Introduction: France as a Laboratory of Culture

Since at least the sixteenth century, when Joachim du Bellay addressed his country as ‘mère des arts, des armes, et des lois’ (Du Bellay, 2013), France has prided itself on the excellence of its cultural achievements. The monarchs of the ancien régime took their role of cultural patrons extremely seriously, as did successive governments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In 1958, France was one of the first Western countries to appoint a Minister of Culture with the task of promoting and extending its cultural heritage. Successive Presidents of the Fifth Republic since then have striven to outdo each other in sponsoring Great Projects to enhance their country’s national pride and international reputation. In the twenty-first century, however, the model of state-sponsored cultural production has come under criticism from many quarters, among other things for its nationalism, its elitism and its sometimes damaging social consequences (Pratt, 2005; Thatcher, 2018; Blatt and Welch, 2019). The main defence against these criticisms has usually been the ability of state initiatives to foster innovation and creativity. However, in the contemporary context, the role of the state begins to pale against the rising power of the new cultural industries to revolutionise the means of production and distribution.

At one of his last Editorial Board meetings, Nick Hewitt raised the question of whether France still held its role as a laboratory of culture, and the question became the focus for a French Cultural Studies workshop, which was eventually arranged for Friday 7 September 2018 at the Maison Française of Columbia University in New York. The articles published in this special issue are the result of papers that were delivered at this event. The organisers set the scope of the event:

We wish to look at France as a grand place – even as a laboratory – of cultural experimentation and exchange, especially with the United States. As in other laboratories, some trials succeed wonderfully, others fail, and yet others are transformed in the transmission across cultures. But participants in such inventions and exchanges learn as much from setbacks as from great achievements. Even when we see lulls of inspiration, of exchange, or misunderstandings at certain moments, we are surprised with creativity and interaction in so many realms of thought, culture and society. Sometimes these experiments and their exchanges seem to have failed or stalled, as with the contemporary issues in society and aesthetic creation. But the laboratory never closes. And the exchanges of cultural ideas exported from France or the US enrich us all. (Lebovics, 2017)

The nine speakers at the workshop tailored their presentations to address the common theme of France’s continuing ability to nurture creativity and innovation, finding examples over a wide range of cultural areas and ranging from the late nineteenth century to the present day. In question-and-answer sessions, and in the round-table discussion that concluded the event, many connections were made between the contemporary situation and the variety of historical antecedents. They recognised the importance of the state, but also highlighted the complex array of other factors that contributed to the dynamism of French cultural life and to its international resonance. The six articles that are published here explore different domains of culture and give a flavour of the cultural dynamism that springs from many sources.

Ilyana Karthas examines the role of women in the making of modern Paris. Her article attempts to answer some of the questions raised in her previous work on women’s complex role in the cultural process of modernity in France – a role that still needs further investigation. Looking at a century of vibrant innovation in Paris, she argues that the cultural flowering of this time was accompanied and shaped by a resurgence of women’s power over aesthetic developments and a reassertion of their authority of judgement. She presents a new paradigm for understanding the arts worlds of Paris, revealing women as important and effective arbiters of taste. In their capacity as patrons, salonnières, teachers, promoters, entrepreneurs, artists and expert critics, women played a crucial role in fashioning Paris as a cosmopolitan centre and a place at the forefront of modern aesthetics and innovation. They were central to making Paris a laboratory of modern culture in the early twentieth century by shaping and legitimating artistic tastes.

Joseph Pomp investigates France’s role in world cinema through international co-production, and focuses on the role of the Fonds Sud, 1984–2012. Recognising the problematic nature of the ‘world’ descriptor, which means ‘the rest of the world’, he suggests that the French usage appears highly inclusive but also calls further attention to how thoroughly France has positioned itself as an epicentre of international cinema. He examines how, in bringing projects from many lands together, France has become a veritable factory for global film culture, where many of the most important cinéastes from Africa, Asia and Latin America have come to use Parisian colour labs and editing rooms as the site of their films’ completion. He focuses on the role that the Fonds Sud has played in extending France’s unique auteur-driven film culture in transnational directions.

Annie de Saussure turns to French conceptions of world literature. She focuses on Michel Le Bris, co-author of the influential manifesto ‘Pour une littérature-monde en français’, which was published by Le Monde in March 2007. She examines the most recent debates surrounding the littérature-monde manifesto before turning to Le Bris’s defence of the concept to which he has claimed ownership. Analysing Le Bris’s discourse regarding the manifesto and its origins, she shows how far the manifesto draws from his career of political activism. She suggests that the most problematic elements of the manifesto, which include its Manichean logic and language of exoticism, stem from Le Bris’s previous intellectual work in Maoism and Breton regionalism.

Oana Panaïté takes up the concept of ‘littérature-monde’, which she construes not as a doctrine or ideology but as a literary stance that makes possible new ways of defining and experiencing the world. In this perspective, she examines recent fictional works by Alice Zeniter and Bessora. In their novels L’Art de perdre and Zoonomia, she suggests that writing the world does not operate as translation, understood as a system of equivalences between universal values or global situations, but as spaces of experimentation. These allow the authors to revisit biographical or historiographic narrative models in order to bring forth situations and characters that test and contest established lines of demarcation between people, languages, ‘races’ and cultures.

Seth Compaoré examines transnational themes in contemporary music, taking the work of the rapper Abd al Malik as a complex example of hybrid music that grows in the interstices between popular and classical genres. His compositions appear as palimpsests drawing on a great variety of canonical and contemporary writers and musicians in the French and Francophone spheres, and adding transnational resonances from elsewhere. Compaoré suggests that Malik’s music can be viewed productively as ‘rhizomic’, in Deuleuze’s sense, resonating with pluralist and multicultural audiences that can now be found in France and the French-speaking world.

Finally, Nicole Rudolph assesses a conspicuously innovative project, funded by the French state, to create ÉcoQuartiers, or green neighbourhoods, which aim to combine housing, shops, office space, green space and mass transit. Launched in 2009, they aim to achieve national, regional and local emissions-reduction goals linked to transnational environmental accords, and stand as laboratories of ‘green culture’. The 74 approved eco-neighbourhoods are tasked with reducing their area’s carbon footprint, spurring urban renewal and economic development, and improving residents’ daily lives. Rudolph explores the tests and trials of ‘green culture’, examining what ‘improving daily life’ means, exactly, to ÉcoQuartier planners and residents. She argues that the French state’s belief in spatial determinism remains strong but that top–down efforts to change norms and behaviours encounter resistance from the residents.

Clearly, the French appetite for creativity and innovation remains strong. State initiatives remain a powerful component, especially in funding large-scale interventions such as urban planning, but also in providing investment in culture industries such as cinema. In both the cases discussed here, support for cultural innovation is closely linked to France’s broader international aims of enhancing its leading role in the wider world. But outside the orbit of state sponsorship, the drive for innovation and creativity is every bit as visible in the cultural life of the country. Our contributors have identified the role of powerful women in steering new developments, of individual writers and musicians weaving their art from complex networks of transnational meanings, and of intellectuals transmuting bygone debates into new concepts for a changed world. The picture that emerges is a continuing urge to embrace modernity, look to the future and do new things.

The examples offered in this special issue have in common that they provide challenges to the way things are, whether in changing behaviours, tastes, perceptions or understandings. Not all of the innovations are unrelieved successes, and not all will be enduring, but it is in the nature of a laboratory that lessons can be learned from failures as much as from successes. In this sense, the authors demonstrate convincingly that France remains a vibrant laboratory of culture in the modern world.