French society entered a period of protracted cultural crisis at the close of the First World War. This was caused in part by France's slow economic development and it could not be resolved until French society sustained a systematic renovation in politics, social values, economic practices and popular mentalities. Modernism as we shall use it in this context represents all of the values so explicitly held by a Jacques Delors, Laurent Fabius, or a Giscard d'Estaing: that bigger is better, that technology (divorced from a coherent social context) is the basis of prosperity and prowess, and that there is but one single path to the brave new world of the future, a world managed by engineers and experts.[2] It is an ideology rooted in the objectivism of the French Enlightenment, the Prometheanism of the Industrial Revolution, and the audacity of the industrial rationalizers in this century. French social discourse had long counterpoised the rational with the sensual, the modern with the traditional, the empirical with the spiritual, the male with the female, and the mechanical with the organic, bifurcating much of the modernization debate around two irreconcilable poles.

Interwar supporters of the modernization vision, despite cultural and social resistance to it, saw little conflict between the mechanical and the organic, because for them, machines were merely simplified organisms.[3] Similarly, machines put to the service of family life would help to harmonize the male world of work with the female duty of motherhood. From that starting point, whatever problems technology wrought technology would solve. Better machines would merely mark the highest stage of human freedom and progress, expressed as a finer control over barbaric nature, and as an act of making nature rational. In addition, "progress" promised to offer technological solutions to social and political problems.

Many credible analyses portray interwar France as a stagnant society, in which modernist activists from Ernest Mercier of the electrical utility trust, to Raoul Dautry of the railroads, Ernest Mattern of Peugeot, and Albert Thomas and Hyacinthe Dubreuil of the CGT, tried to modernize a reluctant France, but failed in the face of the dead weight of traditional practices and mentalities. Louis Renault and André Citroën tried to import Fordism--a synthesis of mass production and mass consumption--yet failed. Similarly, the grandiose plans of the CGT and a substantial wing of the Socialists led to naught.[4] Industrial rationalization and the shift to mass production were limited to a few leading-edge industrial sectors--in new industries such as rubber and auto. Incomes did not rise enough to support a massive expansion in popular consumption. At the same time that they failed on the political-economic front, the modernists, from technocratic and reformist socialists and trade unionists to innovative businessmen and progressive Catholics, succeeded on the social and cultural front.

We know preciously little about the cultural transition in France from the traditional and provincial mentalities of the interwar era to the proud triumphalism of the postwar economic miracle. In examining works on this subject[5], one is tempted to conclude that the new France rose in disgust against the world destroyed in June 1940, out of the despair of Depression and the ashes of defeat. The question remains, however: how did the French public accept such profound changes in the way the society and economy were to be organized? Was the crisis of legitimation for the old order so profound that an entire nation, except a few Poujadists in the 1950s, was suddenly willing to start afresh in 1944? Certainly not. The soil for the new France was prepared not just in the grand theories of X-Crise or the CGT and socialist planners,[6] but in the daily and imagined worlds of many françaises moyennes and français moyens. Modernists implanted a new vision of the ostensible benefits of technological "progress" into the French popular mind in the interwar period, and a collective affirmation of the promise and rhetoric of progress made the postwar transformation possible. Rosemary Wakeman has dealt elegantly with the vision of a society in flight, a takeoff, as a component of the new mentality.[7] Modernists largely succeeded in developing the avenues for selling the image of the comfortable, consumerist family, and this new, vicariously palpable vision broadly gestured toward the liberatory possibilities of a technologically transformed social and political order. This vision was constructed as much by counterposition as by position, as much by inventing an unacceptable Other as by presenting credible scenarios for the future. The new order put in place by the modernists would be a synthetic one that would supersede the tired set of dichotomous divisions that had marked French society. It would include a new middle class with an agenda for growth and consumption beyond the great class divide and a new woman who was simultaneously a worker, a housekeeper, and a prolific parent.

Ironically--or rather, dialectically, as we shall see--a consumerist mentality developed in France without the goods ever really being delivered. The broad public began to embrace a vision of the electrified future, yet it purchased few of the fabled labor saving devices. Of the symbolic and the real sides of technological discourse, the French public seems to have bought only the former. At the same time, in developing a new sense of the future in domestic technologies, French society necessarily began to invent a new perception of the family and the woman's proper place within it. We shall trace the origins of this transition by examining the familial crisis of the 1920s.

