinematography, effectively reconciling the thrill and energy of the new world with the poetic and experimental tradition of French film culture. In another significant cultural domain of the period, car design succeeded, at its best, in bringing together space-age modernity and French haute couture elegance: the star car of the 1950s was undoubtedly the out-of-reach-for-most Citroen DS (1956; DĂ©esse = goddess), with its imaginative aesthetic boldness, and its almost futuristic air of modernity that made even American cars look ordinary.
Unity and difference: the old and the new
In certain respects, therefore, France telescoped into one generation what other countries had taken several generations to complete. One of the reasons why France was able to do this was its longstanding political and administrative centralisation. In many ways, and despite the instability of the Fourth Republic, it was the state that led France into modernity through government initiatives, the national plan, nationalisations and a powerful, centralised bureaucracy. Political structures embedded a sense of shared national identity and cultural developments in the postwar decades developed and intensified this. Radio, television and new, glossy magazines distributed nation-wide all contributed to the development of a collective sense of a specifically French modernity, and it was through these media that stars could enter the domestic intimacy of people’s lives and become, to adapt the words of Edgar Morin, mediators between the ‘heaven’ of a glamorous public world and the ‘earth’ of quotidian reality.7
Until this time, radio had been the most significant mass medium, and had played an important social role in the twentieth century. Along with the education system (and conscription), the radio had acted in many ways as a unifier, a ‘nationaliser’ of France and its citizens. For Marshal PĂ©tain, the radio had been a major propaganda tool during the Vichy period, and de Gaulle was also to use the radio, well into the 1960s. Widespread recognition of LĂ©vi-Strauss as an intellectual authority outside the narrow realm of the university came, in part, from his 1959 radio interviews. Radio would play a vital role, too, in the construction of a teenage audience with its own music and its own sense of values and style – embodied, notably, in Johnny Hallyday – particularly from 1959 with the influential pop programme Salut les copains! But radio ownership was now developing slowly, from 72 percent in 1954 to 78 percent in 1958. By contrast, the growth in TV ownership was sudden and dramatic. In 1958, only 6 percent of the population had a TV set (one million sets). Within the next decade, this increased to 70 percent. In the 1960s, television brought both star performances and news and gossip about star lives, into the home.
But from the immediate postwar period on, a new style of glossy ma...

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