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'Polar-village': The French Roman Noir Beyond the City Walls

Abstract Cultural historians trace the origins of the hard-boiled crime story to the American Depression of the 1920s and the pulp magazines. Thus, in contrast to the classic 'whodunnit', the modern, naturalistic crime narrative is regarded as a child of the city. However, its French-language equivalent, the 'roman noir', engages in different kinds of relationship to the modern city. In this tradition the conceit of the iconic noir cityscape is mobilized through narratives which frame the urban environment as a direct threat to the human condition. Indeed the French roman noir reverses the direction of flow, which, in the literary mainstream of the nineteenth century, swept the hero of the novel from the provinces to the capital. Contrastingly, the reader of the crime genres is more likely to detect a reluctance to embrace modern city life, or perhaps nostalgia for a lost rural idyll, best illustrated by the œuvre of Pierre Véry. Even in those instances that I have termed 'city fetishism', such as Jean-Claude Izzo's 'Marseille' trilogy, where the identity of the main protagonist is subsumed into a particular city, the sense of belonging is violently countered by a displacement, an inexorable moving away from the urban environment. In order to capture this recoil, I focus on two case studies: Le Corbusier's concept of the vertical village is filtered through a reading of Billy-ze-Kick (1974), Jean Vautrin's seminal novel of the Parisian banlieue, and Pierre Siniac's literary vivisection of the anatomy of the provincial French town in Femmes blafardes (1981) is read in counterpoint to Proust's Combray.