French Cultural Studies for the Twenty-First Century 1611496381, 9781611496383

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
P A R T I. PRESS AND LITERARY CULTURE
Ch01. Methods and Challenges in Deciphering Representations of Authorial Intimacy in Late Nineteenth-Century French Photoreportages
Ch02. The Haitian Literary Magazine in Francophone Postcolonial Literary and Cultural Production
P A R T I I. RACE AND IDENTITY IN POPULAR PERFORMANCE
Ch03. Reading Race in Nineteenth-Century French Vaudeville
Ch04. Diversity, Exploitation, and Immigration Politics in French “Ethnic” Pornography
P A R T I I I. REPURPOSED IMAGES
Ch05. Rediscovering Third Republic Illustrated Menus
Ch06. Picturing the Catherinette
P A R T I V. MEDIA STORMS
Ch07. Unpacking the Success and Criticisms of Intouchables(2011)
Ch08. Writing Transgressions
Ch09. Understanding the Tinayre Affair
Index
About the Editors and Contributors

Citation preview

French Cultural Studies for the Twenty-First Century

French Cultural Studies for the Twenty-First Century

Edited by Masha Belenky, Kathryn Kleppinger, and Anne O’Neil-Henry

university of Delaware press Newark

Published by University of Delaware Press Copublished by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2017 by Rowman & Littlefield All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-1-61149-637-6 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-61149-638-3 (electronic)

™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Contents



List of Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction French Cultural Studies for the TwentyFirst Century Masha Belenky, Kathryn Kleppinger, and Anne O’Neil-Henry

xiii

Part I.   Press and Literary Culture Chapter 1 Methods and Challenges in Deciphering Representations of Authorial Intimacy in Late Nineteenth-Century French Photoreportages 3 Elizabeth Emery Chapter 2 The Haitian Literary Magazine in Francophone Postcolonial Literary and Cultural Production Chelsea Stieber

21

Part II.   Race and Identity in Popular Performance Chapter 3 Reading Race in Nineteenth-Century French Vaudeville Lise Schreier

v

41

vi  •  Contents

Chapter 4 Diversity, Exploitation, and Immigration Politics in French “Ethnic” Pornography Mehammed Mack

73

Part III.   Repurposed Images Chapter 5

Rediscovering Third Republic Illustrated Menus Michael Garval

Chapter 6 Picturing the Catherinette: Reinventing Tradition for the Postcard Age Susan Hiner

95

119

Part IV.   Media Storms Chapter 7 Unpacking the Success and Criticisms of Intouchables (2011) Leslie Kealhofer-Kemp

155

Chapter 8 Writing Transgressions: Marguerite Duras, the Villemin Affair, and Public Literature Anne Brancky

171

Chapter 9 Understanding the Tinayre Affair: New Media, New Methods for the Belle Epoque Rachel Mesch

195

Index

213



223

About the Editors and Contributors

List of Illustrations

Figure 1.1 Figure 1.2 Figure 1.3 Figure 1.4

Figure 2.1 Figure 2.2

Figure 3.1

Dornac. Victorien Sardou photographed for Nos Contemporains chez eux. Photo: Elizabeth Emery. Henri Mairet. “Le lawn-tennis.” “Une Heure chez Victorien Sardou.” La Revue Illustrée. September 15, 1892. Photo: Elizabeth Emery. Henri Mairet. “Le cabinet de travail d’Alexandre Dumas.” La Revue Illustrée. June 15, 1893. Photo: Elizabeth Emery. Photographer unknown. “Le déjeuner du directeur de la Libre Parole (Drumont).” “Une Heure avec Edouard Drumont.” La Revue Illustrée. June 15, 1892. Photo: Elizabeth Emery. Front cover of La Revue indigène. Image courtesy of the Fonds patrimoniaux of the Médiathèque Valery Larbaud. Advertisement for a local Port-au-Prince business from the inside back cover of La Revue indigène. Image courtesy of the Fonds patrimoniaux of the Médiathèque Valery Larbaud. “Mlle. PAULINE, rôle de CLAREINE, dans les Habitans des Landes, Vaudeville.” Paris: Martinet Libraire, 1811. Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

vii

4 5 9

12 29

30 42

viii  •   List of Illustrations

Figure 3.2 Figure 3.3 Figure 3.4 Figure 3.5 Figure 3.6 Figure 5.1 Figure 5.2 Figure 5.3 Figure 5.4 Figure 5.5 Figure 5.6 Figure 5.7 Figure 5.8 Figure 5.9 Figure 5.10

“BRUNET, rôle de TREMBLIN dan les Habitans des Landes, Vaudeville.” Paris: Martinet Libraire, 1811. Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Honorine, ou la Femme difficile à vivre. Paris: Hautecoeur Martinet, 1795. Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Les deux Lions. Paris: Martinet Imprimeur-Libraire, 1810. Bibliothèque Nationale de France. “Oréno, ou Le nègre.” Manuscript cover, AN F/18/655. “Les Enfans du Colon.” Manuscript cover, AN F/18/653. Luigi Loir, banquet menu, January 20, 1905, 250e Dîner de la Marmite. Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris. Gaston Noury, blank menu. Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris. Joseph Hémard, blank menu. Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris. A. Agulles, detail, lunch menu, September 12, 1926, Restaurant Drouant. Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris. Jehan Testevuide, detail, dinner menu, September 28, 1928, Restaurant de Castellane. Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris. Anonymous, menu, Hors d’oeuvre. Michael Garval, personal collection. Fernand Le Quesne, banquet menu, January 21, 1898. La Marmite. Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris. Georges Conrad, dinner menu, May 2, 1911. CaféRestaurant du Cadran. Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris. Unidentified artist, menu, January 25, 1889. Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris. Franc-Lamy (known as Pierre Lamy) banquet menu, April 19, 1901. 222e Dîner de la Marmite, offert à Monsieur Doumer, Gouverneur Général de l’IndoChine, et à Madame Doumer. Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris.

