Paul Bleton Machiavelli’s Angels Hiding in Plain Sight: Media Culture and French Spy Fiction of the Cold War Centripetal and globalizing forces shifted French pre-World War Two espionage fiction away from nationalism and towards the protection of the Western block. It developed within an ideological ground: a rightist core made of anti-Communism, racism, radical conservatism, and elitism. It expressed itself through heroes rep- resenting those values, elite fighters, alpha males, master spies, who seemed to inherit emblems of nobility, and were confident enough to assume that they lived in a natural order of society, which did not require explicit assessment; they showed complacence toward ex-colonial empire and smugness toward non-white people, and were less at war with communist theory than with the KGB’s perverse agenda. From a narrative point of view, paperback espionage fiction had inherited Manichaeism from popular literature, and two main types of plot from adjacent or previous genres: adventure (rush and pursuit), often in exotic places, and investi- gation (in the wake of a mystery). The former fitted perfectly the anti-communist program and the latter easily converted topical contemporary news as well as old ideological themes into fiction.1 Adventure: In Agitation clandestine,2 a succession of unfortunate accidents alert a KGB spy ring in Cuba. Anton Blasick decides to eliminate whoever may put the ring in jeopardy. A killing game will ensue fought by him and his nemesis, the French agent Philippe Larsan, who naturally will win in the end. Investigation: In OSS 117 n’est pas aveugle,3 in order to understand the successive disappearan- ces of three scientists working in a military facility, OSS (Office of Strategic Services) agent 117 assumes a false identity, works his way into the Russian-sponsored plot, thinks he has found a culprit only to discover that he has been out-maneuvered by the real traitor. Thanks to a doctored prestidigitation show, he succeeds in unmasking the real traitor. 1 For instance, notwithstanding his age, a reader of André Favières’, Menace asiatique, La Loupe Espionage 64 (Lyon: Jacquier,1958); Gilles Morris-Dumoulin’s, Péril jaune sur la Place rouge, Jean Bruce 63 (Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1960); or John Hery’s, La Guerre des jonques, Espionnage 109 (Paris: Presses noires, 1967). would not have failed to recognize the ancient Yellow Peril ideol- ogem, dating back to Kaiser Wilhelm II, which already had been extensively in use in French popular literature. 2 Michel Carnal, Agitation clandestine, Un Mystère. Jean Bruce 56 (Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1960). 3 Jean Bruce, OSS 117 n’est pas aveugle, Un Mystère, 320 (Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1957). DOI 10.1515/9783110496178-007, © 2020 Paul Bleton, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 License. Machiavelli’s Angels Hiding in Plain Sight 135 In order to secure its readership’s loyalty, the genre had to rely on diversity as well. It was to be found especially in the way each book boasted about being related to the true secret Cold War. For most, it was only an allusive background, others were technical footnote-ridden, or instilled with punctual verisimilitudes trying to establish links between fiction and actual episodes of the Cold War, Opérations combinées4 uses information on US Air Force spy-balloons. But the narrative is par- simonious on them, and gives them only a peripheral incidence. The plot, after American agents have swiftly realized that the intelligence they get from those balloons is actually controlled by the Soviets, concentrates on unmasking the Russian spy ring which had succeeded in countering their technology. or conveyed to their readers the impression of having been sternly and exten- sively researched (e.g. Claude Rank) – in any case, lacking the necessary factual information, the reader would only be able to speculate on the appropriateness of the writer’s knowledge and the reality of the secret war. In a totally different direction, some novels would play popular intertextual games. Karacho Karachi5 offers a dark and unusual variation on the old melodrama theme of the baby kidnapping. In Pakistan, which is courted by Americans and British to install a missile base in order to contain China’s menace, information has leaked from secret meetings. Two hundred pages later, Rambert, a nato counter-spy, will unmask an improbable traitor: the trisomic son of Mouhrad Khan, the Pakistan officer representing his country in those negotiations. Actually, the beloved son was not Mouhrad Khan’s but a Chinese midget agent surgically accommodated to delude the poor father – after the trisomic son had been discreetly disposed of. On another level, some writers thought the dark universe of espionage should be taken with a grain of humorous salt (e.g. Charles Exbrayat). Thus French spy fiction does not depart much from its British and American counterparts. Intimately linked to the Cold War, isn’t it a case of media culture shaping national and social homogeneity, spy versus spy as riffs on the anti-com- munist program? Some of the studies dedicated to the genre seem to agree.6 Nevertheless, instead of elaborating on such a disappointing similarity for 4 G. Livandert [Jean Libert and Gaston Van den Panhuyse], Opérations combinées. Espionnage, No. 260 (Paris: Fleuve noir, 1960). 