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UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) Europeanising spaces in Paris, ca. 1947-1962 McDonnell, H.M. Publication date 2014 Document Version Final published version Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): McDonnell, H. M. (2014). Europeanising spaces in Paris, ca. 1947-1962. General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl) Download date:30 Sep 2021 EUROPEANISING SPACES IN PARIS, ca. 1947-1962 ACADEMISCH PROEFSCHRIFT ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam op gezag van de Rector Magnificus prof. dr. D.C. van den Boom ten overstaan van een door het college voor promoties ingestelde commissie, in het openbaar te verdedigen in de Agnietenkapel op woensdag 12 maart 2014, te 10:00 uur door Hugh Malachy McDonnell geboren te Lincoln, Verenigd Koninkrijk Promotiecommissie Promotores: prof. dr. M.J. Wintle prof. dr. M.D. Rosello Co-Promotor: dr. S.M. Dasgupta Overige leden: prof. dr. M. Silverman prof. dr. J.T. Leerssen prof. dr. I.M. van der Poel prof. dr. L.A. Bialasiewicz Faculteit der Geesteswetenschappen Table of contents 2 Acknowledgements…… 4 List of Figures...... 5 Introduction: Europeanising Spaces in Paris, ca. 1947-1962…… 6 Section 1. Paris as a Europeanising Space Chapter 1. The Paris Café as a Europeanising Space ……. 34 Chapter 2. The Paris Home as a Europeanising Space……. 58 Chapter 3. The Paris Street as a Europeanising Space…… 107 Section 2. Political Europeanising Spaces in Paris Chapter 4. Europeanising Spaces and the Mouvement socialiste des états-unis d’Europe, ca. 1947- 1954…… 146 Chapter 5. Europeanising Spaces and the Fédération des étudiants nationalistes 1960-1963…… 186 Section 3. Cultural Europeanising Spaces in Paris Chapter 6. Cultural Europeanising Spaces of Spanish Exiles in Paris…… 218 Chapter 7. Europeanising Spaces in the Work of Jacques Berque...... 247 Chapter 8. Europeanising Spaces in the Work of Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1948-1955…… 288 Conclusion…… 336 Bibliography…… 347 Nederlandse Samenvatting...... 380 3 Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisors, Michael Wintle and Sudeep Dasgupta, for their unfailing support and invaluable commentary and critique. I am also grateful for the Europeanising Spaces project and to the eponymous research group, which made this thesis possible in the first place. At the risk of forgetting people, particular thanks for comments, ideas and assistance to Marjet Brolsma, Mimis Chrysomallis, Muriel Cohen, Claude Cookman, Sara Crombach, Tatjana Das, Stephanie Hare, Dan Hartley, Benjamin Heckscher, Jim House, Hanna Jansen, Eloe Kingma, Patricia Lorcin, Anne-Marie Pathé, Terry Peterson, Nienke Rentenaar, Mireille Rosello, Elizabeth Sloan, and Klaas Stutje. Thanks as well to my other thesis committee members Luiza Bialasiewicz, Joep Leerssen, and Ieme van der Poel. I would also like to express my appreciation to the departments of European Studies, and the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, which facilitated my research in Paris and attendance at conferences. Colleagues within these departments made my work all the more enjoyable and productive, as well as offering valuable comments as my thesis progressed. Its content also benefited from my participation in the 2011 Trans-Atlantic Summer Institute on ‘Violence in the Mediterranean’ at the University of Minnesota, and from comments, help and advice from other participants. I would also like to thank staff at various libraries and archives including the University of Amsterdam; the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam; in Paris: the Bibliothèque de l’institut d’histoire du temps présent, the Bibliothèque national français, the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, and the Fondation nationale des sciences politiques. Centre d’histoire de l’Europe du vingtième siècle; and the British Library in London. Finally, I owe an immeasurable debt to the love and support of my sister, Roseline; my mother, Catherine; and, in loving memory, my father, Leo. 4 5 List of Figures Figure 1: André Fougeron, Atlantic Civilisation (1953) (115) Figure 2: Paris-Match photograph, ‘Heroes of Budapest’ (1956) (122) Figure 3: Map provided for the conference ‘Les missions de l’armée française dans la guerre révolutionnaire d’Algérie, Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (November, 1957) (137) Figure 4: Photograph of graffito, ‘Ici on noie les Algériens’ (1961) (139) Figure 5: Henri Cartier-Bresson, ‘Jakarta, Indonesia’ (1949) (292) Figure 6: Henri Cartier-Bresson, ‘Behind the gare Saint-Lazare’ (1932) (293) Figure 7: Henri