Performing national consensus: populism in the work of Marcel Pagnol, 1929-38

Abstract

—Though often remembered simply as entertaining, well-crafted melodramas seasoned with Provençal local colour, Marcel Pagnol’s hit plays and films from the 1930s also contain strong elements of social realism and an exceptionally broad, coherent depiction of the fracture lines running through French society as a whole. Beyond addressing class and racial tensions in large cities such as his beloved Marseille, Pagnol highlighted ideological rivalries among local notables in small rural towns, as well as farmers’ struggle to maintain a traditional lifestyle at at a time of unprecedented material hardship and rapidly accelerating migration to large urban centres. Pagnol consistently dramatized the healing of these rifts, and in so doing performed a restoration of consensus among both his on-screen characters and otherwise highly adversarial cinema critics from the Marxist Left to the pro-fascist Right. By examining the socio-political content and reception of Marius (1929–31), Fanny (1931–32), César (1936), Regain (1937) and La Femme du boulanger (1938), the following article argues that Pagnol articulated an ideologically polyvalent form of populism that, in the volatile context of the Popular Front, became not only a highly valuable form of pan-ideological capital, but an enduring part of the French social imagination.