French Musical Broadcasting from 1925 to 1939: A Domination of Classical Music

In the early 1980's, historian René Duval released a publication which became a reference on the topic of French Radio. He especially focused on prewar stations and cleared a vast uninvestigated ground. Throughout a chronological survey, where he describes every situation that contributes to bringing about some thirty broadcasting stations on the French territory, Duval emphasized similarities that occurred in the Thirties between the programs of public and private stations' . He particularly showed that music was the basic broadcasting material of the very first French stations. Whatever the network or the power of diffusion, broadcasted concerts, in which musical art dominates, were at that time the " trading business " of broadcasting stations whose major listeners were members of the local bourgeois middle class. Sketching a first picture of the links and political, socioeconomic and artistic factors, this researcher paved the way for new historical and musicological prospects