47. La Famille Duraton, originally titled "Autour de la Table," aired from 1936 to 1939 on Radio-Cite. For the 1936-37 season it aired at 1:30 p.m.; in 1937-38 it moved to the evenings, at 7:30. After World War II, the program was picked up by Radio Luxembourg, where it aired until 1953.
48. The years after 1945 were broadcast on Radio-Luxembourg, the private station that aired in France after the war.
49. Lise Elina, Le Micro et moi (Paris: Pierre Horay, 1978), 49.
50. "Les 'Duraton' peints par eux-memes," Ici.. . Radio Cite, January 8, 1938, 1.
51. Ibid.
52. Germaine Blondin, "La Famile Duraton," Radio-Magazine, February 13, 1938, 3. In contrast to this image, in another interview with Blondin, Jean Nohain, star at Poste Parisien, loved his job and never saw his own four children at home (Germaine Blondin, "Au Service de la fantaisie radiophonique," Radio-Magazine, April 30, 1939, 3, 5).
53. Galli was one of the featured announcers and hosts on Radio-Cite, co-hosting Le Crochet radiophonique and conducting interviews with other celebrities.
54. See n. 7 of this chapter.
55. Although much radio fiction after 1936 stressed the patriotic responsibility of women to become mothers, early radio critics wanted more airtime on the subject. Lamenting the lack of air play of pronatalist beliefs, J. Reibel reminds his readers about the National Conference on the Birthrate in Lyon from September 25 to September 27, 1936. J. Reibel, "La Question de natalite," T.S.F., Phono, Cine, September 25, 1936, 719.
56. Cita Malard and Suzanne Malard, Les Survivants, Radio-Paris, February 14, 1937. In a review of the play in the Catholic radio journal Choisir, a critic wrote, "It is one of the most moving radio plays written by Cita and Suzanne Malard. . . . A surprising sense of tragedy, a superior sense of feeling and a strange nobility are born from the action in which the simplicity of feeling equals the greatness of mind." Choisir, February 14, 1937, 3.
57. In an interview with Germaine Blondin, the Malards appeared as the perfect image of mother-daughter felicity. They wrote together, lived together, and shared each other's thoughts. Germaine Blondin, "Avec Cita et Suzanne Malard," Radio-Magazine, April 17, 1938, 3.
58. Henriette Charasson's family guides include, among others, Les Heures du foyer (Paris: Laguy, 1926); Le Livre de la mere (Paris: Flammarion, 1944); La Mere (Paris: Nouvelle Societe d'Edition, 1931); with Andre Thibaut, Le Livre du nouveau ne (Paris: Societe Parisenne d'Edition, 1928).
59. Henriette Charasson, Les Meres de Paris: Autour d'un berceau, Bordeaux-Lafayette, July 9, 1939.
60. Henriette Chaudet, VEpoque, June 4, 1939.
61. These poems were collected in Charasson, "Ballade a Marie," in Le Livre de la Mere (Paris: Flammarion, 1944).
62. Hugues Nonn, Markus, French radiodiffusion, 1935-40.
63. Lespine, Helene, divine parmis les femmes. The next chapter will focus on single working-class men and women, showing their negative depiction in radio fiction.
64. Suzanne Normand, Portraits d'honnetes femmes dans le roman frangais: 1) Henriette de Montsauf, 2) Elmire, French radiodiffusion, 1935-40.
65. Louis Gratias, Les Voix de lombre, Radio-Paris, July 10, 1938.
66. Raoul Praxy, Dollars, Lyon-PTT, June 1. 1939. Praxy was also the vice-president of the Societe des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques. For a complex look at the attack on the "new woman," see Roberts, Civilization without Sexes.
