-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Adam C. Stanley, Roxanne Panchasi. Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France between the Wars. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2009. Pp. xi, 203. $39.95, The American Historical Review, Volume 115, Issue 3, June 2010, Pages 902–903, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.115.3.902
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
In this fascinating volume, Roxanne Panchasi seeks to draw salient conclusions about post–World War I French culture via an examination of the ways in which the French in the 1920s and 1930s anticipated what the future portended for themselves, their nation, and the globe. The intention is thus to explore the future as history, as Panchasi notes explicitly at the outset. Citing the value of cultural anticipation as a fertile ground for historical study, she puts a unique twist on the well-established literature regarding memory and commemoration, using those concepts as launching points to suggest that attitudes and images about the future, “a cultural remembrance of things not yet past” (p. 5), can illuminate valuable and significant lessons about interwar French society.
While fiction, film, and cultural criticism provide an important basis for the study, there is as well a sizeable quantity of material from the realms of urban and military planning as well as parliamentary and diplomatic records. The cumulative weight deriving from the integration of such variegated sources makes for a highly persuasive argument. Each chapter in the text analyzes a distinct element of French concerns about the future: the frailties and imperfections of the physical body, and prosthetic devices (both literal and figurative) to compensate for these shortcomings; the perils awaiting the capital city of Paris, whether destruction or unsightly architecture; a foreseen upcoming war requiring strong fortifications and a healthy body politic; the specter of Americanism; and the dangers posed to the long-held international primacy of the French language. In every case, Panchasi looks to uncover what she labels traces and disappearance, namely traces of the future in the present and, at the same time, signs of the impending loss of important cultural characteristics. For instance, the presumed edifices of the future, skyscrapers, were already evident in the aftermath of World War I, but they likewise appeared as a harbinger of the disappearance or diminution of historic sites and architecture vital to French history and culture (strikingly illustrated by the reproduction of interwar photomontages depicting the anticipation of Parisian landmarks such as Notre Dame being dwarfed by neighboring high rises). As this intimates, the tension between tradition and modernity is another critical aspect of Panchasi's work. The balancing act between the maintenance of past practices and cultural markers, on the one hand, and the onslaught of new, modern ideas and realities, on the other, was a vital factor that effected anxieties about the future held by many French in the two interwar decades.
