Coded Geopolitical Allegory in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless [Suez, Haiti, Beirut]

Описание: In Jean-Luc Godard’s transformative 1960 film, Breathless, there is a scene where the protagonist Michel goes to a travel agent in order to collect money that he’s owed.
There are a number of references in this scene that connote historical events that marked a replacement of French colonialism in The Arab World with American imperialist hegemony. These historical events had taken place fairly recently when the film was made, and in the film, there is a wider commentary of American cultural power occupying the mental landscape of the post-war Frenchman.
Monsieur Tolmachov, who Michel is there to meet, describes himself as rusting, and Michel replies that it is better to be rusted than busted, which parallels the sentiment of a declining empire clinging on to power.
Before the more contemporary narrative surrounding the geopolitics of the mid-20th century Arab World takes place, connotation is used to historicise France’s empire and to comment on France’s national character more generally.
We can see a clock which displays the time 16:23 and the date 21st August.
Both are significant in the commentary delivered by the coded narrative of this scene.
An event that marks defeat for French imperialism took place on the 21st of August.
The Haitian Revolution began on this date in 1791. The blow that this slave uprising delivered to the French Empire cannot be overstated. Haiti was their most profitable colony, and the loss of Haiti led to France selling vast amounts of its New World territory to the young country that was the USA in what’s known as The Louisiana Purchase.
Conversely, the year 1623 marks a significant turning point in French history that is defined by growing national influence rather than shrinking colonial influence.
The 1623 Treaty of Paris, which limited Habsburg control over a strategic Alpine region called the Valtelline Valley, set the stage for France’s rise as a powerful European state. This moment signified the emergence of an assertive, independent French foreign policy that was based on national interest rather than religious ties.
Michel mentions a person called Bob Montagne, whose last name is very similar to that of Michel de Montaigne, who was an early intellectual critic of European colonialism at the time of its inception. Montaigne believed that the emerging process of European colonisation was unjustifiable, hypocritical, ethically bankrupt, and motivated by materialistic greed. Montaigne challenged the notion of Europe’s moral superiority, arguing that Europeans are the ones who are truly savage, evidenced by the massacres of indigenous people launched in the name of civilisation. Bob Montagne is mentioned to allude to Montaigne’s anti-colonial perspective, and to introduce this perspective into a modern criticism of twentieth century imperialism both in Paris and Washington.
We can see that Godard, in his historical analysis, is dealing in terms of what his historian contemporaries at The Annales School defined as The Long Duree. Fernand Braudel of The Annales School supposed that short-term events and cycles in history were underpinned by "old attitudes of thought and action, resistant frameworks dying hard, at times against all logic." Godard is applying this historiographical structure to situate France’s imperial decline in the face of growing American hegemony as part of a longer process of developing historical and intellectual trends over centuries.
Finally, we have arrived at the first of the three elements that compose the contemporaneous geopolitical commentary offered in this scene. Michel and Tolmachov discuss a person called Berruti, whose name is pronounced in an identical manner to Beiruti, which is a demonym for something or someone that comes from the Lebanese city of Beirut.
In 1958, the US invaded the city of Beirut for three months. This was known as Operation Blue Bat, and it was the first exercising of The Eisenhower Doctrine. Lebanon had previously been a French Mandate and so The 1958 Crisis in Lebanon represented direct American meddling in France’s former colonial holding, which indicated France’s decline in power on the world stage.


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