The massive participation of women in industry during the First World War, along with France's plummeting birth rate in the period just before and after the war, created a profound disquiet among many French men. French women seemed to be abandoning their proper roles as mothers, unpaid housekeepers, and producers of future soldiers for the "external" world of power, money, and prestige. The negative reaction to Victor Margueritte's novel, La Garçonne, reflected a deep fear of a possible masculinization of women and Catholic writers frequently railed against women's abandonment of the foyer.[8] Marie-Monique Huss has recently shown that the natalist movement (which favored a rapid increase in France's birthrate and hence a renaissance of motherhood) enjoyed uncontested power in interwar politics, while Karen Offen has well shown how a natalist discourse laid the foundations for welfare statist reforms.[9] Woman's place was in the home. Even CGT leaders complained about female competition for their members' jobs.[10] These ideological forces converged with a rapid decline of the textile trades to decrease women's participation rate in the labor force--indeed, women's labor participation rate of 1912 was not attained again in peacetime until the 1960s.

Certainly, many women left the paid labor force in the 1920s, but the statistics remain sketchy. Based on recent analyses, it appears that women's employment declined slightly (a plummeting of women's jobs in textiles and garments was not recouped by rising feminine activity in the metals industries), but there was also a recomposition of the female labor force. Many working class women went home, yet a small but perceptible number of middle class women began to enter the workforce as white and pink collar workers.[11] It was the minimal tendency for middle class women to work which seems to have led to a widespread misperception that women were entering the workforce in ever-larger numbers.

Within the domestic workforce, the change from carriages to cars and the disappearance of the valet meant a decline in the absolute number of domestics. Nonetheless, writers of all bourgeois stripes bemoaned the "crisis of domestics"--"you just can't get good help anymore." In any case, it does seem that domestic servants, many of whom had enjoyed a sense of new power in their industrial jobs during the war, were not going to be the deferential girls they might once have been. Jacques Herbé's sentiments in the monthly, La maison, of December 1925, reflected a widespread perception. After noting the problems in finding a servant he complained that if one could be found at a reasonable price, she was surly, demanded higher pay, refused to address the master in the third person. Worse,

These days some mistresses of the house do not hesitate to reverse roles and adopt the ceremonious [third-person] form when addressing their servants... --pardon, to their "employées de maison,"--because in Paris, servants and domestics are unionized and have repudiated the titles, so plain in such a noble sense, of servants and domestics, for they find them demeaning.[12]

The crisis of domestics, like its solution in labor-saving appliances was probably as much a rhetorical device as a concrete reality. Given the frantic preoccupation with upward mobility among the middle classes in the 1920s, the signs of advanced social status--cars, fashionable clothes, and servants--assumed considerable importance. If the pool of potential servants remained static and the demand rose, then there might have been a crisis of sorts. It is probably also safe to assume that by claiming that servants were not available one could evoke the status of one who could afford them, without ever having to spend the money--some of which could probably not have been afforded. Domestic appliances were culturally appropriate technologies that constituted a symbolic response to this non-problem, as we shall see later. Household modernization promised to replace the insouciant domestic servant with an obedient mechanical slave, and appliances themselves slowly became marks of social distinction. Middle class women would be freed both from the degrading labor once performed by servants, and from the "tyranny" of domestic servants' bad attitudes.[13]

As Alain Corbin has pointed out for the half-century around the Revolution, a class in the making defines itself by negative reference to the animalistic other.[14] Prescriptive literature on the evils of domestic servants was widespread in the 1920s, and domestics were assumed to be highly promiscuous--lying in wait to lure the husband or son astray--and infested with dreaded diseases, including syphilis and TB.[15] This fear was underlined by the highly publicized murder of the mother and daughter of the Lancelin family by their servants, Léa and Christine Papin, in 1933. The crime was particularly disturbing because the Papin sisters had apparently been unremarkable, if not exemplary, servants for seven years; yet they proceeded to rip the eyes out of the victims, to stab them with kitchen knives, and to beat them with a frying pan. The site of the double murder was grisly and covered with blood and body parts--a fact that the tabloid press gleefully exploited. Whether or not the crime could be written off as the acts of perverse lesbian sisters, as the Communists claimed, or the consequence of poor social support systems, as L'Oeuvre claimed, the message to the public was clear: servants were not to be trusted, even those with whom one had been associated for years.[16]

With threats of creeping criminality and insidious infections emanating from the servant class, no fine, upstanding middle class family could allow such dangerous elements in their home, whether they could afford servants or not. Again following Corbin, we can also argue that an obsession with cleanliness often marks an ascending class. With the widespread recognition of the germ theory of disease, dust, dirt, and trash became objects of scorn, and the home of a bien pensant had to be free from these scourges, as well as those brought in by servants. Finally, there is little doubt that standards for the results of domestic labor rose: meals became more elaborate (the multiple-course meal replaced the simple pot-au-feu), clothing became simpler, but wardrobes became more extensive with several changes of clothes per week, etc.[17] The emerging image of the kitchen and bathroom became that of the laboratory, replete with white enameled steel and specialized apparati wherever possible.

