Brigitte Bardot As a Transnational Icon and European Integration in the 1950S and 1960S
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Integration by Popular Culture: Brigitte Bardot as a Transnational Icon and European Integration in the 1950s and 1960s By: Dana Whitney Sherwood Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the MA degree in History University of Ottawa © Dana Whitney Sherwood, Ottawa, Canada, 2011 ii Abstract Integration by Popular Culture: Brigitte Bardot as a Transnational Icon and European Integration in the 1950s and 1960s Author: Dana Whitney Sherwood Supervisor: Dr. Eda Kranakis Submitted: 2011 This thesis explores the history of European integration in the 1950s and 1960s from a popular cultural perspective anchored to a central figure from the era, Brigitte Bardot, in order to demonstrate that the peoples of Western Europe were engaged in processes of Europeanization that helped legitimize economic and political unions. Yet, official EU policy’s privileging of one (outdated) mode for understanding culture has handicapped alternative interpretations of a common European cultural heritage, failing to embrace a shared popular culture. Bardot is a suitable icon through which to begin an exploration into the diversity and significance of an integrating postwar European popular culture because she was a microcosm of several broad, transnational trends in postwar Europe including the rise of mass mobility, a major shift in European fashions, new gender constructions, and the explicit politicization of popular culture. Her films, career, lifestyle, and representation(s) provide key axes from which one can pivot into interrelated areas of European culture and societies in this era—pop culture; consumer culture; youth culture; mobility culture; media culture; political culture; and gender relations—demonstrating a widely integrating European popular cultural sphere. Within this context, Bardot was representative of broad postwar societal changes, served as a mass diffusion tool in relating these changes to the people of Europe, and functioned as a driving force in creating new transnational popular cultural forms. In addition, Bardot is a figure useful in understanding iii the relationship between Europe and the United States, while also demonstrating that economics is not separate from culture and popular culture. The Treaty of Rome, ostensibly about economic integration, further enabled the many circulations apparent in Bardot's career—people, goods, information, and ideas—that were already taking place. Furthermore, popular culture was not irrelevant to, or separate from politics and it helps to explain how the escapism and narcissism of European popular consumer culture could generate a rebellious, but sophisticated political consciousness. Western Europe does indeed have a distinct history of shared popular culture, which should be a factor in discussions of ‘Europeanization’ and the legitimacy of the European Union. It is necessary to explore the roots of this shared popular culture so that it does one day form the basis of a longstanding shared popular culture and can become a recognized element supporting the legitimacy of identities in the European Union in more fluid, dynamic ways. iv Acknowledgements I would like to thank Dr. Eda Kranakis for her inspiration, guidance, and support throughout this entire process, without which this work would have never been possible. I would also like to thank Dr. Jeffrey Keshen for his understanding and guidance from the time I first began my studies at the University of Ottawa. In addition, I am grateful to Dr. Boulou Ebanda de B’Béri and AMLAC&S for the research opportunities and financial support provided over the last year and a half. Finally, I would like to thank Aaron, my parents, and the rest of my family for their unending support and encouragement throughout this entire process. v Table of Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgements iv Table of Contents v List of Graphics vi List of Tables vii INTRODUCTION 1 Chapter 1 EUROPEAN MOBILITIES 20 Chapter 2 EUROPEAN FASHION 59 Chapter 3 THE EUROPEAN CHILD-WOMAN 99 Chapter 4 POP POLITICS 128 CONCLUSION 150 Appendix A 156 Bibliography 157 vi List of Images Figure 1 Louis Réard bikini, Paris, July 5, 1946 85 Figure 2 Two-piece swimsuits, Paris, July 16, 1945. 