Music, Poetry, Propaganda

Translating Cultural Memory in Features and ‘French Night’ at the BBC 87

town on the Home Service, was replaced by transmission of 14 July celebra-
tions around the world and a repeat of the 1939 feature ‘The Voice of Paris’
contrasted with a new piece entitled ‘In wartime Paris’. Choosing to focus
on the French capital in parallel with London, Algiers and Cairo rather than
on the valid but small scale resistance of a town matches better the scale of
what the BBC were trying to achieve. It also had the potential to resound
with the greater number of listeners who were able to pick up the BBC
Home Service in Paris. ‘Light music’ broadcasts of ‘all-star Anglo-French’
Vaudeville featured Maggie Teyte among others and a programme of Folk
Songs arranged by Francis Chagrin played on the Forces programme, while
the Home Service featured the live transmission of Berlioz’s monumental
Te Deum (1849) and a recital of French mélodies by Peter Pears accompa-
nied by Benjamin Britten on the Home Service.

Example 3: Music broadcast on 14 July 1943

In Honour of France:
‘La Marseillaise’ (De Lisle), both live performance from Bedford and commercial
recording
‘Madelon’ (Bosquet and Roberts, arr. Francis Chagrin)
‘Ça ira’ (trad. (1790), arr. Francis Chagrin)
‘Chevalier de la Table Ronde’ (trad. (17th century), arr. Francis Chagrin)
‘Carmagnole’ (trad. (1793), arr. Frank Collinson)
‘Chant du départ’ (Méhul, arr. Frank Collinson)
‘En passant par Lorraine’ (trad., arr. Frank Collinson)
‘Sambre et Meuse’ (Rauski, arr. Frank Collinson)
‘Marche Lorraine’ (Ganne, arr. Frank Collinson)
‘Marche Zouave’ (trad., arr. Frank Collinson)
A composite arrangement of the following tunes:
‘Malbrough s’en va-t-en guerre’ (18th century)
‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’ (19th century English)
‘Quelle est cette odeur agréable?’ (16th century)
‘Fill Every Glass ( John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera)
‘Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman’ (trad.)
‘Baa Baa Black Sheep (trad.)
[Fill-up] ‘Pas ordinaire’ (fanfare, Louis XIV clairon march)

88 Chapter 3

VAUDEVILLE (Forces Programme):
Orchestral introduction to ‘Vaudeville’ made up of medley of French tunes:
‘J’attendrai’, ‘Sous les toits de Paris’, ‘Ça c’est Paris’, ‘Valentina’
Marcel de Haes: ‘These Foolish Things’, ‘Je t’aime’
Orchestra: ‘Kiss Me’ (a few bars)
Ivy St. Helier: ‘An American in Paris’ (patter)
Orchestra and Bruce Trent: ‘Sur le pont d’Avignon’
Joan Young: ‘C’est Marseille’, ‘The Army Fell for Little Isabel’
Françoise Rosay and Carleton Hobbs: Dramatic Sketch
Maggie Teyte: Salute to France (from Donizetti’s La Fille du Régiment)
Orchestra and Bruce Trent: ‘Battez les cœurs’

SONGS OF THE PEOPLE OF FRANCE (Forces Programme):
Orchestra conducted by Francis Chagrin. All traditional French folk tunes transcribed
and arranged by Francis Chagrin.
Orchestra: ‘Au clair de la lune’, ‘Quand Birim voulut danser’
Sophie Wyss and orchestra: Berceuse Bretonne
Orchestra: Bourrée d’Auvergne
Jean Vachet and orchestra: ‘Ma Normandie’
Orchestra: ‘Les Prisons de Nantes’
Sophie Wyss and orchestra: ‘Voici le mois de Mai’
Orchestra: Chanson Tourangelle
Jean Oberlé and Orchestra: ‘Quand je suis parti de La Rochelle’
Orchestra: Alsatian Song
Jean Oberlé, Jean Vachet and Orchestra: ‘Les moines de St. Bernardin’
Sophie Wyss and orchestra: ‘Au clair de la lune’

THE FRENCH FIGHT ON (Home Service and Forces Programme):
Orchestral music (excerpts) under the direction of G. Walter [Walter Goehr]:

Dukas: Fanfare, La Péri
Trad.: French Military Fanfare
Berlioz: ‘Danses des Sylphes’
Debussy: ‘Berceuse héroïque’
Goehr: Incidental Music

Translating Cultural Memory in Features and ‘French Night’ at the BBC 89

BERLIOZ, TE DEUM (1849) for tenor, triple chorus, organ and orchestra (Home
Service):

1. Te Deum
2. Tibi Omnes
3. Dignare
4. Christe rex gloriae
5. Te ergo quaesumus
6. Judex crederis
THE LIVING SPIRIT OF FRANCE (Home Service)
Tenor: Peter Pears
Piano: Benjamin Britten

Fauré:     ‘Nell’ (Leconte de Lisle), o18, no. 1
Debussy:    ‘Le Promenoir des deux amants’ (Tristan l’Hermite)
         ‘Le temps a laissé son manteau (Charles d’Orléans), from
          Trois Chansons de France
Duparc:      ‘L’Invitation au voyage’ (Baudelaire)
Poulenc:     ‘Nous avons fait la nuit’ (Eluard), from Tel jour, telle nuit.

In these programmes, music was engaged in a process of transcoding
where potentials of meaning were revealed in the encounter between the
sound and the listener. Reworked through mediated transmission and
simultaneously ideologically grafted, music participated in a translation of
cultural memory that constituted the BBC’s attempt to neutralise some of 
the strangeness of Frenchness. How was such a process enacted in musical
programming that showcases exemplars of French cultural creativity on
the one hand or concentrates on finding a point of common encounter
by placing music familiar to domestic listeners side by side with its French
equivalent on the other? The layout of the evening shifted from lighter
forms of musical entertainment featuring musical performances that served
dif ferent types public and private functions moving from large choruses
singing marching songs to the solo recital of art song. The programming
also engaged in presenting dif ferent forms of cultural project: military,
popular vaudeville, grand dramatic oratorio, traditional folksong and deli-
cate sung poetry.

90 Chapter 3
In the opening programme, a ‘feature-concert’ to showcase the music

of  fighting France, ‘Songs of  the Soldiers of  France’, sung by baritone
Gaston Richer, there was an attempt to neutralise the Vichy notion
of re-establishing Britain as France’s natural enemy and military songs
which derived from battles against the English. It drew instead on ideas
of cultural exchange stressing the commonality of shared Anglo-French
memories emphasising the extent to which British culture had borrowed
from France in the domain of cuisine and music. It also sought to frame
the ‘great fighting songs and marches of  France in the frame of  their
origins and traditions’.84 A subtle distinction was established between
the songs of soldiers – love songs and drinking songs – and songs sung
about them such as military marches. This policy had both the benefit
of humanising the soldiers and in revisiting music from the First World
War, such as the immensely popular ‘Tipperary’ neatly side-stepped rep-
ertoire of anti-English warsongs. The programme took the opportunity
to exploit an aural enaction of the spirit of Anglo-French cooperation in
a composite arrangement of familiar French and British songs, nursery
rhymes and folk songs. Intertwining ‘Malbrough s’en va-t-en guerre’, ‘He’s
a jolly good fellow’, ‘Quelle est cette odeur agréable’, ‘Fill every glass’ from
The Beggar’s Opera, ‘Ah vous dirai-je maman’ and ‘Baa, Baa Blacksheep’
brought together resonances simultaneously in music. Just as Fritz Spiegl’s
much missed UK theme that started the day’s schedules on Radio 4
arranged folksongs from the four nations to chime together in an aural
manifestation of the BBC’s coverage and the combined individualism the
union is supposed to represent. It is no surprise to find songs associated
with the Revolution and the Fête de la Fedération, but additionally, the
Chant de départ, La Carmagnole, Madelon (associated with post-1870
lust for revenge against the Germans) and Sambre et Meuse were all, as

84 BBC WAC R19/395: Entertainment/The Fourteenth of July, ‘July the Fourteenth:
Special French Programmes, Revised Lay-Out’, 3.

Translating Cultural Memory in Features and ‘French Night’ at the BBC 91

discussed in the following chapter, staples of the short musical interludes
of the BBC French Service, indeed the Marche Lorraine was the sonic
signature of the Fighting French in London.

Following the plenary broadcast feature, ‘The French Fight On’, the
programme split once more between Home and Forces networks. Berlioz’s
Te Deum was broadcast live on the Home Service while it was set opposite
a programme of very dif ferent scale and ambition that concentrated on
the ‘beautiful songs of French folklore’.85 Chagrin had already made use
of several folksongs in the context of propaganda slogans and chansons
broadcasts into France by the French Service, those that are discussed in the
following chapter, which worked not only to reinforce the aural significance
of the melodies to listeners familiar to the BBC in France – who could
hear the programmes – but also to make additional use of arrangements
that Chagrin had already made.

Although some songs were to be sung either by Sophie Wyss or
Gaston Richer, the preference was to perform them in instrumental ver-
sions only, possibly to let listeners safely remember the alternative words
composed by Jean Oberlé or Pierre Dac and instill in them a form of 
tacit contraband, or to lessen the unfamiliarity of French language. A
manoeuvre such as this gains considerable significance in the light of the
Vichy government’s exploitation of the ‘purity’ of French folklore in its
cultural project.86

85 BBC WAC R19/395: Francis Chagrin, ‘July the Fourteenth: Forces Programme:
9.30 pm, The Songs of the People of France’ (11 June 1943).

86 See Christian Faure, Le Projet culturel de Vichy (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Vichy,
1989) and Chapter 5 below.

92 Chapter 3
Example 4: Francis Chagrin’s List of Repertoire for ‘The Songs of the People
of  France’   87
Chansons, je vous emprie         (c. 1550)
La Chanson de Marie            (fairly gay) Breton song
Berceuse                Breton Song
Ah, mon beau château          Children’s song
Dans les prisons de Nantes
Ils sont dans les vignes les moineaux
Quand j’étais chez mon père
La chèvre
Il pleurait comme un fontaine
Chansons Tourangelle            songs of the province Touraine
Ma Normandie               song of Normandy
Bourée d’Auvergne            song of this province.
Quand je suis parti de La Rochelle
Les moînes de Saint Bernadin
Le légende de Saint Nicolas
Compère guilleri
Voici le mois de Mai
Quand Birim voulut danser
Au clair de la lune
Sur le pont d’Avignon

Berlioz, Te Deum (1849) and the Living Spirit of France

A work that is monumental, colossal, gigantic and imposing by Berlioz’s
own token, the Te Deum, had received its first performance at the Palais de
l’Industrie as part of the closing spectaculars of the Exposition universelle

87 BBC WAC R19/395: Francis Chagrin, ‘July the Fourteenth: Forces Programme:
9.30 pm, The Songs of the People of France’ (11 June 1943). He lists his orchestral
combination as 4/2/1/1/1, f lt, hb, 2 clts, bsn, 2 horns, 1 trmpt, 1 trombone, percus-
sion and harp.

Translating Cultural Memory in Features and ‘French Night’ at the BBC 93

of 1855.88 Exploiting scale and space in both arrangement and composition,
this work formed the principal contribution of the BBC’s music depart-
ment to French Night 1943. Transmitted live from Bedford, it was a col-
laboration of the Luton Choral Society, the BBC Chorus and Symphony
Orchestra under the direction of Sir Adrian Boult. In spirit and idiom this
is a work that consciously places itself beside works such as the Te Deum
(1817) by Gossec, and whose style allies it with composers such as Méhul
or Cherubini.

