The anti-city: Representing La Défense in recent French fiction and film

Abstract

This article begins with the 2009 documentary, La Dépossession, by filmmaker Jean-Robert Viallet, suggesting that La Défense is depicted as an anti-city. It seeks to anatomise this trope and chronotope, examining the manner in which a range of recent novels and feature films similarly lament the destructive effects of globalised finance on French society, polity and nation. They figure spatiotemporal relationships between France's present and its historical past, between the anonymity of La Défense and certain unmistakably French locations, between a supposedly ‘Anglo-Saxon’ mode of capital accumulation and the French nation this is held to threaten. Having identified the characteristic features of this trope and chronotope, the article then turns to consider some of their inherent paradoxes, ironies and contradictions. It points out that the historic centre of Haussmann's Paris is itself the product of an earlier process of violent restructuring and dispossession driven by powerful financial forces and undertaken at the behest of a highly conservative political regime. It is ironic that Haussmann's cityscape should now be presented as a symbol of stable, traditional, if now embattled, French national identity. Perhaps, La Défense should be imagined less as an anti-city than as a location deeply embedded in the complexities, contradictions and conflicts of French history.