This dissertation engages French-language films in the 'moraliste' tradition. The French word 'moraliste' has no exact English equivalent. It does not evoke the didactic sense of “moralist;” rather a 'moraliste' is someone who explores the inner workings of the mind, rather than the outer actions of a character. Beginning with the publication of Montaigne’s Essays in 1580, 'moralistes' including Descartes, La Rochefoucauld, Pascal, and La Bruyère created moral literature – literature concerned with personal reflections and the feelings of an individual over the dogma of good society. The emergence of film in the late nineteenth century provided a new medium for raising questions in the 'moraliste' tradition. Éric Rohmer, for example, described his Six Moral Tales as “films in which a particular feeling is analyzed and where even the characters themselves analyze their feelings and are very introspective. That’s what 'conte moral' (moral tale) means.” I argue that the films of Bresson, Rohmer, and the Dardennes are narratively, thematically, and stylistically interrelated in their connection to the specifically French 'moraliste' tradition. I contend that these films surfaced in post-World War II France – growing out of the deep ambiguities that existed in French society in the aftermath of occupation and liberation – and continue to appear in the increasingly transnational landscape of contemporary European cinema. This new approach to film history offers a counterweight to the narrative of French New Wave cinema, which privileges the work of more explicitly political and experimental filmmakers such as François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard.

This thesis examines the popular yé-yé phenomenon and its role in articulating a vision of modern France in the aftermath of decolonization. Yé-yé, a teen-oriented and music-based popular culture that flourished from roughly 1962-1966, was in a unique position to define what it meant to be young in 1960s France. I argue that the yé-yé popular culture, through its definition of youth, provided an important cultural channel through which to articulate a modern French identity after the Algerian War (1954-1962). Using a combination of advertisements, articles, and sanitized depictions of teenage pop singers, the yé-yé popular culture constructed an idealized vision of adolescence that coupled a technologically-savvy and consumer-oriented outlook with a distinctly conservative, apolitical, and inclusive social stance. It reflected France's reorientation toward a particular technological and consumer modernity while simultaneously serving to obscure France's recent colonial past and the dubious legacy of imperialism. To contextualize yé-yé, this thesis begins by examining the blousons noirs (black jackets) and the societal anxieties that surrounded them in the early Fifth Republic (1958-1962). By tracking the abrupt shift from the blousons noirs to yé-yé in predominant media representations of youth, this thesis provides a unique vantage point with which to interpret dominant discourses of the Gaullist Fifth Republic and its attempt to reinvent France into a modernized and decolonized consumer republic. As the work suggests, it was not a coincidence that the optimistic yé-yé youth, unburdened by the tribulations of France's recent past, appeared in full force within months following the recognition of Algerian independence in 1962.