Amongst the Unemployed: Meat to be Burnt

Abstract

Fauxbras’s third novel – Viande à Brûler (1935) – departed from his previous subject matter and addressed the most pressing social issue of the day: unemployment. Conventional wisdom holds that economic depression in France, unlike its German or Anglophone counterparts, failed to endow a cultural legacy of note.¹ This reinforces a sense of exceptionalism about France in the 1930s. Though not of the literary merit of some of the internationally renowned work, there is a considerable and neglected store of French cultural representations of the depression and unemployment.² Indeed, Samuel Becket’s Waiting for Godot (1952) at its most literal and immediate level is concerned with two workless men living unmistakably in the 1930s. Moreover, the experience of unemployment is dealt with in poetry, short story, play, novels and film. The significance of such cultural offerings is that they provide an alternative register of unofficial knowledge about unemployment. Although it is true that many, yet certainly not all, of these authors or film-makers had an explicit political agenda, it is at the level of the everyday, the mundane level of the insider that they are valuable.