Le Crapouillot Is Like Da Bomb, Baby

Searching for additional photos for the Mahu post I ran into this cover of Le Crapouillot. Found here, along with several other issues of the old magazine, I struggled with the ambiguous table of contents in French and even if Tahiti, the cover photo, and the issue's theme of sexuality strongly suggest that a feature of the Mahu, it wasn't clearly stated enough for me to feel comfortable to use it then.

But (too) like many things, the cover & possible contents intrigued me.

High school French suddenly seems more important, and my deepest apologies to Mademoiselles Pfieffer & Glass who both did their best to instill a love of the language.

Using Google's translation, I was able to discover some history on the publication, that illustrator Gus Bofa was a literary critic for magazine between 1922 and 1939, and an easier to follow piece, Paris Muckraker, from Time (Dec. 02, 1935), which said:

Jean Galtier-Boissière founded Crapouillot (name of a small trench cannon) in 1915, at first distributed it only to his fellow soldiers. After the War he branched out, took a partner, began to make journalistic history with a brand of fearless muckraking which caused French citizens' eyes to pop, French officials' hair to rise. With stark facts and photographs Crapouillot took out such disagreeable subjects as the origins and secret causes of the War; French mutinies of 1917; Wartime homosexuality and prostitution in the Army; false Wartime propaganda. It sandwiched learned, readable issues on automobiles, cinema, wines, books between explosive exposures of "The Truth About the Saar," ''Mysterious Deaths," "The Masters of the Wrorld." Greatest Crapouillot beats were on Wartime censorship, on munitions makers in general and sales of French munitions to Germany in particular.

OK, so the few issues I had seen were perhaps a bit less typical, with post war years seeing a deviation from the original intents and purposes -- broadening and growth, if you will. Or it could just be my salacious-sweet-tooth.

But it was this abstract on Non-conformism, `insolence' and reaction Jean Galtier-Boissière's Le Crapouillot, by Nicholas Hewitt at the University of Nottingham, which was even more intriguing than the very first cover I'd spotted:

This article explores the origins of late twentieth-century reactionary political culture through an analysis of Jean Galtier-Boissière and his magazine Le Crapouillot, founded in 1915, which finally ceased publication in 1996. Deriving from both the avant-garde of the belle époque and libertarian politics, the magazine, re-launched in 1919, played a major role in the shaping and expression of political and artistic `non-conformism' in the inter-war years. However, this `non-conformism' began to present certain reactionary characteristics which were accentuated in the immediate post-Liberation period by Le Crapouillot 's fellow-feeling with dissident right-wing political and artistic currents, with which it shared a particular tone, `insolence'. Throughout the Fourth and early Fifth Republics, until Galtier-Boissière's death in 1966, Le Crapouillot presented increasingly recognizable reactionary characteristics, culminating logically in the final phase of the magazine, when it had an explicitly right-wing, and even extreme right-wing, management. An exploration of the history of the journal, together with a discussion of the role of its founding editor, provides a useful insight into the long-term origins, both political and cultural, of late twentieth-century reactionary culture.

With this article, it's not the ability to read French I am lacking, but a membership to the site. :sigh: Well, there's two things to work on: French lessons and a higher income bracket.

But find out more I must because nearly any publication featuring the Profumo Scandal is my kind of publication. Well, that and anti-censorship sentiments, of course.

See more issues here; also, Gay & Lesbian themed issues of Le Crapouillot.