Céline's dark, raging vision of the horrors of the twentieth century exploded on to the French literary scene with Journey to the End of the Night (Voyage au bout de la nuit), his first novel, in 1932. Céline (the pen name of Louis-Ferdinand Destouches, 1894–1961) never stopped raging, in a voice – derisive, savage, funny, immensely eloquent – that broke with all the canons of French narrative prose and pointed the novel in radically new directions. Just as Proust liberated the French novel from the restrictions of linear plot and consistent characterization, Céline freed it from the confines of formal artistic language and conventional grammar, creating a powerfully original prose style based on the expressive resources of popular speech.

Elements of a life

Céline was the product of the petit-bourgeois Paris of the small shopkeeper – the nation of thrift, hard work, patriotism and anti-Dreyfus inclinations. The son of an insurance clerk and a lacemaker, he was born in Courbevoie, in the western suburbs of Paris. His mother ran a shop for many years in the Passage Choiseul, specializing in old lace. In September 1912, after leaving school and holding various short-term jobs, he volunteered for military service, serving in a cavalry regiment. Soon after the outbreak of war in 1914, he was badly wounded in his right arm, and suffered a concussion as the result of a bursting German shell; he was mentioned in despatches and awarded the Médaille Militaire. Deeply affected by his experience of the war, he was invalided out of the army in 1915. After convalescing in Paris he worked for a while at the French Consulate in London. In 1916 he set sail for the recently acquired colony of the Cameroons in West Africa, where he stayed for almost a year as manager of a cocoa plantation. After the war, he studied privately to obtain his Baccalauréat, undertook medical studies at the University of Rennes and, in 1924, qualified as a doctor.

In his account of Laborde's last years, Mac Orlan describes how:

On his return to the Butte, Laborde and a few friends at Au Rêve, like Brunner, Marcel Aymé and Ralph Soupault, tried in vain to come to terms with the ‘débâcle’. Instead, he ‘let his beard grow, a beard of almost religious renunciation, shortly before dying of grief’. It was a typical, if extreme, reaction to the German Occupation of Paris, in which, of course, the enemy's presence was not confined to march-pasts on the grand avenues of the centre, but extended to all corners of the capital, not least its pre-eminent pleasure centre.

Obviously, like during the First World War, Montmartre was subject to general conditions which applied to the capital as a whole, notably stringent rationing and limitation of movement, particularly through the curfew. Robert Aron notes that from September 1940 the German ration for French adults amounted to only 1,800 calories, despite the Germans’ own calculations that 3,000–3,500 constituted the bare minimum for a man leading a sedentary existence, 4,000–4,500 for an active worker and 1,700 was ‘a slow famine regime leading to death’. This was compounded by fuel shortages: ‘in the winter of 1940–1, one of the harshest that France had known for a long time, fuel rations were hardly adequate to allow a family to heat one room poorly and intermittently for a few weeks: eleven degrees was considered a luxury’. The situation deteriorated badly after the Occupation of the Southern Zone in November 1942.

The facts do not wholly support the proposition, advanced by Zola in Au bonheur des dames, that having a grand magasin in the neighbourhood spelled the end for the local petits commerçants. Philip Nord has examined the detailed evidence, in a case study of the quartier du Palais- Royal (extending west as far as the rue Saint Roch), and concludes: ‘Proximity to a department store was by no means a sentence of death for the luckless retailer’. In fact, the grand magasin could bring new trade into a neighbourhood, as Francis Ambrière points out: ‘C'est que, par sa publicité, par ses merveilles, par le prestige de son nom, le grand magasin attire une clientèle immense. Les petites boutiques profitent de ce rayonnement’. However, it remains the case that trade in the arrondissements we have been considering did decline in reality, even though Zola's department store was merely a fiction. The truth has to do with the fact that during the economic depression of the 1890s governments responded to the powerful lobbying of the petits commerçants by providing preferential tax régimes favouring them in the competition with the department stores, seeing them as a force for social stability in the face of working-class unrest and militancy. But this proved a mixed blessing, since it enabled the survival of small operations that in fact were barely viable.