The antiphonal arrangement of organ and orchestra, the two instru-
mental forces operating in dialogue and rarely sounding simultaneously
communes with the double chorus and the large choir, which sang in unison
as a representation of the people. On technical grounds it was an ambitious
choice, because the scale of forces – double chorus, choir, solo tenor (Parry
Jones) and orchestra – could potentially lose significant sound quality
in medium and long-wave transmission. Marked by large-scale progres-
sions that proceed slowly and gradually to a climatic finale at the end of
its movements, the Te Deum resounded with the trope of thanksgiving in
the context of victory. As is common, the final movement, ‘Marche pour
la présentation des drapeaux’ was dropped. In this particular case it was
cut on account of the lack of visual stimulus in radio broadcasting: it was
felt that the Marche would have been an aural anti-climax following the
Judex crederis.89 In a programme that sought to ‘avoid the idea of French
frivolity on the one hand, and France as the intellectuals’ happy hunting
ground on the other’, Berlioz’s music of fered a style that was felt to fit the
British sensibility rather well, falling somewhere between the perceived
extremes of French frivolity and Wagnerian overstatement.90

Following the large-scale drama of the broadcast from Bedford, the
last programme transmitted in the French Night sequence on the Home
Service focused on the intimacy of poetry – both sung and recited – as

88 See The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz, ed. and trans. David Cairns (London: Gollancz,
1969), 478–9.

89 BBC WAC R19/395: Leonard Isaacs to A.C. Boult (n.d.).
90 BBC WAC R19/395 Report of meeting.

94 Chapter 3
expressing the ‘Living Spirit of France’. We have seen above the extent to
which meditations on the idea of ‘spirit’, of ‘esprit’ – after all – found their
way into Resistance discourses in France, largely by seeking to reappropri-
ate the spirit of France in political and ideological opposition to National
Socialism through the invocation of universal values of humanism, and the
enlightenment.91 This programme, organised by Edward Sackville-West and
Lennox Berkeley, engaged with the same rhetoric by using the symbol of
spirit as something unbreakable and manifestly living. To present the ‘living
spirit’ of France the programme used the most abstract and most intimate
works of vocal creative expression – poetry and art song.

Poems were read in French, in translation, and then sung in a recital
of mélodies. The question of translation here not only includes the sense
of seeking to translate the ‘untranslatable’, but also expands to embrace the
problematic of the text-music nexus and important aesthetic questions
about song and the poetics of musical discourse. As repertoire of songs
composed by Fauré, Debussy, Duparc and Poulenc, the recital was con-
nected by expressions of transfiguration: transfiguration through time and
through love, performed by Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten.

Debussy’s ‘Le temps a laissé son manteau’, sets a text by Charles
d’Orléans, as part of the cycle Trois chansons de France, an evocation of 
late-medieval France and chivalry. Olivier Barbarant has demonstrated how
for Aragon, in particular, reference to courtly poetry in his own works func-
tioned as a resistant contraband; medieval France was divided linguistically
as until 1942, France was divided into a Zone-Libre and Zone-Occupée.
A parallel existed also between the escapism of courtly romance from the
barbarity of feudalism.92 Collective knowledge permitted the decoding
of poetry that gained the potential for double reading, of which only the
initiated could partake. The intimacy of love songs, songs that express
desire, the ‘Je tremble en voyant ton visage’ from Le promenoir des deux
amants and the simple beauty of Poulenc’s ‘Nous avons fait la nuit’ from

91 See Gisèle Sapiro, La guerre des écrivains, 1940–1953 (Paris: Fayard, 1999), 65.
92 Olivier Barbarant, Aragon: La Mémoire et l’excès (Paris: Champ Vallon, 1997),

113–14.

Translating Cultural Memory in Features and ‘French Night’ at the BBC 95

the Eluard cycle, Tel jour telle nuit closed the recital in the sense also of 
love’s completion, in the calm that (as Poulenc insisted in his instructions
to performers) was the only means of expressing intensity.93 There is a very
beautiful connection between the radio and the transmission of an intimate
yet disembodied voice as it combines with an appeal to spiritual presence;
the radio transmits the sound of a semi-invited guest whose parole cannot
be controlled and the presence of absence, the voice – including the musi-
cal voice – as (physically) absent presence. The concept of  Frenchness
constructed in this programme was barely translated at all and appealed
to an authenticity in which knowledge of French was a pre-requisite. For
the composer, Herbert Howells, ‘it was this smaller-calibre broadcast that
went right to the heart of what France was, is, and must be, in musical and
literary genius. […] I have heard no programme more satisfying in idea,
presentation, and executive accomplishment.’94

Conclusion

Louis MacNeice’s evocative translation of  Aragon’s contemplation of 
‘the unoccupied zone’ broadcast in ‘The Living Spirit of France’ situated
the the intertwining of two languages – the act of translation – in the
emotional space of the lovers in the poem itself. Aragon’s development
of intimate discourse in Le Crève-Cœur is linked to the poetic subject’s
relationship with history and, as Barabant notes, ‘le chant intime est aussi
une machine de guerre’.95 It is a translation then that engages with shared
cultural memory to make its impact, engaging with a literary inheritance

93 Francis Poulenc, Journal de mes mélodies, ed. Renaud Machart (Paris: Cicero, 1993), 22
(entry dated 11 November 1939): ‘le calme dans un poème d’amour peut seul donner
de l’intensité. Tout le reste est baisers de nourrice.’

94 BBC WAC R27/247 Music Policy/Surveys and Reports/Herbert Howells (14 July
1943), 186.

95 Barbarant, Aragon: La Mémoire et l’excès, 116.

96 Chapter 3
that could be understood only by those familiar with or suf ficiently sym-
pathetic to Aragon’s professed necessity to ‘faire chanter les choses’.96

My love, within your arms I lay
When someone hummed across the way
An ancient song of France; my illness
At last came clear to me for good –
That phrase of song like a naked foot
Rippled the green waters of stillness.97

Distanced music prompts memory from its temporary oblivion and nostal-
gia disrupts the silent contemplation within the ‘Zone-Libre’ – within the
freedom of the interiority of the mind, expressing Aragon’s and, indeed,
MacNeice’s own, preoccupation with world events breaking in on the
integrity of individual imagination.98 The intersection of  the cultural
imaginary with world events is enacted in the Feature programmes of 
the BBC and the extended portrayal of French cultural memory on the
Special Night of 14 July 1943 was a significant landmark in broadcasting
method. It received considerable acclaim from both the listening public,
including listeners in Paris who could receive the Home Service, and from
the upper echelons of the Corporation’s management.99 Programmes had
been stratified to cater for the listening interests of dif ferent constituen-
cies and subsequently presentation ranged from rather crude simplistic
explanation of the dif ferent national perspectives to the presumption of

96 Louis Aragon, ‘La Rime en 1940’, in Le Crève-Cœur (Paris: 1946), 67.
97 MacNeice, ‘The Unoccupied Zone’, in Louis MacNeice: Collected Poems, ed. Dodds,

556.
98 Peter McDonald, Louis MacNeice: The Poet in his Contexts (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1991), 96.
99 In its Audience Research bulletin it was disclosed that the programme had a general

level of listening that was 25 per cent higher than the level of the rest of the week
with a breakdown of figures thus: Songs of the Soldiers of France (HS) 16 per cent;
14th July Features (HS) 10.5 per cent; Vaudeville (Forces Programme)18.6 per cent;
The French Fight on (HS) 16.1 per cent; Berlioz, Te Deum (HS) 7 per cent; Songs of 
the People of France (Forces) 6.8 per cent; The Living Spirit of France (HS) 2.7 per
cent. BBC WAC R9/1/3 Audience Research Bulletin 122–73 (1943).

Translating Cultural Memory in Features and ‘French Night’ at the BBC 97

engagement with sophisticated knowledge of both French language and
culture. Mediating Frenchness then involved a construction of a curious
hybrid of Anglo-French cultural memory that was designed to provoke
recognition of commonality in the context of an alterity that was rendered
less alien by mechanisms of translation. Feature programmes that worked
by dramatising actuality created new forms of knowledge transmission
in which the boundaries of the imaginary were in f lux. This is evident in
a discussion between Robert Speaight and Laurence Gilliam where the
possible extent of dramatisation in ‘The French Fight On’ was set against
including more substantive information. ‘In writing The French Fight On,
I have purposely refrained from dramatising in any but the lightest way
the story of resistance within France; and I therefore think that there is
plenty of detail with which you could fill in a programme giving a more
intimate picture of conditions in the country, if you decide not to treat
the matter in a fictitious way.’100

By presentating a culturally sympathetic translation of Frenchness
to a potentially unsympathetic population, the programmers at the BBC
exploited the speciality of the medium of radio to dif fuse music combined
with a political agenda of rapprochement. In its complicity with broadcast
narratives, the status of the musical work as distinct from its function is
called into question. So too, is the potential manipulation of its meaning
and the construction of the relationship between the listener (and their
particular situation) and the works themselves.

100 BBC WAC R19/395: Internal Memo from Robert Speaight to ADF (Laurence
Gilliam) ‘French Night’ (30 June 1943).



Chapter 4

Constructing Cultural Soundscapes at the
French Service

From July 1941 the calling signal of London to Paris was famously a short,
but charged, pithy little phrase played twice on timpani. This permitted
the regular transmission of a semantic reduction of the word victory, which
was only to be mentioned in full if justified by significant military suc-
cess. In order to demonstrate the extent to which the opening motif from
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony acquired a profound and powerful resonance
in this context, I want to take a detour to Lidice, a village in the Czech
Republic, which was the scene of a Nazi atrocity on 10 June 1942. From
here, I explore Humphrey Jennings’ film, The Silent Village, an edition of 
the BBC French Service’s f lagship programme, Les Français parlent aux
Français, and a symphonic poem by Martinů; all attest to the defiance of
remembering and furthermore engage with the forms of translated cultural
memory I explored in the previous chapter.

Jennings spoke about directing the Crown Film Unit production
The Silent Village in a Home Service programme broadcast during May
1943. In his film, he had sought to literally bring home the scale of atrocity
committed at Lidice to domestic audiences. This small Czech village was
razed to the ground in retribution for the assassination of the Nazi leader
of Bohemia and Moravia, Reinard Heydrich. Instead of building a studio
set, Jennings sought an equivalent to Lidice in Britain itself and found it
at Cwmyiedd, a small mining village in Wales. What resulted was not a
fabulated reproduction of Lidice but instead a Kristevian transposition.
Welsh replaced Czech as the native language at threat from the dominating
German of the invaders and making the film involved a process of mutual
reading and learning. ‘We were able to portray not only what life in Wales
is like at the present moment, but what life – their lives, reactions would

100 Chapter 4
be like if they were placed in the situation that the people of Lidice were
placed in.’1

Jennings sought advice from refugees in order to reproduce the pres-
ence of Nazi troops. He used authentic textual material that was presented
either via a megaphone or announced on the radio demonstrating the
bizarrely incongruent sequences of Nazi broadcasting where notices of
executions would be followed immediately by aid appeals for the Red
Cross. Jenning’s whole project, filmed over many months, was a far cry
from some of the more blatant and unsophisticated forms of GPO and
Crown Film Unit propaganda produced during the Second World War.2
Mixing testimony and social reality – the villagers played themselves –
Jennings’ film reconfigured the distance of the Lidice atrocity, bringing
its potential uncomfortably close to home. The transposition and literal
translation of the tragedy of Lidice was also, for Jennings, a means of set-
ting up a counter-attack via film and radio to the misuses of these respec-
tive media by Goebbels:

So in this picture you see not only the reconstruction of the Lidice story, but also
the clash of two types of culture: the ancient, Welsh, liberty-loving culture which
has been going on in those valleys way, way back in the days of King Arthur and
beyond, still alive in the Welsh language and in the traditions of the valleys; and this
new-fangled, loudspeaker, blaring culture invented by Dr. Goebbels and his satellites.
And it’s through the clash of these two cultures that the mechanism of the film, so
to speak, is presented and not simply as a blood-and-thunder story of some people
marching into a village.3

In the displaced reconstruction created by Jennings, the film revisits issues
concerned with testimonial truth, since it is the participants in the film
who bear vicarious witness in solidarity with their Czech counterparts in

1 Humphrey Jennings, ‘The Silent Village’, BBC Home Service talk (26 May 1943),
reprinted in The Humphrey Jennings Film Reader, ed. Kevin Jackson (Manchester:
Carcanet Press, 1993), 67–75.

