Some images and appeals are so similar that the word "timelessness" can really come to mind.
In the May 1955 issue of the French magazine Marie-Claire, there was a detailed instruction on how to finally win the battle for hygiene.
According to an article, the aim is to get the French children of the next generation to the point of accepting the “cleanliness reflex”.
For the authors, the key to a clean childhood lay in the internalization of daily routines that should be practiced until they run automatically.
Sophisticated didactic concepts were presented for this purpose. In order to explain the connection between dirty hands and illness to children, you should put white gloves on them in the afternoons. At the end of the day, the children can then be shown the “microbes” on them until they reach for a clean handkerchief in the morning as automatically as they reach for school books.
This strangely contemporary observation can be found in the book "Fast Cars, Clean Bodies" by the American romance scholar and literary scholar Kristin Ross, first published in 1995 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Ross, born in 1953, is a retired professor of comparative literature at New York University and one of the specialists in the changes in French culture, politics and society from the late 19th to the 20th centuries.
In “Fast Cars, Clean Bodies” Ross analyzes the profound change that French society underwent in the decade after the disastrous defeat of its colonial army on May 8, 1954 in Vietnam. The battle for Dien Bien Phu, which began on March 13 of the same year, is the epitome of France's defeat in the Indochina War and is one of the most costly battles in French military history. In France, the fall of the French colonial army, including the soldiers of the Foreign Legion, reminded many of France's defeat by Nazi Germany in 1940.
For Ross, the trauma of the lost battle at Dien Bien Phu is one of the reasons for finally overcoming French society, which was still mainly agrarian and "insular" in 1954, towards industrial-urban modernity, the beginning of a decolonization and reorganization of French culture. On the other side of this modernization push, which consisted not least of turning more or less independent farmers into industrial workers, for Ross also the beginning of the current French racism. A racism that for Ross has essentially developed around the figure of the immigrant worker and is a direct result of the downfall of the French colonial army. How right it is to this day can also be seen in the not unimportant detail,that one of Dien Bien Phu's surviving officers goes by the name of Le Pen.