France has always been considered the home of traditional high culture, but increasingly we are now learning to look at other more popular aspects of modern French cultural life. In this volume, specialists from Britain and France adopt a fresh approach to the study of French culture since 1945 by focussing on the mass media and on a whole range of popular cultural forms. As well as introducing English-speaking readers to such new fields as French radio, television, science fiction and popular song, this volume also highlights how the French themselves responded to the growing importance of the mass media in postwar France.

The Story Of The 'hussards" --It has long been assumed that France was dominated by the political left wing and by Existentialism throughout the 1940s and 1950s. This is the first book to re-evaluate the impact of the vigorous and unrepentant right-wing cultural and literary movement during the postwar period.
In this revealing study, the author concentrates on three neglected but significant writers who constitute the group known as the 'Hussards': Roger Nimier, Antoine Blondin and Jacques Laurent. He offers a detailed analysis of the work of the 'Hussards' and others on the fringe of this iconoclastic group who aggressively (and sometimes violently) opposed Existentialism while adopting a tradition from the 1920s full of nostalgia for lost values.
Students and scholars will find that this book fills an important gap in French literary and cultural history of the postwar period.

This book examines Céline's entire oeuvre of the interwar years and the Occupation, and places it in the literary and intellectual context of contemporary France.

Specially commissioned essays by specialists focus on a wide range of political, historical and cultural questions in this Companion. The book provides information and analysis on such topics as French national identity, architecture, the mass media, food, literature, cinema, intellectual culture and music. It features supplementary material that includes a chronology, illustrations and suggestions for further reading.

'What is Montmartre? Nothing. What must it be? Everything', proclaimed Rodolphe Salis in 1881, when his cabaret Le Chat Noir launched an entertainment boom in the 9th and 18th Arrondissements of Paris which would dominate the worlds of popular and high culture until the First World War. Montmartre's music-halls, circuses, cinemas, accompanied by extra frisson of crime and prostitution, coexisted with burgeoning art movements sprung from the cabarets, which spearheaded the avant-garde in painting, theatre and literature. The story, however, did not end in 1914 and Montmartre retained its role as a magnet for tourists, lured by the Moulin-Rouge and the Sacre-Coeur, and, despite the competition from Montparnasse, as a major centre for artistic creativity in the inter-war years. Crucial to this continuity was, not merely the survival of many of the most important players from the pre-War period, but especially the role of the humorous press and the Montmartre caricaturists and illustrators who congregated in the Restaurant Maniere. In this new study, Nicholas Hewitt charts the continuity of Montmartre culture from the Belle Epoque to the Occupation through its many overlapping frontiers and explores its vital ingredients of sexuality, kitsch, bohemia, mass culture and the political and social ambiguities of such a mixture.