Renegotiating French Identity ― Musical Culture and Creativity in France During Vichy and the German Occupation

In Renegotiating French Identity, Jane Fulcher addresses the question of cultural resistance to the German occupation and Vichy regime during the Second World War. Nazi Germany famously stressed music as a marker of national identity and cultural achievement, but so too did Vichy. From the opera to the symphony, music did not only serve the interests of Vichy and German propaganda: it also helped to reveal the motives behind them, and to awaken resistance among those growing disillusioned by the regime. Using unexplored Resistance documents, from both the clandestine press and the French National Archives, Fulcher looks at the responses of specific artists and their means of resistance, addressing in turn Pierre Schaeffer, Arthur Honegger, Francis Poulenc, and Olivier Messiaen, among others. This book investigates the role that music played in fostering a profound awareness of the cultural and political differences between conflicting French ideological positions, as criticism of Vichy and its policies mounted.

Jane F. Fulcher is Professor of Musicology at the University of Michigan and the author of French Cultural Politics and Music from the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War (1999) and The Composer As Intellectual: Music and Ideology in France 1914-1940, among other publications. She has also served as a visiting professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris.