Global culture fronts: the Alliance Française and the cultural propaganda of the Free French

Abstract

In January 1941, F.R. Cowell of the Spears Commission expressed the hope that the British and the Free French might ‘make some use of the wreckage of the Alliance Française now scattered around the world’. Although the Alliance was ‘hopelessly lost’ in places such as Japan and the Balkans, it was not, he argued, ‘justifiable to let the whole business go by default’. In this essay, the author adopts a global lens to analyse this putative ‘wreckage’ of the Alliance and to suggest that the notion of a ‘global culture front’ might be a productive way of investigating the remnants of the Alliance’s international network. What was the significance of the wartime Alliance in the United States, Egypt, Indonesia, Brazil or Uruguay? What role did it play, or fail to play, as a support platform for the cultural propaganda of the Free French? What was the role of French culture, per se, in this complex and shifting political terrain? Part of a larger cultural history of the Alliance Française, this paper explores how representatives of the Free French and of the Vichy regime engaged in mutual surveillance of cultural and political activity within Alliance networks and intervened to shape events.