This lecture is a kind of follow-on from the introductory lecture to the
module and is meant as a broad introduction to French cultural studies.
It's meant as a broad introduction to French cultural studies because one
of the main themes of FRE114: Introduction to Contemporary France
II, is culture and identity. I link culture and identity together
because culture is clearly one of the ways in which identity - national,
ethnic, personal etc. - is constructed and expressed. To quote Jill Forbes
from French Cultural Studies: An Introduction:
Defining the Nation
One of the most important periods in French history, at least in terms of
an attempt by the state to define its indentity through its culture, was
during the Third Republic (1870-1940)
Those years were decisive one for France: the rural exodus, aided by
improvements to France's transport infrastructure saw many French men and
women move from countryside to city and suburb and industrialisation and
the growth of an ever more powerful industrial working class continued
apace. Culturally the period was significant too: male sufferage was
introduced (i.e. men got the vote) and both primary school education and,
for men, military service, became compulsory.
Reform to education was particularly important, as many considered that
the educational system should become a vital channel for the
dissemination, some might call it imposition, of a unitary or single idea
of the French nation. The school could become le creuset de la
nation. The primary school instituteur and institutrice
became a vital agent in transmitting a certain approved version of
France's history, geography and, of course, culture. To quote Brian Rigby,
again from from French Cultural Studies: An Introduction:
The historian Eugen Weber has a more negative appraisal of this process in
his book Peasants into Frenchmen:
Defining Ourselves
Although the Third Republic sought to forge a single nation, speaking a
single language and sharing a common culture, it is very clear to anyone
looking at France today, that there is in fact a plurality of languages
and cultures in circulation. In the 1960s and 1970s, the sociological
writings of Pierre Bourdieu - La Distinction from 1979 is
particularly important - described a France composed of innumerable
cultures and sub-cultures. He saw France as a country that was not so much
unified, as divided by culture.
Although Bourdieu adopts a rather negative position on the culture of
dominated groups within our society, seeing working-class culture, for
example, as inevitably subordinate to, and in awe of, the high culture of the
middle classes, a more positive note is struck by Michel De Certeau. De
Certeau is interested in the ways in which ordinary people use culture,
and certain cultural practices, to define themselves and to resist
assimilation to the dominant culture. One work in particular,
L'Invention du quotidien first published in two volumes in 1980,
represents the most detailed attempt to account for the ways in which
ordinary people negotiate, relate to and use the products, spaces and
activities of everyday life.
De Certeau maintains that the majority of ordinary people are denied
access to the means of cultural production and have little choice but to
consume the products of the dominant cultural economy of large
corporations amd multinationals. However, despite their apparent
powerlessness, and in the face of a seemingly all-pervasive institutional
control, ordinary people assert their own creativity:
As an example of the ways in which ordinary people use culture to define
their own identity, De Certeau cites the ways in which the peasantry
superimposed onto the Christianity imposed on them by the Church, their
own `super-stitions' (pp.34-5). Ordinary people find innumerable ways of
escaping the imposition from above, as it were, of the culture of those in
power. He gives another example of imigrants recreating their own cultural
ways of life in the anonymous housing estates of the French suburbs:
French Cultural Studies
Cultural studies emerged in the U.K. in the 1950s and became
institutionalized in the 1960s. French cultural studies, however, only
began to make inroads, in the U.K. at least, in the 1980s and 1990s. The
publication of the journal French Cultural Studies in 1991 and of
books like Brian Rigby's Popular Culture in France: A Study of Cultural
Discourse (1991), K. Ross', Fast Cars, Clean Bodies:
Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (1995) and J.
Forbes & M. Kelly's French Cultural Studies: An Introduction (1995)
mark this belated beginning.
What is `Cultural Studies'?
