Seducing the Subject: Postwar French Commodity Culture and the Language of Seduction at the 1961 French Exposition in Moscow

The language of seduction permeates French society and culture, where it connotes a method of wielding influence. My project explores how the language of seduction became intertwined within the emerging mass consumer society of the 1950s and 1960s. I contend that French notions of seduction (often gendered) structured the perceived power relationship between objects and subjects; in postwar French discourse the object became the manipulative seductress that the subject had to learn to resist. This relationship influenced the thought of postwar French thinkers, consumer advocacy groups, women’s and family unions, and organizers of commercial expositions, who sought to create the “good consumer,” an idealized figure who would succumb only to the seduction of worthwhile objects, and in so doing strengthen France’s postwar economy and society.

My paper will explore how this knitting together of consumerism and seduction also impacted French foreign policy. On August 15, 1961, shortly after construction began on the Berlin wall, the French Exposition in Moscow opened. One million eight hundred thousand visitors attended the event, which showcased France’s commercial and technical achievements alongside cultural exhibits. I ask how the event’s organizers, headed by state Councilman Robert Bordaz, aimed to seduce Russian visitors through the honeyed power of attraction they attributed to consumer objects. The language members of the General Commission of the Exposition used during the planning stages of the event, as well as the exhibits themselves, assumed that passive Russian subjects, normally deprived of choice, would be especially susceptible to the seduction of the object.