Patrick Modiano’s work casts a wary look at personal and collective histories of the French mid-twentieth century. Rather than nostalgia, this looking-back is imbued with a “sense of emptiness that comes with the knowledge of what has been destroyed, razed to the ground.” Each of Modiano’s novels is, in the words of Adam Thirlwell, “a new restatement of a single unsolvable crime.” Whether that crime manifests as the sin of a whole nation (Nazi collaboration in The Occupation Trilogy) or the sin of one person (murder or betrayal), it inflicts a moral injury more than a material one: it is the result of a failure of human empathy. Many of Modiano’s narrators recount their stories long after they’ve happened, with an immediacy that suggests the wounds are still fresh. His latest novel, Young Once, tells the story of a couple remembering a slice of their youth in the late 1950s to early ’60s, when they were freshly arrived in Paris. These protagonists do not get social capital or edification out of their interactions with Parisian society. Instead, they find themselves manipulated, ordered around, subject to rules from an unfamiliar rulebook.
Louis, a nineteen-year-old who has just finished his military service, strikes up a friendship with Brossier, an older man whose motives for approaching Louis socially and doing him many favors are rather mysterious. He lends Louis enough money to live and then gets him a job running errands for Roland de Bejardy, an aristocrat who seems respectable but puts Louis in harm’s way. The other half of the couple is Odile, a nineteen-year-old aspiring singer. She finds a mentor in the composer and music agent Georges Bellune. When Bellune commits suicide, she begins exchanging sex for opportunities to perform. Louis and Odile meet, fall in love, and move in together. Their story is less about their romance, and more about what these young people with no family or resources must do in order to make a living in a repressive, unequal, and exploitative society.
Young Once captures the ambiance of the postwar period without the usual nostalgia that permeates depictions of that time. Familiar details particular to the time are on every page—three-course lunches for nine francs, benders fueled by chartreuse and Gauloises, smoke-filled cabarets with chanson française singers and knife-throwers—presented unromantically. These period details are not there to make us marvel at the way things used to be; they are the backdrop for scenes of unease and unpleasantness. At the beginning of the novel, Louis is released from the army and Brossier calls two sex workers to entertain them. The encounter is not titillating or celebratory, just horribly awkward. Midcentury Paris does not come across as a chic or glamorous time to live, which runs counter to many contemporary depictions of the period—between the end of World War II and the economic and cultural upheaval of the early ’70s—known as the Trente Glorieuses.
One of the more strident visions of the postwar period can be found throughout Valeurs Actuelles (the equivalent of Newsweek, if it were produced by the staff of the National Review),where Fabrice Madouas mused in 2015, “They say nostalgia is not a good counselor. What if that were wrong? . . . [The Trente Glorieuses] were a time when it was not done to debase the Republic, the nation, or the flag...It was a time when students were taught to behave . . . to respect the authority of their parents and their teachers.”
It’s not as if there’s nothing to be wistful about. During this time, France experienced huge growth, unemployment was nil, women gained the rights to vote, work for equal pay, and run for office, and extensive welfare policies made society more egalitarian. The thirty years following the Trente Glorieuses are sometimes called the Trente Piteuses (Thirty Piteous Years), which isn't totally uncalled for. But some go further than that and understand the postwar boom as more than an economic reconstruction, seeing it a time of harmonious equilibrium thrown permanently off-balance by the economic crash of 1973, and accessorily the cultural conflicts of 1968. In fact, profound socioeconomic transformations were taking place in France throughout the postwar period, not least of them the Algerian war of independence. Economist Jean Fourastié, a regular contributor to the conservative daily Le Figaro, published a history of postwar France whose title, Les Trente Glorieuses, gave the era its name. Less well remembered is its subtitle, or the invisible revolution from 1946 to 1975. Today’s new, unapologetic right-wing, the "droite décomplexée" that recuperates rather than attacks the discourse of the National Front, tends to characterize social progress (including a new school curriculum that promotes gender equality) as a slippery slope to permissiveness and decay—and the golden age of the 1950s as what society is slipping away from. The discourse of the droite décomplexée descends directly from the backlash to May 1968 and from the idea that this brief contestation of the status quo ruined France’s glorious equilibrium forever.
Conversely, Young Once shows us authority figures who deserve very little respect: they are unreliable at best and malevolent at worst. None of the older characters seem to give their protégés enough protection. Police officers confiscate Odile’s passport, compelling her to act as bait to catch a serial rapist. Brossier ostensibly acts as Louis’s mentor, but his mentorship is without substance. He projects a breathlessly aristocratic air, making recommendations to Louis about what kind of shoes he ought to be wearing, the benefits of drinking chartreuse, and other ways to display one’s taste and distinction. Louis observes that when Brossier pontificates about Regency armchairs and first editions of books, he “was no longer himself; he was wholly under someone else’s influence and doubtless repeating his words and gestures.” What Brossier never gives Louis is hard-won advice—“don’t trust Bejardy” would be a useful warning—and eventually he disappears into the carefree bubble of university life. As for Bejardy, Brossier’s reference point for refined masculinity, from whom “a palpable authority emanated,” it turns out that he killed a man and was acquitted, despite damning evidence, through the testimony of his army buddies. Bejardy, too, ends up running off to Argentina. This confirms the reader’s suspicion that Bejardy is not the upstanding gentleman his exterior suggests, and the corruption of the system to which Bejardy belongs.
Young Once seems to say: Be careful what you wish for. In this novel, the men who stand in for the establishment of the golden age of the 1950s are themselves looking back at the 1930s and 1940s, imitating the mores, ideas, and prefabricated phrases of that time—perhaps because conventional values are already crumbling, called into question by the obscenity of war. Bejardy won a military medal for what he describes as the only good thing he has ever done. Brossier sits around waiting for an hour of glory that never comes. Bellune explains in his suicide note that what happened to him during the war never left him. These men who define themselves by their pasts seem afraid to diverge even by a hair from the ways they’ve always lived, but their fear suggests they can sense the historical forces slowly splintering the monolith of tradition.
Emily Lever is a writer based in New York.