Cartier-Bresson, ‘Shanghai, China’ (1949) (309) Figure 8: Henri Cartier-Bresson, ‘Un quartier de Shanghaï a été bombardé par l’aviation du Kuomintang’ (312) Figure 9: Henri Cartier-Bresson, ‘Shanghai’ (315) Figure 10: Henri Cartier-Bresson, ‘Sur le paquebot. Un groupe d’Européens et d’Américains ayant vécu longtemps à Shanghaï’ (319) Figure 11: Henri Cartier-Bresson, ‘Greece’ (1953) (323) Figure 12: Henri Cartier-Bresson, ‘Un hall de l’établissement thermal de Wiesbaden’ (325) Figure 13: Henri Cartier-Bresson, ‘La pancarte autour du cou du jeune homme porte l’inscription “Je cherche du travail, n’importe lequel”’ (326) 6 Introduction: Europeanising Spaces in Paris, ca. 1947-1962 In 1948 Vladimir Jankélévitch, professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne, claimed that the squandering of the opportunity to purge Paris properly of collaborationist elements after the Second World War would not be so tragic but for the fact that one was talking about Paris. As he put it, ‘it would be of no importance if France was Afghanistan. But France is France, Europe’s guide and the conscience of all free men in the entire world; what happens on the banks of the Seine, between the Hotel-de-Ville and la Concorde has a particular importance for man in general.’1 Jankélévitch’s remarks in the journal Les Temps modernes are a useful point of departure for this thesis in indicating the central place, but also the distinctiveness, of Paris in thinking about Europe in this post-war period. The unproblematic straight line that he drew between Paris, France, Europe, and the universal immediately invites critique, of course. But it also implied the question of the space of Europe in the sense of its scope. Europe was, then, to borrow and adapt Frederick Cooper’s argument about France, both less and more than itself.2 Ideas about Europe impacted on and were formed in micro-spaces such as the French capital just as in the wider non-European world. It was often the case that Paris, or spaces within Paris, were in a sense conceived of as a stand-in for Europe as a whole, while Europe was also imagined as constitutively depending on its presence and power in the non-European world. An examination of ‘Europeanising spaces’ is taken to mean an analysis of spaces in Paris in which ideas about Europe were formulated, expressed, exchanged, circulated, and contested 1 Vladimir Jankélévitch, ‘Dans l’honneur et la dignité’, Les Temps modernes (June, 1948), 2259. 2 Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, History, Knowledge (Berkeley & London: University of California Press, 2005), 171. 7 during this post-war period, roughly between the escalation of the Cold War and the end of the Algerian war of decolonisation.3 The concept of space here is broadly conceived to include the physical urban space that Jankélévitch so usefully points to, but also academic scholarship, intellectuals and their interventions, political movements, cultural groups, cultural performances and institutions, journals, literature, manifestos, photographs, and pertinent images. The analysis includes not only explicit interventions about the continent, but also discourse that implicitly called into question the terms of thinking about the meaning of Europe and of Europeanness. ‘Europeanising spaces’ is also taken to have three idiosyncratic definitions: 1. Europeanisation as a process; 2. Europeanisation as the refusal of the closure of the concepts of ‘Europe’ and ‘Europeanness’; and 3. Europeanisation as disclosure, acknowledgement or appropriation of the concepts of ‘Europe’ and ‘Europeanness’. These definitions will be elaborated on later in the introduction. First, though, the rationale for examining discourse about Europe not in Europe as a whole, but in a single European city, Paris, over a period of about fifteen years, is set out. Rationale for the Examination of Europeanising Spaces in Paris Looking at ideas about Europe in the post-war period up until at least the 1960s, one is struck by the confidence with which many took for granted that France was its highest embodiment. A recurring presupposition was that a Europe in which France did not take centre stage would be wholly implausible. And, crucially, by France was meant Paris. Frederick Cooper maintains that at least until the end of the period in question here, France was both narrower and 3 One should note that this conflict was only recognised by the French state as being in fact a war as recently as 1999. 8 wider than the nation. Both culture and politics were highly centralised in Paris from where an ethos of universalism was projected by France the empire-state far beyond its hexagonal frontiers.