Contenu du sommaire : L'Âge d'or

After a short reflection on the problematic archival indexation of the Golden Age, this article discusses its recurrent characteristics. The Golden Age is close to the notion of vintage, which means the convergence of a technology, a practice and an innovative thinking that disposes of special narrative, aesthetic or technological qualities and likewise economic success. Settled in a precise time and space, mostly in the past, the Golden Age is often associated to nostalgic feelings. Those can also reveal the dark side of the Golden Age and at the same time offer the possibility to show the layers of a nostalgia that navigates in between (apparent) regression and prospective creativity.

The French Second Empire has been subject of both Jean Renoir and Sacha Guitry movies. Despite their stylistic differences, these same generation born directors have the same look on this era. Through cinema technical facilities, they can tamper with time, mythologize this period, and make it appear as a golden age of sweetness and fun (the famous Fête impériale).

This article focuses on one of the constructions of the golden age in the media and tries to understand how school books gave credit to the myth of the “Thirty Glorious”. In the high school history textbooks, the phrase coined by Fourastié in 1979 appeared in 1983 and was consecrated by all editors in 1989. The story transmitted is quite simple and the historical drama makes sense by contrast : the golden age of “Glorious” takes place after the world wars and ends with the « crisis » in 1975.

Scopitones, with their simple representations of French yéyé youth, easily lend themselves to a nostalgic vision of the 1960s. Examining the 1980s television rebroadcasts of these filmed songs allows us to observe two key characteristics of how the media can construct a “golden age.” This construction relies on television channels' and music studios' economic motives, as well as the way it allows television to represent its own history.

We are interested in the way in which the website of the radio station Nostalgie as a digital extension enhance its commemorative dimension by staging an idealized image of past between perennity and modernity. In a semiopragmatic frame, we show that the golden age that we agree to define by its congealing, its tagging, its depreciation of the present and its confinement in past, is staged in an abolition of the frontiers (spatial, temporal and sensitive) and a coconstruction which revitalize its object and the initial media of diffusion.

The phrase, less used in English than in French, applies to the late 19th, early 20th centuries, with respect to the press in France, Britain and the U.S.A. In the latter, Mark Twain and C.D. Warner, in another context, wrote of “the Gilded Age”. Gild also tarnished the Golden age of the press. Here, we examine how and when this age occurred, especially in France but also in the U.S.A and in Britain.

The three decades covering the 1945-1975 period are commonly identified as the golden age of French television. This narrative has emerged as soon as the mid-1970s. At that time, the professionals feel like they are witnessing a historic shifting tide, the end of an era. This paper examines the context of the emergence of this narrative and questions its actual dissemination in the public sphere. Its distinguishes, next to a militant version of the “golden age” narrative, committed to defending public service television, another version, more consensual. But the latter seems to fade into a nostalgic celebration of television's idealized past.

Between 1976 and 1978, simultaneously in the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom and across many European countries including France, scores of musical groups were suddenly being referred to in the press or self-defining themselves as “punk”. Those three years constituted a short-lived but seminal period, after which punk, whose transience was stressed by its actors, was considered dead both by the press and by some of the punks themselves. Our study, based on an analysis of a corpus made up of the monthly publications of France's two most important rock magazines, Rock & Folk and Best, will thus examine the distinct features and the plurality of media and memorial processes which take part in the construction of those representations.

Comic fandom emerged almost simultaneously in France and the United States in the early 1960s. In both countries fans would then refer to a so-called « golden age » of the medium. In France it focused on the broadsheet weeklies published from 1934 through 1940 that included mostly American material. In the United States the same term designated 10-cent four-color comic-books released from 1938 through 1945. Instead of celebrating comics as a means of expression, the fans' discourses about the “golden age” focused on comic magazines, describing them simultaneously as vehicles of the medium and of the individuals' nostalgic reconstruction of their daily experience as young comics readers.