2 See The Story of an Air Communiqué, Ministry of Information (1940), dir. Ralph
Elton.

3 Jennings, ‘The Silent Village’, 75.

Constructing Cultural Soundscapes at the French Service 101

the absence of any testimony originating from the event. The necessity
of defiance in the face of the Nazi edict that the village should be erased
entailed that the atrocity impacted forcefully on the imagination and in
many ways its commemoration became imperative. On the BBC French
Service, Les Français parlent aux Français marked the massacre at Lidice
on 12 July 1942 with a short programme composed of a tripartite dialogue,
framed by the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. Its
opening section, in the example below, plays on the repetition of a formula, a
slogan, which even without a musical setting functions to focus the message
on the reprisal for the assassination of Heydrich, and translates into text
something of the musical form of the ostinato that generates the second
movement of the symphony. The middle section then repeats, without any
commentary, the communiqué from Transocéan announcing the reprisal
undertaken for the death of Heydrich in addition to condemning the
entire village population for anti-Reich activity – this included hoarding
rationed goods; resistance activity evidenced though the existence of a
clandestine radio post, arms caches and illegal publications. The men were
shot, the women sent to concentration camps and the children put into
‘appropriate’ educational establishments.4 The final act of destruction was
the obliteration of the name of Lidice:

1ere voix: Village de Lidice!
2e voix: Village de Tchécoslovaquie rasé jusqu’au sol par la fureur germanique le 10
juin 1942.
1ere voix: Pourquoi?
2e voix: Parce que le bourreau Heydrich a été abattu comme un chien.
1ere voix: Hommes de Lidice!
2e voix: Fusillés jusqu’au dernier par les Allemands.
1ere voix: Pourquoi?
2e voix: Parce que le bourreau Heydrich a été abattu comme un chien.
1ere voix: Femmes de Lidice!
2e voix: Arrachés à leurs enfants et envoyées au bagne en Allemagne.

4 Anon., Les Français parlent aux Français, ‘Lidice’ (12 juillet 1942), 21.30, in Les Voix
de la liberté (vol. 2), ed. Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac (Paris: La Documentation
française, 1975), 165.

102 Chapter 4
1ere voix: Pourquoi?
2e voix: Parce que le bourreau Heydrich a été abattu comme un chien.
1ere voix: Enfants de Lidice!
2e voix: Arrachés à leurs mères et envoyés dans les pénitenciers en Allemagne
1ere voix: Pourquoi?
2e voix: Parce que le bourreau Heydrich a été abattu comme un chien.5

The final part of the programme, like Jennings’ film and, as shown below,
Martinů’s symphonic poem, defies the Nazi’s edict with a defiant determi-
nation to remember, to avenge, and addressing Lidice now in the familiar
second person, to not simply rewrite, but to reinvent: ‘Village de Lidice,
les Allemands disent qu’ils ont supprimé ton nom, mais tu ne manqueras
jamais des mains qui le récriront lettre par lettre.’6

Martinů’s Ode to Lidice [Památník Lidicím] (1943), in a similar way
to Philippe Soupault’s Ode à Londres bombardée (1943) discussed below,
is a work that attests to the scale of destruction from a distanced vantage
point and is also one of the reinventing hands of the BBC programme.7
Martinů had f led Nazi-occupied Europe via Paris and Lisbon to spend
the war in the United States and Soupault’s poem was composed while
incarcerated in Tunis in 1942. In the final bars of the symphonic poem,
Martinů cites the opening motif of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, not only
as an intertextual reading of Beethoven’s ‘fate motif ’, it is a quotation of the
calling signal of the BBC bringing Jonathan Grif fin’s ‘roman-morse’ full
circle.8 Recontextualising the BBC call signal within a musical framework
ironically returns it to its originating function but whereas in its source
location it is the generative motif of a symphonic movement, in Martinů’s
work it is a statement alien to the established musical context that pur-
posefully does not participate in the developmental structure of the work.

5 Ibid., 164–5.
6 Ibid., 165.
7 Martinů’s work was commissioned by the American League of Composers and

received its first performance on 28 October 1943 at the Carnegie Hall by the New
York Philharmonic under the direction of Artur Rodzinski.
8 See Anthony Rudolf, ed., Sage Eye: The Aesthetic Passion of Jonathan Grif fin (London:
Menard King’s, 1992).

Constructing Cultural Soundscapes at the French Service 103

The use of the citation bears stark witness to traumatic atrocity invoking a
semantic network of symbolism that has at its root the use of music, albeit
marginal, in radio broadcasting. Short musical slogans were of necessity
highly performative and punched above their weight semiotically as highly
distilled fragments of meaning. Thus, in the Martinů, the opening of the
Fifth symphony encodes a spirit of resistance in the context of horror. It is
the uses of these encoded musical fragments in the broadcasts of the BBC
French Service that is my focus here, contextualised in the following sec-
tion, with analysis of the Service and its operations.

Un poste français

Although broadcasting to France in French had originally begun in 1938
with the Munich crisis, it is Général de Gaulle’s appel to the French on 18
June 1940 on the BBC airwaves that has set the seal as the central image
and symbol of the BBC’s relationship with France during the Second World
War. For Henry Rousso, the image of the uniformed and exiled general
speaking sits at the very core of the ‘resistancialist myth’ that celebrates ‘a
people in resistance, a people symbolised exclusively by ‘l’homme du 18 juin’.9
However, Free French airtime not subject to British editorial control was
extremely limited and their service, Honneur et Patrie had a slot of no more
than five minutes during the key listening period for the French Service –
between 8pm and 9pm. For fifteen minutes (divided into ten minutes of
news and the five-minute Free French programme) of this period, between
8.15pm and 8.30pm, the BBC were able to be broadcast on extra transmit-
ters giving a range that included all of Europe, the Mediterranean, North

9 H. Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, trans.
Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991 [1987]),
18.

104 Chapter 4
Africa, Eastern Canada and the United States.10 Global coverage of the
BBC’s, and British government’s, willingness to give free airtime – even
if just five minutes – was designed to resonate not simply the messages of
an emerging exterior French resistance, but to demonstrate the freedom of 
British airwaves by risking the broadcast of information that infracted or
contradicted its own strategic interests. Although when there was a break-
down in relations between the Free French and the British Government,
there was little hesitation in pulling the broadcasts from the air.

The BBC French Service was independent then of the political power
at Carlton Gardens until 1944, while remaining under the control of British
censorship and protocol. It was a Service that really developed in earnest
once Cecilia Reeves and Darsie Gillie had brought together an équipe of 
French broadcasters during the Spring and Summer of 1940, headed by
Jacques Duchesne (the broadcast name of theatre producer, Michel Saint-
Denis),11 who had broadcast anonymously for the BBC while a Liaison
Of ficer in the French Army working with the British Expeditionary Force,
notably reporting from Flanders in the aftermath of the British evacuation
of Dunkirk.12 As a network defined by dif ferent linguistic and political
boundaries, the BBC French Service intersected with other departments
in the Corporation’s structure and also with exterior agencies such as the
Ministry of Information, the Foreign Of fice and, as indicated above, had an
often complicated relationship with the Free French in London. Through
its engagements with all these other organisations, the Service carved out
and doggedly retained its editorial independence. To have obtained such
freedoms, even acknowledging that they were indeed limited both politi-
cally and creatively, attests to the realisation of strong convictions among a
disparate group of people with strong opinions and identities. Even at the
most basic practical level the conditions in which the équipe were installed

10 BBC WAC E2/9: Foreign General/Allied Government Broadcasts/France/1940–43,
‘Memorandum by Stephen Tallents (then Controller (Overseas)) (13 July 1940). The
Free French slot began from 18 July 1940.

11 I refer to Michel Saint-Denis by his broadcast name throughout.
12 GB-Lbl Ms Add. 81145 vol. LV: ‘A French Liaison Of ficer in Flanders’, BBC Overseas

Transmission (1–2 June 1940).

Constructing Cultural Soundscapes at the French Service 105

at Bush House were cramped and dif ficult, as Russell Page, the French
Service Organiser explained to the Director of European Service, Douglas
Ritchie in March 1941: ‘We have one catacombe (non-security), quite large
enough for French Talks. For programme staf f we have two tables in L.G.
41.’13 Page continued to describe the work to be undertaken, vividly setting
the scene of the chaotic circumstances in which programmes came to air.
A secretary would be typing and correcting scripts as well as typing news
commentaries, Lefèvre and his assistants would be checking discs (a library
of two hundred would have been stored in the same room), organising
announcements, timing and last-minute changes. The French programme
staf f would be sat at the two desks along with external participants and, Page
noted ‘it has to be remembered that the French work in a kind of rookery
atmosphere of chatter and debate – this may not be desirable, but that is
the way they work best, and there is nothing to do about it.14

Although the broadcasts were compiled and presented by the French
recruits, policy and ultimate editorial control remained firmly in the hands
of the BBC; all the slogans, verses and chansons were considered in light
of directives issuing from collaboration between the BBC and Ministry
of Information liaison of ficer, Raymond Mortimer.15 Music critic, Rollo
Myers who later worked for the Overseas Music Department, was initially
involved with the BBC French Service as a translator during the weeks of 
the invasion, armistice and occupation. On 11 July 1940, he drafted a memo
with a series of observations and proposals about how the French Service
of the BBC should organise itself in policy terms now that broadcasting
was the only link remaining with France. Critical of the tendency to make
rough translations of the newswires badly, Myers stressed that:

13 BBC WAC R13/147: ‘Bush House’ FSO to D. Eur. B. (19 March 1941). Douglas
Ritchie was, incidentally, Colonel Britton, one of the very few to broadcast on the
French Service in English.

14 Ibid. (19 March 1941).
15 BBC WAC E1/703: Countries: France/French Service Directives/1941 (7 March

1941).

106 Chapter 4
Only really vital news, appeals to the finest national traditions of courage and liberty,
independence and progress, reminders of France’s age-long supremacy in art and
literature (‘mère des arts, des armes et des lois’), and prompt and unceasing refuta-
tions of German propaganda lies, should find a place in our present-day broadcasts
to France.16

He also perceptively indicated that it was important to avoid ‘too much
criticism of, or insulting references to the Vichy Government’ and outlined
that broadcasting ‘should be of an almost personal character, as if addressed
to individuals, and care should be taken to present the material specifically
to the Frenchman’s mind’. To which end programmes should include ‘wit,
irony, literary and historical allusion’ with all classes and all accents catered
for. Myers leaves his final point for music, his own speciality, ‘and if music
is to be included, it is obvious that this is not the time for trivialities, but
for very carefully selected programmes of really vital music accompanied
by special presentation’.17

The principal propaganda objectives of the service initially were not so
much to inspire anti-Nazi sentiment of which it presupposed the existence,
but to dismantle gradually the residual faith and hope in the figure of the
Pétain. So long as there remained a last hope in Pétain, it was necessary to
maintain unity and morale in France and to destroy misunderstandings
between France and England. Vichy’s power was until 1942 ostensibly
separate from the Nazis and it set up its own agenda of national publicity
concentrated in the figure of the Maréchal. Only passive resistance was
encouraged, and ‘carefully planned sabotage of the German aim to exploit
France’.18 A key moment in fracturing belief in Vichy occurred with the

16 BBC WAC E1/702/1: Memo from Rollo Myers to DDOI [Deputy Director of 
Overseas Information] with annotated reply from Russell Page (FSO): ‘First part
clearly with news does not concern me I suppose, but hear same criticism from every
side. 2nd part fairly well understood as far as “Ici la France” goes.’ (11 July 1940) and
following references.

17 Ibid. (11 July 1940).
18 GB-Lbl add. ms. 81145, vol. LV, Michel Saint-Denis papers, [dates from early 1942],

n.a. [possibly Russell Page or Darsie Gillie], undated document concerned with
‘British Propaganda to France’, 5.

