Who will have mercy on post-war France? National images and affections in Mika Etchebéhère’s chronicles

Abstract

The article examines the journalistic-literary chronicles written by the Argentine left-wing militant Mika Etchebéhère upon her return to France in the second post-war period. The writings were published by the magazine Sur (Buenos Aires) during 1946 and 1947, in a context of tensions derived from international agreements and the story of France’s perdition as an intertext. I propose an analysis of the discursive strategies used by the author in the representation of France and the daily life of the French in the postwar period from the perspective of literary imagology and affect theory. I conclude that the use of a human interest approach and its articulation with an emotional rhetoric is oriented to the production of an experience of empathy in the readers, an intervention framed in the practices of intellectual cooperation developed in Latin America, for the recovery of France.