Vehicle for Change

An Open Access edition of this book will be available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.Since its invention, the automobile has been systematically ‘consumed’,to become part of the fabric of twentieth- and twenty-first-century society,its impact and perception making the car an accurate gauge of changing culturalnorms and values. As it grew in popularity, the automobile conditioned the verytexture of modern life, and the particularly car-centred society of contemporaryFrance is an especially apt locus for examination. The ubiquity of theautomobile across all social strata provides us with a defined lens throughwhich to examine the evolution of French society in the modern and post-moderneras. Taking the Second World War as a pivotal moment in recent French history,this book demonstrates how the automobile was both consumed and fetishized indistinct ways before and after this conflict. The ways in which society evolvedfrom the pre- to the post-war period allow us to view French culture throughthe prism of the automobile as it embodied technological and social progress intwentieth-century France. The present volume seeks to explore and interrogatethe processes of representation and mediation inherent in the evolving patternsof automobile consumption, and their subsequent impacts on local and nationalidentity, framed by a detailed case study centred on France from the late-nineteenthcentury to the oil crisis of the early 1970s.