Yet in a design sense, the new kitchen-as-laboratory was simply too audacious. Not only had French culture not yet adopted a culture of technological progress, the imagined French housewife was not ready to abandon the dream of servants for the pursuit of the domestic technological script. Social contact with a servant could be avoided, however, and in the design for a rational kitchen (Fig. 1) we can see the compromises in stark form. The 2m by 3m floor plan is flanked on the longer wall by a hallway or salon, and the accordion door on the shorter wall opens into a dining room. When the mistress of the house cooks, the accordion door is open, rendering the kitchen a new social space (a far cry from the dark, back-room kitchens of a generation earlier) and allowing her to display both her modern accouterments and her culinary talents. Her work process proceeds rationally in counter-clockwise fashion. When the bonne cooks, the accordion door is closed and dining paraphernalia are passed through the rotating shelves, much like the famed tour at the orphanages for abandoning children. The sanctity of the high status social space in the dining room is preserved and the bonne becomes invisible and harmless.[18]

The emerging position of women in the interwar period thus reflected a set of profound changes in social values and economic practices. Denied the vote in the early 1920s if for no other reason than male fear about a female electoral majority[19], women were to be relegated to the home as the new managers of the domestic sphere. Most Socialist feminists did not contest the belief that women's primary task was to sustain the family and by the late 1930s, even the Communists supported rather traditional markers of women's identity, from motherhood to beauty contests.[20] This implied a new sort of feminism (and I use the word with caution), one in which women would find dignity in their homes as mothers producing the future generations of Frenchmen and as maîtresses de maison assuring that their families would be clean, healthy, and comfortable.[21] In this idealized and prescriptive perspective, home economics schools would teach women the love of home and family, along with the advanced techniques of household management, thus making them happy to adapt to the new set of social expectations. They would not need to seek dignity in the cold, impersonal, and degrading world of paid labor. By default, in the end, if they decided to work for money, they would still be expected to maintain their families. For these middle class women, appliances and domestic efficiency would ease the required burdens.

Modernists deployed a compelling set of images to make the new domesticity attractive. An advertisement by Electro-Lux for their vacuum cleaner in 1928 (Fig. 2) depicted a woman in flight astride her new mechanical servant. The metaphor of sorcery is obvious and it continued a discourse about the "magical" character of the new technology. It also echoed the metaphor of flight and taking-off that Rosemary Wakeman has discussed.[22] A poem of the same period published in L'Art ménager promised a deification of the feminine user of the new technology and maintained the metaphor of sorcery. Deus ex machina became deus est machina:

And God said, "Let there be light", and there was light (Genesis I:3)

I turn the switch with a well accustomed motion;
The usual miracle (prodige) is performed
Suddenly the room is filled
With life-giving light.

Modern Science makes us the equals of God;
I send forth the current, a miniature lightning-bolt,
And assist in the birth, in my home, once deep in the dark,
Several constellations of tiny little suns[23]

In a more quotidian fashion, many modernists recognized that the newly-educated, middle class woman might not see much dignity in cooking and cleaning, promises of becoming the sorcerer's apprentice notwithstanding. In a workshop on gastrotechnique (the science of food preparation) at the 1931 Home Show, Dr. Edouard Pomiane, a member of the Academy of Sciences said:

I would never advocate relegating a women to pursuing a technique that she might consider inferior to her intellect as an educated woman. Without debasing herself, the modern woman can work happily in her kitchen if she considers it rather as a laboratory, perhaps as the atelier of an artist.[24]

By this and other word plays and images, a return to the home was not a concession to social pressures, but an affirmation of a woman's expertise and a considerable empowerment. Lest one consider the new devices an eyesore in the carefully decorated home and an insult to a woman's good taste, Madame André Corthis noted,

The magical complexity of the machines belies a serendipitous simplification of life. They logically deserve a place in the home. They are not ugly; quite to the contrary, they have their own poetry.[25]

A man flees the room when he cannot work in peace because the noise of housework forces him out just at the very time he needs peace and quiet. That is the sort of environment that, despite the good housekeeping that supports it, is badly out of balance. It is easy enough to work at other times, to reserve mending and ironing to the quiet hours when silence is needed for collecting one's thoughts, and to reschedule vacuuming and electric floor waxing at other times.[37]

The newly-constructed leisure time, however, had to be won from a reluctant economy, lest living standards fall. This demanded productivity increases. In similar ways, Catholic reformists and other modernists linked industrial malthusianism (a reluctance among investors to engage in mass-production techniques) to biological malthusianism (a reluctance to reproduce).[38] This linkage rendered modernization and technological change almost inherently patriotic and as such it tended to politicize acts of invention, production, and consumption, turning them into potential critiques of France's conservative elements. The new machines themselves evoked political critiques and agendas.

