13 - Post-war Visions of Paradise: The Dawning of the Consumer Society

Summary

Already in the nineteenth century the influence of America on France was being deplored, and for those who remained attached to traditional French culture, the prospects for future relations did not look bright. Huysmans, in A vau-l'eau, has M. Folantin exclaim: ‘décidément Paris devient un Chicago sinistre! […] profitons du temps qui nous reste avant la définitive invasion de la grande muflerie du Nouveau-Monde!’ (506) His sentiments were echoed in A Rebours by Des Esseintes, who laments the fact that the world has been taken over by ‘la tyrannie du commerce’, which he calls ‘le grand bagne de l'Amérique transporté sur notre continent’ (761). By the 1920s and 1930s this anxiety reached fever pitch as writers returned from visits to the USA to retail visions of a civilisation devoted to the dollar, built on Taylor-inspired industrial assembly lines and the all-encompassing Fordist factory régime. Duhamel, in Scènes de la vie future (1930), depicts the USA as a land where the individual is subjected to ‘machinisme’ and is in danger of being swallowed up in a mass society. Céline, in Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932), bears witness to the overwhelming might of the cities of skyscrapers, the cult of the dollar and the depersonalising impact of work in a factory. But ‘On n'échappe pas au commerce américain’, his hero declares.

By the time Pascal Quignard published L'Occupation américaine in 1994, the American influences on French culture were still being deplored, but it was too late to forestall them.