Children of the Revolution Read online

  While this classical, mainstream art enjoyed success during the Dreyfus Affair, at a time when France felt uneasy about its standing as a nation, it did not manage to stifle new waves of avant-garde art in music and drama which made a huge impact in the so-called Belle Époque leading up to the First World War. Even at this late date and at the experimental end of art the patronage of the salon hostess could still be important. Winaretta Singer, who had inherited her father’s sewing-machine fortune, had her marriage with one French aristocrat annulled in 1891 because of her lesbianism and in 1893 married Prince Edmond de Polignac, son of Charles X’s last minister, a relationship which flourished on their joint homosexuality and love of music. The salon of the Princesse de Polignac, as she now became, had a music room designed by the poet, aesthete and patron Comte Robert de Montesquiou, who inspired Huysmans’ Des Esseintes and Proust’s Baron de Charlus. For the opening ceremony she dreamed of bringing together Gabriel Fauré, choirmaster of La Madeleine church whose Requiem had been performed there in 1888, and the now very sick Paul Verlaine. This ambition was not fulfilled, although Fauré, enjoying the hospitality of her palace on the Grand Canal in Venice, set a number of Verlaine poems to music as Five Melodies from Venice. Claude Debussy was another habitué of the princess’s salon. He also set Verlaine to music, and although his love of Wagner’s Parsifal was not shared by the Prince de Polignac, it was the inspiration for his only completed opera Pelléas et Mélisande, based on Maeterlinck’s play, which was performed in 1902. Most important, musically, however, was the princess’s promotion of the Russian ballet of Serge Diaghilev which took Paris by storm in successive seasons after 1909. With his choreographer Fokine, designer Benois and leading dancer Nijinsky, Diaghilev made a ballet of Debussy’s Après-midi d’un faune in 1912, in which Nijinsky simulated an orgasm, and also launched Stravinsky on to the Paris scene with the Firebird ballet in 1910 and Petrushka in 1911. The opening night of the Rite of Spring at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on 29 May 1913 was so revolutionary it nearly caused a riot and Debussy covered his ears, but by the end of the season Stravinsky had become a hero.28

  Modern art as well as music enjoyed a heady phase in the years before 1914. After a few visits from Spain Pablo Picasso settled definitively in Paris in 1904, joining a colony of artists living on Montmartre. His key contacts were the poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire, who was born in Rome of a Polish mother and claimed to be an illegitimate son of the pope, the patrons Gertrude and Leo Stein, a German-American-Jewish couple, and the German-Jewish art dealer Kahnweiler. Picasso did not like to exhibit and sold directly to his dealer and patron. Gertrude Stein, whom he painted laboriously in the winter of 1905–6, claimed that ‘I was the only person to understand Picasso at the time.’29 After his pink period, painting circus folk and their families, he launched out in 1907 with he Demoiselles d’Avignon, five female nudes, possibly in a brothel, each seen from a different angle. Even his friends were confounded. Gertrude Stein saw it as ‘too awful’, Leo as ‘a horrible mess’, Kahnweiler as ‘mad or monstrous’. Matisse himself thought it ‘an audacious hoax’. It lay under wraps and was not sold until 1924.30 Picasso found a way out through his association with Braque. Together they launched Cubism, rendering first landscapes, then still lifes, in more and more abstract forms. They were assisted financially by Kahnweiler and promoted in the literary press by Apollinaire, who wrote experimental poetry for his own reputation and pornography in order to make a living. Still Picasso refused to exhibit, but Cubist followers such as Robert Delaunay and Fernand Léger did, at the salon of independent artists. At the salon of 1910 Apollinaire announced that the new school had completed the ‘rout of impressionism’, with Matisse in particular seeking ‘not to imitate nature but to express what he sees and feels through the very matter of the picture’.31 In 1911 Apollinaire was wrongly arrested for stealing the Mona Lisa from the Louvre, but hit back by gaining control of the Soirées de Paris review in 1913 in which he sang the praises of Picasso, Braque and Matisse, the writers Alfred Jarry, creator of Ubu Roi, and Max Jacob, and, from the world of popular literature, the Fantômas detective series.32

