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Zazous by Gérard de Cortanze

2017; American Association of Teachers of French; Volume: 91; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tfr.2017.0462

2329-7131

Roland A. Champagne,

French Literature and Poetry

sous forme de scénario où la menace aérienne passe au loin et La Maison est épargnée. Le roman ne dit pas si le poulet plumé par qui la catastrophe arrive était ficelé ou pas, mais le roman, lui, l’est bien. La fantaisiste Chiarello, dans le sillon des Oulipiens et de Jonathan Swift, par son regard loufoque et acéré sur notre société angoissée porte haut les couleurs du nouveau roman comique français. Eastern Connecticut State University Michèle Bacholle-Bošković Cortanze, Gérard de. Zazous. Paris: Albin Michel, 2016. ISBN 978-2-226-32404-7. Pp. 529. This eponymous youth group from the Occupation rallied French teenagers around the swing variation of jazz. Not accepted by the Nazis, the Collaboration, nor the Resistance, the Zazous became the counter-culture of Occupied France. This novel traces the fictional fates of six adolescents, mostly sixteen-year-olds, who met regularly in 1940 under the leadership of Josette at the Café Eva in the 14th arrondissement. Their distinctively colorful clothing were provocations to the reigning ideologies of the Occupation. Although swing music, songs, and dance were forbidden by the Nazi Occupiers as non-Aryan, Josette’s clan promoted swing, a distinctive offshoot of jazz music, as patriotic defiance and proclaimed their group as “l’anti-Révolution nationale” (41). Their collective name of Zazous was derived from Cab Calloway’s and Fred Taylor’s celebrated jazz scats. The adolescents circulated the letter V in graffiti as a sign of rebellion and performed such clandestine sabotage as letting air out of the tires of Nazi trucks, giving false directions to enemy soldiers, and taking down posters promoting Collaboration. In 1940 Josette’s group participated in a prohibited November 11 march on the Champs-Élysées where two of them were arrested and jailed. The openly military reaction against the march drove these Zazous further into their own secretive militancy.As opposed to the melancholic mood of Occupied Paris with its shortages of just about all of life’s necessities, the Café Eva group networked with other regional swing fans to promote fun as a healthy alternative. The youthful vigor of their enthusiasm eventually developed with other groups of Zazous into an alternative culture that threatened the Occupiers and Collaborators such that they were wrongly associated as Jewish. The racist programs of the Nazis did have significant impact on the integrity of the Zazous for whom imprisonment at camps like Drancy was a real threat. They changed the titles of some American jazz songs banned by the Nazis so that, for example, the “St. Louis Blues” became La tristesse de SaintLouis and “In the Night”, Hymne Zénith. They fostered French cultural integrity opposing verbal attacks by Nazi and Vichy sympathizers that jazz and its youthful patrons were threatening the moral fiber of the country. Instead, the sunglasses, circumflex-shaped mustaches, and the closed umbrella visually distinguished the Zazous as they proclaimed in graffiti the tag that “le moral de la France est intact” 262 FRENCH REVIEW 91.1 Reviews 263 (69). Multiple attempts by the Occupiers to vilify and break up Josette’s band led to harsh realities as they matured in this ambience. Their music, which is organized in CDs under the same title and can be purchased separately from the book of de Cortanze, was played in surreptitious concerts throughout Paris and became opportunities to dance the swing or especially to be musicians (Charles Louis performed on the clarinet and saxophone in various gigs). Citations from newspapers of the moment and historical references ground this story’s affirmation of youth as a positive cultural contribution to the struggle for the survival of Paris and France from World War II. Trinity University (TX) Roland A. Champagne Del Amo, Jean-Baptiste. Règne animal. Paris: Gallimard, 2016. ISBN 978-2-07017969 -5. Pp. 419. Del Amo’s novel has an immense and weighty feel to it, not least because it spans four generations of farmers rooted all but literally in the rugged terrain of l’Occitanie. The novel’s first half (1898–1917) has distinct Zola-esque qualities, including long sentences with realist descriptions of the...