Author: Robert L. Frost, Visiting Associate Professor of History, University. of Michigan

Subject.
A study of the cultural, social, and economic impact of mass-production technologies and the emergence of mass-consumption objects in France in the years just before the transformation of the postwar period, this book examines the emergence and popular acceptance of new notions of technology and science-driven "progress." In a large sense, this book studies the transformation of French thinking about technology, examining not only on agendas for technological change, but also the actual implementation of the agendas and the reactions to them. These projects for modernizing France meant reinventing women, industrial workers, and the middle class. Nonetheless, the objects to be reinvented as part of the modernization process were also historical subjects, and they had and developed their own ideas about what the future should look like. By the late 1930s, they began to act accordingly, thus contributing to a fascinating dialog of the deaf between purveyors and users of new technologies and techniques.

Abstract.
France emerged from World War One with a serious birth dearth and a diminished sense of collective confidence in the future. Perceptive observers had seen France lag economically and technologically in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and though French science remained respectable, superior German technology, industry, and manpower cost France dearly in the war. Moreover, women and peasants got a first taste of factory life and the economic autonomy that their labor on the open market brought them. Finally, after having seen the successes of Henry Ford and the productive achievements of rationalized war production, French experts began to imagine an economic and social transformation of France through the introduction of mass production techniques. Mass production would make possible mass consumption, mass culture, and popular democracy in a massive homogenizing process.

As modernist business and labor reformers began to develop a new social agenda, communicating it through new advertising techniques, home and auto shows, and the like, they immediately ran into the opposition of conservative business, Communists, and women. Though some leading-edge industries such as electrical power, aircraft, appliances, and automobiles were transformed, widespread opposition and risk aversion cut the process short. Conservative businessmen preferred paternalist labor practices and a tradition low-output, high-price "quality" production style over the low-margin, mass production approach. In addition, they were loath to allow the loss of personal control that managerialism and sales of stock represented. Communists supported mass consumption based on rationalized industry, yet demanded that capitalism be abolished first.

Women faced conflicting new choices between profluent motherhood and paid labor (even careers) with some trepidation. By dint of their own practicality and their new sense of dignity, they tried to forge new social identities despite the expectations imposed on them by modernists, Communists, and Catholics. The modernist agenda meant reinventing women, the family, the worker--even space and time--and the parties to the process were determined to have a say in it.

This book examines the modernist project, responses to it, and the synthesis--or rather, for the interwar era, the lack of synthesis--that resulted. It uses records from the French labor inspectorate, army, and police; documentation from the Catholic reform, public hygiene, and industrial rationalization movements, as well as the archives of annual home shows (the Salon des Arts Ménagers) and industrial firms in order to define the rhetorical, economic, and material terrain of industrial and technological modernization. Focusing on the critical disjuncture between the rhetoric of progress and the mediocrity of practice, this book identifies the ideological and cultural basis of the transformation of France in the postwar era. Though France remained quaintly traditional in the interwar era, it was at that time that tradition ceased to be sufficient justification for what was. Increasingly, the measure of France's social, economic, and technological systems became the goods and social identities they produced.


Chapter Summaries.

Introduction: The making of technological culture.
This section serves to introduce the historical terrain of interwar France, the basic arguments of the book, and raises theoretical issues in historical analysis, class and gender studies, and technological change. Theoretical issues include: the use and abuse of discourse analysis, analyzing objects as texts, the utility of imputing prospective narrative for understanding social agendas, transcending conflicts between social constructionism and technological determinism. In addition, this work proceeds crucially from two interrelated notions, that in inventing a device of process, the promulgator implicitly invents and prescribes the actions of the user, and that there can be historical disjunctures between technological and cultural change--that they do not always complement each other or move in parallel. Such disjunctures can tear open the fabric of the historical process, exposing the causal (or anti-causal) core of historical change. Due attention will be given to the arguments of Bruno Latour, Pierre Bourdieu, Patrick Fridenson, Alain Corbin, Ruth Cowan, Thomas Hughes, Alice Kessler-Harris, Joan Scott, and Michelle Perrot.


