In fact, discourse on or around film noir is always and necessarily a discourse of consolidation (I could even say, of consolation) that allows us to forget what the founders Borde and Chaumeton had none the less taken the trouble to pinpoint with a great deal of intellectual honesty. The notion of film noir, for them, was meaningful only for French spectatos cut off from the American cinema during the war years and discovering in Paris during the summer of 1946, under the impetus of the Blum-Byrnes accords, a few detective films that would form the core of the genre. From 1946 to 1955, the critical work on film noir is effectively that of consolidation intended to justify the first impression, this initial astonishment that leads to the discovery in the post-war American cinema, coming from a nation whose military power and economic well-being were so striking, of films with an appearance of poverty in which the optimistic and moral lesson could not always be easily discerned by non-natives. The dates that have been agreed upon are thus ones that concern French critical reception and not American production.

What is furgott�n in the wake of this is the French climate that allows film noir to be erected as an historical object. The French have a paradoxical image of the United States: on the one hand, it permitted victory in the struggle against Nazism and offers the image of a people whose standard of living is sharply superior to that of the French, who until at least 1955 were caught in an economy of scarcity inherited from the war and even from the pre-war period. But, on the other hand, the United States is an imperialist menace that threatens to impose upon France values and a culture that are not its own: if the Americans are superior and even saviours in the military and economic domains, they are judged to be inferior and dangerous in the domain of culture, for they threaten to replace red wine with whiskey, Marcel Proust with the dime detective novel, and 'Le Temps des cerises' with jazz. [...]