STARDOM IN POSTWAR FRANCE Polygons: Cultural Diversities and Intersections General Editor: Lieve Spaas, Professor of French Cultural Studies, , UK Volume 1 Volume 7 Reynard the Fox: Social Cultures of Exile: Images of Engagement and Cultural Displacement Metamorphoses in the Beast Epic Edited by Wendy Everett and Peter from the Middle Ages Wagstaff to the Present Volume 8 Edited by Kenneth Varty More than a Music Box: Radio Volume 2 Cultures and Communities in a Echoes of Narcissus Multi-Media World Edited by Lieve Spaas in association Edited by Andrew Crisell with Trista Selous Volume 9 Volume 3 A ‘Belle Epoque’? Women in Human Nature and the French Society and Culture French Revolution: From the 1890–1914 Enlightenment to the Edited by Diana Holmes and Napoleonic Code Carrie Tarr Xavier Martin Volume 10 Translated from the French by Claims to Memory: Beyond Patrick Corcoran Slavery and Emancipation in the Volume 4 French Caribbean Secret Spaces, Forbidden Places: Catherine Reinhardt Rethinking Culture Volume 11 Edited by Fran Lloyd and Catherine The Meanings of Magic: From the O’Brien Bible to Buffalo Bill Volume 5 Edited by Amy Wygant Relative Points of View: Linguistic Volume 12 Representations of Culture Stardom in Postwar France Edited by Magda Stroin´ska Edited by John Gaffney and Diana Volume 6 Holmes Expanding Suburbia: Reviewing Volume 13 Suburban Narratives London Eyes: Reflections in Text Edited by Roger Webster and Image Edited by Gail Cunningham and Stephen Barber S TARDOM IN P F OSTWAR RANCE Edited by John Gaffney and Diana Holmes Berghahn Books New York • Oxford Gaffney_final.qxd:Gaffney_final.qxd 12/7/07 6:49 PM Page iv First published in 2007 by Berghahn Books www.BerghahnBooks.com © 2007 John Gaffney and Diana Holmes All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without the written permission of Berghahn Books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stardom in postwar France / edited by John Gaffney and Diana Holmes. p. cm. -- (Polygons: cultural diversities and intersections ; v. 12) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-84545-020-5 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. France--Social life and customs--20th century. 2. Celebrities-- France--History--20th century. 3. France--Intellectual life--20th century. 4. France--Civilization--1945- 5. Fame. I. Gaffney, John. II. Holmes, Diana. DC402.S73 2007 305.5'2--dc22 2007040252 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed in the United States on acid-free paper. ISBN 978-1-84545-020-5 (hardback) The editors would like to express their gratitude to Peter Kramer and Chris Warne, without whose contributions to the discussion of stardom and French cultural history in the early stages of the project, the book would never have been written. They would also like to thank Lieve Spaas for her help and advice as Series Editor. (cid:2) (cid:3) C ONTENTS Introduction 1 John Gaffney and Diana Holmes 1. Stardom in Theory and Context 7 John Gaffney and Diana Holmes 2. 1950s Popular Culture: Star-Gazing and Myth-Making with Roland Barthes and Edgar Morin 26 Susan Weiner 3. ‘A Girl of Today’: Brigitte Bardot 40 Diana Holmes 4. Rock ’n’ Roll Stardom: Johnny Hallyday 67 Chris Tinker 5. Stardom on Wheels: Raymond Poulidor 94 Philip Dine 6. The Auteur as Star: Jean-Luc Godard 126 Alison Smith 7. The Intellectual as Celebrity: Claude Lévi-Strauss 152 Christopher Johnson 8. ‘Starlette de la Littérature’: Françoise Sagan 175 Heather Lloyd viii Contents 9. The Only Act in Town: Charles de Gaulle 199 John Gaffney Conclusion 219 John Gaffney and Diana Holmes Bibliography 223 Notes on Contributors 234 Index 236 (cid:2) (cid:3) I NTRODUCTION John Gaffney and Diana Holmes The aim of this book is to examine the concept and the practice of stardom in the France of the 1950s and 1960s,1 a period of French history that saw dramatic economic, social and cultural change. Our premise is that the ‘stars’ of a given historical period or moment capture their era for us in a range of ways: that the preoccupations, values, conflicts and contradictions of a particular culture, its ‘climate of feeling’, are vividly expressed through its celebrities. Stardom may be read as a symbolic portal into the nature of a culture, stars as that culture’s ultimate expression. At the same time, stars, by their very nature, are what most people are not, are symbolic negationsof a given culture: they offer the new in place of the old; excitement where it has been lacking; the urbane to the provincial; glamour where there is none; and dreams to those whose dreams are unrealised. In our relationship to stars, there is often an element of idealised self-recognition, but there is also aspiration, desire and sometimes nostalgia. A study of stardom in a period of particular social change can reveal what is becoming and what is being left behind; what is being aspired to and what is being forgotten or denied. Stars can restate, often in new and modern forms, old identities and values, as well as calling a society towards newer, and perhaps confused, emergent values and value systems. The combination of the old and new was encapsulated in the phenomenon of French post-World War II stardom. 2 Introduction Stardom has been theorised mainly in relation to the cinema, and it is film stars who first come to mind when the word ‘star’ is used. Yet it is unmistakeably the case that stardom goes well beyond the movies. Film theory has defined the star as ‘a performer in a particular medium whose figure enters into subsidiary forms of circulation and then feeds back into future performances’ (Ellis 1982: 1). The mass appeal of film stars is argued as guaranteeing their capacity to reflect and express a given culture: ‘[s]tars matter because they act out aspects of life that matter to us; and performers get to be stars when what they act out matters to enough people’ (Dyer 1987: 19). Each of these statements can be applied not just to stars of the big screen, but also to that select number of musicians, sportsmen and -women, politicians, writers and intellectuals who seize the public imagination not just as exceptional achievers in a particular sphere, but also as part- mythified characters, at once compellingly different and reassuringly recognisable. Françoise Sagan, for example, represented a new kind of tough but vulnerable femininity for a vast national audience, not just for her readers, just as Poulidor meant strength, talent and the capacity to fail nobly for a public that far exceeded cycling fans. Writers and intellectuals are rarely thought of as stars, but they are an essential element of our study. Particularly in this period, the intellectual dimension of stardom distinguished France from most other countries in character, and all others in scale. We find in the 1950s and 1960s a range of intellectuals who were household names, including Barthes and Lévi- Strauss. With Jean-P aul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, indeed, the intellectual and the popular cross paths, for they were themselves part of trendy Paris café society, along with celebrities such as the singer Juliette Greco. Even political stars such as de Gaulle were major intellectual figures, and the treatment, as we shall see, of a Poulidor race as a highly elaborate analogy of Manon Lescaut by a sports journalist borders on the surreal when one imagines Anglo-Saxon equivalents. The intellectual life as a hallmark of Frenchness, in fact, was one of the cohesive elements of this period of postwar stardom, from intellectuals as stars to politicians as intellectuals, from the intellectualism of cycling – originally France’s truly working class sport – to the intellectual aspirations of singers such as Greco, or singer-songwriters like Brassens and Brel and even, to a minor extent, yé-yé singers such as Françoise Hardy. If this particularity provided France