The uses of popular culture by rival elites: The case of alsace, 1890–1914

Abstract

In the final years of the nineteenth century, the artistic and intellectual elite of the former French province of Alsace became the chief supporters and creators of popular culture. Buoyed by patronage from the urban middle classes in such cities as Strasbourg and Colmar, the so-called ‘Alsatian Awakening’ movement succeeded between 1890 and 1914 in founding journals, museums devoted to folk arts, and theaters where contemporary plays written in Alsatian dialect were performed.’ The artists’ deliberate attempt to lay claim to popular culture as their own arose as a response to similar claims from Germany. In effect, two elites-one Alsatian, the other composed of German settlers and administrators who had immigrated following the forced annexation of Alsace in I871confronted one another over the the issue of interpreting and preserving Alsatian popular culture. By the eve of World War I, the Germans had virtually conceded defeat, while a native Alsatian intellectual elite had fashioned an image of Alsatian identity which endures substantially unaltered to this day. The significance of this brief episode in the cultural history of Alsace lies in the light that it sheds on the relations between elite and popular culture, as well as on the conditions for survival of popular culture in the modern era. (By ‘elite’ I mean here those-both German and Alsatian-possessing political or economic power, or those whose formal education or artistic training set them apart from a less educated public. With the exception of a few German aristocrats, they were predominantly middle-class; virtually all came from urban backgrounds. By ‘popular’ I mean those lacking that power or training, of peasant or workingclass origins, whether from the city or the countryside.) Why should the rivalry between two elites be played out in the arena of popular culture? Further, what does this contest suggest about elite and popular culture as definitional categories? Elite and popular cultures are commonly viewed as mutually exclusive-what belongs to one, by definition, cannot belong to the other. Yet here we find the boundaries blurred. In 1978 there appeared two influential books that largely set the terms for the discussion of popular culture in the ensuing decade. Peter Burke’s Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe and Robert Muchembled’s Culture pupuluire e? culture des Sites both chronicled the decline of a once-vigorous popular culture. Both agreed that the relations between elite and popular culture in Europe had passed through three distinct stages since the Middle Ages. In the first, ‘participatory’ stage, Burke wrote, ‘the elite participated in the little tradition [of popular culture], but the common people did not participate in the great