Constructing Cultural Soundscapes at the French Service 107

Nazi breaching of the German-Soviet non-aggression pact with the of fen-
sive on the Eastern front which began on 22 June 1941. This had important
repercussions within France, in principle reinforcing, or at the very least
clarifying, opposition to the Vichy pact with Germany but also for the
communist movement, which was, after all, proving to be the driving force
of resistance and soon to become the target itself of negative Nazi publicity
and worse. Responding quickly with opinion pieces relating to major events
was also vital to the success and integrity of the service. The BBC itself
was behind the programme that announced the attack on Pearl Harbour
on 7 December 1941 with an opinion piece by Jean Marin following two
days later. Although for Pierre Laborie, 1942 is used too simplistically as
the representative year in which there was a large-scale turning point in
French attitudes towards Vichy, it was, he argues, pivotal in the reaction
to the implementation of Jewish racial laws in France.19 The first deporta-
tion from France was 27 March 1942, the wearing of yellow stars was ruled
compulsory on 29 May 1942 and enforced from 7 June; the summer was
marked by the large round-ups, commencing with the Vél d’Hiv on 16 and
17 July 1942 and the last on this scale were undertaken on 26–28 August
1942. André Labarthe broadcast a strong piece condemning anti-Semitism
in Les Français parlent aux Français on 8 August following the denounce-
ment of the Vichy racial laws by the Comité National Français. His talk,
which deliberately targets the hypocrisy of Laval, highlighted diversity in
the unity of shared risk:

Notre patrie devient un coupe-gorge, une ruelle d’Europe, où par désespoir les parents
se tuent après avoir assassiné leurs enfants. La France est une chambre de torture,
la France serait la fosse aux juifs! […] Français! Vous ne laisserez pas faire ça. Vous
faites la chaîne du cœur autour du f léau qui monte et dans lequel vous pourriez tous
périr: juifs, Bretons, Lorrains, Basques, gens d’Auvergne, gens de France, tête ronde,
tête noire, chacun avec vos accents et vos patois.20

19 See Pierre Laborie, ‘1942 et le sort des Juifs, Quel tournant dans l’opinion’, Annales
ESC 48 (1993), 655–66.

20 André Labarthe, Les Français parlent aux Français (8 August 1942), in Jean-Louis
Crémieux-Brilhac, ed., Les Voix de la liberté, vol. 2, 186.

108 Chapter 4
A short interlude, broadcast in the week before Labarthe’s more extended
exposé on the subject plays, as the Lidice programme had done before,
on repetition, reinforcing anti-Semitism as a key policy in the Nazi New
Order whose ultimate aim is the destruction of France:21

(Musique dramatique)22
– L’antisémitisme …
– L’antisémitisme est un moyen de diviser les Français
– L’antisémitisme est une partie essentielle de l’Ordre Nouveau, cet Ordre Nouveau
qui vise à l’asservissement de la France.
– L’antisémitisme permet d’expérimenter sur les juifs des mesures qu’on pourra impo-
ser ensuite à tout le reste de la population … on l’a vu en Pologne.
– L’antisémitisme tel que les Allemands le pratiquent aujourd’hui en France occupée,
ils l’ont mis en vigueur en Pologne il y a trois ans.
– L’antisémitisme. L’embrigadement de la jeunesse. La concentration des industries,
ce sont trois actes d’une même pièce: l’Ordre Nouveau.
– L’Ordre Nouveau c’est le vieux rêve de Hitler, l’anéantissement de la France.
Not only were BBC programmes seeking to set an agenda, they had to
respond to the programmes broadcast on rival stations, of which the most
important was the German-run Radio-Paris. These programmes and inter-
ludes needed to counter programmes such as Les Juifs contre la France or
Un Journaliste allemand vous parle broadcast from Paris in the context, as
shown below, of a rich and substantial music and cultural schedule.
If at the BBC French Service music was distilled and used sparingly
in order to secure the clarity of its messages, Radio-Paris did precisely the
opposite. Its music programme was designed to make its programming
of Nazi propaganda palatable or at least provide the incentive to tune
in and for listeners to hear the political broadcasts in passing. Prima la
musica, more broadly, formed the foundation of Nazi cultural policy in

21 ‘Antisémitisme’ (2 August 1942, 19.30). Other programmes that treated anti-Semitism
included, Roger Chevrier, ‘Les juifs persécutées’ (31 Aug. 1942); Jacques Maritain,
‘Juifs, mes frères’ (12 Sept. 1942); Jean Marin, ‘L’épiscopat et l’antisémitisme’ (15 Sept.
1942).

22 The slogan ‘Antisémitisme’ is listed as dubbed with Vaughan-Williams, Symphony
No. 4 in F minor, mouvement iv ‘Finale’ (1931–4).

Constructing Cultural Soundscapes at the French Service 109

France and was manifest in events such as complete-cycles of Beethoven,
tours by orchestras and conductors, gala festivals dedicated to Mozart
and Debussy and the first recording of Pelléas et Mélisande.23 All were in
part or in total bankrolled by the occupying administration; the ‘entente
franco-allemande’ could be successfully exploited as a means of reconcili-
ation permitting French culture to meet German on a level playing field
following military defeat.24

While the propaganda involved in the concert programming could be
surreptitious, at Radio-Paris, as Cécile Méadel writes, the division between
music programming and political broadcasting revealed an almost schiz-
ophrenic duality.25 When the European Music Supervisor at the BBC,
Leonard Isaacs, suggested to Russell Page that there might be scope for
the transmission of music performed live in studio, he received a nega-
tive response.26 Programming was made dif ficult due to the prohibition
of listening, jamming and the sheer amount of demand on time, but the
principal reason for not attempting to develop a music programme, even
though it was agreed that it was desirable, was the competition outre-Man-
che: ‘After all Radio Paris and co put out excellent straight programmes all
the time – people don’t want this from us. We do our best to make every
minute pay from a propaganda point of view. We are definitely not out

23 See Karine Le Bail, ‘Musique, pouvoir, responsabilité: la politique musicale de la
Radiodif fusion française, 1939–1953’ (4 vols), thèse d’histoire, Institut d’études
politiques de Paris, September 2005, 282, 289.

24 Marc Pincherle uses the formula ‘le f lambeau de la réconciliation par l’art’; see ‘La
propagande allemande et la musique’, Contrepoints 1 ( Jan. 1946), 83, quoted ibid.,
285.

25 Cécile Méadel, ‘Pauses musicales ou les éclatants silences de Radio-Paris’, in La vie
musicale sous Vichy, ed. Chimènes, 238.

26 BBC WAC R27/94/1: Music General/European Service/1941–1946, Leonard Isaacs
to FSO ‘Music in French Programmes’ (22 Sept. 1941). ‘I could imagine the immense
ef fect of introducing at the right moment such a thing as Debussy’s Noël des enfants
qui n’ont plus de maisons or a background Impromptu by their beloved Fauré – or
some of the tiny pieces written for the Paris Exhibition of 1937 by such men as
Auric, Sauguet etc.’

110 Chapter 4
for entertainment as such.’27 Although there was a separation between the
cultural programme at Radio Paris and its propaganda, one used by artists
to justify their contribution when their politics were not necessarily col-
laborationist, the division between aesthetics and politics was not accepted
by the post-Liberation purges. Already in October 1942, the clandestine
resistance journal Musiciens d’aujourd’hui had listed playing or singing
on Radio-Paris as active collaboration and targeted head-on the concept
of ‘collaboration “purement” artistique’ declaring that ‘s’ils ne compren-
nent pas qu’ils sont utilisés par l’ennemi comme instruments de ses plans
d’asservissement de la France, le peuple, lui, le comprend si bien qu’il ne
fait pas de dif férence entre eux et les traîtres. Il les juge d’après leurs actes
et non après leurs paroles et leurs intentions!’28

So when the Comités d’épuration sought to punish artists for collabo-
ration it was the Radio-Paris payroll that provided the evidence. Artists,
speakers and musicians were nominally banned for a period of time related
to the number of hours broadcast with the network, except for partici-
pants in propaganda programmes whose interdiction was immediate and
definitive.29 Listed among those who had earned more than 5,000 francs
and ‘interdit définitivement par arrêté du Ministère de l’Information’ were
Edith Piaf, Tino Rossi, Maurice Chevalier and Charles Trenet. Alfred
Cortot, Lys Gauty and Reda Caire were ‘suspendus jusqu’à nouvel ordre
pour faits de collaboration’.30

Music programming at Radio-Paris was as varied as it was extensive,
and Le Bail remarks that it was dif ficult to remain unmoved its charms.31
It was led by the immensely popular Pierre Hiégel whose successful request
programmes made use of his own personal collection of recordings. Then in
1941, the station created its own symphony orchestra, the Grand Orchestre

27 BBC WAC R27/94/1: Music General/European Service/1941–1946, response from
FO (Public Trustee) to Leonard Isaacs, n.d.

28 Musiciens d’aujourd’hui 4 (October 1942).
29 See BBC WAC E2/24: Anglo-French Co-operation/Collaborators (1943–45). The

BBC received lists from Radiodif fusion nationale.
30 See BBC WAC E2/24: Anglo-French Co-operation/Collaborators (1943–45).
31 Le Bail, ‘Musique, pouvoir, responsabilité’, 297.

Constructing Cultural Soundscapes at the French Service 111

de Radio-Paris under the direction of Jean Fournet. From 20 May 1943,
the orchestra played in free dominical public concerts at the Théâtre des
Champs-Elysées welcoming leading conductors from Germany. Its key
policy was diversity in entertaining repertoire and light music, cabaret,
music-hall, which were played extensively with the participation of con-
temporary vedettes such as Maurice Chevalier and Mistinguett as well as
in its repertoire broadcasts.

Les Français parlent aux Français on 13 October 1940 tackled the Nazi-
led musical propaganda programme head-on in a programme that sounded
the musical conquest of Paris: ‘La conquête musicale de Paris’. It was con-
structed of a simple conceit contrasting the success of foreign musicians,
Paderewski, Yehudi Menuhin, Bruno Walter and their musical conquest
of Paris with the arrival of a dif ferent style of foreign visitor. ‘D’autres sont
venus depuis avec des uniformes gris, des chemises noires et brunes avec une
musique aussi, une musique militaire, où percent les clochettes aigrelettes.
Combien plus subtile était la conquête d’Ignaz Paderewski.’32

The programme opened with Paderewski playing Chopin, the most
assimilated of foreign composers in French culture, followed by a brief aural
tour of Parisian concert halls, taking listeners through extracts of Menuhin
playing Paganini and Debussy, harpsichordist Wanda Landowska playing a
Bach prelude and a concert by the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire
where Bruno Walter directed a Concerto Grosso by Handel. All three musi-
cians would have been banned from performing in Paris since the racial laws
prohibiting Jews from public function hit the statute books on 3 October
1940. The programme closed by contrasting the af fection relating to the
musical conquest of Paris with the arrival of the Nazi invaders, for whom
such af fection will never be expressed. ‘Donc aujourd’hui une nouvelle con-
quête de Paris est accomplie, par d’autres, mais combien de temps resteront
ils les maîtres temporels de Paris? Ils ne sauront jamais s’attirer spontané-
ment la sympathie et l’af fection comme ces musiciens; ces musiciens qui on
conquis le cœur musical de Paris avant eux, et pour toujours.’33

32 ‘La Conquête musicale de Paris’, Les Français parlent aux Français (13 October 1940).
33 Ibid., 2.

112 Chapter 4
If the BBC strategy was not to compete with the music program-

ming it also chose not to be complicit with the use of music as a sop or a
front, its messages and its music were designed to be direct, urgent even.
So while Radio-Paris’s cultural programme was a masquerade for Nazi
propaganda, the cultural memory constructed and projected by the French
Service, as we address next, was in part created in response to the success
of its Parisian rival; contingent matters such as location, authenticity, and
identity motivated the creation and content of programmes, their sound
and their music.