  The pinnacle of modernism came with the publication in 1913 of the first volume of Proust’s la recherche du temps perdu. Its birth had not been easy and acclaim was not immediately forthcoming. Proust, the son of a successful doctor and Jewish mother, was received into the salon of Madame Caillavet in 1889 and called Anatole France ‘the first of my masters’, although France once quipped, ‘Life is too short and Proust is too long.’ He was invited to the salon of the ageing Princesse Mathilde and after 1894, through his friendship with Robert de Montesquiou, became a regular at the salon of Montesquiou’s cousin, Comtesse de Gref-fulhe, the leading society beauty of the Faubourg Saint-Germain.33 Living on family income and contributing occasional literary pieces to Le Figaro, he wrote and rewrote his great work in the Grand Hôtel of Cabourg and in the cork-lined bedroom of his Paris apartment. The novel was a social panorama on a scale not attempted since Balzac, but he was not content to observe characters from the outside. ‘Our social personality is a creation of others’ opinions,’ he wrote, of fantasies about their pasts and the worlds they live in.34 He examined the conversation and gestures of his characters in order to understand the rules governing the relationships between aristocrats and intellectuals, Jews and Gentiles, married partners, mistresses and their lovers, and homosexuals. These relationships changed over time, so that rich and cultivated Jews who were assimilated into high society were cast out of it as a result of the Dreyfus Affair, and passion and jealousy waxed and waned according to ‘the intermittence of love’. While most authors projected their heroes forward in time and followed their adventures, Proust wished to understand the secrets of life and love which were merely experienced the first time. Meaning was given to them only when memories surged up unexpectedly from the unconscious or when lost worlds were recaptured by the genius of the artist who could draw together sensations, associations and memories.

  Proust found it almost impossible to publish his novel. He dedicated it to Gaston Calmette, editor of Le Figaro, but Calmette rejected it for serialization in his paper and failed to deliver a contact he promised with another publisher, Fasquelle. The Nouvelle Revue Française, founded in 1909 by André Gide and his friends and published by Gallimard, also rejected it, regarding Proust as ‘a snob, a literary amateur, the worst possible thing for our magazine’. Eventually Proust published it with Grasset at his own expense, and Calmette grudgingly published a review in Le Figaro, three months before he was shot. The book was not a commercial success, selling only 2,800 copies in the first year, but it was a literary event. Belatedly, Gide told Proust that ‘the refusal of this book will always be the gravest mistake the NRF ever made, and… one of the most stinging regrets, nay, remorses, of my whole life.’ Gallimard now recovered the rights from Grasset, publishing a full and revised version in 1922, and in 1919 the second volume of la recherche, l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, won the Goncourt Prize it had been denied in 1913. ‘And I thought I was unknown,’ Proust wrote to Grasset, as a hundred newspapers covered the event.35 He died recognized, but as the quintessential modernist artist who had no regard for mass culture and no resonance with it.

  MASS CULTURE

  Avant-garde culture was in tension with classical bourgeois culture, as epitomized by the likes of Anatole France, Jules Lemaître and Edmond de Rostand, but as a rule both were defined against mass culture. This was the culture generated by a mass market of a largely urban but also rural population that was literate but not bookish, and wanted to be informed and entertained rather than educated. It was fed by the mass production and distribution of media, a mass scale that was also sensitive to different markets, such as the female market, which had long existed, and new markets, such as that of adolescents. Just as avant-garde and bourgeois culture cross-fertilized literature, art and music, so mass culture also produced crossovers between books, the
theatre and new media such as the cinema, as well as between the press and sport. Despite their fundamental opposition, however, there could nevertheless be interaction between mass culture and more elitist forms of art. Thus some writers and artists found a wider audience through media such as the café artistique, while some popular literary forms, such as the comic cartoon, were beloved of students.

  Books and bookshops catered essentially for a bourgeois audience, although reading matter was produced in new and more accessible forms for the mass market. A book in this period cost 3 francs 50, a good day’s wage for most workers, and the production of titles reached a high point of 15,000 in 1889, then fell to 11,500 in 1912. The novels of Zola were bestsellers, with L’Assommoir selling 40,000 copies in 1878 and Nana 80,000 in 1880. In 1892 Le Figaro calculated that the 120,000 copies of La Débâcle sold to date, if piled on top of one another, would rise eleven times as high as the Eiffel Tower.36 Zola’s readership in 1887, however, as gauged by those who wrote to him, was almost entirely middle class, with hardly any artisans, shopkeepers, peasants or servants, although perhaps these may have been readers but not letter-writers.37 Much more popular were authors not now part of the classical canon. Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days was serialized in Le Temps in 1872, published by Hetzel in 1873, and also adapted as a play for the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin in 1874. Complete with special effects and a live elephant, it was as much circus as fiction and enjoyed huge success, with a run of 1,550 performances down to 1898, while the book itself sold 108,000 copies before 1904. By then, taken together, Jules Verne’s works had sold a million copies.38