87 Figure 3 Bild Lilli cartoons 107 vii List of Tables Table 1: Aggregate tourist flows 1958, 1964, 1965, and 1966 157 INTRODUCTION At the 8th Franco-German Dialogue meeting in May 2006, Ton Nijuls (Director of the German Institute of Amsterdam) argued that the crises of legitimacy facing the European Union at this time—the rejection of the EU Constitution by France and the Netherlands—was rooted in the fact that “Europe was never a project of the citizens, but of the political elites.”1 Such a statement reveals more about the significant problems in understanding the emergence of an integrated Europe than about the actual legitimacy of the union itself. The framework for understanding national identities (that privileges a clearly defined political identity supported by actively engaged citizens) has been irresponsibly applied to conceptions of frameworks for understanding an integrating Europe. A European identity (or identities) and the overall process of Europeanization does not have to be political, does not have to be entirely unitary, and does not have to conform to bordered space. In fact, “European state building and national formation and the development of the EU should not be elided with Europeanization, for these processes do not always work in tandem.”2 There can be multiple European identities, intersecting, conflicting, and complementing one another and it is through the full assemblage of these shared identities that the building of an engaged political Europe could, and did emerge. Europe then, was a project of its citizens who engaged with and developed different identities through varied levels and avenues of Europeanization at different times and in diverse places across national spaces; the terrain on which to locate this citizen-based 1 “EU legitimacy crisis: Problem of democracy, delivery or perception?” Published May 30, 2006, updated June 1, 2007. http://www.euractiv.com/en/future-eu/eu-legitimacy-crisis-problem-democracy- delivery-perception/article-155620 2 John Borneman and Nick Fowler, “Europeanization,” Annual Review of Anthropology 26 (1997), 492. 2 momentum is the realm of popular culture. The integration of Europe was driven from a far broader and more grass-roots type of Europeanized identity construction based in shared popular cultural forms, symbols, and icons than isolated examination of treaties, governing bodies, and policy formation can explain. The integration of Europe was as much a ‘bottom-up’ as ‘top-down’ process and the forces pushing integration from the bottom-up, rooted in popular culture, require further examination in order to develop a fuller picture of integration in the postwar era. Doreen Massey suggests that ideas of place-identity “are always constructed by reference to the past;” identities are understood in any given present through the layering of many elements that would have seemed foreign in the past.3 Because an integrating trans- European popular cultural space was a new phenomenon during the 1950s and 1960s, it would have indeed seemed ‘foreign’ at the time. Trans-European popular culture and the emergence of an integrated Europe were new concepts, lacking the established pasts that would have enabled Europeans to identify unifying elements. But the popular cultural phenomena that we will explore have histories that are now a half-century (or more) old, and they demand examination, especially in light of the fact that EU policy makers have failed to build a shared popular cultural tradition into the cultural history of Europe. Rather than accept the frequent co-opting of popular cultural phenomena as distinctly national, we can analyze them at the European level. By shifting our focus away from the nation state and layering elements from the past towards a concept of Europe, budding elements of a European identity are revealed. 3 Doreen B. Massey, Space, Place, and Gender, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 8. 3 The present work seeks to explore the history of the popular cultural integration of Europe from the immediate postwar period to 1968—with a specific focus on the period of the mid 1950s to mid 1960s—in order to demonstrate that the peoples of Western Europe were engaged in processes of Europeanization that helped legitimize economic and political unions. This process of Europeanization was impervious to national boundaries and Europe was indeed a project of the citizens, evident in their desire for transnational mobility, the emergence of similar popular cultural constructions across national borders, the increasingly similar tastes in consumer goods, and unified responses to challenges posed from abroad. All of these driving factors were related to popular cultural forms that could not be contained or controlled within sovereign national spaces. It is, however, difficult to locate the common cultural history of Europe for several reasons, including the long-term lack of any cultural policy at the political level, and privileged definitions of culture itself. The European Union and its forebearers did not have an official cultural policy until the 1992 Treaty of Maastricht. Even then, Article 128 stated, “the community shall contribute to the flowering of the cultures of the Member States, while respecting their national and regional