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Copyright by Valérie Masson 2017 The Dissertation Committee for Valérie Masson Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Bridging the Gap between Center and Periphery: La région as a Medium to Thinking the Nation in George Sand, Guy de Maupassant, and Marcel Pagnol Committee: Alexandra Wettlaufer, Supervisor Carl Blyth Caroline Frick Hervé Picherit Lynn Wilkinson Bridging the Gap between Center and Periphery: La région as a Medium to Thinking the Nation in George Sand, Guy de Maupassant, and Marcel Pagnol by Valérie Masson Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August 2017 Dedication To my family and friends who have supported me with my work throughout the years. Acknowledgements I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Alexandra Wettlaufer, my supervisor, who has continuously encouraged me to pursue my academic career when I had doubts about my aptitude and the quality of my work. I thank her for taking the time to provide me with insightful comments and give me guidance throughout this dissertation. I thank as well my committee for reading my work and encouraging me in this project. v Bridging the Gap between Center and Periphery: La région as a Medium to Thinking the Nation in George Sand, Guy de Maupassant, and Marcel Pagnol Valérie Masson, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2017 Supervisor: Alexandra Wettlaufer This project examines how the division between Paris and la province has evolved over the course of a century, approximately 1850-1950, to give way to the territory of la région and its ideological construction. I examine how French identity has been shaped in reference to la région as a place of essence which has led to the construction of a myth of authentic France or France profonde. Focusing on three authors, George Sand (1804-76), Guy de Maupassant (1850-93) and Marcel Pagnol (1895-1974), each of whom wrote popular works that focused on a different region of France, I explore the evolution of the representation of la région as it was constructed according to the period of national crisis and the changing definition of the French identity. Applying the correlation between le peuple and the nation as formulated by Jules Michelet to Sand’s “romans champêtres,” as well as Ernest Renan’s insistence of France’s cultural heritage to Maupassant and Pagnol, I argue that the small community offers these authors the opportunity to reflect in their works on the nation. I contend that these authors have been misread as regionalist artists whose representation is limited to the defense of the cultural heritage of their region. vi Instead, as I demonstrate, la région is used by Sand, Maupassant and Pagnol as a frame to comment on the community and the nation at large, and critique or defend its social practices. vii Table of Contents Introduction: Moving la région to the Center of French National Identity .............1 Center and Periphery.......................................................................................1 La région as lieu de mémoire ........................................................................11 Regional vs. regionalist writing ....................................................................16 Imagining the community: From the local to the national ............................21 Chapter 1: Constructing a National Myth of Origin in George Sand’s “romans champêtres”...................................................................................................26 La région in the National Historiography .....................................................33 The Temporal Displacement of la province .................................................37 George Sand’s regional ethnography ............................................................41 Resisting the Spatial Hierarchy of Center and Periphery .............................46 Mythology in the “romans champêtres” .......................................................51 Myth and the Sacred .....................................................................................57 Origin in the “romans champêtres” ...............................................................61 From the Collective to the Individual ...........................................................71 Chapter 2: From Nature to Artifice: Cultural Identity as an Urban Product .........78 The Urbanization of the Countryside: the Environs of Paris ........................81 The Sensualism of Nature .............................................................................87 Consuming the Pastoral ................................................................................96 The commodification of Nature through art .................................................99 Performing Identity .....................................................................................106 From Regional Stereotypes to Universal Human Nature ...........................112 Reshaping Traditional Codes of Representation .........................................120 Defending individualism against collective laws .......................................124 Cultural Identity and Patrimonial Roots .....................................................129 Chapter 3: Imagining the Community in Pagnol’s Films ....................................136 La Région’s Ideological Discourse .............................................................139 The Return to the Land ...............................................................................142 viii Provence as home for Pagnol and his cinema .............................................150 Peasants into Farmers: Changes in the Relation to the Land in Jofroi .......156 National Unity in Response to the Rise of Fascism in Europe ...................159 Pagnol’s Propositions for Social Reforms ..................................................167 Manon des sources as a Moral Tale of Fraternity.......................................174 Provence Made into Heritage......................................................................181 Conclusion: la région: Past or Present ? ..............................................................191 Bibliography ........................................................................................................201 ix Introduction: Moving la région to the Center of French National Identity CENTER AND PERIPHERY As he travelled through rural France partly on missions of exploration, partly to prepare a survey of the country’s rural populations, economist Adolphe Blanqui was above all struck by the profound differences between the inhabitants of the French countryside and those of the French capital. In his preliminary notes of 1851, he thus insisted that France was a nation where “deux peuples différents vivent sur le même sol une vie si différente qu’ils semblent étrangers l’un à l’autre, même s’ils sont unis par les liens de la centralisation la plus impérieuse qu’il eût jamais existé.”1 What Blanqui refers to here is the extreme diversity of the living conditions, becoming ever more pronounced with the rise of capitalism and industrialization, between the population living in rural France and in the capital, the nexus of the country’s political, economic and cultural life. Moreover, France’s multiple regions offered such a variety of cultures and states of development that it was difficult to imagine them as forming a single nation. Therein lay the challenge of constructing a French national identity that could recognize and value regional specificities through local patriotism while ensuring the unity of the nation by promoting national allegiance. 1 Eugen Weber, La fin des terroirs. La modernisation de la France rurale 1870-1914 (Paris: Fayard, 1983) 25. 1 The centralization in place since the establishment of power in the capital had created a hierarchy of space which opposed the center – identified as its capital -- to the periphery, considered as the rest of the country. La province referred to that periphery. Encompassing France’s multiple regions and their singular cultural identity, la province gathered them as one whole as the collective noun suggests. It was defined in opposition to Paris, therefore as the negation of the characteristics attributed to the capital. The dichotomy between center and periphery originated with the centralization of power in the capital or nearby Versailles, which under the absolute monarchy turned la province into as space of deprivation due to the subjects’ distance from the monarch. Constructed as a space of obscurantism, an anxiety of contamination accompanied prolonged stays in la province by seventeenth-century Parisian subjects such as Mme de Sévigné who during her short exile in Brittany, feared to lose the use of French because of her contact with provincials whom she referred as “gens de l’autre monde.”2 If provincials were despised or mocked in some of the writings of the ancien régime because of the stigma associated with this space, la province became a topos in nineteenth-century texts, turning provincials into a type. The massive project of the physiologies of Les français peints par eux-mêmes illustrates this tendency. Presenting itself as an inventory of the different types of individuals of the society of the July Monarchy, the physiologies, although mostly focused on the urban context, devotes nevertheless three