John Shovlin, Trading with the Enemy. Britain, France, and the 18th-Century Quest for a Peaceful World Order, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2021, xxxv + 374 pages, ISBN 978-0-300-25356-6
Hoppit, Julian
John Shovlin, Trading with the Enemy. Britain, France, and the 18th-Century Quest for a Peaceful World Order, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2021, xxxv + 374 pages, ISBN 978-0-300-25356-6 - 2024.
80
Within the context of the French Communist Party’s political and cultural aggiornamento, as well as of a reorientation of its youth movement’s propaganda towards mass culture, the communist press created in 1958 the Relais de la chanson française, a musical talent show meant to promote young singers and attract the young masses to the unions of French Communist Youth. The initiative was paradoxical: it recycled traditional structures of communist mobilization, while imitating commercial practices; it aimed at fighting against the deleterious influence of the cultural and media industries but depended upon them for its success; it promoted a legitimist, poetic conception of chanson française, while more and more young music lovers turned to new musical fads. These contradictions fed the disinvestment of orthopraxic militants, who aspired to a purer, more political form of activism: though the Relais de la chanson did help several singers to make a breakthrough, their militant and organizational failure announced the Communist Youth’s shift to a more politicized conception of its propaganda from the mid-1960s on.
John Shovlin, Trading with the Enemy. Britain, France, and the 18th-Century Quest for a Peaceful World Order, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2021, xxxv + 374 pages, ISBN 978-0-300-25356-6 - 2024.
80
Within the context of the French Communist Party’s political and cultural aggiornamento, as well as of a reorientation of its youth movement’s propaganda towards mass culture, the communist press created in 1958 the Relais de la chanson française, a musical talent show meant to promote young singers and attract the young masses to the unions of French Communist Youth. The initiative was paradoxical: it recycled traditional structures of communist mobilization, while imitating commercial practices; it aimed at fighting against the deleterious influence of the cultural and media industries but depended upon them for its success; it promoted a legitimist, poetic conception of chanson française, while more and more young music lovers turned to new musical fads. These contradictions fed the disinvestment of orthopraxic militants, who aspired to a purer, more political form of activism: though the Relais de la chanson did help several singers to make a breakthrough, their militant and organizational failure announced the Communist Youth’s shift to a more politicized conception of its propaganda from the mid-1960s on.
Réseaux sociaux