Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (October Books) [ペーパーバック]

This book does a good job of analyzing themes of modernization, Americanization, and construction of a new French identity in the period c.1955-65. A non-academic reader may be put off by the opening chapter, but after that should be able to follow the author's examples and arguments. Much of the book deals with movies, novels, magazines, and advertisements and how they display the author's themes (film stills, photos, and advertisements dot the book). In the final chapter the author moves on to discussions of theoretical work of the period. I was particularly interested in the (Marxist) critique of Structuralism and how it reflects the technocratic, "post-historical" mindset illustrated earlier in the book. This raises interesting questions of how radical thinkers from that tradition can become, although the author doesn't follow this thread to later decades. The clearest connections the author draws to present-day France are in attitudes to minorities, a point re-enforced at several points in the text.

The main quibble I have with the book is that the process of decolonization could be dealt with in greater depth. There are sections on theorists of decolonization and Algerians migrating to France, but only brief mentions of pied noirs moving to France and post-62 relations with the former colonies. Apart from that, the author successfully explores the themes raised in the text.

From the Jean Baudrillard school of concise and sexy theory comes Kristin Ross's book on French culture, a culture confronted with American post-war consumerism, cars, couples, L'Express magazine, structuralism as well as the political decolonialization of Algeria and other former colonies. In this substantial inter-disciplinary work, Ross interrogates films (Mon Oncle, Pierrot le Fou, Un Homme et Une Femme) and advertisements ("Tout s'y reflete") that reflect (Tout s'y reflete) the rapid colonialization of the every day life of the French bourgeois. A sound resource for students of French history or culture, Francophonephiles, or just the average person wanting an intelligent, direct book on an extensive and interesting topic, will not need to look further than Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, which gives good clean intellectual mileage per the word.

In Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture, Kristin Ross explores the interrelation between decolonization and modernization in France. Ross' central argument is that during the rapid modernization that occurred between the late 1950s and the early 1960s, the French government engaged in a form of domestic colonialism. The primary focus of this neocolonialism was the French domestic sphere, however it also significantly affected conceptions of cleanliness and masculinity. To support this argument, Ross relies primarily on periodicals, literature, and film.
In the first chapter, Ross examines the role automobiles played in the modernization or Americanization of France and the transformation of French society's understanding of space and time. First, the mass-production of motorized vehicles required a modern industrial sector and cheap unskilled labor. Many automakers secured this labor from the native populations of France's colonial possessions. Second, the mass ownership and use of automobiles in France necessitated the creation of new roads and technology as well as a change in the way that urban planners designed cities. By increasing individual mobility and the speed of life, the mass ownership of cars in France also changed the way that French people viewed space and time. The French understood space differently because motorized vehicles decreased the time it took to travel long distances. In addition, the automobile changed the French people's understanding of time by quickening the pace of their lives.
As a result, Ross argues that automobiles were important themes in French society and culture during the age of decolonization. According to Ross, the role of the car in modern France is demonstrated in two ways. First, the French press gave great publicity to violent car accidents that resulted in fatalities. Second, while filmmakers initially portrayed the automobile as a positive feature of Americanization, in the latter years of this era realist directors increasingly portrayed cars as both evil and destructive to the French way of life. For instance, in Robert Dhéry's La Belle Américaine (1961) the protagonist, named Marcel, purchases a large American luxury car only to become the victim of a series of catastrophes including the loss of his job. Marcel's bad luck only ends after his wife crashes the vehicle into the back of an ice cream cart. Similarly, in Christiane Rochefort's novel Les stances à Sophie (1963), an automobile again plays a primary role in a series of disastrous events. In this novel, a violent car crash not only kills one of the principle characters, it also leads another character to cheat on and eventually divorce her husband. Ross argues that Dhéry and Rochefort's negative depiction of motorized vehicles reveals their contempt for the rapid modernization taking place in France and the changes it caused in French society.
Ross devotes the second chapter to examining the role that cleanliness and hygiene played in French society during the era of Americanization. Specifically, as the French empire ended with the independence of Algeria in 1962, the French government replaced its efforts to control its colonies, with an effort to control domesticity. Ross demonstrates this by examining the contents of French women's magazines. Advertisements in these publications, featuring sterile white kitchen appliances implicitly emphasized the connection between modernization and the cleanliness of the domestic sphere. In addition, articles like Franoise Giroud's "Is the French Woman Clean" (1951), published in Elle magazine, called attention to the fact that while the garter belts of French mothers went unwashed for several years, they still instructed their sons to wash their hands before every meal. French realist films also extolled the virtues of a clean household. For instance, according to Ross, one of the primary characters In Jacque Tati's Mon Oncle (1958), was an "obsessionally clean housewife" (105). In these ways, Ross argues that the media linked modernization with cleanliness.
Ross goes on to assert that French society's preoccupation with cleanliness symbolically mirrored the French government's use of torture in Algeria, which she describes as "violent house-cleaning" (108). For instance, French soldiers often used common household items as instruments of torture. In one case they used a toothbrush and glass bottle to sexually assault an innocent Algerian woman. In another incident, French troops in Algeria used a telephone to administer shock torture. The media in France also likened the military's use of torture to housecleaning. The most direct example cited comes from a popular cartoon from the period of a French soldier holding another man underwater in a bathtub next to a box of laundry detergent. The reference to the French military's use of torture in Algeria is obvious. Thus, Ross argues that both French women in the metropole and French men in Algeria literally and metaphorically "cleaned house." Modernization required the French people to clean their homes and their colonies.
In the third chapter, this author analyzes the metaphorical role that the concept of the "French couple" played in the dialogue of modernization and decolonization. For instance, politicians, novelists, and social commentators all likened the relationship between France and Algeria to a marriage, and their separation to a divorce. However, Maurice Thorez, a communist politician, first used this metaphor during the 1930s. Additionally, while French couples literally provided both the current consumers and the future workforce required by modern France, the concept of the "French couple" also had a figurative significance in the metropole. Specifically, Ross alleges that the "French couple" offered a "peculiarly French" alternative to the American and Soviet models (127). According to Ross, contemporary films and media images of famous heterosexual couples, such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, exemplified the ideal French couple. Ross also argues that the concept of the "French couple" led to the geographic segregation of French society. For instance, novels such as Beauvoir's Les Belles Images (1966) celebrated couples that moved from the suburbs to the modernized parts of Paris. Influenced by this ideal of the contemporary popular culture, middle class "French couples" moved to the modernized areas of Paris and the subsequent rent increases forced the working class, and especially immigrants, to move to the suburbs.
The final chapter of Fast Cars, Clean Bodies explores the restructuring of male gender roles during the period of modernization. Ross identifies three alternatives to the male gender role that prevailed prior to the modernization of France. The first is Frantz Fanon's "new man," which unites the characteristics of both the colonial native and European administrator. The second is Roland Barthes' "structural man." This new model of masculinity was based upon the idea that men gained significance through the physical environments in which they lived. Ross describes the third category of new man as a "jeune cadre." The male bureaucrats who authored and oversaw the implementation of neocolonial policies in the metropole epitomized this model of masculinity. The common characteristic of all three alternatives to the traditional male gender role is that they are all products of decolonization and modernization. The author ends this chapter with a brief discussion of how each of these new men exacerbated the social problems inherent during this period. Specifically, these men were part of the middle class that distanced themselves from the new wave of immigrants, using the physical structures of neighborhoods and automobiles. Therefore, Americanization resulted in the inequality that it was touted to resolve.
While some recent scholarship implicitly supports Ross' argument that the unraveling of France's empire led to a form of neocolonialism in the metropole, such as Francois Gaspard's A Small City in France and Tom Sheppard's The Invention of Decolonization, this work has several significant flaws. First, a great deal of the evidence that Ross uses to support her argument is anecdotal. For example, while Ross argues that many films portrayed automobiles negatively, she does not provide actual examples of the ill effects of cars or car-culture on modern France. Second, the author provides very few concrete examples of the central government's involvement in the colonization of the metropole. Instead, this author focuses on the role that women's magazines, films, and literature played in proliferating the colonization of domestic France. Third, Ross almost completely fails to acknowledge or examine the role that increased immigration played in the restructuring of French society during this period. Fourth, Ross does not provide English captions for the numerous illustrations in this monograph. In a few cases, she even neglects to connect the illustrations to her argument. Fifth, she incorrectly refers to Robert Dhery as Jacques Dhery (50). Sixth, Ross provides little or no summaries of the arguments made in individual chapters or the text as a whole. As a result, the reader is left to draw his or her own conclusions about the relationship between the chapters and the author's central thesis that during the rapid modernization that occurred between the late 1950s and the early 1960s, France engaged in a form of domestic colonization.