Radio provided a new and powerful medium in 1930s France.
Devoted audiences responded avidly to their stations’
programming and relied on radio as a source of daily entertainment,
news, and other information. Within the comfortable, secure
space of the home, audio culture reigned supreme. In Programming
National Identity, Joelle Neulander examines the rise
of radio as a principal form of mass culture in interwar France,
exploring the intricate relationship between radio, gender,
and consumer culture. She shows that, while entertaining in
nature and narrative in structure, French radio programming
was grounded in a politically and socially conservative ideal.
In the early years of radio, France was the only Western
nation—apart from Australia—to have both private
and public radio stations. Commercial station owners created
audiences and markets from a scattered group of radio enthusiasts,
relying on traditional ideas about French identity, family,
and community ties. Meanwhile, the government-run stations
tried to hew an impossible compromise, balancing the nonpolitical
entertainment that listeners desired with educational programs
that supported state over private interests. As a public medium
operating in a private space, radio could potentially cross
normal gender and social boundaries. Programmers responded,
Neulander shows, by restricting broadcast content, airing
only programs deemed appropriate for a proper French home.
Accordingly, radio culture espoused normative gender roles
and traditional notions of the family.
Neulander analyzes radio program schedules and content, including
plays and songs, and explains how programmers, governments,
station owners, and average citizens fought over what was
aired. On French radio, she shows, the best families had working
fathers, homemaking mothers, and money in the bank. Indeed,
for radio characters, bourgeois stability proved a prerequisite
for happiness, and characters who did not fit the ideal often
served as bad examples. Although the left-wing Popular Front
controlled the French government during the late 1930s, both
public and private radio portrayed the working class negatively—usually
as buffoons or criminal characters. Indeed, Maurice Chevalier,
better known today for his film career, first cultivated his
working-class playboy image on 1930s radio, and legendary
radio artist Edith Piaf rose to fame singing tragic tales
of prostitutes.
Neulander also examines French radio’s ambivalent stance
toward the colonial world featured in so many plays and songs.
The colonies represented a perceived threat to the traditional
French patriarchal family and home, so broadcasters stereotyped
them as alien, often perilous spaces. Yet love songs by French-perceived
exotic types like Tino Rossi proved wildly popular.
The first work in English about interwar French radio, Programming
National Identity reveals the persistence of conservative
notions of family and nation that challenged the failing liberal
democracy of the Popular Front at the end of the Third Republic.
Joelle Neulander is an associate professor
of history at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina. |
