# Jonathan Thomas, *La propagande par le disque: Jean-Marie Le Pen, éditeur phonographique*

Paris, Éditions EHESS, 2020, 253 p.

Elodie A. Roy

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**Electronic version**

URL: https://journals.openedition.org/transposition/6734

DOI: 10.4000/transposition.6734

ISSN: 2110-6134

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CRAL - Centre de recherche sur les arts et le langage

**Electronic reference**

Elodie A. Roy, "Jonathan Thomas, *La propagande par le disque: Jean-Marie Le Pen, éditeur phonographique*, Transposition [Online], 10 | 2022, Online since 12 May 2022, connection on 02 July 2022. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/transposition/6734 ; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/transposition.6734

This text was automatically generated on 2 July 2022.

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Jonathan Thomas, *La propagande par le disque: Jean-Marie Le Pen, éditeur phonographique*

Paris, Éditions EHESS, 2020, 253 p.

Elodie A. Roy

REFERENCES

Jonathan Thomas, *La propagande par le disque: Jean-Marie Le Pen, éditeur phonographique*. Paris, Éditions EHESS, 2020, 253 p.

1

From its inception in the late nineteenth century, recorded sound and its meanings have been continuously negotiated and shaped by individuals, communities and institutions (including the first state sound archives) to serve a wide range of social and political purposes.¹ At the same time, the advent of recording technologies has progressively contributed to dynamically define and redefine the contours of social experience, subtly anticipating novel relationships to the self, to others, and to the past. As Jonathan Thomas compellingly suggests, the study of recordings – and, by extension, of sound-reproducing technologies themselves – cannot be divorced from a wider consideration of the material as well as affective networks of circulation, mediation and exchange which they have contributed to sustain. In the wake of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, empirical studies of listening practices have often celebrated meaning-making encounters with recorded sound, underlining the positive role of music in the structuring of the self and particularly its emancipatory potentials in subcultural practices. Such approaches, focusing on the realm of personal and interpersonal relations and instances of counter-hegemonic resistance, have sometimes deemphasised the existence of recorded sound as a mass medium, an aspect which had been crucial for early theorists of phonography (particularly Theodor Adorno) and which would resurface in the radical theses
articulated by Guy Debord in the 1960s. Adorno and Debord's Marxist-inflected, frequently melancholy critiques of recording technologies tend to be caricatured as "techno-deterministic", or implicitly dismissed, in contemporary approaches to recorded sound. It follows that while the far-reaching ideological implications and uses of the film medium have been abundantly discussed,² the literature on recorded sound, ideology and (self-)alienation remains relatively scattered and marginal within music studies.³ When these issues are discussed, it is generally in relation to clear-cut historical instances of sonic propaganda, most notably during – and between – the two World Wars.⁴

2. La propagande par le disque innovatively combines a preoccupation with music in everyday interpersonal practices with a nuanced questioning of how recorded sound may concretely mediate and negotiate ideological contents on a larger scale. Jonathan Thomas's deft and original study uncovers the little-known – yet by no means innocuous – history of the Éditions Serp, the militant record label opportunistically founded by French far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen in 1963 when he realised that audio recordings illicitly made during the trials of OAS members would sell amongst supporters of French Algeria. Founded in the aftermath of the Algerian War (1954-1962), the Serp label continued to disseminate phonographic material across the French market (mostly *via mail-order*) until the turn of the century, releasing at least 269 recordings on vinyl records, cassette tapes and compact discs between 1963 and 2000 (according to the probably incomplete discography established by the Bibliothèque nationale de France and which Thomas used as his main database). The Serp catalogue was organised into two main categories, respectively titled "Hommes et Faits du xxᵉ siècle" ("People and Events of the 20ᵗʰ century", dedicated to history, militant sound documents and political speeches), and "Musique et Chants" ("Music and Songs").

