Les Revenants, Tignes, and the Return of Post-war Modernisation

This chapter reads the French television hit Les Revenants (The Returned, Canal+, 2012-2015) as a parable of the uneasy legacy of France’s “Trente glorieuses,” the period of rapid economic growth that followed World War II. Situating the show’s fictional city and its story of failing dams in the history of the real dam that inspired it—the dam that displaced the village of Tignes in 1952—the chapter argues that Les Revenants encourages us to re-think the Trente glorieuses and its long-term effects and to ask both what became of the projects that defined these years and what has re-emerged from the shadows of their glories—from failing infrastructure and a police surveillance state to the environmental consequences now associated with the Anthropocene.