French Literature by Alison Finch

Author:Alison Finch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2011-12-01T16:00:00+00:00

6

Despair and Optimism (1913–1944)

The turn of the century had brought a sense of confidence. Writers were moving away from the ‘miserabilism’ of much nineteenth-century literature. Not only the Third Republic’s political progress but also the marvels of technology played a part – for painters as well as authors. Already, such works as Monet’s multiple versions of the Gare Saint-Lazare (1877) had rendered beautiful an invention that was changing people’s lives, the steam engine. The domestic harnessing of electricity was transforming daily living. The techniques of photography (invented and developed in France in the early nineteenth century) were rapidly improving, and the creation of the lightweight camera meant that amateurs could record images on a regular basis. The telephone had started to take its place in the home from the early twentieth century on; test airplane flights had succeeded in 1903; and the first ever public film-screening had been shown in Paris in 1895. Optimism, belief in creativity, and the urge to experiment are so unmistakable in the art of the immediate pre- and post-war periods that we cannot help identifying ‘inventiveness’ with ‘inventions’ in these decades at least. Yet at the same time, during and after the First World War (1914–18), Europe was struggling with the terrible trauma of the slaughter: thinkers throughout the West expressed their shock and dismay. In France, foretastes of the war itself had come with the Franco-Prussian conflict, its long aftermath and more recently the murder of the Socialist leader Jean Jaurès in 1914. (Striving to organize resistance to the rush into war, he was assassinated by a right-wing activist.)

France seemingly recovered quickly from the war, buoyed up in part by the victory over Germany and a settlement that the almost universally short-sighted observers deemed fitting revenge for France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. Furthermore, the Third Republic remained in place; at obvious levels, therefore, stability was regained. France soon rediscovered its highly creative twentieth-century élan and would maintain it during the twenty-two years after the First World War, 1918 to 1940. In these two decades, however, the divisions between Left and Right that had crystallized round the Dreyfus Affair became ever more acute, and although for some of the period a broadly left-wing government was in power, the right-wing party Action Française grew increasingly strong and influential. The French Communist Party was founded in 1920, the fascist-leaning party the Croix-de-feu (Cross of Fire) in 1927. In 1934, the year after Hitler came to power in Germany, there were right-wing demonstrations in Paris, countered by an anti-fascist general strike; two years later, the left-wing Popular Front came to power under the Jewish prime minister Léon Blum. He introduced numerous reforms, such as paid holidays, a forty-hour week, the raising of the school leaving-age to fourteen, and collective bargaining. Although Blum soon lost power (1937), his reforms remained in place and his government has acquired legendary status in left-wing circles.

By now it was clear that another pan-European war was looming; after the eight-month ‘phony war’ of

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