A Brief History of France by Cecil Jenkins

Author:Cecil Jenkins [Cecil Jenkins]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781849018128
Publisher: Constable & Robinson
Published: 2011-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

With the war over and France entering its ‘années folles’, the mad years, Paris reverted to its dual role as cultural capital and Gay Paris. The writers and artists moved from Montmartre to Montparnasse, Coco Chanel displayed her fashions, the Moulin Rouge and the Folies Bergères featured Mistinguett or the American Josephine Baker and, with the increasing availability of radios and gramophone records, the whole country could now hum the latest jazz tune or listen to Lucienne Boyer singing ‘Parlez-moi d’amour’. People tried to forget.

But there were those who could not forget. And in 1919 alone, the year of the Treaty, there were several events worth noting. Paul Valéry published his article on the European crisis, suggesting even from the striking first sentence – ‘We civilizations now know that we are mortal’ – that the continent had committed moral and intellectual suicide.4 Oswald Spengler published The Decline of the West, a book that was to lead the young André Malraux to develop, in relation to the ‘death of Man’, the new idea of the Absurd.5 Also in 1919, if we are to believe André Breton, the leader of the Surrealist movement, the young writer Philippe Soupault made a practice of visiting apartment blocks and asking the concierge whether Philippe Soupault lived there. If the concierge replied that Philippe Soupault did indeed live there, Breton tells us, ‘Soupault would not have been surprised, but would have gone and knocked on his door’.6 In short, he was actualizing precisely the sense of the lack of identity and meaning implied by Malraux’s idea of the Absurd.

As the Romantic movement had largely been a response to the turmoil of the Revolutionary period, so a new cultural landscape was emerging in answer to the shock of the war and to a new world of hectic movement and technological advances. A major upheaval was under way: in philosophy with the appearance in French of Hegel and then Heidegger, in music from Stravinsky to Messiaen, and in the plastic arts from Cubism to abstract art. The new driving forces in thought that emerged were figures who had been known before the war, but who only came into their own – as though on to a prepared stage – after 1918. The most influential were Einstein with his theory of relativity, Freud with his emphasis on the unconscious, and Bergson, with his elevation of intuition over intelligence.

These influences coloured the literature of the time. The plays of Pirandello, with their fluctuating characters, suggested that there was no continuity to the individual personality and therefore no coherent self. Proust, often ill and writing in his cork-lined room, tried to establish the psychic continuity of the self on the basis of involuntary memory: something as simple as the taste of a small cake – the famous madeleine – can bring back a flood of memories, so that we can transcend time by living in a fusion of past and present. It is as though Proust, at a time of growing agnosticism, was trying to find a secular equivalent of the Christian soul.

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