Radio must broadcast from somewhere and it is an irony of a medium
defined by its ability to transmit through the air that that the identities of 
the competing stations in the guerre des ondes were firmly embedded in city
locations. There was then a dramatic political polarity that existed between
the BBC’s Radio Londres and its main Metropolitan competition, until
the appearance of Philippe Henriot on Radiodif fusion nationale in early
1944. At issue was a competing claim for authenticity, if the BBC French
Service’s Ici la France attempted to undermine the German-accented Radio-
Paris, it was compromised by its location.34 A fact the Radio-Paris counter-
programme Les Français de France parlent aux Émigrés sought to exploit,
indeed the extent to which the station began to develop its own sketches
and slogans – and they were, as shown below, particularly violent – revealed
the success of the BBC broadcasts from London.35 It is indeed the notion
of the real France existing as an idea in the minds of its people – Aragon’s
‘Zone-Libre’ – and its allies, that becomes the primary focus of broadcasts
from London to Paris; one of the aims of the BBC French Service was to
re-create an authentic sense of geographically-displaced nationhood the
sense of which is expressed in Soupault’s Ode à Londres bombardée. Of
course, the France of Ici la France was an ideological construction, but one
whose identity – which was more simply rendered by focusing on people

34 Michael Stenton, Radio London and Resistance in Occupied Europe: British Political
Warfare 1939–1943 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 129.

35 See Briggs, ‘The War of the Words’, in The History of Broadcasting in the United
Kingdom, vol. 3, 228, and Luneau, Radio Londres, 143.

Constructing Cultural Soundscapes at the French Service 113

and not place in Les Français parlent aux Français – that, where it can be
defined, sought to inspire shared values with its listeners distinguishing
it absolutely from the overtly anti-Semitic proclamations of Radio-Paris
demonstrated in the programmes mentioned above.

The decision to make regular broadcasts into France in French was
made at a meeting held by a committee that included Emile Delavenay
and Cecilia Reeves on 14 June 1940. Outlining an extended programme of 
talks and music (‘gramophone records of the light-classical type’) to replace
broadcasting which had up to then largely missed their intended audience
due to technical limitations of medium wave reach and lack of interest in
shortwave listening.36 A peak slot, from 20.30 to 20.45, was then allocated
to French Service broadcasting. The programme Ici la France was inaugu-
rated by the French ambassador, M. Corbin, on 19 June 1940, having been
postponed from its original broadcast date of 17 June for technical reasons.
It is in the interim that de Gaulle made his broadcast on 18 June, which,
even if it was not listened to in great numbers, became monumentally
important symbolically for the precedent it set for broadcasting relations
between Britain and France. Unlike de Gaulle’s speech, Corbin’s inaugural
broadcast called upon virtue and the maintenance of esprit, articulating
one of the most important purposes of the BBC’s broadcasts to France and
the French population exiled in Britain, namely of keeping faith in certain
representative values in spite of the immediately bleak outlook.

La British Broadcasting Corporation a pris les dispositions pour dif fuser un service
rédigé par des Français pour les Français … Vous trouverez là, au jour le jour, les raisons
de garder votre foi dans les destinées de notre Patrie. Si sombres, si douloureuses que
puissent être les heures présentes, soyez sûrs que les vertus de notre race, retrempées
par le malheur, sauront assurer la résurrection du pays.37

36 BBC WAC E2/9: Foreign General/Allied Government Broadcasts/France (1940–
43), ‘Minutes of Meeting to discuss the possibility of augmenting the programmes
broadcast to France’, Friday, 14 June 1940, 10.30 am’ in the presence of Mr Delavenay,
Mr Dunstan, Miss Reeves, Mr Marriott and later, Monsieur Ferry.

37 BBC WAC S50/1: M. Corbin quoted in Ceclia Reeves-Gillie, History of BBC Wartime
French Service ‘Dans la nuit’ ( June 1940–December 1941), 8–9.

114 Chapter 4
These values became encoded in the context of limited and dif ficult broad-
casting conditions and economy of means applied as much to conveying
meaning as it did for financing elaborate programmes. Music clearly had a
dif ferent role in such a network where listening was in short, precise and
intense periods and in which the need to inform clearly took precedence
over any suggestion of entertainment. However, messages (not necessarily
coded ones) that were relevant to Rollo Myers’s earlier point about literary
or historical allusion could be enhanced or reinforced by musical framing.
His notion of ‘vital’ music links to the ambassador’s speech at the opening
of the service about ‘esprit’, both terms were laboured, appropriated and
demarcated by many dif ferent agencies that chose to use them to express
political or universalising values. Contemporary demands necessitated
that several dif ferent processes mediated the web of messages – both in
authority and content – to serve various political, national and intellectual
purposes. The dynamics of this recontextualisation – especially though
the transmission of texts as chansons, slogans or non-verbally through
purely musical means – calibrated, as Richard Bauman terms it, listener
expectations through the material’s adherence to or transgression of generic
boundaries.38

It was simple ideas, according to Jean Oberlé that were crucial to the
propaganda developed by the BBC French Service.39 Such projects used
canonical figures or works from French history or literature to construct
an exclusive cultural memory, anodyne to the occupiers and loaded with
resonance and meaning for those in the know. So, texts by Maupassant
or Alphonse Daudet concerned with the 1870 invasion were chosen and
more resonantly still, because it evokes the cityscape, Oberlé wrote a series
of sketches on Parisian statues ‘imaginant que, la nuit, elles descendaient
de leurs socles pour bavarder entre elles sur la défaite et l’espérance dans

38 Richard Bauman, A World of  Others’ Words: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on
Intertextuality (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 10.

39 Reeves-Gillie, History of BBC Wartime French Service ‘Dans la nuit’, 42.

Constructing Cultural Soundscapes at the French Service 115

la victoire; je faisais ainsi converser Victor Hugo et Henri IV, Gambetta
et la République’.40

The simplicity of the idea that the statues, the collectively remembered
figures of note or authority that populate the Parisian landscape, might
be resurrected across historical time in some ghostly spectacle to critique
the desperate state of actuality, permitted a dialogue to be constructed
between grand figures including the stalwarts of the nineteenth-century
French literary canon, the memory of the first of the Bourbon kings who
honoured courage, goodness and bravery; Gambetta, the anticlericist hero
of 4 September 1870, and the figure of République herself. Such a trope
evokes the legend that figures from portraits in the Louvre come alive at
night and parade around in a limited space – the limitation of space as
metonymy for restricted freedom in occupied Paris is clear.

As London spoke to Paris, the cities respectively became locations
for meditation in poetry, reminiscence, song and music. Depicting the
soundscape of Paris was a regular feature in the radio broadcasts of the
BBC, simultaneously combining nostalgia with the idea of an ‘esprit
éternelle’, of  ‘Paris sera toujours Paris’. As well as playing on musical
meanings, the équipe also made use of literary traditions. A programme
entitled La Petite Académie broadcast on Sunday evenings parodied the
Académie française and proposed ironic and politically pertinent new
definitions for words.41 These were noted down by Recteur Henry in
a small notebook which is now held in the collections of  the Archives
nationales. His ‘Souvenirs de la Radio Britannique 1940’ contain some
of the ‘Révision[s] du Dictionnaire de la Langue Française par la “Petite
Académie” de Londres’:

40 Ibid., 42.
41 F-Pan 72AJ/226 ‘L’académie, chaque dimanche soir, tire 3 ou 4 mots à définir. Après

discussion, l’on propose une définition qui est adoptée après avoir été mise aux voix. Il
n’a pas été possible, si l’on voulait conserver la trace de ces décisions sans d’attendre la
fin du dictionnaire, de reclasser les mots par ordre alphabétique. De plus, les fréquents
brouillages n’ont pas permis de les transcrire dans leur totalité.’

116 Chapter 4
Anglais: Ennemi héréditaire. La cause de tous nos maux passés, présents et
futurs.
Ex: Les Anglais réquisitionnent tout en France et forcent les Alsaciens à
ne plus parler français.
Gaule: 1° la Gaule – Pays qui se redresse toujours au bon moment
2° de Gaulle – Homme qui s’est dressé au bon moment. De Gaulle est le
goal de la Gaule; s’écrit avec deux ‘l’: les deux ailes de la victoire.
3° Une Gaule – Instrument de pêche qu’il faut redresser au bon
moment.
Laval: Peut se lire dans les deux sens.
Bonnet: Ni beau, ni bon, c’est bonnet.42

Sketches were also written in the style of classical authors such as Voltaire,
or parodied scenes from the classical French theatrical canon – Corneille or
Molière. A programme celebrating the birth of La Fontaine both expressed
the dislocation and exile of the équipe in London and worked to reinforce
their connection with a shared tradition and culture. ‘En fait, comme
vous le savez déjà, nous cherchons chaque soir à vous faire participer à la
vie d’un groupe français qui est ici et nous voulons aussi faire entendre à
ceux d’entre vous qui le peuvent, la voix de Français libres qui, parce qu’ils
ne sont pas chez eux, deviennent d’autant plus conscients de leur tradition
et de leur culture.’43

‘Sentimental pilgrimages’ were written into the programmes as a means
of revisiting a ‘monde qui est hélas d’autrefois mais qui aura, n’en doutons
pas, des lendemains.’44 Using programming strategies such as anniversa-
ries, or dates and reminiscences of places, the programmers sought to give
listeners ‘la sensation de la bouf fée d’air frais qui arrive brusquement par
une fenêtre ouverte dans quelque demeure à l’atmosphère suf focante’.45
Their aim, then, was to relieve the sense of imprisonment and of sadness
of les Français de France, and their programme content quickly became a

42 After the advertising slogan for the aperitif, Dubonnet: ‘du beau, du bon,
Dubonnet’.

43 BBC French Service Script, Ici la France (8 July 1940).
44 BBC French Service Script, Ici la France (9 July 1940).
45 BBC French Service Script, Ici la France (9 July 1940).

Constructing Cultural Soundscapes at the French Service 117

vehicle – and it is in this guise that it expanded most – for messages, not
only of nostalgia, but also of political exigency. Without having to do so
explicitly, such a focus on Paris furthermore set itself up against the Vichy
propaganda which condemned Paris for the decadence of its international
cosmopolitanism. Far from being the location of civilised culture, for Vichy
supporters it was the place of infiltration by foreigners who had upset and
destroyed the fabric of French society. Fear of the city became expressed in
a regressive, indeed reactionary, move towards a nostalgic rural France and
wedding to the soil that was inevitably dangerously racial in its purity.

Sounding the City

Evoking Parisian soundscapes was a particularly important feature of 
broadcasts, not only as a means of dismantling confidence in Radio-Paris,
which began as early as 3 July 1940, but in order to evoke a specifically
aural memory of the city. In analysing three editions of Ici la France in this
section I revisit some of the notions of the timescape and the potential
of the city outlined in Chapter 1. Alerting French listeners to the Nazi
management of Radio-Paris, in a familiar, conversational tone the speaker
presenting the evening’s broadcast asked the listener in France, whether,
like him, they had heard ‘cette voix sans âme’. Enacting the role of the
listener, he recounts how once late in the evening with an English friend,
while scanning the airwaves to find ‘celle que les ondes voudraient bien
nous of fir’, it was Radio-Paris, like the Nazis, ‘qui entra, brutalement, sans
s’être fait annoncer, bien entendu’.46 A sonic evocation of Paris then fol-
lowed making use of recordings originally made in 1939 for programmes
celebrating the State visit of the French president.47 The intrinsic musical-
ity of this cityscape sets the scene for our consideration of limits of music

46 BBC French Service Script, Ici la France (3 July 1940).
47 Material from this visit was also re-used in the 14 July broadcasts discussed below.

118 Chapter 4
on the margins of broadcasts. The city, and particularly the sense in which
there is a connection between the two cities here made possible by the
airwaves, is constructed by a soundscape – via people, church bells, and
cabaret. By viewing the city as a locus of successive ‘réécritures’ of the pal-
impsistic urban text, Jean-Christophe Bailly emphasises the ‘livre ouvert’
of the city, in reading which a passage becomes an aphorism, an impasse
becomes a question, or a staircase a reply.48 The radio programme makes
a musical analogy in the same way via the presenter’s explanation that:
‘Cette sorte de symphonie discordante peut aider utilement à mettre de
l’ordre dans ces souvenirs, à les rafraîchir, à les rapprocher.’49 The idea of 
the musical then in the sonic evocation becomes an essential organising
component of the memories the broadcast sought to evoke. For Bailly
the experience of the urban landscape is a language in permanent tension
between l’existant and le possible.50 The tension which drives BBC’s radio
script is situated between what exists and the shimmering potential of 
liberation – an evocation of a Parisian past suggests not only the eternal
spirit of the city, but also implies that such spirit will at some point in the
future emerge unscathed by the ravages of its temporary (and uninvited)
visitors: ‘Paris redeviendra Paris, mais il y a pour cela une condition: il faut
que vous vous en alliez Monsieur Hitler.’