The facts do not wholly support the proposition, advanced by Zola in Au bonheur des dames, that having a grand magasin in the neighbour-hood spelled the end for the local petits commerçants. Philip Nord has examined the detailed evidence, in a case study of the quartier du Palais-Royal (extending west as far as the rue Saint Roch), and concludes: ‘Proximity to a department store was by no means a sentence of death for the luckless retailer’. In fact, the grand magasin could bring new trade into a neighbourhood, as Francis Ambrière points out: ‘C'est que, par sa publicité, par ses merveilles, par le prestige de son nom, le grand magasin attire une clientèle immense. Les petites boutiques profitent de ce rayonnement’. However, it remains the case that trade in the arrondissements we have been considering did decline in reality, even though Zola's department store was merely a fiction. The truth has to do with the fact that during the economic depression of the 1890s governments responded to the powerful lobbying of the petits commerçants by providing preferential tax régimes favouring them in the competition with the department stores, seeing them as a force for social stability in the face of working-class unrest and militancy. But this proved a mixed blessing, since it enabled the survival of small operations that in fact were barely viable. As Christophe Charle points out: ‘Il est probable […] que le pullulement des commerces dans certains secteurs ou dans certains quartiers condamne la majorité à végéter, le petit commerce occasionnel ou le micro-atelier étant parfois une solution au chômage trouvée par des salariés d'autres secteurs.’ Many of these small businesses thus operated in conditions of constant precariousness. Being the proprietor of a small shop actually meant, as often as not, fighting tooth and nail to make ends meet, in an overpopulated and thus fiercely competitive sector, with little guarantee of success. But in the eyes of the petit commerçant, having one's own business brought with it a major distinction: one was self-employed, or even an employer (though few had more than one employee, if that). Not being a worker was crucial to a class whose main preoccupation was to remain apart from the proletariat and seek to rise in society either on one's own account or through one's children.

Céline Sciamma's films consistently display stories of girls’ and women's experience in ways that implicitly challenge historical myths and social scripts relative to the erasure of women and their experiences from history. Where filmmakers like Cavani, Denis, Martel and Ramsay engage with ambiguity in a predominantly darker sense, Sciamma's filmmaking appears closer to Granik’s, expressing a gentler, but no less powerful, statement on the importance of emotional turbulence within ambiguous lived experience suggestive of future ethical freedoms.

In this regard, Sciamma reflects an ‘erotic generosity’ (Bergoffen 1997: 2) in her filmmaking, describing the intersubjective connections between eroticism, freedom, ethics and joy. Beauvoir's evolving notion of ambiguity was the key ‘way of acknowledging the body; her [Beauvoir’s] unique contribution to the phenomenological-existential tradition's insistence that as humans we are situated subjects whose first, primordial and most crucial situation is the body’ (Bergoffen 1997: 4). In Chapter 5, I discussed Bergoffen's concept of erotic generosity, which she explains through the inherent power of Beauvoir's muted voice, as typifying an ethics that involves recognition of the other's ambiguity that enables acceptance of one's own. As Bergoffen describes, Beauvoir's muted voice as erotic generosity ‘provides us with the beginnings of a feminist ethic’ (1997: 7) and we see it demonstrated in Sciamma's films consistently via the female bond, as a way of being with women that is not always effortless but nevertheless shown as a highly valued pathway to freedom.

The ambiguity expressed in and through the female body in Sciamma's films is most evidently exercised through what she describes as the ‘female gaze’, here argued as ‘the reciprocal gaze’ given its emphasis on recognising the subjectivity of the other and the intermeshedness of power, ethics, freedom and desire in our relationships with others. The bond between girls or women that is created within each of Sciamma's film diegeses is further established between screen and audience. As discussed in previous chapters, Beauvoir rejects the solipsistic position in her existentialist philosophy of freedom, which is arguably a view shared by Sciamma and one which instructs her cinematic aesthetic. In an interview with Maria Garcia for Cineaste (2019), Sciamma speaks of the difference between a conventional (male) and revolutionary (female) gaze, where the latter is a withdrawal from a heteronormative framing of the female body, its sexuality and erasure of agency.