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show that imperial heroism was a phenomenon to be reckoned with when it comes to British and French popular cultures from the late nineteenth century onwards. More remains to be said about how these cultural artefacts changed European popular perceptions of the empire, of non-European worlds, of the encounter between the two and the influence it had on national identities. The postcolonial legacy
which heroes were individuals capable of changing the course of history. Several fundamental changes in nearly all aspects of British and French life help us understand the backdrop against which this new type of hero developed. A unique set of conditions enabled the appearance of imperial heroes in British and French popular culture. First, geostrategic developments linked to the
’s underlying discontent with the cliquish self-absorption of the French officer corps, the democratisation of the Third Republic and the vulgarisation of French popular culture. 48 Lyautey’s long-standing aversion to money-grubbing grands colons and the European settler proletariat in the major cities of Algeria and Morocco was not mere snobbery. It stemmed from the conviction that
exhibitions of the inter-war period: the Marseilles colonial exhibition of 1922, the 1930 celebrations of the centenary of French rule in Algeria, and the massive 1931 colonial exhibition in the Vincennes parkland on the eastern fringes of Paris. Reminders of empire abounded in French popular culture. Why then is the idea of popular imperialism in inter-war France so elusive? The
contrary. The increasing visibility of the colonial theme in the metropole over the period studied in this book represents an unquestionable evolution in French popular culture Limited to a relatively small and educated constituency in the first half of the nineteenth century, material about the colonies became more widely available as better means of communication transformed