* Hachette World Guides, dubbed 'Guide Bleu' in French. The Guide does not tell us, of course, how this fine prosperity is shared out: hierarchically, probably, since they think it fit to tell us that 'the serious and patient effort of this people has also included the reform of its political system, in order to achieve regeneration through the loyal application of sound principles of order and hierarchy.' Needless to say, this prosperity is 'statistical' and 'global', or to be more accurate: 'commercial'. Beside the historical accounts proper (which are rare and meagre, incidentally, for it is well known that History is not a good bourgeois), those accounts in which the Republicans are always 'extremists' looting churches - but nothing on Guernica - while the good 'Nationalists', on the contrary, spend their time 'liberating', solely by 'skilful strategic manoeuvres' and 'heroic feats of resistance', let me mention the flowering of a splendid myth-alibi: that of the prosperity of the country. TRANSLATOR'S NOTE 7 PREFACE TO THE 1970 EDITION 9 PREFACE TO THE 1957 EDITION 11 MYTHOLOGIES The World of Wrestling 15 The Romans in Films 26 The Writer on Holiday 29 The 'Blue Blood' Cruise 32 Blind and Dumb Criticism 34 Soap-powders and Detergents 36 The Poor and the Proletariat 39 Operation Margarine 41 Dominici, or the Triumph of Literature 43 The Iconography of the Abbé Pierre 47 Novels and Children 50 Toys 53 The Face of Garbo 56 Wine and Milk 58 Steak and Chips 62 The Nautilus and the Drunken Boat 65 The Brain of Einstein 68 The Jet-man 71 The Blue Guide 74 Ornamental Cookery 78 Neither-Nor Criticism 81 Striptease 84 The New Citroën 88 Photography and Electoral Appeal 91 The Lost Continent 94 Plastic 97 The Great Family of Man 100 The Lady of the Camellias 103 MYTH TODAY 109 Myth is a type of speech 109 Myth as a semiological system 111 The form and the concept 117 The signification 121 Manufactured in the United States of America Of the essays reproduced in this book, 'The World of Wrestling' first appeared in Esprit, 'The Writer on Holiday' in France-Observateur, and the remainder in Les Lettres Nouvelles.

The eiffel tower and other mythologies