67. Charles Oberfeld and C.-L. Pothier, "La Femme est faite pour l'homme," 1934.
68. Gabriel Timmory, La Soiree d'hier, Radio-PTT-Nord, March 17, 1938.
69. Yvonne Guilbert, Venus Justifiee, French radiodiffusion, 1935-40.
70. Charles Oberfeld, R. Pujol, and C.-L. Pothier, "C'est pour mon papa," 1930.
71. Roger Bernstein and George Van Parys, "C'est lui," 1934.
72. Henri Garat, "Serait-ce un reve?" 1931.
73. Frank Churchill, "Un Jour mon prince arrivera," French adaptation by F. Salabert, 1938.
74. H. Christine and A. Willametz, "Elle est epatante cette petite femme-la," 1933.
75. Bleustein-Blanchet, Sur mon antenne, 70.
76. The median wage for men in 1936 was about eight francs per hour. Georges LeFranc, Histoire du Front Populaire (Paris: Payot, 1965), 324.
77. Bleustein-Blanchet, Sur mon antenne, 72.
78. Ibid., 70.
79. Ibid., 71.
80. Ibid.
81. Ibid.
82. A good contemporary comparison can be made with ABC's show "Extreme Home Makeover," which each week rewards a fully redesigned and furnished house to "deserving" families. The shows and all the contents of the house are sponsored by Sears, and the hosts visit the store each week and purchase all of the appliances and decorations there. The builders are often from national contracting companies, like Beazer Homes. Since the show's debut, its host, Ty Pennington, has had his own home-decorating line established at Sears department stores. In spite of this obvious marketing, the show still retains its claim on the heartstrings of its viewing public. It is the modern-day equivalent to Radio-Cite's public programs, something that probably would have pleased Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet.
83. Louis Merlin, Jen ai vu des choses (Paris: Julliard, 1962), 420-21.
5. the perils of the single life 1. In this sense, Ray Ventura may have shown a more realistic vision of working-class women than the standard song or play did. Paulette works as a store clerk, a standard position for working-class women in the city. No other play or song places women in the store, even though a job there would have been quite expected at the time (Louise A. Tilly and Joan W. Scott, Women, Work, and Family [New York: Routledge, 1978], 182-83). Even Zola recognized the ubiquitous placement of the shop girl by the end of the nineteenth century, focusing on the life of a woman who worked in a department store in Au Bonheur des Dames.
2. In their work, Adrian Rifkin and Kelley Conway show how this fascination with working-class life and criminality extended far into French culture. Adrian Rifkin depicts the liminal part of Paris in photographs, songs, crime reporting, and film as one of the central themes of popular culture in the first half of the twentieth century (Adrian Rifkin, Street Noises: Parisian Pleasure, 1900-1940 [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993]). Kelley Conway analyzes the gendered implications of music hall and film, especially in women performer's use of the realist song to create their own vision of France (Kelley Conway, "The Chanteuse at the City Limits" [PhD dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1999]).
3. As we saw in chap. 1, Jean Nohain parlayed his success with Mireille into a fruitful radio career, performing as "Jaboune" for the station's Thursday afternoon children's programs.
4. Marie-Claire, April 30, 1937, 3.
5. Mireille, Avec le soleil pour temoin (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1981), 52.
6. Ibid., 73.
7. The show (Les amis de Mireille) featured conversations around the microphone with invited celebrity guests. The group would chat and then break out into Mireille's songs as they fit into a directed conversation.
8. Mireille and Jean Nohain, "A cause du comptable," 1934.
9. Mireille and Jean Nohain, "Presque Oui," 1933.
10. Mireille and Jean Nohain, "Couches dans le foin," 1933.
11. Adrian Rifkin looks closely at Maurice Chevalier's autobiography and the ways in which Chevalier categorizes himself as part of the Parisian (and particularly Menilmontant) working class. Here, instead of looking at the Paris landscape, I will try to fit Chevalier's work into radio's larger depiction of the working-class man and the ways that Chevalier became the powerful representative of his class.
