“How Do You See Paris Released?”

a design contest and the memory of french resistance in newspapers from Rio de Janeiro (1945)

Abstract

This article resulted from a qualitative research on newspaper publications around the children's drawing contest “How do you see Paris relesead?”, organized in 1945 by Beatrix Reynal, from Rio de Janeiro. This private initiative, launched through vehicles of the Associated Diaries, involved around six thousand children and was welcomed by the Ministry of Education. Understanding the individual and collective memory in interrelation and transforming newspapers into historical sources of the cultural practices that constitute them, it is possible to map traces of the communication process of a celebratory memory of the French Resistance and the Liberation of Paris, in formation at that moment. This memory is problematized, also as a social investment and a resource of distinction among the elites, in related with the persona Beatrix Reynal. This is the configuration of a Gaullist memorial framework, which is linked to the diplomatic policies and the importance attributed by the public of Brazilian artists and intellectuals to the French cultural legacy, betting on the reconversion of the recent past, in the face of the crises generated by the war.