On 9 July 1940, Ici la France sought to create a similar atmosphere, the
script this time focuses on aspects of Parisian concert life. Once more there
is an appeal to chance, ref lecting possibly the real-life chaos amid which
these programmes were put on air. It is the ‘curieuse rencontre’ between
‘les musiques françaises du passé et des musiques françaises qui sont peut-
être des plus modernes’ that forms the nexus of the programme. The two
soundworlds evoked are those of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
with reference to the Société des Instruments Anciens, the instruments that
‘chevrotent’ – harpsichords, quinton and the dif ferent viols (da gamba,

48 Jean-Christophe Bailly, La Ville à l’œuvre (Paris: Éditions de l’Imprimeur, 2001),
25.

49 Script of Ici la France (3 July 1940).
50 Bailly, La ville à l’œuvre, 8.

Constructing Cultural Soundscapes at the French Service 119

d’amore) of ‘noms merveilleux’ and the modern music of Milhaud’s Le
Boeuf sur le toit (1920) in its arrangement for violin and piano as Cinéma-
fantaisie (1921), with a cadenza by Honegger performed in a recording
by Jean Wiéner. Placed side by side to show their relationship to each
other, the presenter’s text permits a moment of dissent. ‘Il est probable
que beaucoup d’entre vous ne sont pas de mon avis, c’est à dire, qu’ils ne
trouvent aucune amitié entre ces deux musiques, c’est parfaitement leur
droit. Pendant ce quart d’heure de la France libre il est une règle que nous
devons tous respecter: chacun est maître de son avis.’51

By subsequently reversing the ‘experiment’ and playing the Milhaud
before Montéclair’s Les plaisirs champêtres performed by Henri Casadesus,
the programme appealed for consensus and unity to remember the time on
the rue de la Boétie (a reference to the Salle Gaveau) ‘aux temps heureux où
M. Hitler laissait l’Europe vivre tranquil’. It also sought to link by inheritance
the contemporary music of Paris with that of its grand-siècle ancestors:

Je crois qu’il est impossible de leur refuser une parenté certaine. D’abord parce que
les unes et les autres sont françaises cent pour cent. Ensuite parce que MM. Darius
Milhaud et Honegger, musiciens modernes entre tous ont été à l’école de ces com-
positeurs du dix-septième et du dix-huitième siècles français et qu’ils ont tiré d’eux
le meilleur de leurs enseignements. Il est encore une troisième raison; et celle-là est
la plus importante, c’est que les musiciens d’autrefois comme ceux d’aujourd’hui ont
respiré le même air de liberté.

Barbara Kelly notes that Louis Vuillemin writing on ‘concerts métèques’
in 1923, condemned ‘le mauvais goût international’ that was brought in to
the Paris of the Harlequin years by precisely Wiéner and Milhaud.52 The
exiled composer had by this time been firmly listed among the degenerate
musicians and it was not beyond supposition at the BBC, even if it were
not known for certain, that violinist Jean Wiéner had gone into hiding.

51 Ici la France (9 July 1940).
52 The term ‘métèque’ is a racist one, though not specifically antisemitic in its attribution,

that is certainly its implication in this case. Louis Vuillemin, ‘Concerts métèques’,
Le Courrier musical (1 Jan. 1923), 4. See B. Kelly, Tradition and Style in the Works of 
Darius Milhaud (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 7.

120 Chapter 4
In another evocation of Paris, broadcast on 30 July 1940, extracts from

Gustave Charpentier’s Louise elided the struggle for amour-libre and for
Louise’s liberty to love her forbidden paramour, with the political situation
in France. Charpentier’s own libretto, which he termed a roman-musical,
is set in the Montmartre of the 1890s, twenty years after the Commune.
Louise ‘sage et rêveuse’ is the daughter of strict parents. Forbidden to see
her bohemian lover, Julien, Louise is forced to choose between love and
duty. Each character is described, outlining not simply their role, but also
their attitude towards life in general. Louise’s father ‘a vu la repression, a
manqué d’être fusillé et il sait bien, sans se plaindre, qu’il y aura toujours
des pauvres et des riches et que la justice n’est pas de ce monde’. Julien, on
the other hand, of a younger generation who did not experience the battles
of the Commune in Montmartre, Belleville or Ménilmontant, ‘n’a pas de
sou, naturellement, et, la tête pleine de chimères, il envisage l’avenir avec
confiance’. The contrasting attitude of the characters to one another is then
outlined: the father considers Julien ‘un rêveur sans importance’, while
Julien sees Louise as ‘un oiseau qu’il doit libérer’. As the love between Julien
and Louise triumphs, it is set against the background of night falling over
Paris as viewed from the height of the Butte. The lights of the city begin to
come on at twilight and the voices of Paris call on the couple to be free in
their love and to escape the repression of a family that refuses to believe in
their hope and courage for the future. Julien and Louise then are symbolic
of every pair of young lovers who stand ‘épaule contre épaule’ watching the
sunset ‘tout en jurent un amour éternel … Et il n’y a aucune raison pour
que cela finisse.’ Fear of the city, its decadence and the confrontation of 
the other are enshrined in the figures of Louise’s parents, marking a paral-
lel with the conservative retrenchment of Vichy and the call of the city
to the lovers to be free with the spirit of French liberation. The notion of 
freedom – intellectual, bohemian and Parisian – in Louise has much to do
with being free from any constraining force that prevents the eponymous
heroine living out her identity – a freedom that translates ef fectively and
simply the message of the équipe in London.

Musing on the city from the standpoint of actual imprisonment,
Philippe Soupault composed his Ode à Londres bombardée during his
eight-month incarceration in 1942, it was published in the Algerian-based

Constructing Cultural Soundscapes at the French Service 121

journal Fontaine, with a dedication to ‘l’équipe qui a organisé pendant deux
ans et demi pour la BBC le programme: “Les Français parlent aux Français”:
Jacques Borel, Pierre Bourdan, Jacques Duchêne, André Labarthe, Jean
Marin, Jean Oberlé et ceux qu’il ne connaît que par ouï-dire’.53

Soupault had been arrested for ‘high treason’ by milice in Algeria
following the dismissal from his post as director of Radio Tunis on 12
March 1942. He had originally been appointed at the suggestion of Pierre
Brossolette (then in charge of Radio PTT) by the Front populaire govern-
ment in 1937 to head a radio service intended to counter Mussolinian propa-
ganda being directed at North Africa. The public dedication of his Ode to
BBC French Service staf f, to which we as readers bear witness, signals, as
outlined by Genette, the establishment of an intellectual, or artistic and
political, relationship functioning both as evaluation and commentary. It
is possible to see an active involvement of the dedicatee because he or she
‘est toujours de quelque manière responsable de l’œuvre qui lui est dédiée,
et à laquelle il apporte, volens nolens, un peu de son soutien, et donc de sa
participation’.54 The impetus for the poem is the symbolism of a broadcast-
ing voice associated not – importantly – with the national identity of the
broadcaster, but with the city from where the broadcasts originated as the
source-location of exiled voices. By carving out poetic space from personal
and collective memory, Soupault’s Ode transforms London into a location
of psychological importance both distanced yet within intimate reach,
audible over the airwaves. Depiction of traumatic events in the history of 
London – the Great Plague and Fire – combines with personal memory so
that the city space of London is revived in spite of being under perpetual
violent threat. Populated by the troubled ghosts of Thomas Dekker and
Thomas de Quincey, this ref lection provides the opportunity for an enact-
ment of Bailly’s notion of the city as ‘une mémoire d’elle-même qui s’of fre
à être pénétrée et qui s’infiltre en retour dans la mémoire active de qui la

53 Fontaine, 5.26 (May 1943), 60, also reprinted in the introduction to Soupault, Ode à
Londres bombardée in edition with English translation by Norman Cameron (Algiers:
Edmond Charlot, 1944).

54 Gérard Genette, Seuils (Paris: Seuil, 1987), 139.

122 Chapter 4
traverse’.55 The poet too is revived in the description of a dream sequence
in which he encounters a younger version of himself:

Je me glisse comme un souvenir et comme un papillon
vers les rues familières où me guident les ref lets du f leuve
jusqu’à ce monument qui n’a pas d’autre nom
sur cette petite place morose près de l’éléphant
où sourit un jeune homme que je reconnais
et qui est le même après tout puisque je vis encore

London is presented as both alone, withstanding courageously incessant
bombardment, but also as an imperial centre – a global powerbase, because
the voice of London is listened to around the world: in Melbourne, Ottawa,
Cape Town, Calcutta and Auckland – all villes fratérnelles of the British
Empire:

Quand le grand Ben et ses cloches
Af firment qu’il est minuit exactement
Que c’est l’heure de nouveau courage
Melbourne écoute et Ottawa
Le Cap Calcutta Auckland
Toutes les villes du monde
Tous les villages de France
Et Paris.56

Listening to London in Paris was an act of political subversion of course
and punishable, the early requisition of radios was, along with a ban on
using the telephone, among the ‘minor repressive measures’ taken against
the Jewish population.57 Although there is a certain form of geographical
transference fusing with mythic constructions of a liberated France, there

55 J.-C. Bailly, La Ville à l’œuvre (Paris: 1992), 175, quoted in Michael Sheringham, ‘City
Space, Mental Space, Poetic Space: Paris in Breton, Benjamin and Réda’, in Parisian
Fields ed. Sheringham (London: Reaktion, 1996), 114.

56 Philippe Soupault, Ode à Londres bombardée [1942].
57 See ‘Religious Persecution’, no. 3, 29 June 1942 (12 Aug. 1942) Conditions in Occupied

Territories: A Series of Reports issued by the Inter-Allied Information Committee,
London (HMSO), 9.

Constructing Cultural Soundscapes at the French Service 123

is no overt Gaullist sympathy here in Soupault’s work. When Paris forms
the final utterance of the Ode, it is the culmination of a mirroring process
that has not simply set up a ref lective relationship between London and
Paris, but that has gone further still to extend the pairing so that London
has somehow become that which Paris, in its imposed silence and shadows,
should have been. Even if bombs and fire create the light of London, it is
still a light that promises, in a familiar wartime trope, the dawn of a new
world from the womb of the night:

Une lueur proche haute fervente aurore
aurore d’un nouveau monde enfantée par la nuit.

So, the voice of London is one of hope, one that calls through infinity. It is
a voice that speaks of ‘la vie aux moribonds et de la foi à ceux qui doutent’.
Soupault’s Ode more than once makes an analogy with collective maladies
generated through defeat or ‘shipwreck’. At the utterance ‘Ici Londres Parla
Londra London calling’, the radio signal, the collective oppressed would ‘tai-
sions comme lorsqu’on écoute battre un cœur’ as though the message from
London, and the BBC is the signal, however faint, of vital signs of values
– courage in the face of death, perseverance and hope – feared lost in face
of the tyranny referred to in an appropriate citation from La Marseillaise.
London’s voice also takes on a palliative role as ‘une amie à votre chevet’, the
kind voice at the bedside of someone suf fering. If this poem’s initial creative
dynamic was sparked by being conceived while imprisoned then, as shown
by Debra Kelly, the sustaining force of the voice of London was extended
to a ‘whole population in captivity, and creates resistance, individual and
collective, armed and intellectual, active and emotional’.58

Soupault’s poem is moving testament to the importance of the BBC
French Service and the significance of the spirit of the respective cities.
In 1945, Louis Aragon spoke in English on the European Service about
‘The Wounds of London’ describing his surprise at the feelings the city
provokes in him:

58 Debra Kelly, ‘Philippe Soupault and “Ode à Londres bombardée”’, in Six Authors in
Captivity, ed. Nicole Thatcher and Ethel Tolansky (Bern: Peter Lang, 2006), 176.

