Commitment, commercialism and the dawning of image culture : the early years of L'Express.

Abstract

It is the magazine’s [L'Express] evolution over the first ten years of its life which this article sets out to explore. It argues that central to it is a tension between commitment and commercialism: while L’Express may appear to be a committed and earnest journal, it is also a business which must survive in a competitive market. The article goes on to suggest that the working out of this tension in favour of the logic of commercialism, and the magazine’s subsequent transformation from a journal d’opinion into a journal d’information, help bring to light broader trends at work in French culture and society at the time. Most notably, they allow us to observe the birth of both what will become known in the 1960s as the société de consommation, and what we can call the ‘image culture’ which accompanies it.