The new domestic agenda hinged upon new ideas about economic organization. This approach demanded that part of the technologically- and managerially-induced productivity gains be rolled back to the working class, thus creating markets of the scale required by the new production techniques. Yet this logic had a central flaw: once unions were weakened by the middle of 1920, there was little to stop employers from pocketing the benefits of productivity increases. Alternatively, businesses could look for a sufficiently large market in the emerging white collar strata that the new economic organization was generating. While this seems to have worked in the US (which was able to develop middle class mass markets in cars, radios, and appliances), France's middle class was simply too small, though this did not prevent the new consumer durables from becoming the visual markers of the new middle class. To this end, an advertisement from Alsthom in February 1932 showed two very well dressed and expertly coifed housewives sitting in a parlor, with one remarking to the other how life with appliances was so thoroughly modern with all of its push-buttons (Fig. 4). One journalist put it most bluntly in a furniture trade magazine: "The [new] family house, synonymous with the home, must be lived in by the middle class, the group that represents the essential vital and productive force of the nation."[39]

Whatever increases in working class incomes there were seem to have gone largely into better diet, transportation expenses, and housing--and, when possible, to remove wives from the labor force.[40] Working class incomes were rising but unstable, rendering savings difficult and making purchases of large consumer durables unthinkable. Given, for example, that in 1928 a regular stand-up vacuum cleaner by Mors cost 855 francs and that a skilled male industrial worker made 5 to 6 francs per hour,[41] it is no surprise that few working class families could afford much in terms of appliances. This in turn meant that while design closure (a convergence of functional definitions about what a given machine is supposed to do) could be reached through references to American artifacts and by a discourse on domesticity, mass markets and mass production methods could not develop. As artifacts, appliances did not develop cultural or economic meanings as objects of mass consumption. This placed the consumer goods industry more broadly in the classic artisanal impasse: markets were too small to justify mass production techniques, but without mass production techniques, production costs and hence sale prices could not drop, thereby assuring that there could be no mass market.

Rosalind Williams is correct in discerning the emergence of a consumer culture before the First World War, because so many of the attributes of mass consumption were present: mass marketing, department stores organized on a quasi-industrial basis, and a seamless configuration of goods.[42] However, the goods available at places like Bon Marché and Galeries Lafayette represented a compromise with the American model popularized by Sears. Knock-offs of elite artifacts abounded, and some specifically middle class articles were available, but the artifactual terrain of the French department store emulated rather than contradicted elite style. Crucially, French consumers with high incomes tended to seek difference and to demonstrate their separateness from the crowd--what good bourgeoise would want to be seen with the same dress as another at a soirée?[43] This attitude was anathema to mass production techniques based on standardization and long production runs, the kind seen in the United States in the 1920s--a country rife with immigrants seeking objects that would minimize their differences from the population as a whole and help them assimilate. As a result, only a few of the French appliance manufacturers (among them, Calor and Thomson[44]) could develop mass production and mass marketing arrangements.

The lack of mass market thus hindered efforts to reach design and cultural closure on domestic technologies. The feedback mechanism that usually runs from consumer decisions back into designs of objects and the construction of their meanings could not operate. Bruno Latour and Madeleine Akrich have argued that when inventors develop new objects, they implicitly invent the users of those objects at the same time.[45] In addition, the inventive process needs to be discursive, that there should be a process of implicit negotiation between promulgators and users so that technologies are appropriate to their context. In interwar France, producers of domestic appliances could not easily discover or invent their prospective clients' needs because there was not a broad market which could be said to reflect broad public tastes. Manufacturers thus unilaterally had to invent the users of the new machines, and in their efforts they developed a set of machine and visual images which helped to redefine and redeploy the meanings of French women and families, and of the new middle class--even though those new meanings were scarcely supported by the material context. When the managers of the Salon des Arts Ménagers (the annual Home Shows in Paris) discovered in the late 1920s that their representation of the technologically revolutionized home was too audacious, it cleverly introduced "retrospective" exhibitions that featured aristocratic and haut bourgeois parlors and dining rooms--just meters away from the latest in appliances. This was a fruitful juxtaposition because the member of the new middle class (say, the wife of an account executive at Citroën) could promenade through one part of the Salon and invent her past in a Louis XV parlor, then walk through the rest and imagine her future in a rationalized kitchen-as-laboratory.