124 Chapter 4
I did not know that I loved London. A week ago I would have spoken with detach-
ment. But coming back from France I have found friends rather than houses. And
I thought my heart proof against the sight of ruins, having seen so many in my own
country, so many that one was tired of talking to them.59

Both Aragon and Soupault find it dif ficult to retain their anger at the
incredulity that marked the beginning of the war. The scars of the city are
the lessons that must be learned this time. Aragon brings Paris and London
together in closing:

In the face of strain, in face of danger, it is the same for London as for Paris; for each
house destroyed, for each heart stilled, I have not only tears. I have understood how
dear London was to me, I have understood how dear Paris was to me, and for Paris
as for London it is the same anger that mixes with my tears.60

Having investigated the wartime cityscape as sound and timescape, the
next section of this chapter is concerned with the highly ef fective snippets
of propaganda that were sung or spoken. The inf luence these fragments
obtained in France is investigated by looking at the responses of rival sta-
tion Radio-Paris and in an example of resistance literature.

Slogans, Ritournelles, Chansons

From programmes that concentrate on music or musicality specifically as a
means of conveying messages to French listeners, I want to revisit now the
use of musical snippets, the tiny slogans that became themselves an entire
repertoire apart of propaganda. Challenging generic specificity, playing
with meaning and expectation, slogans operate within webs of meaning that
connected text and music, as part of a shared body of knowledge, by both

59 Louis Aragon, ‘The Wounds of London’, BBC European Service broadcast reprinted
in London Calling 291 (5 April 1945), 2.

60 Ibid.

Constructing Cultural Soundscapes at the French Service 125

transposition and amplification. It is possible that these slogans, introduced
to the main body of programming, were among the most memorable and,
indeed, ef fective carriers of information employed by the radio. Such desir-
able performativity led to the invention of no fewer than seven books of
slogans containing 858 dif ferent examples and two books of chansons.61

The use of slogans began on 29 July 1940 and their purpose was
explained by Duchesne as of fering a creative gap in which to contemplate a
statement or opinion that might have interested a listener. In addition, being
‘set to popular tunes, many of them bawdy, meant that listeners could hum
them without giving away the fact that they had been listening to “foreign
propaganda”’.62 The definition of a slogan, necessitated by the frequency
of their use, was within the BBC a matter of some contention:

I am afraid it is not easy to give a definition of the word ‘slogan’ as applied to broadcast
programmes other than that supplied in the agreement, but our European Service
describe a slogan as a short propaganda point framed in music used in broadcasts
to European Countries. These slogans ceased to be used in our programmes in 1944
shortly after ‘D’ day, and commercial records were only used in some instances.63

The separation of a musical text from any sort of authorially coded inf luence,
especially one including adherence to the concept of the work in its entirety,
engenders the possibility of dif ferent reader-, or listener-led interpretations.
It is less a case of losing, but rather gaining within the realm of meaning.
The work trace (if that is the best way to term the fragment) is, through
its re-contextualisation, amplified; and with its function – now limited

61 AN 72AJ229 Crémieux-Brilhac Papers/Slogans et Chansons: Copies of the BBC’s
collection of chansons and slogans that formed the basis of the publication Les Voix
de la Liberté. Book No. 1 is missing. 1. No. 2, No. 176–268; 2. No. 3 269–402; 3. No. 4
403–528; 4. No. 5, No. 529–613; 5. No. 7, No. 722–858; 6. Slogans C, No. 1–626
[Musical order]; 7. Slogans D; 8. Chansons A; 9. Répertoire de chansons B and 10.
Slogans B.

62 BBC WAC S50, 18. ‘They were not all of them of equal value but their preparation
cheered up the team, and their frequent use served to ram home certain simple
truths.’

63 BBC WAC R12/66 Copyright/Dubbing/French Slogans (1944–46): Letter from
Copyright Director to Brian Bramall (Gramophone Buildings) (20 March 1946).

126 Chapter 4
by historical contingency – combines to add new layers of signification.
There are two dif ferent ways in which music served the purposes of these
propaganda slogans. New arrangements in which new words were set to
pre-existing melodies – a sort of propagandic contrafactum and second
in which rather than recording new arrangements, slogans were created
by using dubbed records.

The table below lists music used as accompaniment to spoken, or occa-
sionally sung, slogans. The information is collated from copyright records.
Every time a work was dubbed, a copyright payment was due at the sixth
broadcast cycle hence the need to document their usage.

Table 1: Music Accompanying Slogans (compiled from copyright records)

Slogan Music
Pensez aux alliés J.S. Bach, Suite in G [Vc] c.1720
Le Père Musso Beethoven, Symphony No. 6 in F (1808)
Vincent d’Indy, Symphonie sur un chant
Victor Hugo–Alsace montagnard français (Symphonie cévenole)
10 commandements de l’auditeur (1886)
25e anniversaire – Armée rouge Beethoven, Symphony No. 5 in C minor
Ce sont vos alliés (1807–8)
Chanson des V
Dictature, démocratie (and Berlioz, Danse macabre, Symphonie
D’une minute à l’autre fantastique (1830))
Groupe écoute radio Berlioz, Symphonie fantastique (1830)
Millions d’habitants Berlioz, Marche troyenne (1864)
On ne peut plus danser
Pour la première fois
Quelques minutes de perdues
Trois Allemands dans une brouette
Commissaires du pouvoir
A toutes les époques
Eden–Février 1944

Constructing Cultural Soundscapes at the French Service 127

Adjerat one Borodin, Symphony No. 2 in B minor
Chez Darnand (1869–76)
Darnand fidélité
Henriot, soldat inconnu
La peur chez les miliciens
La Résistance, c’est la France
Loi du 24 juillet 1943
Mai 40–Mai 44
Malgré …
Malte
Miliciens si la France
Mille avions
Millions d’habitants
Mobilisation
Nazi fascistes
Nazis français
Nice, Corse, Savoie
Peur

Victoire italienne, victoire alliée Chabrier, Joyeuse marche (Marche
française) (1888)
Meyerbeer, Coronation march (1861)

Ouvriers en Allemagne Debussy, Trois ballades de Français Villon
(1910)

Dans la Russie solitaire et glacé Debussy, ‘Colloque sentimental’, Fêtes
galantes (1904)

Guerre sous-marine Debussy, La Mer (1905)
Guerre sous-marine-guerre aérienne
L’Honneur de la France, Liberté Voltaire
Loi du 24 juillet 1943
Mai 40 – Mai 44
Nettuno film
Situation alimentaire
Berlin

Eden – Février 1944 Elgar, Symphony No. 1 in A f lat (1904,
1907–8)

Le monde vivait en paix Ibert, Escales (1922)

128 Chapter 4

Adolf au micro Of fenbach, Orphée aux enfers (1858)
O Germanie Of fenbach, Gaité parisienne, adapt.
Rosenthal
Philippe Henriot ment Of fenbach, La belle Hélène (1864)
Ravel, Rapsodie espagnole (1907–8)
Vous n’aurez pas l’Alsace
Radio Boche bombardement Rossini, La Scala di Seta (1812)
Train trouble
Alsace-Laval-Churchill Rossini-Respighi, La Boutique fantasque
Charade Laval
Dates invasion Schumann, Symphony No. 4 in D minor
Un pour mille (1851)
La peau de chagrin Shostakovich, Age of Gold [Zolotoy vek]
La peur chez les miliciens ballet (1930–31)
Partout Shostakovich, Prelude in A f lat (1918)
Shostakovich, Symphony No. 1 in F
Méthodes d’autrefois minor (1924–5)

Usines Ford Sibelius, Symphony No. 1 in E minor
Avec nous (1899) ‘Ich hatt’ einen kamaraden’
Dans la Ruhr la nuit Sibelius, Symphony No. 2 in D major
Fascisme guerre (1901–2)
Hitlerisme poussière Tchaikovsky, Symphony No. 2 in C minor
L’Allemagne est perdu (Little Russian) (Rev. version 1879–80)
Discours Laval Nos 6 and 7
Ça va de mieux en mieux
C’est écrit, c’est signé
Stalingrad-Berlin

Constructing Cultural Soundscapes at the French Service 129

Victoire et Liberté Tchaikovsky, Symphony No. 4 in F minor
Victoire française (1877–78)
170 millions de Russes
A l’est rien de nouveau Tchaikovsky, Symphony No. 5 in E minor
Appel aux généraux (1888)
Après la guerre Tchaikovsky, Symphony No. 6
Coup de filet (Pathétique) in B minor (1893)
Europe Tchaikovsky, Romeo et Juliet (c.1878)
Au voleur Tchaikovsky, 1812 Festival Overture
(1880)
10,000 partisans Tchaikovsky, Capriccio Italien (1880)
Dix mille parisiens
Chantiers de jeunes Vaughan-Williams, Symphony No. 4 in F
Discours cergovie minor, iv movement ‘Finale’
L’aube va poindre
Chaque jour-Marins
Où chassera Laval
Production 40 per cent
Miliciens, si la France
Millions d’habitants
Rations 1943
Reddition f lotte italienne
Retrograde
20,000 prisonniers
Dates
Fascisme guerre
L’Antisémitisme
Ouvriers, la France est grande
Rien de pire
Se cacher
Vider la France
Chemins de fer

130 Chapter 4
Vincent d’Indy, Symphonie sur un chant
Sur la route en Russie montagnard français (Symphonie cévenole)
A toutes les époques (1886)
Churchill France ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ from Die Walküre
Hommes de Darnand (Milices) (1852)
Vengeance RAF
Avance allemande
Encerclement

At first glance there seems to be very free association between the
musical dubbing and the messages conveyed – Vincent d’Indy’s Symphonie
accompanied slogans concerned with Mussolini, the Eastern Front,
Churchill’s relationship with France and the German police. Musical sig-
nifiers are then collapsed into serving as mere carriers of texts – and music
that might otherwise typify Nazi might is def lected into representative of 
the bombing power of the RAF. Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich and Borodin
– whose Symphony no. 2, had been the code for Les Apaches, the group of
musicians (including Ravel) that associated in their support of Debussy’s
Pelléas et Mélisande – carried the widest diversity of slogans. Together they
outnumber those taken from French or British composers.64 Sounding
the music of Russia would generate considerable anti-Axis solidarity as
the Nazi forces suf fered immense losses in the struggle on the Eastern
Front. Debussy’s La Mer was another example of military appropriation
chiming with not simply the old colonial maxim that Britannia rules the
waves, but with the battles between U-boats and submarines in the ‘Guerre
sous-marine’.

From June 1942, Laval promoted a scheme termed ‘La Relève’, the
Reich had determined that it required 350,000 French workers to work

64 Les Apaches included composers Ravel, Florent Schmitt, Maurice Delagen Paul
Ladmirault, Edouard Bénédictus; poets, Léon-Paul Fargue, Tristan Klingsor; critics,
Michel Calvocoressi, Emile Vuillermoz, pianist, Ricardo Vines, and conductor D.E.
Inghlebrecht. See Jann Pasler, ‘Stravinsky and the Apaches’, Musical Times 123 ( June
1982), 404. ‘The theme of Borodin’s Second Symphony became the password the
group whistled to draw each other’s attention after concerts and to get the apartment
door opened.’