Chapter One: Reluctant modernism: the elite politics of industrial rationalization and domestic consumerism.
Organized chronologically, this chapter focuses first on the efforts at mass production and the utilization of women's industrial labor during the First World War. It then turns to a discussion of the prescriptions for peacetime economic social and political-economic organization growing out of the corporatist experience of wartime industrial management, in particular, the French adaptation of the Fordist agenda of linking mass production techniques with popular consumption and mass marketing. The discussion examines the commonalities between marxist and modernist business views of a recast social-industrial order. The modernists' failure to implement their agenda, due both to a dreamy wish for a return to a mythologized prewar innocence of the belle époque and to the excursion of a large part of the Left into irreconcilable opposition, will then be examined. The chapter then discusses how, despite their failure in high politics and the onset of the Depression, modernists began to penetrate the growth areas of the state and business--the technical ministries within the government and the science- and technology-based industries. It closes with an examination of the critical political and industrial conjunctures of the Popular Front, the war mobilization, and the defeat of 1940.

Chapter Two: Inventing the new middle class.
Starting from the argument that a social class comes into being as much from acts of conscious affirmation of a new identity as from economic bases, this chapter examines how a new middle class, materially generated by the emergence of science-based industry and the managerial revolution, began to become conscious of itself as a class in the interwar era. This included a number of socio-cultural inventions: defining the older middle and professional milieux as outdated and retrograde, developing a sense of status based almost exclusively on the kind of merit that could be defined in a resumé, and discovering a palpable functional position within the emerging social structure of production and marketing. Equally important, the new middle class tried to identify its place in the world of objects by developing styles of consumption and deportment which were distinct from both the working class and the traditional elite. Though this new class owed its very existence to the emergence of mass industry, it distanced itself from many mass-produced objects, preferring its own, quasi-elite style of consumption. Unlike the more unified American mass market, the French mass market was divided between upscale and downscale consumers. The new French middle class spent its discretionary income on items that imparted a patina of distinction, unlike its American counterparts, who sought a cohesive identity as a mass middle class. Finally, in the objects it purchased, the new middle class often sought to affirm a certain aspect of modernism, reflected in design styles. In so doing, it paid homage to the technological "progress" which was its material and ideological base.

Chapter Three: Recasting space and time.
This chapter deals directly with efforts to reconfigure work and domestic space, from the rational kitchen to the rational factory. Such efforts drew on Taylor, Fayol, and others in the industrial realm, but also from Christine Frederick, Pauline Bernège, and social hygienists in the domestic sphere. This discussion starts from the notion that the invention of a device or a technique implies the simultaneous yet subtle invention of the consumer and of his or her activities. The design of the modern factory presumed a certain kind of worker--unskilled and willing to trade a sense of power at work for a higher income--, and the new washing machine prescribed a certain structure and practice in domestic life--abundantly dressed families with individualized washing. Similarly, the physical layout of the new factory and of the rationalized domestic work spaces (kitchen- or bathroom-as-laboratory) prescribed specific gestures which had new social and cultural meanings by, for example, enforcing new norms of efficiency and cleanliness. This also meant the emergence of a new notion of leisure time, defined in large part in contradistinction to new notions of work time. Just as the income gained from labor was now to be rationally budgeted, so was the new leisure time to be wisely spent in aggrandizing activities from sports to touring and collective action. In a Foucaultian sense, efforts to redefine social space and time were overt acts of power, veiled as they were in the raiments of efficiency, pleasure, and taste.

Chapter Four: Making the modern worker.
With the death of ideological anarcho-syndicalism as a reaction to industrialization through the experience of World War One and the disastrous strikes that followed, the French working class split its allegiances. Socialists sought to redistribute the ostensible fruits of progress by affirming a technocratic-corporatist strategy of reform, Communists attempted to pursue the same agenda for progress through a permanently oppositional strategy, and Catholics tried to soften the blows of progress and to humanize capitalism. None succeeded before 1936 in winning any institutional position for the working class within the workplace, yet the Communist Party successfully developed a strategy for organizing urban life. At the same time, of course, the working class was reinvented from the outside, through both industrial rationalization and a repositioning within the world of goods, from urban space to consumer items. Some of this reflected simply the manufacturing and distribution of goods for a new, apartment-dwelling urban population, but some of it reflected conscious efforts to redefine working class values through, for example, the popular hygiene and home economics movements. As such, these efforts were part of a broader modernist strategy to recast the culture of space and time.