  It was not that the mass public did not read, just that they did not go into bookshops. Plenty of other media existed for reading material to reach a mass public, some developments of traditional colportage or hawking, others using and at the same time promoting the popular press. Romans-feuilletons or novels serialized in the press, at the bottom of the first page and sometimes page three as well, appealed in particular to a female readership. Many women cut out the serials and sewed them into little books, or used special binders provided by the newspaper, and swapped them with friends. Stories with pacey plots, heroes and villains, about wronged innocence finally redeemed, were republished in popular editions or adapted for the stage, as was the immensely popular Porteuse de pain of Xavier de Montépin in 1884, the story of a widow wrongly accused of arson and gaoled, staged at the Théâtre de l’Ambigu in 1889.39 Alongside female audiences a new public was emerging among adolescents. These generated a new genre of adventure stories featuring American heroes such as Nick Carter or Buffalo Bill but also homegrown masked lords of crime with their own gangs of ‘apaches’ who flouted work, and were addicted to drink and violence, pursued but never caught by their police inspector nemeses. From 1909 to 1913 Le Matin serialized the adventures of Zigomar, written by a failed dramatist Léon Sazie. These were later sold as ‘little novels’, in instalments, once or twice a week, for between 1 and 2 sous (5 and 10 centimes), the price of a newspaper, and sold not by bookshops but by grocers, stationers and street criers.40 The Zigomar stories sold a million copies a time and were imitated by other dubious heroes, notably the masked bandit Fantômas invented by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre and launched in 1911. Meanwhile the gentleman thief and detective Arsène Lupin, with his plebeian father and aristocratic mother, a redresser of wrongs echoing some of the characters of Eugène Sue, was created in 1905 by Maurice Leblanc. After their original incarnations as serials Fantômas and Arsène Lupin were published as ‘popular books’ by Joseph Arthème Fayard, who was repackaging old favourites such as the Porteuse de pain but also the new detective and thriller genres for adolescents.41

  The popular newspapers that carried serialized novels entered an era of mass circulation at the end of the nineteenth century, fuelled by a growing urban population, universal suffrage and the liberal press law of 29 July 1881. Le Petit Parisien, founded in 1876, was taken over in 1888 by Jean Dupuy, senator of the Hautes-Pyrénées, and its circulation rose from 100,000 in 1884 to 555,000 in 1894 and 1,453,000 in 1914. It overtook Le Petit Journal at the turn of the century, but these two Paris dailies together with Le Matin and Le Journal had a combined circulation in 1914 of 4.5 million copies, controlling 75 per cent of the Paris daily market and 40 per cent of the provincial market. Powerful regional dailies such as La Dépêche de Toulouse and L’Écho du Nord also had wide circulations, selling 180,000 copies a day in 1914, while Le Progrès de Lyon topped 200,000. This circulation went far beyond the middle classes to the petite bourgeoisie, working class and some elements of the peasantry. News information was provided for these newspapers by agencies such as Havas, which also managed their advertising, and also became involved after 1889 in the sale of Russian bonds through the press. New technology and marketing gimmicks constantly expanded the readership. From 1903 Le Petit Parisien published photographs and also ran competitions with large prizes. Alongside the news, information was provided about stock exchange prices, food market prices, racing prices, trial proceedings and crime. Faits divers or human-interest stories including crime, accidents, suicides, fires and rescues took up between 10 and 20 per cent of Le Petit Parisien in 1894–1914, with a whole proletariat of reporters hanging around police stations and even conducting parallel investigations in order to provide mat erial, the reportage drawing on and in turn fertilizing the contemporary taste for crime and detective fiction.42