Constructing Cultural Soundscapes at the French Service 131

in Germany and in the terms of Laval’s scheme for every three workers
that left, a French prisoner of war would be released, the Service Travail
Obligatoire (STO) which enforced workers to leave following the lack of
success of the volunteer scheme, was ruled into law in February 1943. How
the respective radio voices sought to inf luence public opinion was one of 
key moments of the guerre des ondes. Radio-Paris in parallel to increasingly
anti-semitic ‘anti-France’ propaganda, extolled the virtues of working in
Germany, and special programmes were made on location welcoming the
return of French prisoners at Compiègne. In ‘La Relève’, which appeared as
one of her clandestine Contes d’Auxois circulated by Minuit, Édith Thomas
describes the independent reactions of two characters, Le Guirrec and
Robert Bassin. While the newspapers, like Radio-Paris, emphasised the
duty to work in Germany in order to free prisoners – ‘ceux qui attendent
anxieusement, depuis des mois, derrière des fils barbelès, le moment de leur
délivrance’ – the BBC, ‘la radio interdite scandait d’une voix mystérieuse
autant qu’impérative qui s’incristait dans les têtes: “En Allemagne, ne va
pas, en Allemagne, ne va pas.”’65 Between these two positions, was a space
that gave workers a sense of freedom that paralleled taking the decision
to strike: as a show of strength of force against their oppressors. It is also a
reminder of how that freedom felt: ‘Depuis l’armistice, c’était la première
fois qu’ils avaient le choix d’agir, même si ce choix n’impliquait qu’une
action négative, un refus.’66 Thomas, through Le Guirrec, Robert Basin,
and others explores the range of deliberations and positions provoked by
the prospect of working in Germany. Le Guirrec, catholic and resigned
in general to his fate, could see the benefit of liberating someone, even
if there was no opportunity to specify a brother or a cousin. Descended
from a family of gardeners, Le Guirrec ‘n’avait qu’à obéir aux riches et aux
puissants, puisque Dieu, de toute evidence, avait voulu sa misère et son
humilité; maintenant il n’avait qu’obéir au Maréchal’.67 Yet, he does not go,
unable to leave his dying wife in hospital and unable to leave his country.

65 [Edith Thomas], ‘La Relève’, Conte d’Auxois (Paris: Minuit, 1945), 15.
66 Ibid., 16.
67 Ibid., 16–17.

132 Chapter 4
Robert Basin on receipt of his ‘l’ordre de se rendre à la gare de l’Est’ finds
his decision, both political and emotional literally embodied in his lover
Simone. ‘Ne pars pas’, she repeats and as she plans how he could remain
hidden with an aunt, ‘il s’en remettait à cette femme qui était la sienne, à
sa parole sure qui organisait autour de lui tranquillement, toute la com-
plicité d’un pays’.68 The only two people who go are ‘deux très jeunes et des
cerveaux brûlés’, with no conviction but a taste for adventure, ‘resquilleurs’,
untrustworthy chancers: ‘ce n’était pas des gars comme eux qui aiderai-
ent beaucoup à la victoire de l’Allemagne’.69 Thomas’s tale plays with the
boundaries of thought and action; the empowerment of decision and
the liberation rendered in refusal inspired by a simple slogan that spoke
against the noise of the of ficial media. The method of setting new words
to fragments of traditional songs or folk songs was used most frequently:
‘Les Gars de la Marine’ became ‘Les Gars de la Vermine’; mélodies, such as
Debussy’s setting of Verlaine’s ‘Colloque Sentimental’, transposed ‘Dans la
Russie solitaire et glacé’ instead of the original ‘Dans un vieux parc solitaire
et glacé’ and Poulenc’s ‘Écrevisses’ from Le Bestiaire was used to highlight
the Nazi retreats from the Eastern Front:

Dans la Russie, oh! quel supplice!
Les Allemands maintenant s’en vont
Comme s’en vont les écrevisses,
A reculons, à reculons.70

Other slogans such as ‘Ne va pas en Allemagne’, mentioned in Edith
Thomas’s text and ‘Démoralisez’ both avoided melody and instead used
percussive repetition to drum in their message.

Given the evident ef fectiveness of the broadcasts from London, Radio-
Paris became increasingly violent in its response to the BBC.71 Broadcasting

68 Ibid., 22.
69 Ibid., 18.
70 F-Pan 72AJ227 BBC émissions françaises 1940–1944.
71 Radio-Paris began to imitate the French Service of the BBC with increasing frequency

as the war progressed, in ef fect betraying the ef fectiveness of the BBC’s impact in
France. A programme, Les Français de France parlent aux Émigrés, was the counter

Constructing Cultural Soundscapes at the French Service 133

on the station was stretched in the evenings from 8pm until 2am and the
regularity of propaganda talks, such as Un journaliste allemand vous parle:
Le quart d’heure de la collaboration as news bulletins, was augmented.
Georges Oltramare, the pseudonym of Charles Dieudonné, began broad-
casting a fifteen-minute talk entitled Les Juifs contre la France at the end
of 1941. Using the BBC’s own methods of course marked the success of 
London’s broadcasting and their riposte to ‘Radio-Paris ment’ was set to
the song ‘Auprès de ma blonde’:

Au jardin d’Angleterre, les bobards ont f leuri
Tous les menteurs du monde parlent à la BBC
Au gré de ces ondes, qu’il fait bon mentir.72

In addition to the équipe that wrote French Service programmes, special-
ists in slogans were Pierre Dac, who arrived to London in 1943 – paro-
died by Radio-Paris as the ‘loufoque de Radio-Londres – Jean Oberlé and
Maurice van Moppés and the musical elements of the French Service were
undertaken by E.T.A. Mesens, and by far the most prolific contributor was
Francis Chagrin whose role I assess next.73

Of Romanian origin, Chagrin whose original name was Alexander
Paucker, had studied with Ducasse and Boulanger at the École normale
in Paris (1934–5) and the moniker derives not from overt sympathy for
the plight of his once-adopted home, but rather from that same country’s
reluctance to take to his compositions. Unusual negotiations with the
BBC about the ownership of the scores – Chagrin insisted on keeping

to Les Français parlent aux Français as outlined by E. Tangye-Lean. See Voices in
the Darkness: The Story of the European Radio War (London: Secker and Warburg,
1943), 144.
72 See Aurélie Luneau, Radio Londres, 1940–1944, Les Voix de la Liberté (Paris: Perrin,
2005), 143.
73 A collection of his chansons were published with illustrations by Jean Oberlé, Les
Chansons de Pierre Dac à la Radio de Londres with a preface by Jacques Duchesne
(Paris: Masspacher, 1945) and Maurice van Moppès slogans were airdropped into
France and subsequently published as Chansons de la BBC (Paris: Pierre Trémois,
[1943]) with his own illustrations.

134 Chapter 4
them at his home, while the BBC insisted on their ownership – has for-
tunately preserved them in a way that might not have happened had the
BBC retained them in their own archives.74 A large collection of manu-
scripts is thus accessible at the British Library.75 These scores give us the
recording date – there were weekly recording sessions on a Wednesday
afternoon. The often-ambitious orchestrations were recorded using musi-
cians from the LSO at Chagrin’s insistence including among them the horn
player, Denis Brain, and choral forces were often supplied by the Forces
Françaises Libres, for the song ‘Battez les cœurs’ in July 1941, for example.
Chagrin was an accomplished composer who received a premier at the
53rd season of the Proms in 1947 of his Prélude et Fugue pour orchestre
conducted by Basil Cameron and as a musical director he toured in the
British performances of  the Compagnie Renaud-Barrault assisted by
Pierre Boulez in 1951.76

Some debate about what constituted originality in arrangement of
material became a matter for discussion with the Music Department of 
the BBC. Chagrin’s work for the French Service was frequently dismissed
by Music as ‘miscellaneous’ (Arthur Bliss) or ‘debatable’ (Steuart Wilson)
but some recognition of the dif ficulty in which he worked was conceded
when it was realised that far from making his arrangements on the basis
of written scores, ‘he has a recording or tune sung or whistled over the

74 BBC WAC RCont1: Francis Chagrin/Music Copying/1A: Memo from Programme
Copyright to Miss Duncan, Bedford [Music Dept], ‘Ownership of M. Chagrin’s
Scores’ (3 July 1942). ‘[Chagrin] has now agreed that we should have technical own-
ership of the scores provided he has permanent possession of them.’

75 GB-Lbl Ms. mus. 58–64: Chagrin Collection.
76 GB-Lbl Ms. mus. 72: Chagrin Collection, vol. lxxi. Programmes of performances

of Chagrin’s music, and of concerts conducted by Chagrin, 1936–72. Chagrin’s
Prélude and Fugue was subsequently performed in a broadcast by the Club d’Essai on
Radiodif fusion française and the 1951 tour of Compagnie Renaud-Barrault included
performances of Baptiste (derived from Les Enfants du Paradis), Claudel, Partage
de midi and Molière, Amphitryon with music by Poulenc and directed by Louis
Jouvet.

Constructing Cultural Soundscapes at the French Service 135

telephone’.77 Indeed when his value was questioned by Steuart Wilson,
who seeking to undermine ‘the truculent pirates of the arranging market’,
threatened replacing Chagrin with someone else, strong support came
from John Sullivan:

The fact of Chagrin being irreplaceable – apart from taking a very long-term view – is
in my opinion hardly to be contested. In the first place, he is used to doing arrange-
ments at very short notice, which is essential to a propaganda service, and should
the news suggest a song, he is quite willing to work all night, if necessary, to prepare
it. Secondly, he knows French well and can, consequently work to our lyrics; his
collaboration with our lyric writer is a very happy one, and obviously it would take
some time to develop an equal extent of collaboration with anyone else. Thirdly, our
singers, who are in the main amateurs, find him extremely helpful in seeing them
through. And, fourthly, and perhaps most important, Chagrin has now a thorough
grasp of the sort of idiom which is likely to appeal to French listeners. We have no
expert musician in the French Section, and it has only been through a certain amount
of trial and error that he has learnt exactly what we want.78

In spite of the marginal position of slogans in the context of broadcasting
urgent information and propaganda, it is clear that great professionalism
and care was taken by Chagrin to ensure that these small pithy messages
were written and performed with the highest quality. His own composi-
tions included the theme music to the French Services children’s pro-
gramme Babar, éléphant français libre – featuring a major inversion of the
appropriated Beethoven call sign arranged for strings, piccolo and bassoon.
He was promoted for his work for the French Service led to an Of ficier
d’Académie in 1948.79

77 BBC WAC RCont 1/Francis Chagrin/Music Copying 1B: Memo from Steuart
Wilson (OMD) to Miss Duncan (20 November 1943). (The other citations are from
documents in the same file).

78 BBC WAC RCont1 Francis Chagrin/Music Copying 1B: Memo from J.F. Sullivan
(French Programme Supervisor) to Steuart Wilson, ‘Francis Chagrin’s Arrangements’
(2 October 1943).

79 Benjamin Frankel, ‘Francis Chagrin–Obituary’, Musical Times (1973), 65.

136 Chapter 4

Conclusion

As the profound impact of radio propaganda was realised towards the
end of 1939 listening in to other broadcasters around the world became
a necessity of the war and it inaugurated the large department of BBC
Monitoring, first based at Evesham before moving to its present home
at Caversham in 1943. At the BBC, the monitoring service simply lis-
tened and reported what it heard; it was not designed to comment or
interpret.80 This neutrality dif fered from the way other broadcaster’s
listened in. While organising broadcasting in preparation for the inva-
sion into occupied France, the European Intelligence Department of the
BBC undertook a detailed study of radio eavesdropping. They sought to
establish to what extent audiences would choose to listen in to broadcasts
not specifically intended for them. In France, for example, although lit-
eracy in languages in other than French was rated at no more than 10 per
cent, there was awareness that listeners would tune into the Home and
Forces programmes and especially in Alsace-Lorraine the BBC services
in German.81 Establishing that the language-orientated services were
saying something dif ferent from the domestic vernacular service was a
critical point in the anti-BBC propaganda organised at Radio-Paris and
Radiodif fusion nationale at Vichy. Radio-Paris was particularly virulent
in its propaganda, and of course, the BBC was its principal competitor.
On more than one occasion it attempted to use overt (colonial) racism
as a means of undermining any authority the Corporation might have in
France. ‘If one listens to transmissions in English for home consumption

80 J.G.T. Sheringham, ‘BBC Monitoring Service: The Ears of Britain’, in How to Listen
to the World ed. J.M. Frost (Hvidovre: World Radio-TV Handbook, 1974), 51–60.

81 BBC WAC E2/188/2: Foreign General/European Intelligence Papers/Studies of 
European Audiences/October 1942–April 1944, ‘BBC Special Studies of European
Audiences – Radio Eavesdropping (Second Study) (24 April 1944).