Making Space in Post-War France: The Dreams, Realities and Aftermath of State Planning by Edward Welch (review)

Reviewed by: Making Space in Post-War France: The Dreams, Realities and Aftermath of State Planning by Edward Welch Derek Schilling Edward Welch. Making Space in Post-War France: The Dreams, Realities and Aftermath of State Planning. Modern Humanities Research Association "Research Monographs in French Studies" 69. Cambridge, U.K.: Legenda, 2023. Pp. 210. Describing the work of ideological interpellation, Louis Althusser emphasized the ability of modern states to call citizen-subjects to attention: "You there!" Often downplayed in favor of the police in analyses of state power is the built environment. It is nonetheless, argues Edward Welch in this illuminating study, the assemblage conjoining human subjects and manufactured things that not only regulates flows across the national territory, but that defines the look and feel of everyday experience. Writing some fifty years after the 1973 Guichard circular ended the construction of grands ensembles, Welch asks how planners reshaped metropolitan France post-reconstruction through the provision of transport infrastructure and the creation of villes nouvelles. These transformations were not only envisioned in maps, scale models, and reports, but, once realized, were "captured, registered and displayed" (5) within the sphere of cultural production by filmmakers, photographers, and writers. Following Kristin Ross' Fast Cars, Clean Bodies (1994), the author underscores continuities between France's failed colonial project and the internal colonization undertaken to offset regional underdevelopment in the Hexagon (this geometric trope conveniently urged the French to forget their imperial past). De Gaulle pressed for massive infrastructure projects, giving prefects unprecedented authority to implement eminent domain. High-speed motorways, airports, hydroelectric dams—all these space-hungry projects profoundly altered perceptions of landscape while creating a manner of national unity (20). Yet, recalls Welch, l'aménagement du territoire simultaneously excluded from many benefits of modernization the post-colonial descendants of the men whose labor had made post-war reconstruction possible. Welch provides deep insight into the origins and ethics of France's planning culture. Chapter One attends to la prospective which, unlike Enlightenment progress, sought to inject into the present something of the future, rather than rely on short-term prévision, then, to imagine the acceleration of possibilities several decades hence (33–34). Addressed in Chapter Two are the ways French planners—invariably white and male—reconciled their liberal humanistic and technocratic leanings; the production of space must be understood not abstractly, but as "a profoundly human activity, guided by historically situated individuals filled with their own feelings, desires and beliefs" (45). The object of Chapter Three is the new town of Cergy-Pontoise whose disorienting effects Annie Ernaux noted in Journal du dehors and whose enterprising residents Éric Rohmer comically featured in L'ami de mon amie (1987). Chapter Four unpacks such "manufactured landscapes" as the regional rail and road networks portrayed in Bertrand Blier's Buffet froid (1979) and Agnès Varda's Sans toit ni loi (1985), while a final chapter evaluates the French administrative state's will to divide national territory into prioritized "zones" (ZAC, ZUP, ZAD…); the last of these acronyms prompts a brilliant gloss on the zadistes, alter-globalist partisans of the zones à defendre. Like Kenny Cupers' monumental The Social Project (2014), Making Space in Post-War France illuminates the contradictions of France's post-war modernization through cogent syntheses and fine-grained analyses of a wide range of documents; crucially, Welch lends to visual and verbal representations (Godard, Besson, Depardon, Chibane, Rolin…) not only diagnostic value, but a fresh critical edge. End Page 161 Derek Schilling Johns Hopkins University Copyright © 2024 L'Esprit Créateur