Renegotiating French Identity Musical Culture and Creativity in France during Vichy and the German Occupation

In Renegotiating French Identity, Jane Fulcher addresses the question of cultural resistance to the German occupation and Vichy regime during the Second World War. Nazi Germany famously stressed music as a marker of national identity and cultural achievement, but so too did Vichy. From the opera to the symphony, music did not only serve the interests of Vichy and German propaganda: it also helped to reveal the motives behind them, and to awaken resistance among those growing disillusioned by the regime. Using unexplored Resistance documents, from both the clandestine press and the French National Archives, Fulcher looks at the responses of specific artists and their means of resistance, addressing in turn Pierre Schaeffer, Arthur Honegger, Francis Poulenc, and Olivier Messiaen, among others. This book investigates the role that music played in fostering a profound awareness of the cultural and political differences between conflicting French ideological positions, as criticism of Vichy and its policies mounted.

Jane F. Fulcher is Professor of Musicology at the University of Michigan and the author of French Cultural Politics and Music from the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War (1999) and The Composer As Intellectual: Music and Ideology in France 1914-1940, among other publications. She has also served as a visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The new historiography of Vichy and recent theoretical insights: implications for study of the music created and performed

Recent historiographic insights into the regime's conflicting visions and evolution
Initial new directions in larger studies of Vichy culture
New issues: dual surveillance, the complex bureaucratic matrix, and the cultural field
Vichy's musical culture and the still looming questions: what did result, when, and where?
Concomitant theoretical issues: how were musical works inscribed, framed, and read?
Public and creative responses: the question of collective and individual French identity
What constituted resistance in music, and what kinds of innovations did it foster?
Reformulating older questions and posing new ones

1. The essential political and institutional background

Beyond a monolithic view of Vichy and its doctrine of the Révolution Nationale
Vichy and its relation to the Germans
Vichy's brand of patriotism and nationalism
Beneath the apparent traditionalism
The evolution of the regime and the significant markers
German and Vichy repression, and the development of the resistance
Vichy's reconstruction of French identity
Vichy's negotiations of French cultural identity
Vichy and the question of the French national heritage, or cultural tradition
The limits allowed by the Germans in the reconfiguration of French national identity
Vichy's cultural institutions and the divergent, evolving mandates
A consistent Vichy cultural agenda?
Beyond conceptions of a Vichy patriotic "double game"
A Vichy musical program? Its evolving aims and the musical field
The role of Ministers of National Education and of the Secrétaire Générale in music
The role of the Germans and their interest in concerts and in the musical press
German and French broadcasts of classical concerts
The Germans and the Paris Conservatoire
The Germans and intervention in French recordings
Vichy's own constraints and shifting goals in music
Vichy "experts" in music, and the case of Jacques Rouché
Another Vichy "expert"-Alfred Cortot
Vichy and its goals in recordings
Vichy's corporate organization of the musical profession
Vichy and state commissions in music
The Case of the opéra: Rouché's initial latitude but growing Vichy and German Pressures
Vichy's interest in the Conservatoire and its regional branches
Subversion within institutions and performance venues
The development of the musical resistance and its response both to the Germans and to Vichy

2. Re-inscribing, framing, and subverting an operatic icon: Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande

The double advantage of both Berlioz and Debussy
Pelléas: its nature, style, and the initial French reception in 1940
Désormière's "classic" interpretation in a still relatively autonomous musical field
The 1940 production and the opera's enunciation within the context
Ambiguity, liminality, and the opera's impact at Vichy's start
Pelléas at Vichy: refocusing the opera's national significance through performance
The recording of Pelléas and its increasing dissonance with the new discursive framing
Resistance responses to the Franco-German cultural discourse
Pelléas and the battle over national memory: the 1942 commemoration and production in Paris
The discursive framing and context of the 1942 production of Pelléas
Vichy's political turn, mounting resistance, and the 1943 Debussy commemoration
The Resistance appropriation of Debussy and of Pelléas
Debussy as emblematic of authentic French classicism
Debussy and Pelléas as cultural emblems of liberation
From propaganda to national healing: Debussy in the reconstruction of cultural memory

3. From the legal to the illegal: Schaeffer's journey toward resistance and artistic exploration

Vichy's attempt to remake French youth and Schaeffer's own personal agenda
Radio-Jeunesse and Vichy's new sound culture
Schaeffer's quest to make tradition dynamic in Jeune France
Jeune France's organization and range of projects
Jeune France and Mounier's "revolutionary humanism"
Jeune France and the creative curation of tradition
Musical innovation within Schaeffer's Jeune France
Schaeffer's movement from the legal to the illegal
Schaeffer's subjective re-assessment and reflection on the "language of things"
Schaeffer's search for an "invisible theater" and new meanings, or realms of perception
Schaeffer and the Studio d'Essai: from new perceptual fields to resistance

4. The soft or hard borders of French identity: Honegger's iconic role and subjectivity during Vichy

Honegger omnipresent
Honegger's modernism and the modernist strain condoned by both Vichy and the Germans
Honegger's supporters and their ideological trajectories
The evolution of the French fascist aesthetic and Honegger's complex relation to it
Gaston Bergery and his support for Honegger
From state collaboration to collaborationism: the fine line and Honegger's symbolism
Music and the goal of the group collaboration
Honegger and the musical synthesis promoted by later 1941
The composer's dual cultures and his style in Antigone
The original material inscription, enunciation, and reception of the opera
The context for the selection of Antigone at the Paris Opera
Antigone's physical and ideological re-inscription at the Opéra in early 1943
The multivalent potential of the opera's text and style
The critical and public reception of Antigone at the Paris Opera in 1943
The performative impact of Antigone in 1943 Paris
Honegger's search for identity in Vichy and occupied France
Honegger's contradictions as critic
The Second Symphony and Honegger's subjective conundrum
Monologic or Dialogic? The critical reception of the Second Symphony
Honegger the resistant? His postwar sanctions

5. Poulenc's metamorphosis: his journey towards resistance and a stylistic counter-discourse

From one nationalism to another
Poulenc at Vichy's dawn
Vichy traditionalism in Les Animaux modèles?
From the search for personal authenticity to a new political awareness
Resistance nationalism and its artistic goals
Theories and models of French musical resistance
Poulenc's search for his own resistance style
Exploring the tactic of stylistic disruption: Poulenc's Sonata for Violin and Piano
Poulenc's turn to the literary resistance's stylistic paradigms
Metamorphosis and its meaning in Poulenc's Figure humaine
The importance of trajectories and of symbolic meanings within their context

6. Messiaen in a Catholic Church divided: spiritual authority, subjective agency, and artistic breakthrough

Messiaen's refusal and his nonconformist background
Mobilization, capture, and creativity
Internment, internal liberty, and Messiaen's Quatuor
Levels of utterance in Messiaen's Quatuor
Reactions to the Quatuor and to its textual framing
Release and recruitment into Schaeffer's "Band of Christian Democrats"
Messiaen's artistic explorations in Portique pour une fille de France
The politics of Messiaen's appointment to the Paris Conservatoire
Performance of and support for Messiaen's previous compositions
Messiaen's new circles and private commissions
Vichy's political direction, division within the church, and Messiaen's creative choices
Sartre, Messiaen, Hello, and subjective choice
New content and approaches to form in the Visions de l'Amen
Responses to the challenge of Messiaen's Visions de l'Amen
Messiaen's turn to resistance themes and models
Man and God in the Trois petites liturgies de la presence divine
The Resistance embrace of Messiaen and of his work

Conclusion: Vichy's shifting cultural goals and tactics: the results, the responses, and how to perceive them

Notes
Bibliography
Index