New Puritanism
CELINE MANSANTI: La Vie Parisienne in the 1920s US: “New Puritanism”, Censorship and Self-Censorship
Chair: Andrew Hobbes
This presentation is based on a work in progress on the cultural transfer of La Vie parisienne and other humorous French magazines (such as Le Rire, Le Sourire, Le Journal amusant, etc.) to the US between 1913 and 1939. Cumulatively attracting millions of French readers during the Belle Époque (roughly between the 1870s and 1914), these French light, comic, risqué, satirical illustrated magazines had a rich, second, later life in the US where they contributed to massive reactions against the “new Puritanism” (Mencken) prevailing in the American society. In particular, they helped reshape the magazine landscape when “sex o’clock” (Current Opinion, vol. 55, n°2, August 1913) started to chime around 1913, contributing, in the 1910s, to the modernization of the triad of classic humor magazines (Puck, Judge, Life) and helping a “smart” magazine such as Vanity Fair find its distinctive, sophisticated voice; encouraging the creation of a set of small humorous magazines in the 1920s (such as French Frolics La Vie Parisienne, French Humor, Joe Burten’s magazines); and taking part in the birth of a whole line of French-themed spicy pulps (such as Parisienne Monthly, Gay Parisienne, Paris Nights, and La Paree Stories), mostly in the 1930s. In this talk, I will focus on La Vie parisienne and show how, in the 1920s, this magazine inspired several American publications (fully-fledged magazines or “Vie parisienne” issues of existing magazines) committed to fighting “new Puritanism”. A good number of these publications printed approximate copies of La Vie parisienne’s risqué illustrations, triggering censorship actions reported in the press. Censorship in turn generated self-censorship phenomena. Studying how censorship operations were reported in the press of the time and comparing some of the original illustrations published in La Vie parisienne with those copied in these American publications should help us highlight some of the censorship and self-censorship mechanisms in the “new Puritan” America of the 1920s and see that the “Roaring Twenties” did not roar for everyone everywhere.
Celine Mansanti
is an associate professor in American history at the University of Picardie-Jules Verne in France. She wrote her PhD thesis on transition magazine (La revue transition, 1927-1938, le modernisme historique en devenir, Rennes, PUR, 2009). Her field of interest is the cultural history of the United States and its relationships with Europe in the first half of the 20th century, with a special focus on periodicals. She is currently writing a manuscript entitled “‘Sex O’Clock in America’: The cultural transfer of La Vie parisienne, Le Rire, and other French humorous magazines to the US, 1913-1939”.