Tyler Stovall,
"The New Woman and the New Empire: Josephine Baker and Changing Views of Femininity in Interwar France"
(page 3 of 7)
If the New Woman threatened the underpinnings of French society
during the interwar years, the empire posed a different kind of
challenge. In defending herself against Germany during the war, France
had relied on her empire to a far greater extent than ever before in her
history. In particular, French authorities imported hundreds of
thousands of colonial subjects to fight on her battlefields and man her
factories and farms during the hostilities. Many Frenchwomen and men saw
nonwhites for the first time in their lives during the war years, and in
a very real sense World War I constitutes the beginning of the
postcolonial era in modern France. This unprecedented presence of the
colonized in the métropole both reaffirmed the global
greatness of France and called into question some basic assumptions
about French identity.[14]
Many saw the new importance of empire as a positive development. One
result of the war was the popularization of the idea of France as a land
of "100 million Frenchmen." Conscious of the fact that their nation of
40 million people faced a vengeful and potentially powerful Germany of
70 million, theorists of empire and others argued that by including the
inhabitants of her colonies, France really had a population of 100
million and was therefore much stronger than her German rival.[15] The
most prominent example of this kind of thinking in interwar France was
the 1931 Colonial Exposition in Paris, perhaps the greatest
advertisement for imperialism ever staged. Attracting tens of millions
of visitors, the exposition showcased the cultures and achievements of
France's empire, most notably by building a full-scale model of
Cambodia's Angkor Wat on the outskirts of the capital.[16] This interest
in colonialism also helped fuel the wave of exoticism and fascination
with "primitive" cultures central to French avant-garde culture after
the war. The fact that Josephine Baker portrayed so many French colonial
natives during her career was merely one example of this thirst for far
horizons and exotic shores, as was the influence of jazz and African
sculpture on modernist music and art.[17] Although the average
Frenchwoman and man still paid little attention to imperial affairs, for
policy makers and members of the avant-garde, the colonies became
central to their vision of 20th-century France.[18]
Yet this vision was not always positive. If the colonies represented
opportunity and excitement overseas, they also posed a potential danger
to French identity at home. Increasingly, many in France argued that the
much-vaunted civilizing mission was a failure, that it was ultimately
impossible for black and brown natives to become truly French. The
colonial theory of assimilation largely gave way by the 1920s to a new
theory, association, which emphasized separate paths to development and
the fundamental inequality of different races of men.[19]
Such fears of
native savagery targeted in particular the prospect of colonial subjects
coming to France. At the end of the First World War, public authorities
decided to expel the colonial workers who had come to France during the
war, in spite of the economy's crying need for healthy young men,
judging that the nation was not yet ready for an experiment in
multiculturalism.[20]
Even the exoticism of the postwar era not only
reinforced traditional stereotypes of colonial peoples but also, by
underscoring the contrast between them and the French, gave a certain
racialized idea of French national identity. The empire could indeed be
useful, but only if the boundaries between métropole and
colony remained firmly in place.
Anxieties over the New Woman and the empire during the interwar years
converged around fears for the very future of the nation. This was not
only a military but also above all a demographic concern. Not only had
France lost over a million young men in the war, but she also had one of
the lowest birthrates in Europe, and was in fact experiencing negative
population growth by the 1930s.[21]
The image of France as a nation of
old men and empty cradles became widespread in the interwar years and
for many signaled their country's grave peril. One response was
pro-natalism, the determination to boost the birthrate by any means
possible. These included not only abundant propaganda in favor of
motherhood, but also state subsidies for large families and increasingly
severe penalties for the dissemination of birth control information.[22]
In such a context, the garçonne who left home to lead a
wild and single life became nothing less than an enemy of society. It is
telling that Margueritte's heroine Monique Lerbier ended up sterile, not
only the ultimate punishment for a woman, but also a clear warning of
the dangers to women and to France in general posed by female
liberation.[23]
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