Although it is frequently suggested that the idea of celebrity, as opposed to fame, is a construct of twentieth-century popular culture, many of the originating mechanisms and characteristics of modern celebrity have their roots in the more distant past. In France, the Industrial Revolution and the resulting mechanization of the media in the early to mid-nineteenth century fostered the processes of publicity. The invention of photography, the explosion in circulation of newspapers, and the emergence of cultural criticism gave rise to a new sense of both the importance and the relatability of people in the public eye. Elisa Rachel Félix (1821-1858), known professionally as “Rachel,” was the undisputed star of the French state theater, the Comédie-Française, from 1838 until shortly before her death. She was in many ways the first exemplar of the tropes of celebrity in French popular culture. Not only was she greatly admired for her talent in performance, especially in the classical tragic repertoire of the Golden Age of French playwriting, but she was also a pioneer in what Tom Mole has called “the hermeneutic of intimacy,” the perception on the part of the public that the accessibility of images of the performer creates a sense of connection and sympathy between artist and audience. This dissertation will explore the varieties of media through which Rachel’s career and life were publicized and the competing currents of her celebrity identity: the extent to which the star was understood as an exceptional woman versus her identification with her public. Depictions of Rachel in traditional arts, such as sculpture and painting, competed with her portrayal in such modern media as photographs, newspaper columns and caricatures, either enhancing her closeness to her fans or emphasizing her fundamental difference. The image of celebrity which Rachel helped to create endured after her premature death and contributed mightily to a foundational shift in the emphasis of media culture in France. Coinciding as it did with the heyday of Romanticism and the rise of realism in the arts, the cult of celebrity contributed strongly to the death of the tragic genre. / text

Contemporary French identity issues are often conceived spatially in popular imagination and political discourse. France and French identity have been mapped into a series of imagined exclusionary spaces through media representations and political rhetoric. This dissertation argues that artists in the fields of film, rap music and fiction are actively yet often indirectly intervening in French identity debates by reframing the question of “integration” and by demonstrating that not only can one be simultaneously French and “other,” but that French identity is always already more complex and transnational than prevailing discourses of “imagined” identity will admit. This is done most effectively, I contend, by avoiding the clichéd and reductive spaces and spatial categories that inflect the debate. The works I examine employ travel and motion to move beyond the discursive ghettos such as beur or banlieue cinema or “minority” music and fiction. While often less overtly political these responses are more effective than the more typical banlieue narrative of clash and confrontation with power. Taking examples from cinema, I argue that the road movies I address are effective weapons of the weak precisely because they avoid the traps inherent in representing the banlieue. My analysis demonstrates that the discursive ghetto is not always a bad thing for a filmmaker because referring to representational stereotypes can open the possibility of more readily “trapping” the viewer and therefore forcing him/her to actively participate in the process of decoding the author’s positioning. Often works attempting to contest spatial exclusion run the risk of simply falling into entrenched binary conceptions of society, reinforcing what the viewer already thinks they know about life in the suburbs or as a minority in general. Looking beyond cinema to music and literature, I demonstrate how artists are mobilizing narrative of space and identity to re-chart France with “hyphenated” perspectives, from African and Algerian to Portuguese and Pied-noir. / text

The suburb of Belleville is situated on the north-eastern outskirts of inner Paris. Its particular blend of social strata, race and architecture has made it a site of interest for historians, writers and artists since the Middle Ages. Thanks in part to the phenomenal success of Daniel Pennac’s six tome Malaussène series, published towards the end of the 20th century and situated in Belleville, the site has continued to enjoy a privileged status among the historical and cultural precincts of Paris. The representation of Belleville in the written and spoken word has a long history, part of which has been told, although in somewhat piecemeal fashion to date. Existing research may be divided into 3 categories, corresponding to the disciplines of history, sociology and literature. Historical studies are extensive and tend to support the suburb’s reputation as a site of revolution and social unrest. The sociological studies focus on immigration to the suburb and on the consequences of its physical transformation over the last half of the 20th century. The overall image presented by sociologists is one of a cosmopolitan suburb whose inhabitants manage to co-exist peacefully despite the multicultural mix; Belleville’s reputation as a melting pot success story sits at odds with that of its image as a centre of rebellion. Literature-based research conducted into the suburb is more sketchy; Belleville’s association with the noir genre and its inherent illicit elements also contrasts with the previous observations. If the existing studies present various pictures of historical and contemporary Belleville, they do not, however, give a comprehensive image of the suburb, nor do they provide an analysis of the role of Belleville in the noir genre, with particular reference to the Malaussène series. I have thus undertaken a multidisciplinary study of the suburb, with the objective of establishing links between the history, sociology and the literature of Belleville, of gaining an understanding of the function of Belleville as a setting for detective fiction and of offering a new explanation of the success of Pennac’s Malaussène series, by relating it to his representation of Belleville. The three focus areas of my research are its history from the Middle Ages until the end of the 20th century, its diverse representations in literature and popular culture, and its connection to a particular literary genre: the noir. The originality of my project lies in the method created to categorise existing research. Belleville rouge presents a view of the site as historically antiauthoritarian in its attempts to promote social justice. Belleville rose incorporates those studies which emphasise the suburb to varying degrees as a utopia, a model of social harmony or a centre of joyful festivities. Belleville noir focuses on the choice of the suburb as backdrop for the noir genre in literature and film; a hub of transgression and criminal activity, the antithesis of the positive space presented in the second category. The first part of my research project looks at the history of Belleville, the changing nature of its borders, which differ greatly from the administrative division according to author and historian, and the creation of a collective Belleville identity. Part two examines the representations of Belleville in literature and popular culture from the Middle Ages until the year 2000, and furthermore attempts to determine to what extent these cultural representations correspond to the suburb’s history. The third section deals with the role of Belleville in noir film and literature. If a single image corresponding to the décor of the neo-polar genre begins to emerge from the representations of Belleville by the film directors and various authors whose texts make up our corpus, this image differs greatly from the nostalgic one offered by Daniel Pennac; his representation of the suburb is hence treated separately. It is this strong sense of attachment to, and identification with, Belleville that is underlined by Pennac in his Malaussène series. Setting himself apart from his néo-polar contemporaries, Pennac draws heavily on all of the three faces of Belleville: the rouge, the rose and the noir. His refusal to adhere strictly to the néo-polar genre and his corresponding tendency to borrow from other genres such as the fairy tale, has resulted in a fusion of the real and the mythological which has engendered in his series a streak of optimism not found in the works of his contemporaries. Pennac draws on the history and traditions of the suburb to thus present an original view of contemporary Belleville as a peace-loving, cohesive community. If we accept that the cultural memory of a site is dictated in part by its inhabitants, and hence is in constant evolution, outlasting its physical appearance, Pennac’s role of guardian of the cultural memory of Belleville may extend to that of the cultural memory of the French nation. / Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2009