Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture

POPULAR FRONT PARIS AND THE POETICS OF CULTURE Dudley Andrew and Steven Ungar Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2005, 464 pp. Reviewed by Charles O'Brien In Popular Front Paris and Poetics of co-authors Dudley Andrew and Steven Ungar offer a study of cultural life of mid-1930s Paris in extraordinary breadth and substantive detail. Spanning topics from literature to film, stage revues, automobiles, photo journalism, literary awards, weekly magazines, and colonial and decorative-arts expositions, and layered with cross-references and thematic links, this weighty book is of essential value for scholars of interwar France. For film studies, it provides a useful methodological guide to that which falls under heading of cultural studies. Culture in current humanities scholarship has become an astonishingly multi-faceted object of analysis, encompassing an endless variety of artifacts and practices, and at same time, becoming a phenomenon to be explained and a causal force in its own right. Regardless of where one stands on possibilities and limits of cultural contextualization of film, Popular Front Paris is likely to prove provocative. My remarks in what follows concern pertinence of book's reflections on historical method to current film and media studies, without, I hope, slighting its achievement as a study of particularities of Popular Front Paris. Andrew and Ungar acknowledge difficulty in defining cultural history's object of study, conceding that culture, as term functions today in humanities, is so amorphous that it tends to be characterized negatively, as whatever escapes purview of traditional political or social history. That is, term culture now serves as a default, referring to aspects of past that literature and film scholars often feel compelled to examine but may fall outside frame of what historians traditionally regard as central to their concerns. Cultural history amounts to a counter-project of sorts, a struggle to bring into foreground of inquiry hitherto marginal aspects of historical record. For Andrew and Ungar, effort also involves methodologies more familiar to arts than to political history. The difference between cultural history and political history looms large in Popular Front Paris in light of familiar status of Popular Front of mid193Os France as, in essence, a political event. Like other popular fronts of interwar years, such as those in Germany, Chile, and Spain, in France movement formed in response to imminent threat of a fascist takeover of national government. Socialists, communists, and other leftist parties deferred their disagreements and mobilized as an anti-fascist coalition. Triggering mobilization in France were riots of February 1934, which followed scandalous revelations of government corruption. The movement against fascism peaked in May 1936 with leftist victory in national elections, which brought into power socialist government of Leon Blum, whose rule, wracked by strikes, lasted for just over a year, expiring in June 1937. The popular-front coalition itself collapsed definitively following year, in November 1938, two months after signing of Munich Accords that made war between France and Germany inevitable. The timeline of relevant political events-and associated personages, organizations, and groups-receives close scrutiny from Andrew and Ungar, who nonetheless stress what they see as limitations of a strictly political account of Popular Front Paris. Indeed: We have written this book to test our belief that metaphor of 'front' has occluded other aspects and potential accounts of that are crucial to a historical understanding of final years of Third Republic. They argue that these neglected aspects essential to the character and tone of period often go under name culture. …

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