National negotiations: Art, historical experience, and the public in Paris, 1945--1962 (France, Andre Malraux, Isidore Isou, Raymond Hains, Jacques de la Villegle)

This dissertation is concerned with visual and spatial articulations of historical experience and public memory in France during the years coincident with the end of WWII and the disintegration of the French colonial empire. In particular, it looks to both the dominant and oppositional ways in which the public was differently conceived by such artists, theorists, politicians, and activists as André Malraux, Isidore Isou, Raymond Hains, Jacques de la Villeglé, and the 30,000 anonymous Algerians who took to the streets of Paris on October 17, 1961. These figures, amongst others, attempted to restructure Enlightenment claims about universality and nationality, institutionalized in French social and political thought since the Revolution but radically and perceptibly challenged by the experiences of the Holocaust and decolonization. In response to these challenges, a dominant historicism based on the repression of public memory was built into new conceptualizations of urban culture and the nation. As a consequence, artists and activists turned to literal and metaphoric public spaces to combat the silencing of past and current events and create opportunities to configure counter and alternative publics. Chapter One reads the ordering of French culture, and in particular urban space, enacted under Malraux as Minister of Culture through insights garnered into the dehistoricized roots of Malraux's aesthetics as developed in Les voix du silence (1951), while simultaneously considering the implications of both for the collapse of the French Empire. The varied programs developed by the two innovative aesthetic practices of Lettrisme and décollage, discussed in chapters two and three, respond by attempting to rehabilitate historical memory through contesting the limitations of the public sphere as manifest in linguistic and visual culture. In the process, both practices force radical reconsiderations of the public in relationship to the nation. These become paramount in my concluding remarks which analyze the October 17, 1961 Algerian manifestation against a Muslim-only curfew in Paris as a brief, inherently cultural apparition of the colonialist models that de Gaulle's administration and French society sought to obliterate from memory and public view.