In twenty-first-century, neoliberal societies we are living through an age of “I”. Yet desire for the unity and reciprocity of “we” is resilient, and pervasively evident in popular culture, not least in the undiminished centrality of romantic love to the stories that people – and especially women – consume. This chapter examines how the ideal of romantic love is socially ordered in new, often exploitative ways in contemporary culture, yet continues to articulate profoundly felt desires for reciprocal, fulfilling relationships with others. To explore this dynamic, I take the case of France – both as representative of globalized Western culture and as the culturally specific pays de l’amour, traditionally identified with romantic love – and focus on the popular fiction currently read by a vast number of that nation’s considerable female readership. Through critical readings of some recent Harlequin romances written for the French market, and of the bestselling work of popular novelists Guillaume Musso and Anna Gavalda, I ask how immersive fictional reading interprets and shapes the lived experience of romance in a period marked by distinct flux in intimacy norms. Study of what most women read suggests that literary fiction continues to play a substantial role in the collective imagining of the meanings of love.
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Harlequin’s trans-national success confirms the paradox outlined above, namely the remarkable resilience of romance in what would seem to be an uncongenial social context, or in other words the continuing resonance of a fantasy of the perfect “we” in a culture that promotes and rewards thinking in terms of “I”. Harlequin’s global dominance, however, also depends on a strategy of pragmatic adaptation to local conditions, and the Harlequin product competes with indigenously produced romances in ways that vary from one national culture to another. To consider the buoyancy of the romance genre purely in global terms is to ignore the diverse specificity of cultures, even within the Western capitalist sphere, in terms of gender politics, literary norms and traditions of romance. My exploration of the reasons for the genre’s continuing – and in many ways surprising – popularity will focus, then, on a single national culture, that of France, and discuss some examples of contemporary, highly popular French romance fiction. My questions are these. What is generic and what specific about the situation of romantic fiction in contemporary France? Can the romance narrative simply incorporate social change, particularly change in gender roles and identities, even where such change appears to contradict its basic premises? And to what extent can romance provide a space for readers to interrogate and think beyond the culture – at once global and local – in which they live? (176)
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Romance is central to the three cases I want to discuss here: the hybrid romantic thrillers of France’s most consistently chart-topping novelist, Guillaume Musso; the “new romances” published by Harlequin specifically for the French market; and one representative story by Anna Gavalda, another top-selling French author whose work straddles the border between popular and middlebrow, and addresses more directly the place of romance in women’s lives in contemporary France. (178)
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Musso’s plots skilfully combine the heterosexual love story with a mystery or quest narrative, sometimes leavened with a touch of the paranormal, and feature rich and beautiful protagonists with glamorously globe-trotting lifestyles. Published by top commercial publishers (since 2017 by Calmann-Lévy, part of the Hachette empire), smartly marketed and highly profitable, his novels implicitly define happiness in terms of professional success rewarded by glossy affluence, marriage to an “alpha” partner of the opposite sex and the promise or reality of children. (179)
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In 2013, Harlequin-France began to commission novels from French-language authors, which meant some possible derogation from the stories’ hitherto obligatory setting in a vaguely evoked, glamorized North America, and some potential reference to readers’ own social context. The French originals, mainly published in the collection HQN, include novels in the category “new romance” or “new adult”, aimed at readers aged between 18 and 30 (57% of romance readers in Babelio’s earlier-cited survey were under 35), and featuring a strong dose of eroticism. My analysis here is based on two of these novels, both representative of the wider sub-genre of the French-authored “new romance”. Emily Blaine is described on the Harlequin-France website and elsewhere as the “uncontested queen of modern romance à la française”, though her fiction is set uniquely in the USA and makes no direct reference to France. Her 2016 novel Toi. Moi. Maintenant ou jamais (You. Me. Now or Never) tells the story of Charlotte and Jérémiah who first fall in love at high school, break up after an argument over Jérémiah’s life-threatening exploits as a racing driver, then meet again at a school reunion 10 years later and recommence their conflictual, passionate relationship. Nathalie Charlier, so far less well known but also prolific and popular with readers, situates her stories in contemporary France and introduces elements of realism into the basic plot of romance. In Ton arrogance, mon insolence (Your Arrogance, My Insolence), published in 2018, Ella, a French medical student who becomes an accomplished surgeon, falls for Nathan, a star footballer who comes from a working-class background in an impoverished post-industrial town in northern France. The lovers must negotiate their differences of class and education before reaching the inevitable happy ending. (181)
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Contemporary France’s buoyant market in romantic fiction confirms the elasticity and resilience of the genre. Postfeminist imperatives conserve yet reshape the familiar form of the romance, adapting its fantasized imagining of a perfect “we” to a culture that glorifies romantic love even as it prioritizes individualism, a culture in which sexual inequality has been made visible and is widely contested, yet continues to erode the viability of inter-sex relationships. (187)
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