Broadcasting morality: Family values and the culture of the radio in 1930s France

From 1935 to 1940, the left-wing coalition called the Popular Front struggled for, gained and finally lost power in France. While in control, the government worked hard to create a far-reaching left-wing culture that would change how France saw itself. With movies, rallies, art, theater and literature, the Popular Front attempted to sway public opinion for socialist causes and a socialist state. The radio was the one place where their cultural project failed. Instead of broadcasting a left-wing socialist agenda, the radio displayed a cultural consensus between left and right that positioned the traditional bourgeois family as the central sustaining feature of French life.; This is not to say that the Popular Front did not fight to recreate the radio in its own image, but its attempts failed in the face of a popular private radio that garnered huge audiences for its light programming. Radio listeners themselves also came out strongly against state radio programming, voting against the Popular Front in radio elections in February 1937. As a democratic, republican coalition, the Popular Front listened to the voters, changing its programming from a focus on the education of the masses through theater and lectures, to new features of entertainment with swing and crime drama.; The position of radios within the French home strongly determined the radio culture that resulted. As a public medium airing in private space, radio transgressed normal gender and social barriers, and programmers limited broadcasting to what they deemed as acceptable programming inside French radio owners' homes. Overall, radio's culture was a conservative one, espousing normative ideals of separate spheres. Contrary to the Popular Front's interests, the radio also displayed the working class only negatively, creating criminal characters from families that could not effectively support and nurture their sons and daughters. And the radio reminded listeners that foreign influences had no place in the metropole; the colonies offered France vast resources, but colonial culture itself soiled the nation. In the late 1930s, French families listened to radios knowing that inside their homes they were safe from politics, class strife and foreign influences.