Special Issue

Anglo-American Cultural Outsiders in World War I and Interwar Paris: Building Other Periodical Communities

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Abstract

While various scholars have endeavored to write the history of the nineteenth-century English-language press in Paris, the first half of the twentieth century largely remains to be written. Undoubtedly, the cultural aura of the ‘Lost Generation’ has shaped the production of scholarship on this time period, giving precedence to literary publications over more journalistic genres. Trying to fill this critical gap, we will see that the Franco-American Eagle, Jazz, and the British Colony Magazine all worked toward the integration of the relatively large Anglo-American diasporic communities of the first half of the twentieth century. Whether they targeted World War I soldiers (Franco-American Eagle), tourists (Jazz), or residents (British Colony Magazine), these magazines all promoted festive cultural life in Paris at a time when ‘the city of lights’ was widely seen, in the Anglo-American world, as a powerfully attractive ‘moveable feast’. Creating a sense of belonging was particularly crucial for these foreign-language periodicals, which catered to three communities that would have had a difficult time finding their place in Paris without the assistance of print. Indeed, while the ‘Lost Generation’ and the ‘American colony’ of businessmen both had institutions supporting their lives in the city (such as the network of artistic salons and little magazines’ publishers, the American Library, and the American Chamber of Commerce), soldiers, Britons, and tourists were less likely to enjoy this support. In this article, I discuss what sense of belonging the Franco-American Eagle, Jazz, and the British Colony Magazine offered to these three understudied diasporic communities. To do so, I focus on these periodicals’ relationship with place, and examine the seminal role of Paris in integrating these communities. First, I introduce these periodicals and show that they represented Paris as a concrete, material place of pleasures. Then, I discuss a possible correlation between such representations and the integration of lesser-intellectual communities by introducing a brief comparison with Anglo-American exile avant-garde magazines in interwar Paris. Eventually, I suggest that scholarly attention to periodical communities such as the Franco-American Eagle, Jazz, and the British Colony Magazine can enlarge our understanding of the cultural history of the time period by driving our attention to overlooked cultural artefacts grounded in the materiality of the city. In the course of this article, I suggest that our way of looking at, and categorizing, the English-language periodicals flourishing in World War I and interwar Paris probably partly relies on institutional partitions between media studies and literary studies, of which we need at least to be aware.

Keywords: Paris, WWI and interwar period, periodicals in English, diasporic communities, FrancoAmerican Eagle, Jazz, British Colony Magazine

How to Cite:

Mansanti, C., (2025) “Anglo-American Cultural Outsiders in World War I and Interwar Paris: Building Other Periodical Communities”, Journal of European Periodical Studies 10(1), 56–74. doi: https://doi.org/10.21825/jeps.91998