French III: Nation, Identity, and Culture

Chair: Pascale Perraudin

Saint Louis University

"Learning to Love Your Country: The Chanson de Roland and French National Identity"
Stephanie Lohse

University of Minnesota

Throughout time, the Old French Chanson de Roland has been read in ways that exploit its potential to contribute to a discourse of French national identity constructed vis-à-vis an Islamic Other. In the late nineteenth century, the text entered "official" modern French culture via its inclusion in the French school curriculum. Leon Gautier, in the introduction to his 1881 edition, explains that he wants his reader to learn to understand and love the poem and then in turn to love his country. In order to help the reader achieve this understanding, Gautier mediates the discourse of the Old French text through choices he makes in translating it into modern French. He exaggerates the poem's emphasis on identity and alterity by imposing his own Manichean reading on the translated text, and he limits the reader's participation – and therefore the possibility for "mis-reading" – by employing translation techniques such as clarification and explicitation. An innovative use of visual aides further guides the reader in his interpretation of the poem. While Gautier's text itself is no longer widely read, the us-against-them narrative of Christian French superiority it established continues to inform modern readings of the Chanson as well as a conception of French national identity that the text has helped to construct.

“Culture and National Identity: The Case of Jean-Paul Sartre”

Hedwig Fraunhofer

Georgia College

Similar to the Historikerstreit continuing in Germany since 1986 and stirred up again in 1996 by Daniel Goldhagen's controversial book, Hitler's Willing Executioner, examining the role so-called ordinary Germans played in the Holocaust, the discussion of France's and French citizens' relationship to Nazism and the German occupation of France during WWII is a debate that keeps recurring. […]

In spite of proclamations denying any French complicity, the American historian Robert Paxton asserts that the often expressed American view that the French won’t confront the dark side of their response to Nazi occupation has been false for thirty years. Ever since students began challenging their elders’ reticence in 1968, France has undergone binges of self-scrutiny, whose feverish and repetitive character led Henry Rousso to give his book on history and memory the title The Vichy Syndrome. Indeed, for some years now, France has been engaged in what Caroline Wiedmer calls a spectacular reassessment of its past, and specifically of its uniquely ambiguous relationship to Nazi Germany.

I agree with Paxton that this reassessment started in the 1960s. I argue, however, that there is a long way from the early questions often asked by a younger generation and the public acknowledgments by French governments and institutions that the second half of the 1990s saw. The present paper addresses the long-lasting denial of fascism in France--now turned a national-obsession-with-the-past--indirectly, through an exploration of the work of one of France’s leading intellectuals of the twentieth century--Jean-Paul Sartre.

My essay thus explores the complicated relationship between art and philosophy—and in this case, celebrated antifascist art and philosophy--and fascism. Although I do not intend to minimize in any way the atrocities committed under German fascism, my argument also aims to establish the continuities between Western modernity, including French cultural discourse, and the catastrophe that was early-twentieth century fascism.

“Creating Mediterranean Models of Identity in France:

The Role of Marseilles in Cahiers du sud and La pensée de midi ”

Heather Brady

Monmouth College

Marseilles’ ancient cosmopolitanism is a product of its unique, intermediary position on the Mediterranean coast between Europe and Africa, a portal opening onto the Mediterranean and other faraway destinations, and witnessing the tidal flow of countless arrivals and departures. In the twentieth-century, French writers have become acutely aware of Marseilles, alternately embracing and rejecting it as a model of cosmopolitanism and a bridge between France and the Mediterranean world. From the 1930s to the 1960s, the writers Jean Ballard, Gabriel Audisio and Louis Brauquier formed an intellectual community that privileged Marseilles as a Mediterranean source of cosmopolitan identity. In their literary journal Cahiers du sud, they published their own essays, poems and stories, in addition to those of writers like Albert Camus, Jean Giono and René Char, making possible Marseilles’ emergence as a literary community and space of hospitality for travelers, immigrants and refugees during World War II. Moreover, as Ballard continued to publish Cahiers du sud throughout the war, the journal played a significant role at the end of France’s colonial rule in witnessing the arrival of former French colonial settlers and North African immigrants upon French soil.

At the end of the twentieth-century editors of La pensée de midi purposefully draw upon the intellectual community of Cahiers du sud to explore the same kinds of probing questions of identity through essays on archeology, art history, literature, and music amongst other subjects. La pensée de midi similar acts as a forum for vibrant intellectual exchange in Marseilles and Southern France as a whole. In my paper I will focus on models of identity put forth by the journal within the current discussion of multiculturalism, which, I will show, inherits from earlier debates in Cahiers du sud.

“Of GMOs and McDomination: What’s At Steak in the Contemporary French/American Conflicts Over Food”

Jennifer Willging
The Ohio State University

Willging.1@osu.edu

Jennifer Willging explores the link between recent French-American conflicts over food (GMOs, hormone-injected beef, the proliferation of McDonalds restaurants throughout France, etc.) and French efforts to maintain a certain cultural (and culinary) identity in the contemporary, globalized world.

What exactly is at “steak” in the contemporary conflict between the two nations over food? What impact has the presumed Americanization of one of the most emphatically and enduringly French aspects of that nation’s identity, its food, had on France’s ability to affirm its cultural specificity both in Europe and in the contemporary, globalized world?

In this presentation Jennifer Willging will argue that the incursion of American foodstuffs into the French market, which began in earnest at the Liberation with Coca-Cola and chewing gum but which has been particularly successful over the last ten years, has been even more difficult for the French to “swallow” than the Americanization of other cultural domains (such as cinema, industry, or even politics). It has been so, I will suggest, because this incursion signals a penetration not only of national and local borders and public and private spaces (such as restaurants, grocery stores, and kitchens), but also of individual, biological bodies. While Levi’s jeans only covered the French body, Monsanto’s genes threaten to permeate it and therefore to alter it, organically and permanently. If one is indeed what one eats, then it would seem that the French (along with much of the rest of the world) have reason to fear not only looking, acting, and sounding increasingly American, but of very literally becoming so.