3. La propagande par le disque draws from the abundant visual, material and sonic culture of the Éditions Serp to demonstrate how the far-right record company became a machine for the revisionist filtering and recounting of the historical past. Jonathan Thomas approaches the record as "a signifying and complex object, articulating sonic contents, liner notes, photographs and illustrations within a system where each element partly determines the meaning of others" (p. 29, my translation). In addition to closely describing discrete recorded artefacts, Jonathan Thomas insists that the meaning of recordings may only get activated – and momentarily accessed – when they are put in relation with other sources, including written and oral ones. As such, the book "follows" some of the key actors of the Éditions Serp, drawing as it does from original in-depth interviews including those of activists and historical members of the National Front, or yet again from communications with online sellers of Serp records (no extensive direct testimonies from listeners are given, possibly because the tendentious and near-illicit nature of the label makes it difficult to identify and approach participants). Each of the four interrelated chapters highlights one specific aspect of the relationship between recorded sound, politics and historiography.

4. The first chapter delineates the early days and ideological foundations of the Serp record label. It shows how the label founders sought to establish an "emotional community" (as conceptualised by Barbara Rosenwein) where music "offered powerful means of representation and symbolic evocation" (p. 83, my translation), rearticulating the anger and disenchantment felt by far-right militants after the Algerian War. The
commercial release of recordings served as a means of consolidating an existing community of far-right militants and of enlarging their circle, thus involving previously scattered listeners into a nation-wide ideological project beyond the realm of private listening. As such, the record is seen as constituting a symbolic space where the ideological trauma triggered by past events (including, but not only, the Algerian War) is simultaneously contained and cultivated (nostalgia for the former colonial empire for instance appears as a recurrent theme throughout the early catalogue of the Serp label). As well as existing as a mnemonic object, the far-right militant record fuels a desire for “revenge” and “reparation”, thus indicating an arena for future action. The first chapter notably pays attention to the falsified historical objectivity of the Serp catalogue. From 1968, the label began to systematically diversify its catalogue, including recordings affiliated with socialism and left-wing history (including for instance songs of the Front Populaire or anarchist songs) so as to present itself as a holistic – and even pedagogical – venture, seeking to superficially disguise its right-wing roots and to counter accusations of political extremism.

In the second chapter, Thomas examines the musical contents released by the Serp label under its “Musique et Chants” heading and which constitute 160 out of the 269 recordings analysed during the research. A variety of musical forms were distributed by the label including military marches, choral music, hymns, popular music (notably right-wing rock) – though the latter was more systematically featured from the early 1980s onwards (when Marie-Caroline Le Pen, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s daughter, took over the direction of the Serp company). The chapter stresses the traditional importance of singing – and especially collective singing – for the consolidation and transmission of militant identities. Thomas underlines that the first musical releases of the catalogue directly expressed the personal musical preferences of Jean-Marie Le Pen, answering his own narrow definition of “popular music” – literally understood as *patriotic* music endowed with a “high moral value” and devoid of “amplification or artifice” (p. 89, my translation). This contrasted with the dominant understanding of popular music in the 1960s, denying its frequently counter-cultural impulses as well as its ingrained internationalism (and its particular affinities with the Anglophone realm). Through its highly controlled catalogue, the Serp thus strove to “educate” listeners, initiating them into its fixed aesthetic canon – which, in the first twenty years of the label’s existence, persistently excluded jazz, rock, and pop, all of which were associated with the perversions of technological modernity, cosmopolitanism, and the collapse of moral standards.

