Reading Franco-American Relations through Glossy Magazine Advertisements: Comparisons of Paris Match and Life Magazines, 1945–68

Colloquially, the saying goes, “We are what we eat.”  Or, as an advertiser might assert, “We desire to become what we want to consume.”  This logic may overstress a domineering, ideological function of advertising, but it importantly points to advertisements’ gesticulations of magical transformation and allegiances through products tied to specific places.  To explore and challenge this line of thinking, this presentation compares advertisements representing American spaces found in the French magazine Paris Match to the advertisements representing French spaces found in the American magazine Life after WWII (1945-1968).  Ultimately, through a close reading of the images and texts of these advertisements, one sees how postwar advertisements representing and selling American and French spaces to French and American consumers, respectively, created a space built on imaginaries of visiting, consuming, and becoming what was desirable in each other’s culture.

This presentation draws from my broader dissertation project examining how, why, and with what lasting influence French and American popular media regularly represented the American and French woman, respectively, in the immediate postwar period.  Initial findings indicate that French and American media used each other’s women to rework postwar French and American perceptions of national self and attitudes toward the Franco-American alliance through explicit and implicit comparisons between the two countries.

In addition to critically analyzing key advertisements, my paper draws upon the importance of print media within its historic context after WWII in addition to literature on nationalism and social psychology.  Through this paper, I hope one will discover not only how French and American print media comparatively represented and imagined American and French women through their advertisements, but also how popular magazine’s advertisements of space and place tell a gendered story of how national symbols might attract and repeal American and French allegiances toward one another.