5 - The ‘little world’ of Françoise Sagan

Summary

The most successful middlebrow fiction captures, through compelling stories, some vital element of the mood, aspirations and anxieties of its era. In the 1950s and ‘60s, Françoise Sagan's concise, elegant tales of love and disillusion, set among an affluent yet bohemian section of the French middle class, attracted a readership of millions both at home and abroad. She was a highly mediatised star in France from her dramatic arrival on the literary scene in 1954, aged just 18, with the scandalous Bonjour Tristesse, and on through the following decades, remaining an instantly recognisable name and face up to and beyond her death in 2004. Her success was in part the product of a new type of commercial publishing, itself one aspect of the accelerating consumerism of the 1950s, and of the decade's appetite for youth and novelty in the aftermath of defeat and humiliation. Like her contemporary Brigitte Bardot (and like Colette’s fictional Claudine), she was widely touted as a ‘girl of today’, but her novels were read and enjoyed for reasons that went well beyond effective marketing and mediatisation.

Sagan's world is one of whisky-fuelled nights in smoky bars and nightclubs, of open-topped sports cars gliding through Paris at dawn or racing down open country roads, of white villas or beachfront hotels overlooking the blue Mediterranean, of lives sufficiently leisured to make relationships and the pursuit of pleasure their central focus. Protagonists work in journalism, the good ones for left-leaning journals, or in publishing, advertising, architecture, fashion or interior design – the cultural industries that burgeoned as France moved into a more American-style, consumerist stage of advanced capitalism. Affluence in this world is easy, a given rather than a goal. At one level, Sagan's fictions mirror the mythologies of Paris Matchor Elle, two of the period’s most popular and glossy weeklies which represented the French back to themselves as young, well-off and stylishly modern, reflecting the reality of increased material wealth – car ownership, for example, like that of radios, washing machines and refrigerators, rose exponentially between 1948 and 1968 (Gaffney and Holmes, 2007, 11) – but also giving visual and verbal form to less earthbound dreams of luxury, glamour and personal freedom. But Sagan's stories also register the dark shadows underlying the bright surface of 1950s and ‘60s France.