Cultural Aggiornamento and Mass Culture Within the Communist Youth. The Relais de la chanson française Talent Show (1958-1970)

Within the context of the French Communist Party’s political and cultural aggiornamento, as well as of a reorientation of its youth movement’s propaganda towards mass culture, the communist press created in 1958 the Relais de la chanson française, a musical talent show meant to promote young singers and attract the young masses to the unions of French Communist Youth. The initiative was paradoxical: it recycled traditional structures of communist mobilization, while imitating commercial practices; it aimed at fighting against the deleterious influence of the cultural and media industries but depended upon them for its success; it promoted a legitimist, poetic conception of chanson française, while more and more young music lovers turned to new musical fads. These contradictions fed the disinvestment of orthopraxic militants, who aspired to a purer, more political form of activism: though the Relais de la chanson did help several singers to make a breakthrough, their militant and organizational failure announced the Communist Youth’s shift to a more politicized conception of its propaganda from the mid-1960s on.