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trend that they can sell to suburban mall rats, and even pay stylistic agents provocateurs to aid them in this quest, can anyone maintain a belief in spontaneous bourgeois popular culture? Nor can even proletarian culture be “spontaneous” in the globalized “pop” marketplace where the marchand provocateur’sall too visible hand guides taste and sales. The urban “gangsta” has become a commercialized analogue of Atala and Winnetou.19
If one speaks “of the people,” or even “folk,” one is presumably speaking of the pre-postmodern, for even “folk” has connotations that cloud Montaigne’s usage for us. Suffice to say that he is discussing informal literary types––the roots of ballad or song. For Montaigne, poésie populaire represents songs of life derived from wholly natural, internal inspiration, and from an idyllic, communal way of life. Montaigne’s notions flourish through the twentieth century, appropriated by various totalitarian regimes of the left and right as a weapon against “bourgeois decadence.” Thus, we find Nazis and Communists latching on to conceived folk traditions and exalting them by way of “ministries of culture.” They and others, of course, were experts at fabricating “instant” cultures.20 We shall see that even a last grasp at absolute monarchism in Europe, King Zog’s Albania, attempted this sort of thing. The mention of monarchism may allow us an interlude of discursive intellectual nostalgia.
This ideal of national character was elaborated on by the philosopher usually identified as the first modern, “scientific” historian, Giambattista Vico. In 1725 he picked up on this notion; note, though, that it is not known whether he read Montaigne, but the resonances are there. Vico draws on this notion of nationality as the premise for his theory of history. All humanity passes through three stages of thought, so Vico argues, moving from primitive folk-wisdom to more highly developed attitudes of