12. The biographical information on Chevalier comes from three rather celebratory texts: James Harding, Maurice Chevalier: His Life, 1888-1972 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1982); Michael Freedland, Maurice Chevalier, (New York: Morrow, 1981); and David Bret, Maurice Chevalier: Up on Top of a Rainbow (London: Robson Books, 1992).
13. Chevalier writes of his success in America with some surprise. He assumes that it is his innate ability that wins him his fame. In his autobiography, he often writes of the positive responses he gets from other entertainers after they see his show. He sees himself as an exotic, but friendly, commodity. Maurice Chevalier, Ma Route et mes chansons (Paris: Flammarion, 1998).
14. Maurice Chevalier must have suggested this character to Rodgers and Hart, who then created the song around his depiction. The "apache" fitted his tailor perfectly because it revealed his working-class roots in a dance number performed as a baron to his wealthy audience.
15. Bret, Maurice Chevalier: Up on Top of a Rainbow, 92.
16. Nostalgia for the Belle Epoque and a time prior to World War II may also play a role in the song's popularity. Other artists used nostalgia to promote themselves, including Polaire, who gained her fame from a whole show sung with songs and costumes from the Belle Epoque. She was written up favorably in Paris-Midi, a daily paper in Paris, which also had a photo of her in her 1900s garb. "Polaire," Paris-Midi, December, 1934, from Fonds Bougle, Manuscripts (Press Cuttings/Variety), Bibliotheque de l'Histoire de la Ville de Paris, Paris.
17. Bret, Maurice Chevalier: Up on Top of a Rainbow, 101.
18. For work on paraliterature, see Robin Walz, Pulp Surrealism: Insolent Popular Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). On fait divers, see Schwartz, Spectacular Realities, and on apaches and fait divers, Dominique Kalifa, L'Encre et le sang: Recits de crimes et societe a la Belle Epoque (Paris: Fayard, 1995), Les Crimes de Paris: Lieux et non-lieux du crime a Paris au XIXe siecle (Paris: BILIPO, 2000), and Crime et culture au XIXe siecle (Paris: Perrin, 2005).
19. Patricia C. Nichols reviews the literature of English studies of language and class in "Networks and Hierarchies: Language and Social Stratification," in Language and Power, ed. Chris Kramarae, Muriel Schulz, and William M O'Barr (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1984), 23-42. In their work, Lars Andersson and Peter Trudgill, two English linguists point out that "bad language" has direct links to perceptions of class status and that by using slang and bad language, people can transcend class, lending themselves allures of "toughness and strength." Lars Andersson and Peter Trudgill, Bad Language (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 8-9.
20. Geo Koger and Vincent Scotto, "Ma Pomme," 1935.
21. Rifkin, Street Noises, 79-85.
22. Sullivan, Willemetz and Pothier, "La Petite Dame de l'Expo," 1938; Willemetz, Rene Toche, and Charles Borel-Clerc, "Ah! Si vous connaissiez ma poule!" 1938; Van Parys and Jean Boyer, "Appelez-^a comme vous voulez," 1939.
23. See chap. 2.
24. Mistinguett made only one sound film in 1932 and found the transition to radio very difficult. In spite of lucrative contracts with Radio-37 and Poste Parisien, her constant appearances on the air inspired only disgust from most radio listeners. For example, in Notes d'ecoute, Vendredis weekly column on the radio, Mistinguett is berated for appearing too frequently on Radio-37. "On Radio 37 Mistinguett continues to prolong her stay. We will admit one thing: she still has beautiful legs. Too bad that you can't see them on the radio." Jacques Amaire, "Notes d'ecoute," Vendredi, May 20, 1938, 7.
25. Fernandel, "Pour que vous m'eussiez dit oui," 1941. The original, unattractive-sounding, and snobby French is sung as follows: Pour que vous m'eussiez dit oui Il eu fallu que je vous le demandasse Pour que je vous le demandasse Il eu fallu d'abord que je l'osasse Que nos mains se melassent Que vous frissonassiez Que je vous sermonasse Que vous sympathissiez Ah! Mais je n'ai pas ose, zose, zose!