In terms of the machines that were actually developed, especially refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, and washing machines, design stabilization came almost entirely from copying American models. For example, Thomson, the largest appliance manufacturer, seems to have been entirely dependent upon General Electric for its designs.[46] The false starts were astounding, such as a vacuum cleaner which also acted as a hair dryer and an atomizer of both perfume and insecticide (visible on the back of the vacuum cleaner in Fig. 2), a gasoline-fired iron, and a countertop garbage incinerator. French refrigerators circa 1930 were built for the American practice of weekly shopping, not for the daily shopping pattern of the French. They were thus too large and, despite the efforts of Electro-Lux (a Swedish firm) to promote its small, gas-fired Bijoux refrigerator in the 1930s, they rarely found domestic customers. Similarly, floor care machines seem to have been built for large, American-scale spaces, not for the smaller French homes. Similar observations can be made with respect to water heaters and stoves. Electricity availability grew during the interwar era, but delivery capacities (the wattages that could be carried) remained minimal and prices high, thus reducing the market for electrical devices. In short, actual designs fit poorly with the French material context. This did not mean, however, that "home" appliances had no market. Institutions such as hotels and hospitals bought them in large numbers, for in the institutional context, they made good economic sense.[47] Ironically, it was the institutional market that kept many of the domestic appliance manufacturers afloat. Some saw in the economics of appliances a strong incentive for collective housekeeping, but the social agenda of the modernists largely precluded that possibility.[48]

Domestic technologies saw little diffusion for other reasons as well. The argument that seemed so compelling for rationalization and automation in industry was economic: machines would replace workers and thus save employers considerable wage expenses. This model was meaningless when applied to mechanizing the home. Once women were cajoled or forced back to the home, what point was there, in an economic sense, to put them out of "work"? Even for well-heeled middle class families, expenditures on costly home appliances were hard to justify. The analytic domestic accounting advocated by the home economics mavens would have demonstrated the folly of such purchases. Concretely, then, the domestic market for appliances was minimal, despite coherent cultural discourse to the contrary.

Domestic mechanization in interwar France thus remained materially elusive. If we can argue that every machine has both a symbolic and a functional or material side, we know that the concrete side of the modernist agenda clearly failed. France's birthrate stagnated, mass consumption and mass production practices remained minimal, and a number of women not only continued to work, but began to seek higher education and professional jobs.[49] We do have reason to believe that the symbolic agenda succeeded, however. Socialists and, after 1935, Communists began to critique the capitalist order less for its penchant for exploiting workers and more for its refusal to support industrial "progress." In terms of social practices, the French public embraced the new leisure, but more as an escape from work than as an affirmation of modernism.[50] Most significantly, the Salons des Arts Ménagers seem to have been a major popular cultural event in the interwar era. The Salons presented each year's new model of appliances, from broom handles to dishwashers. The popular press, led by Le Petit Parisien, gave the event front-page billing and many of the grands hommes politiques showed up for photo opportunities at each winter's Salon. More tellingly, by 1938, Salon attendance surpassed 500,000 people.[51]

The Salon had little success in creating a mass market for domestic appliances, though for artisanal-scale and high-price enterprises, it was a profitable affair. The vast majority of the visitors bought little more than a Berger lamp or a Mouli grater; most, however, reveled in the pleasure of vicarious consumerism. The Salons and their resplendent, flashy products portrayed a world that could be: a reformed, a productive capitalism that could deliver the goods for all.

As symbolic political discourse, the Salon's dream-world of familial liberation and material prosperity mocked the desperation of a France in Depression and chided hidebound politicians and businessmen. Most importantly, the Salon pointed the path to a modernized France, an economic miracle which France ultimately lived in the 1950s. The cleavage between the rhetoric of progress on one side and the banality of practices on the other prepared the fertile cultural soil for a modernized postwar France. The language of progress remained gleefully liberated from the constraints of everyday life, allowing the cultural construction of an idealized liberated housewife living happily with her middle-class family in her thoroughly modern home.

[Credits for images]

Figure 1: derived from André Hermant, "Cuisine-type," L'Art ménager 97 (mai 1935): 364. Reconfiguration (c) R. Frost, 1992.

Figure 2: L'Art Ménager January 1928, back cover.

Figure 3: L'Art Ménager April 1937, p. viii

Figure 4: L'Art Ménager February 1932, p. vi.

L'Art Ménager series is from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, held at the Archives Nationales as series 850023/185. Rights have been acquired from the Archives Nationales.