La Ville en Vol: Toulouse and the Cultural Legacy of the Airplane

Abstract

The airplane and aviation have played a unique role in French modern culture during the twentieth century. Pilots and their flying machines captured the imagination of the French public as the heroes of the new age. The experience of flight was conceived as a metaphor of liberation, a celebration of the human spirit.' As a machine equated with the realm of emotion and elan, the airplane and the flight it made possible acted as catalysts in the invention of modern cultural images and practices. Ultimately, the airplane was the most compelling example of the ascendent technology that was essential to the emergence of mass culture over the course of the twentieth century. In this article I examine the role of aviation in the practice and representation of modern culture and image in the city of Toulouse from 1910 through the 1970s. I regard the city as a social and cultural construction where people create its meaning, define it, change it, and are conversely changed by their understanding of urban life. Toulouse has been one of the foremost provincial centers of French aeronautics throughout the twentieth century. Ringed by airports, watchful over each new aircraft, mesmerized by the exploits of its pilots, Toulouse became the cradle of French aviation, the land of flight. The material presented here delineates how the airplane was appropriated into the city's culture as a visual symbol of modernity and as the expression of