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During the Second World War, the radio occupied a unique and deeply ambiguous position in French society. It served simultaneously as a tool of mass propaganda for the Pétain regime and the Nazi occupiers, and as a lifeline for the Resistance and the Allies, who used the same airwaves to transmit coded messages and sustain opposition.
The Radio de Vichy in particular functioned as one of the most powerful instruments of social control of the occupation period, broadcasting messages that were deliberately contradictory: on one side defending French traditional values, on the other justifying forced collaboration with the occupying power. To illuminate this, the students mobilized two theoretical frameworks |
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The first was cybernetics, which allowed them to examine how the Vichy authorities continuously adjusted their messaging in response to public reaction, operating through a feedback loop in which information was reformulated to reinforce compliance and make resistance appear futile. The second was Gregory Bateson's double bind theory, which describes a situation in which a person receives contradictory messages that make any coherent response impossible. This was precisely the effect the Radio de Vichy produced on its audience, trapping listeners in a cycle of confusion and obedience. To make these theories tangible, the students designed a twelve-piece puzzle constructed from a 96 by 72 centimetre cardboard sheet, cut into pieces and covered with a collage of painted and hand-drawn visual elements inspired by the Bauhaus movement. |
Once assembled, the puzzle revealed a composition of historically charged imagery: a radio set symbolising the era's primary communication medium, figures of Hitler and Pétain representing the occupation and collaboration, the French tricolour flag standing for a national identity under strain, stylised radio waves illustrating the invisible but powerful diffusion of messages, silhouettes of listeners representing the target audience of radiophonic propaganda, and a double-reading poem written in 1941 by an unknown author, probably from Marseille. Read line by line, the poem appeared to praise the Nazi regime; read by column, it became a tribute to Resistance values, a concrete illustration of the double bind embedded in wartime communication.
The experience did not end with the completed image. Hidden within the artwork were letters scattered across the puzzle pieces, forming the apparently meaningless sequence "SIXMLANNTO." Using a handmade decoding wheel composed of two superimposed cardboard discs, visitors had to rotate the discs to find the correct alignment and reveal the hidden message: "Radio Vichy." Through this combination of visual assembly and active decoding, the students conveyed that understanding propaganda requires more than passive observation. The message only becomes legible to those willing to look for what has been deliberately concealed.
The experience did not end with the completed image. Hidden within the artwork were letters scattered across the puzzle pieces, forming the apparently meaningless sequence "SIXMLANNTO." Using a handmade decoding wheel composed of two superimposed cardboard discs, visitors had to rotate the discs to find the correct alignment and reveal the hidden message: "Radio Vichy." Through this combination of visual assembly and active decoding, the students conveyed that understanding propaganda requires more than passive observation. The message only becomes legible to those willing to look for what has been deliberately concealed.