The last two chapters are closely entwined. The third chapter closely examines how the non-musical recordings released by the label – most significantly political speeches – contributed to articulate and rewrite twentieth-century history. Thomas demystifies the highly questionable sonic “documents” issued by the Serp, examining in particularly how iconography, “authentic” historical photographs and liner notes were utilised to consecrate modern martyrs and falsify the historical past – while at the same time mimicking and devaluing processes of scientific investigation. The fourth chapter further uncovers the ambiguous relationship between recorded sound, militant memory and historiography. From the advent of phonography, and the early treatises of Edison and Berliner, recorded sound has been valued as a mnemonic object as well as a supposedly authentic sensory trace of the real. This ideological overinvestment in the record as a patrimonial object (or document) can notably be observed in the first European sound archives, established at the turn of the twentieth century.
Furthermore, the immediacy of the recorded voice and its emotional proximity – independently of when the recording might have initially taken place – anticipates a primarily (but not exclusively) affective relationship to the past as the latter partially becomes re-experienced (or more exactly re-invented) in the immediate phenomenological present of listening (rather than in the mediated and reflective practice of reading and discussing). For Thomas, the Serp parasitically exploited both the “documentary effect” and particular affective properties of recorded sound to disseminate and “naturalise” (p. 190) a whole ideological vision: this was not achieved in the interests of historical transparency (or pseudo-history) but rather in order to perpetuate far-right politics in the present. It is a concerning – yet unsurprising – fact that in recent years several of the recordings issued by the label should have been uploaded onto digital platforms such as YouTube. Though the present reception of the Serp falls outside the scope of Thomas’s study, the contemporary remediation of its catalogue disturbingly testifies to its continuous activity and repercussions in contemporary French culture.

7

Jonathan Thomas writes about a highly polemical and challenging topic in a consistently nuanced and measured style, resisting the temptation to sensationalise the Serp label, while never diminishing its actual social and cultural toxicity. The book is partially derived from Thomas’s broader doctoral research exploring the emergence and cultural imaginary of political records in 1930s France. It would have been valuable to contrast the activities and *modus operandi* of the Serp with that of other militant record labels (including the French socialist record label “La Voix des Nôtres” founded in 1930), in order to resituate the label within the wider history of the political record. On a practical level, the lack of an index for the book occasionally makes it difficult to navigate and revisit such a densely-textured study: this oversight ought to be revised in potential re-editions – or translations – of the work.

## NOTES

1. Georgina Born has noted, for instance, “how each new medium, as it stabilises and comes into common usage, proffers or affords new kinds of cultural, aesthetic, intellectual, social and embodied experience.” BORN Georgina, “Afterword: Recording: From Reproduction to Representation to Remediation”, in COOK Nicholas, CLARKE Eric, LEECH-WILKINSON Daniel and John RINK (eds), *The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music*, Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 287.

2. See for instance FOX Jo, Film propaganda in Britain and Nazi Germany: World War II Cinema, Oxford, Berg, 2007; HOFFMANN Hilmar, The Triumph of Propaganda: Film and National Socialism, 1933-1945, Providence, Oxford, Berghahn Books, 1996; PRONAY Nicholas and D.W. SPRING (eds), Propaganda, Politics and Film, 1918-45, London, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1982.
3. See for instance STEEN Andreas, “Propaganda on shellac, vinyl and plastic: the politics of record production during the Cultural revolution in China (1966-76)”, *Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art*, vol. 4, no. 2-3, 2017, p. 221-241.

4. See for instance BIRDSALL Carolyn, *Nazi Soundscapes: Sound, Technology and Urban Space in Germany, 1933-1945*, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2012.

## AUTHORS

ELODIE A. ROY

Elodie A. Roy is a media and material culture theorist with a specialism in the history of recorded sound. She is the author of *Media, Materiality and Memory: Grounding the Groove* (Routledge) and the co-editor, with Eva Moreda Rodríguez, of *Phonographic Encounters: Mapping Transnational Cultures of Sound, 1890-1945* (Routledge) as well as a number of chapters and articles on the visual and material history of phonography published in journals including *Popular Music*, *Media History*, and *Sound Studies*. Forthcoming publications include the monograph *Shellac in Visual and Sonic Culture: Unsettled Matter* (Amsterdam University Press) and a chapter in *The Routledge Handbook of Ecomedia Studies*. Elodie notably held research and teaching position at the Glasgow School of Art (Forum for Critical Inquiry), the University of Glasgow (School of Culture and Creative Arts) and Humboldt University of Berlin (Institut für Kulturwissenschaft). She currently works as a Research Fellow in the Department of Arts at Northumbria University (Newcastle, UK).