France's folly, France's Follies

If there is such a thing as national character, one of the most salient features of the French is a dragging world weariness, the jaded, unforgiving eye they cast on foreigners, their politicians and one another. Charles Rearick's book makes you understand why.

It begins and ends with the two World Wars which shaped modern France; the first with its wholesale slaughter of a generation in the trenches, the second with the still lingering shame of collaboration. In the songs and films Rearick chronicles, the wars inspired alternating strains of realism, escapism and denial.

During both conflicts, the government censored songs and films deemed harmful to morale. The propaganda worked - for a while - and the myth of the merry poilu soldier singing "Quand Madelon" as he marched into battle took hold. When reality set in, France suffered a terrible disillusionment which it never shook off. "They've told you: `make children'," a female singer told her cafe-concert audience in the 1920s. "We'll make as many kids as you want - if war never comes back to take them from us."

The first sign of cultural realism was Abel Gance's 1919 film, J'accuse, in which the dead rise up from the battlefield of the Great War and advance frighteningly towards the viewer. But like the US in Vietnam, it took a decade before the French could again bear to relive the experience, flocking to films such as Leon Poirier's Verdun, Visions d'Histoire and the 1930 Hollywood production of All Quiet on the Western Front. In between, there was the escapism of the dance halls and music halls, with their extravagant shows of barebreasted, plumed women.

Between the wars, Maurice Chevalier and Mistinguett - two faubourien children of the working class neighbourhoods of Paris - reigned supreme on the French stage and cinema. When Chevalier received the highest salary in Hollywood, all France shared in his triumph. Years later, after he supported Marechal Petain and praised collaboration with the Germans, France shared his disgrace.

The new stars of second World War vintage - Edith Piaf, Jean Gabin, Yves Montand - would also rise from Paris back streets. The characters they played and sang about were familiar cliches: women were prostitutes, ingenues or devoted wives and mothers. The standard first World War protagonist was the poilu (literally "hairy one") soldier, with his moustache, pipe and pinard (wine). He was replaced by a more enduring French type, the rebellious debrouillard rule breaker. The French also had a soft spot for honest losers, but in popular culture the rude voyou remained the male archetype.

Charles Rearick likens his book to a family photo album. The resemblance between generations is powerful, and this splendid portrayal of French character may give the reader a recurring sense of deja vu. For example, Paris critics were already decrying the nefarious influence of American culture in the 1920s. The first weekend traffic jams around Paris were reported between the wars. Rearick's descriptions of the left/ right polarisation in the 1930s are startlingly prescient of recent French politics.

I couldn't help thinking of last spring's 60,000-strong Strasbourg protest march against the racist National Front when I read of the anti-fascist marches of the mid30s, ". . . a cortege that went on for five or six hours . . . a slowly advancing sea of workers' caps, raised fists, banderoles, and banners". Today, as in the 1930s, the French left struggles to reclaim symbols of nationhood hijacked by the extreme right: Joan of Arc, the tricolour and the Marseillaise.

Lara Marlowe is the Irish Times's France correspondent