5 Jean Crain, Karacho, Karachi, Espionnage, No. 20 (Paris: Presses noires, 1964). 6 Erik Neveu, L’Idéologie dans le roman d’espionnage (Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1985); Paul Bleton, Les Anges de Machiavel. Essai sur l’espionnage, Etudes paralittéraires (Québec: Nuit blanche éditeur, 1994). 136 Paul Bleton English-speaking readers, this essay will develop a two-pronged argument which will start from the assumption that Cold War anti-Communism was at the core of the French espionage fiction. First, instead of simply describing Cold War themes from the genre, it will focus on the obvious relationship between the Cold War and the genre from the composite point of view that can be culled from the bulk of espionage fiction – using an infra-thematic approach, so to speak. Building up a cultural history from a material ground and the history of cultural industries, it will attempt to reveal the underlying complexity of the situation. Second, whatever the centrality of anti-Communist politics may have been, the success of spy fiction itself suggests a link to another type of consideration: the relevance of such stories for their public. How did fiction set in such an eso- teric professional milieu, fighting secret battles involving enigmatic state appa- ratuses, about disquieting, apocalyptic, but fuzzy objectives come to catch the public fancy, especially within a very exoteric mass culture? This essay will contend that, as powerful as the centripetal and globalizing forces which built Western bilateral representations of the Cold War around a political, anti-Com- munist core may have been, they could not paper over new and inherited ideolog- ical differences, accentuated by their own centrifugal impetus, by their own het- erogeneous vehicles (semiotic, generic, discursive…), and by their own cultural configurations, each of them not only complex, but also evolving. The Cold War as Cultural Industry The publishing industry of popular literature emerging from the Second World War was profoundly different from the one that existed before. Even though a few pre-war players survived, the spirit of the time had drastically changed, since French pop culture had elected America as a possible cultural model: this was the driving force behind the development of pop genres aimed at male readers (especially science fiction, crime thrillers, and espionage). In that general context, and since spy thrillers were seldom published hors-collection, a quick survey shows a massive production in the 20 first years of the period. Almost immediately, the paperback format asserted itself, and even though provincial publishers could try their luck for a time, the Parisian gravitational center rapidly took command of the industry. Here is a chronology of the larger collections, stating the quantity of respective titles.7 7 The word collection may be a faux-ami. In French, and in this paper, it will mean an ensemble of books that their publisher regroups around a common generic characteristic very obviously Machiavelli’s Angels Hiding in Plain Sight 137 Table 1: Important collections chronological collections number of rank titles 1. Fleuve noir, Espionnage 1951 to 1987 1904 titles 2. L’Arabesque Espionnage 1954 to 1970 622 titles 3. Librairie des Champs-Elysees, Le Masque, Dossiers secrets 1956 19 titles to 1957 Le Masque, Roman d’Espionnage 1957 to 1961 33 titles Le Masque, Espionnage 1961 to 1963 19 titles Le Masque, Espionnage 1962 to 1964 15 titles Le Masque, Service Secret 1964 to 1965 37 titles 4. Atlantic (Grand Damier) Top Secret 1955 to 1962 198 titles 5. Les Elfes, Top Secret 1963 17 titles 6. Galic, Carnets des services secrets 1961 to 1964 65 titles Contre-espionage 1961 to 1962 21 titles 7. Presses noires, espionnage 1964 to 1970 176 titles 8. Euredif Espionnage 1969 to 1972 33 titles 9. Presses Internationales, Jet Espionnage 1959 to 1965 73 titles Choc Espionnage 1962 to 1963 23 titles Inter-Espionnage 1964 to 1971 210 titles Inter-Choc Espionnage 1964 to 1965 19 titles 10. Fayard, L’aventure de notre temps 1956 to 1965 43 titles 11. Flammarion, Agent secret 1964 to 1966 31 titles L’Aventure de notre temps (Fayard) featured only one author, Pierre Nord, who was already a well-known espionage writer in the 1930’s, and had himself been a practitioner of the Spionspiel. Le Masque (Librairie des Champs-Élysées), which published spy fiction before World War Two only haphazardly, decided to create specialized espionage collection lines in successive guises.