The article retraces how the notion of cultural singularity in sexuality was constructed and weaponized in the most popular French illustrated periodical of the First World War. It argues that La Vie Parisienne’s sublimation of romantic love, sex, and Frenchness worked as a cultural tactic that, while helping the readership cope with a devastating historical disruption, undermined at the same time claims for social change. The close analysis of works by illustrator Chéri Hérouard uncovers how nationalism and anxieties of sexual dispossession contributed to integrate a fraught notion of women’s sexual consent to a broader claim of cultural superiority. This article provides a critical approach to popular and visual representations of heterosexual and non-conjugal norms of desire, seduction, and sexuality in wartime France. It also offers a historical example of how the racialization and nationalisation of gender relations, discussed as ‘Gallic singularity’ in recent scholarship, trivialises masculine aggression and produces the ambivalence long associated with the notion of women’s sexual consent in France.

这篇文章回顾了第一次世界大战中最受欢迎的法国插图期刊如何构建和武器化性行为中的文化单一性概念。它认为，《巴黎生活》对浪漫爱情、性和法国性的升华是一种文化策略，在帮助读者应对毁灭性的历史混乱的同时，也削弱了对社会变革的主张。对插画家 Chéri Hérouard 作品的仔细分析揭示了民族主义和对性剥夺的焦虑是如何将女性同意的令人担忧的观念与更广泛的文化优越性主张结合起来的。本文为战时法国异性恋和非婚姻规范的欲望、诱惑和性行为的流行和视觉表现提供了一种批判性方法。