True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900–1945 (The Wilder House Series in Politics, History and Culture)

today As Many As 30 Percent Of French Voters Would Agree With Jean-marie Le Pen That Foreign-born Muslims Should Be Expelled From France. True France Is A Provocative History Of The Prototype Of This Contemporary France For The French Movement - The Conservative, Static, Intolerant Understanding Of French Identity That Became A Powerful Tool In National Politics During The First Half Of The Twentieth Century. booknews a History Of The Conservative, Static, Intolerant Understanding Of French Identity During The First Half Of The Century, When It Became A Powerful Tool Of National Politics. Lebovics (history, State U. Of New York) Weaves Into The Narrative Biographies Of The Politicians And Social Scientists Who Took Part In The Movement. Annotation C. Book News, Inc., Portland, Or (booknews.com) Today as many as 30 percent of French voters would agree with Jean-Marie Le Pen that foreign-born Muslims should be expelled from France. True France is a provocative history of the prototype of this contemporary "France for the French" movement - the conservative, static, intolerant understanding of French identity that became a powerful tool in national politics during the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing on the insights of anthropological and cultural theory and on extensive archival research, Herman Lebovics shows how, among politicians and thinkers from both the right and the left, the glorification of True France masked the cultural project of eliminating diversity. He skillfully interweaves the biographies of representative figures in debates about "True France" from the time of the Dreyfus affair to the end of the Vichy regime: the anthropologist and politician Louis Marin, the colonial hero Marshal Lyautey, the radical Vietnamese student Nguyen Van Tao, Paul Rivet, the Socialist director of the Musee de l'Homme, Andre Breton, and the folklorist Georges-Henri Riviere. Lebovics offers fresh accounts of such landmarks in the growth of True France as the founding of French anthropology, the formulation of French cultural policy in the colonies, the manipulation of imagery at the Paris International Colonial Exposition of 1931, attempts by the Left to include workers in the culture of True France, and the institutionalization of the myth of French identity under the Petain regime. Historians of modern Europe, intellectual and cultural historians, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, ethnographers, and others interested in the politics of cultural identity and pluralism today will want to read True France Contents Illustrations Preface Introduction 1 Integral Culture: Louis Marin and the Conservative School, tSgo-1940 2 The Seductions of the Picturesque and the Irresistible Magic of Art 3 Frenchmen into Peasants: Rerooting the Vietnamese in Their Villages 4 Identity Conflicts: Folklore and the National Heritage 5 True France or ... ? : Fulfillment and Disruption Conclusion Bibliographical Essay Index