The cultural scene

Paris after World War II quickly regained its stature as one of the world’s great centres of intellectual creativity. A cluster of brilliant thinkers and writers competed for influence, attracting acolytes both in France and abroad. The first postwar wave was led by Jean-Paul Sartre, whose influence made existentialism the leading ideology of the time. Sartre saw the world as “absurd” and irrational, lacking guideposts for humans adrift in a meaningless universe. People, said Sartre, know only that they exist and are free to cast their own lot. In the absence of any guiding power, individuals are condemned to freedom (hence responsibility), forced to forge their own lives, however insecure and contingent these may be, and to give them meaning by commitment to a course of action. Sartre’s essays and novels made him the most admired intellectual of his generation and won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964 (which he refused). His rival Albert Camus, also a Nobel Prize winner, broke with Sartre over the latter’s support of the Soviet Union and over Sartre’s inability to define an ethical base for commitment to a cause. Camus’s agnostic humanism led him to insist that even in an absurd world commitment must rest on clearly defined ethical principles—on the need to resist oppressors and fanatics and to respect the shared humanity of all people.

The dark postwar mood that lent existentialism its appeal faded when economic recovery set in. In the 1960s it was replaced by a new vogue called structuralism, whose scientific aspirations better suited a technological age. Drawing on the ideas of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the structuralists stressed the persistence of “deep structures” that were held to underlie all human cultures through time, leaving little room for either historical change or human initiative.

For a time structuralism became the dominant intellectual wave both in France and abroad; it showed signs of crystallizing into an ideology or worldview. But by the 1970s it gave way to a cluster of doctrines loosely labeled “post-structuralist,” each variety identified with its own master-thinker: the philosopher Jacques Derrida, the intellectual historian Michel Foucault, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and the Marxologist Louis Althusser.

The structuralist vogue also affected the novelists who, beginning in the mid-1950s, launched le nouveau roman, the antinovel. More interested in theory and the subversive play of language than in storytelling, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor, and their imitators attracted much media and critical attention; but their provocative and demanding output stimulated more publicity than sales. Their iconoclastic aspirations were paralleled by those of a nouvelle vague (New Wave) of filmmakers such as Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, and François Truffaut, whose movies of the late 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s revolutionized French cinema. “New novels” and “new wave” films may be compared to another contemporary creation popularized by the media: nouvelle cuisine, whose aesthetic objectives also evoked more critical than gourmandizing interest.

Those discouraged by pretentious fiction were turning to biography and general history, a realm dominated by the contributions of scholars such as Fernand Braudel, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, and Pierre Nora. Marked by pathbreaking investigation of long-term perspectives and by a vivid, seductive style, their explorations of social, cultural, and economic history proved broadly appealing. On all these fronts, French works and ideas continued to generate worldwide attention and, often, imitation.