  The press and popular novels were not the only ways of reaching a mass public. Popular hunger for up-to-the-minute news and comment was fed by fast-selling pamphlets, songs and cartoons, supplied by a multitude of printers – perhaps 1,500 in Paris – and sold by camelots, the heirs of the colporteurs, particularly during dramatic events such as the Dreyfus Affair. Answering Zola’s Letter to France of 7 January 1898, which had sold 47,000 copies, Léon Hayward, otherwise known as Napoléon, printed a Reply of All French People to Émile Zola, which sold 200,000 copies. This was a continuation of the Grub Street literature of the Revolution which involved the labouring classes, unemployed and immigrants in political debate.43 Of the more substantial illustrated magazines, Excelsior had a circulation of 100,000 in 1910, while one of the successes of the Offenstadt brothers was the youth press, comics with titles like L’Épatant thriving after 1908 on the back of Louis Foulon’s cartoon strip, the Pieds-Nickelés, featuring the subversive and inventive heroes Croquignol, Filochard and Ribouldingue, and using speech bubbles for the first time. Jean-Paul Sartre, born in 1905, recalled not only ‘reading the concluding pages of Madame Bovary twenty times’ but dragging his mother to the kiosk at the corner of the boulevard Saint-Michel and the rue Soufflot to buy the weekly copy of L’Épatant.44

  Mass culture was generally blended in with entertainment and thus drew on other resources such as drink, music and sex. A law of July 1880 removed the Empire’s police control over cafés, requiring owners simply to register them rather than seek permission. The number of cafés in Paris ballooned from 22,000 in 1870 to 42,000 in the mid-1880s, falling back to 30,000 in the Belle Époque, and were the social space of a broad mixture of classes. In 1867 the theatres’ monopoly of putting on shows had ended, leading to a great expansion of café-concerts such as the Alcazar and Eldorado which had developed under the Empire, a ‘democratized theatre’ or ‘theatre of the poor’ which generally charged only for food and drink, not for the show. In the working-class districts the tradition of communal, participatory singing carried over from the goguettes was common, but in central Paris the tendency was to greater refinement and sophistication. The cabaret artistique or literary café was aimed at a bohemian, intellectual clientele and launched the careers of poets and singers. Émile Goudeau, a low-level functionary in the Finance Ministry, founded the Hydropathes in the Latin Quarter in 1878, which boasted the humorist Alphonse Allais on the bill. Later Allais moved to Le Chat Noir, a cabaret on Montmartre decked out in mock Louis XIII style, where writers such as Maupa
ssant and Huysmans, who generally moved in literary circles, could find a wider audience. Le Chat Noir was bought in 1885 and renamed Le Mirliton by Aristide Bruant, a bourgeois whose education had been cut short by his father’s death. He was apprenticed to a jeweller, fought in the Franco-Prussian war and was a clerk in a railway office before going into show business. An excellent publicist and self-publicist, Bruant commissioned posters from Toulouse-Lautrec, was deliberately rude to his clients, and celebrated the criminals and pimps of Paris in songs the vulgarity of which for Edmond de Goncourt provided ‘warning signs of the approaching end of the bourgeois age’.45

  Another upgraded version of the café-concert was the music hall, which developed after 1890. These were sumptuous variety theatres like the Moulin Rouge, which opened for the Exposition of 1889, and the Folies Bergère, draped in red and gold, lit by gas or electricity. These charged at least 2 francs entrance, 3 francs standing and 4 or 6 francs for a seat after 1900 when the Comédie Française cost 2½ francs, which put them beyond reach of the petit peuple. These had to be content with downmarket guingettes such as the Moulin de la Galette, which charged 50 centimes for men and 20 for women and combined entertainment with clandestine prostitution. Music halls put on circus acts such as trapeze artists, fairground spectacles such as the Pétomane whose act was a symphony of farts, and dancing girls such as the Barriston sisters from America. Music and comedy were central to the routine and stars of the music hall emerged such as Yvette Guibert, whose father died when she was nineteen and who worked as a sales girl in Printemps before being spotted and launched as an actress. She made her career as a singer and comedienne, starting at Eldorado in 1889, moving to the Moulin Rouge, but was also popular in the open-air cafés chantants such as the Ambassadeurs, unmistakable in her long black gloves and iconized by Toulouse-Lautrec. The buttoned-up American writer Rupert Harding Davis found her songs and sketches ‘neither funny, witty, nor quaint, but simply nasty and offensive. The French audiences of the open-air concerts, however, enjoy these, and encore her six times nightly.’ Other audiences also appreciated the star, who made successful tours of Europe and America.46