The Preparation for Vichy: Anti-Semitism in French Musical Culture Between the Two World Wars

Abstract

In January 1923 the important journal Courrier musical published an article by Louis Vuillemin entitled provocatively, Concerts mteques: m~~tque, a term widely propagated at the time by the nationalist Ligue de l'Action Frangaise, denoted, technically, a halfbreed, but specifically, in the usage of the league, a Jew. This nuance is unmistakable, for the article relentlessly excoriates the concerts organized by Jean Wiener, a Jewish composer, pianist, and entrepreneur. Vuillemin indicts these concerts, which presented the works of the Second Viennese School, of Les Six and Stravinsky, in addition to jazz, employing the code popularized by the league: he impugns such repertoire as appealing primarily to suckers (implying Wiener), whom he describes as physically seedy and apt to wear lunettes L la boche (German glasses). Finally, insinuating treachery, the critic poses the invidious question of who or what machiavellian and poisoned propaganda really lies behind the venture. For he asseverates that such figures are seeking to gangrener the national organism and to demonstrate the decline of French taste to the many curious foreigners attending the concerts. Vuillemin concludes, however, by reassuring his readers that the public has uncovered the plot and exposed the despoiled and impotent exoticism that this repertoire so odiously incarnates.1 The rhetoric and racist circumlocutions the article so dexterously interweaves were by no means exceptional in postwar French writings on music or indeed in operatic works. The image of the insidious, avaricious outsider, or the exotic and rootless Jew, who is not truly French but bound to international or Germanic conspiracies against the nation, is common. This discourse, moreover, links such an image to the assault on French tradition or to the modernist and cosmopolitan danger now posed to indigenous French cultural values. We may