26. Paul Misraki and Andre Hornaz, "C'est dommage que j'puisse pas vous l'montrer" (ed. Ray Ventura, 1938).
27. Eugen Weber, The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s (New York: Norton, 1994).
28. Tilly and Scott estimate that 55 percent of working women worked in the industrial sector. Tilly and Scott, Women, Work, and Family, 152.
29. Suzanne Cordelier, Femmes au travail: Etude pratique sur dix-sept carrieres feminines (Paris: Plon, 1935). Cordelier also uses the paradoxical argument that female difference should lead to their equality. She claims that these careers are specifically suited to women because of the "natural" female character, with "finesse, delicacy, sense of nuance and inward psychology" (3). Sara Kimble, in her University of Iowa dissertation, "Justice Redressed" (August 2002), shows that many bourgeois women entered the professions, including law, and made more of their lives than Suzanne Cordelier thought possible.
30. Susan Bachrach, Dames Employees: The Feminization of Postal Work in Nineteenth-Century France (New York: Haworth Press, 1984).
31. Catherine Omnes, Ouvrieres Parisiennes: Marches du travail et trajectoires professionelles au 20e siecle (Paris: Editions de l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1997), 167.
32. Nonn, Marcus, 1935-40.
33. Tilly and Scott, Women, Work, and Family, 152. Tilly explains that by the 1930s working women would choose almost any career over domestic service. Many families had to fire servants. While the percentage of women in the workforce remained stable over the first half of the twentieth century, the number of women in domestic service dropped. Over the first half of the decade, the age of the domestic servant rose, as well (ibid., 155). Radio plays do not reflect this change.
34. The trope of the "French maid" runs through centuries of farce and tale, from the innocent victim of an evil count in Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro to Jean Genet's ferocious pair in Les Bonnes. On 1930s French radio, the maid appeared frequently and always as a sexual(ized) victim of circumstance and assumption.
35. Jean A. Dauven, Samedi soir, Radio-Paris, May 13, 1936.
36. Andre-Micho, Bijoute, Radio-Paris, February 2, 1936.
37. In opposition to the images of the working girl were repeated images of happy family life. The successful families on French radio were always the middle-class families, with a working husband and a wife in the private sphere. La Famille Duraton, a daily soap that featured a "typical" French family around the dinner table showed the "natural" family portrait. Over the years, the daughter moves from the bosom of her family directly into marriage. In other radio plays where virtuous women are featured, their hopes always ride around marriage and children. Some good examples are Henriette Charasson, Autour d'un berceau, Bordeaux-Lafayette, July 9, 1939; Andre Deleaze, La Femme qui epousa le diable, Strasbourg, March 12, 1937; Suzanne Normand, Portraits d'honnetes femmes dans le roman frangais: 1. Henriette de Montsauf, 2. Elmire, 1936.
38. Henriette Charasson, Le Theatre Express: La Femme de menage (III) (1935-40).
39. It is no surprise that even the unattractive, barren Marie becomes a mother in this play. Henriette Charasson, as we saw in chap. 4, was a Catholic pronatalist activist who saw motherhood as the only option for patriotic French women.
40. Cossin and de Berys, La Peur.
41. The idea that women were emotionally unstable was another stereotype propagated by French radio fiction. See, e.g., Theo Bergerat, Souvent femme varie, Lille (Radio-PTT-Nord), December 24, 1938.
42. Leon Lemmonier and Jacques Cossin, La Demarche, Radio-Paris, October 30, 1938.
43. Mireille and Jean Nohain, "C'est gentil," 1935.
44. Mireille and Jean Nohain, "27, rue des Acacias," 1933.
45. Paul Misraki and Jean Feline, "Pas de tout d'argent," 1936.
46. Mireille and Jean Nohain, "Ma Grandmere etait garde-barriere," 1935.
47. Again, this notion of crime was not new to French listeners. They had literature, newspapers, stage plays, and cinema that all featured the criminal element. See nn. 19 and 22.