Broadly speaking, cultural studies is the analysis of culture understood
in the broadest and most inclusive sense of the word. Cultural studies
collapses the distinctions frequently made between `culture' and
`non-culture', or what are more commonly known as `high culture' and
`popular culture'. Cultural studies rejects the social narrowness or
exclusivity demonstrated by such definitions and the implicit system of
values that underpin them. Cultural studies strips culture of élitism and
hierarchical ordering (the terms `high culture' or `middle brow', for
example, are implicitly informed by this hierarchy of value), broadening
and extending the definition of culture to include such texts and
practices as cinema, television. popular music, advertising and the like.
Its object of study is, therefore, culture understood in the broadest and
most inclusive sense of the word.
French cultural studies in particular analyses the changing cultural texts
and practices that emerge as the result of, to paraphrase J. Forbes & M.
Kelly, the following historical developments:
Some Key Assumptions
Notes
Introduction
Culture is the visible territory on which the struggle continues, to
define and defend a certain idea of France. (Forbes & Kelly: 1995 p.290)
What I'd like to do in this lecture is three things:
In the Third Republic, the principal means of creating a common republican
culture was through the state's establishment of a universal system of
national education, whose principal aim was to make every child in every
corner of France into a full and worthy citizen of the new secular,
republican nation. (Forbes & Kelly: 1995 p.38)
One of the most important parts of any culture is, of course, language
and, to a, lesser extent, literature. It is during the Third Republic that
attempts were made to describe and define the French language - the first
volume of Ferdinand Brunot's Histoire de la langue française was
published in 1905 - and French literature - Gustave Lanson's Histoire
de la littérature française was published in 1895. Concerted efforts
were made to impose a standard French on France's linguistically diverse
population. Dialects and patois, and the sense of regional identity (e.g.
Breton, Occitan) that accompanied them, were actively discouraged within
the school system and were perceived as a threat to France's common
national identity.
French culture became truly national only in the last years of the
[nineteenth] century ... We are talking about the process of
acculturation: the civilisation of the French by urban France, the
disintegration of local cultures by modernity, and their absorption into
the dominant civilisation of Paris and the schools. Left largely to their
own devices until their promotion to citizenship, the unassimilated rural
masses had to be integrated into the dominant culture as they had been
integrated into an administrative entity. What happened was akin to
colonisation. (E. Weber: 1979 p.132)
A une production rationalisée, expansioniste autant que centralisée,
bruyante et spectaculaire, correspond une autre production,
qualifiée de `consommation': celle-ci est rusée, elle est dispersée, mais
elle s'insinue partout, silencieuse et quasi invisible, puisqu'elle ne se
signale pas avec des produits propres mais en manières d'employer
les produits imposés par un ordre économique dominant. (De Certeau: 1980,
xxxvi)
Far from considering ordinary peple as passive and docile consumers, De
Certeau identifies some of the innumerable ways in which ordinary people
fabricate their own meanings in their encounters with cultural products
and activities produced by others. De Certeau own chapters, as well as
those of his collaborators Luce Giard and Pierre Mayol, describe, and
indeed celebrate, `la créativité dispersée, tactique et bricoleuse' of
ordinary people in everyday life. His main metaphor is that of the
poacher, making forays into territory owned by the powerful and stealing
from them: `Le quotidien s'invente avec milles manières de
braconner' (De Certeau: 1980, xxxvi).
Ainsi, les manières d'`habiter' (une maison ou une langue) propres à sa
Kabylie natale, le Maghrébin à Paris ou à Roubaix les insinue dans le
système que lui impose la construction d'une HLM ou du français. Il les
surimpose et, par cette combinaison, il se crée un espace de jeu pour des
manières d'utiliser l'ordre contraignant du lieu ou de la langue. (De
Certeau: 1990, p.51)
De Certeau writes then, of how ordinary people can subvert the dominant
culture, bending it, forcing it, distorting it to make it their own. A
good contemporary example of this might be the language and culture
produced by young people in les banlieues. Rap music, `tagging' and
the form of slang known as verlan are all good examples of ways of
asserting one's individuality, marking out and making one's own territory,
expressing one's specificity and distinctiveness.