An Army of Shadows: Black Markets, Adaptation, and Social Transparency in Postwar France

Abstract

Few facets of French culture in the three decades following World War II are as storied as the antagonism that beleaguered the relationship between state and society. Anxiety underlying this relationship confronted officials, intellectuals, and society at large with a severe conflict over the transparency of social relations: the state was prying into society, prying it open, while elements of society, in turn, at times seemed noncompliant to the point of threatening the stability of France as a governable unit. In the midst of a strongwelfare state, with high regard and legal protections for the individual and privacy, and with laws that even allowed for feedback from families and social organizations in the planning of everyday life, sectors of intellectual life, politics, and society bent nevertheless toward antistatist paranoia, occasionally even the celebration of a stateless society, on the grounds of the state’s reach into everyday life. The tension has long been explained as a result of a communism-driven intellectual scene that decried the republic and the state as violent bourgeois shams ðan approach mirrored in the 1950s anti-tax poujadiste movement’s denunciation of machinations of the “corrupted brain” and the “vampire tax state” against the “little,” “free,” truly FrenchÞ; as a result of the experience of Vichy and the heroization of the resistance; as a general Western phenomenon; or as the afterlife of a disappointed early postwar hope for a superior political regime ða hope that returned at important moments, notably the later 1960sÞ. Such explanations mistake particular political constellations for a set of concerns that reached deep into the tissue of everyday life; this article proposes to address the mutual constitution of state and society, and the antagonism between them, by focusing on the complex imagery of social transparency negotiated in this competition from 1944 to about 1968.