48. J. Vaillard and Raymond Asso, "Browning," 1938; J. Delanney and Suzy Solidor, "Dans un port," 1937; Raoul Le Peltier and A. Valsien, "Mon Vieux Pataud," 1936; Robert Malleron, "L'Etranger," 1936.
49. J. Manse and C. Oberfeld, "Un Dur, un vrai, un tatoue," 1938.
50. In all of the radio plays I have read, I have found none that focus on positive images of working-class families. Working-class families are either absent altogether from the stories of working people's experience or they are portrayed as linked to ultimate criminal behavior in the children they produce. Bourgeois families, on the other hand, appear in both positive and negative images of French life.
51. Roger-Fran^ois Didelot, Le Retour dans la nuit, Radio-Paris, March 13, 1938.
52. Georges Avryl, Cellule 29, Strasbourg, September 10, 1937.
53. Andre de Lorde, LEnfant, Lille (Radio-PTT-Nord), April 15, 1939.
54. The literal translation is "sidewalk song," but because faire le trottoir ("do the sidewalk") in slang means to be a prostitute, the use of the term "prostitute's song" would be more correct. These songs belong to a larger group of songs called chansons realistes that depicted every aspect of life on the streets-from senseless killings to drug use. Kelley Conway attempts to give the female realist performers agency in the creation of realist songs on film and on the music-hall stage, where women artists embodied these characters and gave them life (Kelley Conway, "Les 'Goualeuses' de l'ecran," in Le Cinema au rendez-vous des arts: France, annees 20 et 30, ed. Em-manuelle Toulet [Paris: Bibliotheque Nationale de France, 1995]). Rene Baudelaire breaks down the basic forms of this song trope in La Chanson realiste (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1996).
55. The necessity for easy recognition reflects Elizabeth Tonkin's ideas about "genre" and the importance of communication between audience and performer in Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992). Tonkin claims that audiences need to understand the type of story they listen to, in order to fully comprehend its meaning. Stories thus fall into types, or genres, that share styles and themes. She focuses on oral performance and oral history, but I believe her ideas can be equally applicable here. Performance in the chanson du trottoir is exceedingly important, as the lyrics themselves could not fully express the image in each song. Voice, background, and tempo all played fundamental roles in these songs.
56. Although these songs were sung by women, they were always written by men. The most famous lyricists who specialized in these songs were Raymond Asso, who wrote for Edith Piaf and Marie Dubas, and Borel-Clerc, who wrote for many of the singers.
57. Elizabeth K. Menon, "Images of Pleasure and Vice: Women on the Fringe," in Montmartre and the Making of Mass Culture, ed. Gabriel P. Weisberg (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 37-71.
58. Ibid., 37.
59. Kelley Conway, Chanteuse in the City: The Realist Singer in French Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
60. M. Monnot, A. Rhegent, and R. Malleron, "Maison louche," 1935; R. Dumas and E. Rocagno, "Le Tango des filles," and "Fleur de joie," 1932.
61. J. Delettre and M. Aubret, "En maison," 1934.
62. H. Ackermans, Polge, and Noyelle, "La Catin du village," 1933.
63. Prostitution was legalized in France because manhood was directly linked to sexuality and the need for and ability to have sex. In her dissertation, Michele Rhoades explores the ways that doctors justified legalized prostitution during World War I as providing a service for male soldiers-a service that often ended with both sex partners getting and spreading syphilis (Michele Rhoades, "'No Safe Women': Prostitution, Masculinity, and Disease in France during the Great War" [PhD dissertation, University of Iowa, 2001]). For an excellent general history of the relationship between prostitution and the state, see Alain Corbin, Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). Corbin shows that by the interwar years the public brothel had nearly disappeared and most prostitutes worked on the streets (as they did in the songs) rather than in houses.