Chapter Five: Inventing the modern woman
The experience of massive involvement of factory work for French women during World War One, similar to that of Rosie the Riveter in the US a generation later, forever changed society's perceptions of women's work as well as women's sense of their own worth. In addition, just as changes in the economy were opening employment opportunities for blue and white collar women, the loss of over 1 1/2 million young men led many natalists to demand that women stay at home and reproduce. Indeed, strict laws (particularly against abortion and contraception) and informal practices made it clear in the early 1920s that women's place was in the home, even though many families relied on their earnings and their sense of dignity depended on work. Restrictive hiring practices and denial of voting rights also diminished women's public life. Efforts to define women outside the home as morally suspect--from the new flapper to the traditional woman of loose morals--set plenty of negative weight against public woman, and the invention of the domestic technician placed positive weight on the private woman. The new domestic engineer-manager, working in her kitchen-laboratory and doing her present-value accounting of domestic assets was expected to find new dignity in the rhetoric of the modernized home while breast feeding her infant sons. The symbols for a dignified home life became aggressively modern. As it became obvious through the interwar years that many families simply couldn't afford to lose the income of the working wife, and that women with ever-greater education were less and less willing to stay at home, the social script for domestic life changed and appliances again took on new meanings.

Chapter Six: Reinventing home and family.
The invention of the modern middle class French family, done in the interwar era largely on a symbolic and rhetorical level, meant the direct social construction of the housewife, replete with the technological systems of the ostensibly modern home, but also the invention of the spurned others in terms of the lazy, profligate, and dirty working class and the decadent, inbred, and backward elite. This meant that middle class family space and time had to reconcile itself with the servants it wanted but could not afford (referring to a largely spurious "crisis of domestics" as an explanation for their absence), claiming to replace them with more rational machines. In the new script, the middle class housewife need no longer worry (as if she ever had to) that the servant girl would infect her family with syphilis or TB, nor that she would sass her mistress. Instead, she would have obedient mechanical servants. As such, she would gain the mark of identity for the new middle class: commanding rationalized, mechanical activities according to objective laws, as opposed to the petty tyrannies of elite mistresses of the home or the profligacies and debaucheries of the working class. In the new domestic environment, the educated man and, by the early 1930s, his educated, professional wife, would find the dignified leisure commensurate with the mental activity that was their work life. Ironically, however, the appliances which were to be the symbols of the new domestic tranquility were rarely bought by households; instead, they were bought by the collective establishments (lunchrooms, schools, and the like) which were to play key social and economic roles in the 1950s.

Chapter Seven: The failure of modernism and the emergence of modern frustration
For all of the efforts of the modernists, France's economic performance--the fulcrum upon which the modernist agenda hinged--remained less than spectacular in the interwar era. Moreover, the structure of French society changed very little. New jobs began to appear, from analytic accountant to marketing representative, yet the social identities and values behind them remained traditional. The problem went beyond economics--the scenarios for the future offered by the modernists simply didn't reflect the aspirations of the bulk of the French populace, not because the latter was backward (whatever that might have meant), but because the solidaristic aspirations of many citizens could not support individualized consumption within segmented product markets. Similarly, elite practices gave little solace to those who believed that the dominant social groups could reform themselves. Where industry was modernized, jobs speeded up and profits rose (at least, until 1932), yet prices remained high and goods inaccessible. Few citizens were particularly enthusiastic to envision a future in a hard-surface, square-corner Mallet-Stevens home, or in the tightly choreographed future scenes of the modern kitchen or factory. Yet the goods themselves were attractive, and the good life they represented constituted an ambivalently seductive future.
Inadvertently in the case of business modernists and intentionally in the case of socialists, the visions of the future presented in the industrial rationalization and domestic consumerism rhetoric constituted a critique of the existing order, whose failures were only underlined by the Depression. The French populace might not have bought the new consumer goods or the promises of efficient production, but they did buy the notion that a better, more resplendent material life was possible--provided social power was recast. The massive strikes of 1936 were not a revolt against work per se, but against its ends and power relations. In short, through the modernist agenda of the interwar era, the French people learned both a frustration with the static world that was and a vague vision of a world that could be. It was on that basis that the citizenry so easily allowed dictatorship to replace democracy in 1940, and to allow a technocracy legitimated by the rhetoric of progress to take over after 1945.

Presentation and visual aesthetics.
Many photographs are available, from contemporary advertising copy to managerial consultant literature. An entire series is available, for example, on the rational factory, the rational kitchen, the rational bathroom, and the rational laundry room. In addition, one could also use organizational and flow charts for both industrial and domestic management.

Market.
Monographic for graduate courses in history of technology, women's studies, labor history, social history, and economic history. As an innovative work in twentieth century social history, this volume in paperback might be adopted in upper-level French and European history courses, as well as in French civilization and technology studies courses.