France la doulce ..

Written in several weeks during the summer of 1933, "France la doulce" was meant to be Morand's most accessible novel. Consisting mostly of dialogue, it is a farce set in the French film industry during the early years of talkies, a milieu Morand was almost uniquely familiar with among the top French writers of the time, having worked on a significant number of film projects. In fact, the book was widely considered revenge for Morand's experience as a screenwriter for G.W. Pabst's 1933 epic "Don Quichotte." Morand, also a diplomat and an adventurous traveler, was a practiced observer with an acid wit, and "France la doulce" lampoons the slippery, resourceful, often desperate improvisations of a "cosmopolitan" group of producers making a blockbuster production of the French epic "The Song of Roland." The plot is brisk and entertaining and offers an authentic and humorous glimpse into French filmmaking at a time of profound technical and financial change. By 1934 Morand had already been an international bestseller--a star at Gallimard--for nearly a decade, and "France la doulce" was instantly popular (it went through more than 80 printings in its first year). However, it has an underbelly. Its central theme is the "invasion" of France by "immigrants," and its satire (with its historically unforgivable closing line, which naturally gave the 1939 German edition its title) has more than a whiff of the xenophobia and anti-Semitism that at the time was acceptable in a France mired in the Depression and fearful of the influx of desperate economic and political refugees. (The novel appeared first, serialized, in a respected centrist periodical headed by a Jewish editor, Emmanuel Berl.) Though popular, "France la doulce" was dismissed by critics as fluff. But depth was rarely Morand's target, and the book has value today as a document of both film and social history. It also marks an important moment in the writer's biography: With it he began to declare himself for the Right in the deep and often violent political divisions of 1930s France--a choice that would later contribute to diminishing his audience and his legacy. (In the 1940s he became a man of Vichy and a collaborationist, barely avoiding formal censure after the war by remaining in self-exile for several years. Nevertheless, he was partially rehabilitated, and though his 1958 nomination to the Academie Française was blocked by President Charles DeGaulle, a first, by 1968 DeGaulle relented and Morand was inducted.) Now most of Morand's oeuvre is seen as superficial, though "France la doulce" is still considered an outlier. (Unlike his short-story collections and other novels, it has never been reissued in a stand-alone edition.) But Morand's intent was always speed and surface, and what remains interesting in his work, in addition to the prose itself, is the transient subcultures he evoked. At that, and as a picaresque entertainment, "France la doulce" is successful.