Seduction, Aggression, and Frenchness in LA VIE PARISIENNE (1914–1918)

Abstract

The article retraces how the notion of cultural singularity in sexuality was constructed and weaponized in the most popular French illustrated periodical of the First World War. It argues that La Vie Parisienne’s sublimation of romantic love, sex, and Frenchness worked as a cultural tactic that, while helping the readership cope with a devastating historical disruption, undermined at the same time claims for social change. The close analysis of works by illustrator Chéri Hérouard uncovers how nationalism and anxieties of sexual dispossession contributed to integrate a fraught notion of women’s sexual consent to a broader claim of cultural superiority. This article provides a critical approach to popular and visual representations of heterosexual and non-conjugal norms of desire, seduction, and sexuality in wartime France. It also offers a historical example of how the racialization and nationalisation of gender relations, discussed as ‘Gallic singularity’ in recent scholarship, trivialises masculine aggression and produces the ambivalence long associated with the notion of women’s sexual consent in France.