Carrying the Torch High : The Military Element in the US Cultural Policy in France (1944–1967)
Résumé
This project investigates the promotion of American GIs on French territory from 1944 to 1967. After the creation of the National Security Council in 1947, the US army was called upon to play an important role in the United States’ foreign policy. Close to 60,000 GIs and their dependents were stationed in France from the late forties through the sixties as part of the Cold War military security programs. While these American expatriates settled in various parts of the country, the United States Information Service (USIS/France) tried to monitor contact between the soldiers and the local population in order to diffuse an official image of the United States. USIS/France put into place a network of cultural offices, composed of preexisting information services of the main military organizations established in France. Culture became an instrument of foreign policy and a basic factor of Cold War politics, confirming a strong relationship between culture and security at the time. Who designed the US cultural policy for the American military? Why did the US Congress never interfere with the promotion of soldiers in France, despite its strong distrust of the alleged propagandist nature of information agencies? As the number of combat units stationed in France increased, did the United States Information Service in Paris become the cultural backbone of the US military diplomacy in Europe? Through a close analysis of American and NATO archival records, this research sets out to analyze the structure of the US cultural policy in France, and evaluate its reception by the French population. Archival accounts show that its publicity was organized not only via existing US diplomatic channels (i.e. USIS/France, MSA, the Department of Defense) and international organizations (i.e. the NATO Information Service), but also via unofficial and personal/voluntary initiatives that created extraordinary cultural and social change. This period also left its mark on both French and American popular cultures, where the GIs’ experience was placed in a larger narrative, on the screen, through music and in text, media that permeated the popular culture and collective memories of both countries. This dissertation is situated at the crossroads of cultural history and the study of crosscultural relations. It aims to offer a comprehensive overview of the US cultural policy structure in France from 1944 to 1967, and to evaluate the importance of the military presence in its program. Most of the primary sources are recently declassified documents collected at the US National Archives and at the NATO headquarters. First-hand documents in the field such as letters, memoirs and personal scrapbooks, as well as press-clips and movies were also obtained. The diversity of these sources raises the ongoing issue of a proper classification method and the constitution of a theoretical framework, which we will discuss in this presentation. However, as a whole, and due to a very limited number of existing secondary sources on the US cultural policy for France, this project seeks to contribute to the current literature on history of military and cultural diplomacy during the Cold War.