Through a discussion of France's music scene, David Looseley (2003) demonstrates an interesting relationship between political and popular culture. Despite conventional opinions to the contrary, France boasts a flourishing pop culture, one comparable to that of other western democracies. Even so, compared to other western nations, French academics have displayed a marked lack of interest in launching an intellectual exploration of such topics. Looseley attributes the French's disinclination to consider pop an important aspect of their culture to cultural legitimacy, explaining that the trend is "partly no doubt because of official resistance to Americanisation" but can be more specifically attributed to "the complex way in which the word populaire in la culture populaire is construed in France."
The institutional understanding of la culture populaire provided by France's Ministry of Culture, the country's main source of cultural legitimization, differs importantly from the way the term is generally understood in English-speaking countries. Whereas la culture populaire is usually anthropologically defined as the spontaneous ways in which the members of a society (especially the working class) express themselves through creative and recreational endeavors, Looseley (2003) explains that "in French governmental and some intellectual discourses ... the term has tended to have a more aspirational than anthropological sense, signifying something to be fought for rather than something that already exists."
Looseley calls the phenomenon cultural democratization and traces it back to the aftermath of a French military scandal, the Dreyfus Affair. In 1894 Captain Alfred Dreyfus was wrongfully charged with treason and sentenced to life in prison. Two years after his imprisonment, evidence emerged that pointed to Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy as the actual traitor, but instead of exonerating Dreyfus and convicting Esterhazy, Military officials acquitted Esterhazy and forged documents to reaffirm Dreyfus's supposed guilt. When an open letter, penned by Émile François Zola, was published in the newspaper, the scandal was finally brought to the attention of the public.The news of the military's wrongdoings received a range of passionate responses from the French people, but in the end, Dreyfus was exonerated and restored to his military duties. The aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair saw a new appreciation for intellectuals, like Zola, and a movement to increase access to education, culture, and leisure. This access, which was entrusted to the government, led to the attachment of the epithet "populaire" to relevant activities (e.g., theatre, sports, aviation). Looseley explains: "From then on, for the artists, animateurs and politicians committed to it, la culture populaire tended to signify above all that the working class should have access to cultural, educational and leisure activities previously reserved for a bourgeois elite; it meant a culture brought to people rather than made by them." This, Looseley says, is cultural democratization.
France's first Minister for Cultural Affairs, André Malraux, narrowed the scope of popularization (which was more often called democratisation) so that it referred specifically to the arts. As they emerged, newer forms of music (e.g., rap, pop, rock, techno) were not absorbed into la culture populaire, and were even sometimes met with distain. In the case of rock and roll, which reached France in the 1950s, "its coarseness and air of menace were greeted with dismay, or with the kind of amused paternalism illustrated by de Gaulle’s remark that if rock fans had so much energy they should be building roads" (Looseley, 2003). As stated earlier, the lack of appreciation for modern musical genres as "real culture" has lead to a lack of interest on the part of academics. Elsewhere, music and democratic governance are being brought together to different ends.
While entrusting the government with making art, leisure, and education more accessible to citizens seems like a good way to cultivate an informed and content citizenry, allowing the government to decide what is and isn't "true" culture is unlikely to be well received by many Americans. In fact, American popular culture is paid a great deal of attention not only by the country's academics, who study it's trends, impact, and future directions, but also by many other interest groups (e.g., some clergy spend much time and effort educating their flock of it's dangers), and by the population at large.
References
Looseley, D. (2003). Cultural democratisation and popular music. Modern & Contemporary France, 11(1), 45. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.
Photo Credits
L'Aurore (1898). Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:J_accuse.jpg
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