H-France List Archives

• Message-Id: <199604041002.LAA04320@listserv.rl.ac.uk>
• Date: Fri, 21 Mar 1997 20:13:57 -0800
• From: "Bertram M. Gordon" <bmgordon@mills.edu>
• Subject: Pascal Ory _La belle illusion_ (fwd)

Date: Fri, 21 Mar 1997 17:48:18 -0500
From: Donald G Wileman <dwileman@knet.flemingc.on.ca>

Ory, Pascal, La belle illusion: culture et politique sous le signe du Front
populaire, 1935-1938. (Paris: Plon: 1994) 850 pages plus notes.

I need to find someone who loves this book, so I can learn to see it
through their eyes.

One of the people who first recommended it to me warned "You'll need more
than the standard two-week interlibrary loan to digest that!" Later I came
back to him and asked whether this was a matter of the importance of Ory's
ideas or simply of ploughing through his verbiage and length. My friend
claimed he couldn't remember. In any event, this is probably yet another of
those doctorat du troisi=E8me cycle theses, clapped unedited between paper
covers, so physically heavy that it gets painful to hold after a while, and
which tries to rip itself to bits under normal handling.

At one level this seems to be a book arguing that the French popular
front's forays into culture, popular leisure and science were -for all
their brevity- a turning point. Where subsequent enemies (like the Vichy
r=E9gime) tried to defeat the popular front by out-bidding it, the reforms
lasted and tended either to be marked with the Leftness of their birth [Eg.
823], or to be reverted by the Fourth or Fifth Republics to something more
like the form the popular font had had in mind; where the front's cultural
initiatives were scrapped or replaced [Eg.  815], the changes tended not to
last. This seems a good thesis, pretty well sustained. I just don't know
why it had to be done at such interminable length (amiably acknowledged by
the author) and in such impenetrable prose -particularly when Ory can write
clearly, as he showed in his biography of Nizan. Try to get past the
generalities; try to understand the proof and structure of Ory's argument,
and one gets lost and trapped in a Sargasso of "blah, blah, blah, blah" -no
one sentence of which seems to mean anything. Totality is forever flowing
into integrality and unanism is for ever being a logical consequence of
historical continuism [Eg. 842]. This kind of French reminds me of the kind
of German which thinks it has changed the meaning of the word problem by
adding the suffix "-atik". Help! Similarly, Ory doesn't speak of education,
but rather of education policy, and not so much of policy as of the rue de
Grenelle; even then he insists that one must specify which rue de Grenelle
is one speaking of and so on and on and on. Eventually I get impatient and
say, in effect "Excuse me M. Ory. Dialectically this is all very
marvellous, but I'm stopped learning anything several kilometres back and
I'm not having any fun, either. May I go now?

Another problem that concerns me is the way this book is not about culture
or leisure or science so much as about their administration -a step which
Ory plainly thinks is indispensable to the development of any Good Thing
(Eg. 13). I hope not. It reminds me too much of the current madness of the
business-Right, in which nothing is about making shoes or music, or
learning; instead, everything is about "the business of music, the business
of shoes -and in fact about business itself in its most rarefied, abstract
form. I am besieged by Net "services" offering to send me -on a daily or
even hourly basis- information about my "competitors'" stock prices, press
releases, executive hirings, firings and such. As a scholar I find this
confusing, but not amusing. I had thought that the Left, for all its
faults, at least did not do this sort of thing, but here seems to be Ory,
gung-ho for replacing, not just Government, but Everything with
administration -and by particular under-secretaries of state at that  (Eg.
614 and 812).

I agree with the paid vacations and most of what the French popular front
tried to do in politics. Some of the gains the People made in the mid 1930s
in France are by no means secure today -even in the industrial West.  When
I try to remember French cultural products of this era which have had
enough resonance to get to me on another continent and to stick in my mind
-it's another story: I am left with the composer Ibert, whose
Divertissement was popular enough that one of its movements became the
closing theme to the Britcom Hancock's Half-Hour -but I've never heard
anything else by this composer. There's Poulenc of course, but as Ory
confirms, the popular front came just at the time when Poulenc was
reverting to Catholicism. Mostly I am reading reams of pages about names of
administrators whose historical effect seems transitory at best and never
to have got as far as here.

At least, I figured, I could find out what became of the =E9cole unique -a
potentially major social reform which never happened. Well, no. Or at
least, if Ory actually gets around to telling me this, I can't find it. It
just seems to vanish into the root system of the French Educational
establishment. One gets the idea Ory is not really very interested anyway:
it was a Radical Party idea, (and thus in Ory's view old fashioned), and
some Radicals helped it in its self-destruction.

So: what am I missing? Why is this an important book?


Other observations

129 Interesting to discover, as in passing, that the Third Republic was a
time of "fairly feeble political polarisation". I'm inclined to agree, but
it's a highly controversial assertion, quite counter to the standard
Fran=E7ois Goguel-and-all-that version of history which sees France in
general and the Third Republic in particular as all too dominated by the
extremes of Left and Right, Progress and Movement, so on and so forth. How
does Ory get away with being so offhand about a major debate in a very
large book?

255 et. Seq. Some interesting stuff about attempts to make Great Artists
like Van Gogh comprehensible to first-timers. Includes some interesting
debate with the Right about Active vs. Passive musea, about the nature of
art, how is it to be understood, and how widely the gift of such
understanding is distributed socially. Unfortunately I was left with little
or no sense of whether the techniques succeeded, even in their own terms.
How many people on paid vacations did such displays lure away from the
beach? How many of the lured came away happier or culturally enriched? It's
a pity not to know. If Ory could show us some results of that kind, then
the importance of this subject (and his book) would at least be clear. You
couldn't call a France that was renewing its commitment to joy, leisure and
learning in this way entirely "decadent" -as Duroselle et. Al. do. [Ory
comes close to making this argument on the second-last page of his book, so
perhaps this is his thesis. The massification of culture would still be a
controversial issue, if we were more civilised and less selfish as a
society than we currently are.

556 Interesting side-bar on the still-miniature scale of French democratic
politics, when Blum tells the editors of Vendredi that seats are won and
lost in France on the basis of 2-3,000 votes, and that what makes Vendredi
important is that it shifted significantly more votes than that.


______.sig file begins here:___________

Make him [the reader] laugh and he will think you a trivial fellow, but
bore him in the right way and your reputation is assured.
-W. Somerset Maugham
_The Gentleman in the Parlour_

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