As Indian summer approaches, this chesty voice returns to us which seemed to caption an improbable Lelouch film: “You know, I have never been as happy as that morning”, followed by a va-va- goes airy. Joe Dassin’s song lapped the beaches of 1975 like a heady surf. This may just be a detail to you, but this phenomenon is dead. Without realizing it, we have just experienced a new summer without hits, these refrains which no one escaped and which made the mythology of a so-called season of love: For a flirt, The grenadine heart, etc. On occasion, we learned from Joe Dassin about the watercolors of Marie Laurencin, the temperatures in northern America, etc.
When The big mop had 17 million entries…
In the age of streaming music and silo platforms, good understanding has disappeared: we no longer have the same references from 7 to 77 years old. Of this crisis in culture, the historian Jean-François Sirinelli delivers a delicate, unexpected analysis, in the form of a tomb for an era: that of the “world before”, where images and sounds permeated the minds of all ages. confused, governed free time and discussions at the table; When The big mop had 17 million entries and Indian summer 800,000 sales. These cultural products, supposed to last the time of their marketing, have crossed the generations, leaving deep traces, even if certain examples of the book begin to melt, such as The snows of Kilimanjaro1966 hit.
The visit to the attic, where the old television lies, begins at the end of the 1950s and ends at the beginning of the third millennium, when the Internet modifies mass culture, which has today become less massive than saturated. The book could have been called The camera explores time (a pioneering program of the ORTF), first for the legitimate place occupied by films and television news, but above all for its almost cinematographic art of focal length. Each chapter begins with a simple cultural object: take TV 7 days or Mitterrand’s 1981 campaign poster, give it some depth of field, then make a changing France appear in the background. This ability to delve into the banality, to bring to light what we no longer saw through obviousness, is the beauty and elegance of this Time passing bybig test of the start of the school year.
The end of the memory chain at the time of the “split cultures” of the digital age
In small touches, he composes what Max Weber called a “thought table”, demonstrating that Polnareff and Poulidor are very serious objects of analysis. Over the course of 49 very brief chapters, Sirinelli achieves a feat: making this not-so-distant world strange; this world from which images and sounds still reach us, and with which we believe we have so much in common: consumer society, the media, rock, etc. Wrong: just read the subtle analyzes of the films To us little English girls (1976) or The party (1980) to get dizzy. Yesterday is well over. Not only because Vic-Sophie Marceau’s morals have changed, but because such films no longer exist. They did not just represent society, they created society, through identification: the stereotype in which the public recognized itself gave them in return a place in History, through the box office.
As a farewell, Sirinelli recalls that the biggest success of the Indochine group, The adventurer, greeted in 1982 a hero who was not of their generation: Bob Morane, adventurer “lost in the infernal valley”, launched in 1953 by the Belgian publisher Marabout. Said comic strip hung around the boarding school where singer Nicola Sirkis grew up. At that time, print still made it possible for heroes not to die entirely. It is indeed this memory chain which no longer exists in the era of “split cultures” of the digital age. President Macron verified this to his cost by invoking Gérard Majax between the two towers: the Internet was immediately filled with articles to explain to the younger generations who the mage of the Dorothée years was. What will a world be like tomorrow without The big mop (and without Majax)? The question is not trivial. Philippe Chevallier
Passing time, France that is changing. Echoes of the world before
By Jean-François Sirinelli, Odile Jacob, 336 P., €23.90.