43 50 51 61 62 101 102 103 104 105 107 108 110 111

114

List of Illustrations   •  ix

Figure 6.1 Figure 6.2 Figure 6.3 Figure 6.4 Figure 6.5 Figure 6.6 Figure 6.7 Figure 6.8 Figure 6.9 Figure 6.10 Figure 6.11 Figure 6.12 Figure 6.13 Figure 6.14 Figure 6.15 Figure 9.1 Figure 9.2

“Vive Ste Catherine,” n.d. Susan Hiner, personal collection. “Prière d’une jeune fille sur le point de coiffer SainteCatherine,” n.d. Susan Hiner, personal collection. “Catherinette,” Dix, Paris, n.d. Susan Hiner, personal collection. “Catherinette,” Dix, Paris, n.d., Susan Hiner, personal collection. “Saint Catherine,” J.K., n.d. Susan Hiner, personal collection. “La Sainte Catherine,” J.M., Paris, n.d. Susan Hiner, personal collection. “Vive Ste Catherine,” n.d. Susan Hiner, personal collection. “Vive Ste Catherine,” P.C., Paris, n.d. Susan Hiner, personal collection. “Catherinette,” n.d. Susan Hiner, personal collection. “Adieu,” E.L.D., n.d. Susan Hiner, personal collection. “Ste Catherine,” n.d. Susan Hiner, personal collection. “Ste Catherine,” B.C.I., n.d. Susan Hiner, personal collection. “Ste Catherine,” M.F., Paris, n.d. Susan Hiner, personal collection. “25-11-20, Ste Catherine [catherinettes dans la rue],” 1925. Courtesy of Bibliothèque Nationale de France. “Vive Ste Catherine,” n.d. Susan Hiner, personal collection. Marcelle Tinayre in La Vie Heureuse, March 1903. Rachel Mesch, personal collection. Honoré Daumier, “Les Bas Bleus.” Le Charivari. February 26, 1844.

120 124 129 129 131 133 135 136 139 140 141 142 143 145 147 202 203

Acknowledgments

The editors of this volume would like to extend their thanks to the participants in the symposium, “Beyond Tradition: French Cultural Studies, 1800– 2014,” held in April 2014, whose thought-provoking presentations and lively discussions convinced us that a reappraisal of the field of French Cultural Studies was timely. We also thank our contributors whose insightful work made this reappraisal possible. We are grateful to The George Washington University, Georgetown University, and the Embassy of France for providing financial support for this project. We greatly appreciate the invaluable administrative and moral support of Kate Rosa and Joan Matus. Several people have contributed to the intellectual shaping of this volume. Sylvie Durmelat, Chelsea Stieber, Nathan Hensley, Patrick Henry, and Mary Anne O’Neil provided astute comments on the introduction. We are grateful for the valuable suggestions by the anonymous reviewers. Our editors at the University of Delaware Press—Donald Mell, Edward Larkin, and Julia Oestreich—have enthusiastically supported this project from its inception and skillfully led us through the publication process. Finally, we would like to thank our families for their love and affection, as well as their patience and forbearance even when this project seemed to take over our lives.

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Introduction French Cultural Studies for the Twenty-First Century Masha Belenky, Kathryn Kleppinger, and Anne O’Neil-Henry

As scholars of French and Francophone culture in the early twenty-first century, how do we examine sources that do not necessarily fall within previously established disciplinary boundaries? In this volume, we bring together current scholarship on such diverse materials as French postcards, Haitian literary magazines, contemporary pornography, and Third Republic restaurant menus in order to evaluate the field of French Cultural Studies as it is practiced today in the American academy. Previous scholarship on French Cultural Studies has focused primarily on asserting the relevance of Cultural Studies as a discipline and on defining the stakes of using an interdisciplinary approach to analyze cultural objects from France and Francophone regions. French Cultural Studies for the Twenty-First Century builds on these foundational questions to evaluate the state of this complex and constantly evolving field and its current methodological practices. Our authors address how scholars of French Studies can effectively analyze what we term “nontraditional sources” in their historical and geographic contexts. In doing so, our volume offers a compelling vision of the field today and maps out potential paradigms for future research. The volume includes scholarship by practitioners of French Cultural Studies working in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries who critically reflect on how scholars work with these non-traditional sources in a sustained and rigorous way. Often ephemeral and understudied, the source materials at hand range from those that lay far outside the realm of tradi-

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tional academic study (postcards, menus, erotica) to others that, although textual (vaudeville plays and the popular press), have long been considered too marginal for analysis in standard academic contexts. The productive dialogue among these contributions brings to the fore parallel questions related to researching and teaching such source material from a broad spectrum of time periods and regions. French Cultural Studies for the Twenty-First Century expands on these conversations to articulate the current state of French Cultural Studies. While no single volume could achieve an exhaustive overview of the field, each chapter here reflects relevant and paradigmatic approaches to scholarship central to French Cultural Studies today.1 This book contributes to the field of French Cultural Studies in two distinct but complementary ways. In the first place, the contributions assembled here both model and theorize how the field is currently practiced. Each chapter not only offers a rich interpretation of its particular object of study but also considers its own inner workings, laying bare the methodological underpinnings as well as the larger stakes of its project. In the second place, this collection emphasizes the common ground between approaches to a rich variety of topics from different literary-historical periods, each informed by diverse theoretical frameworks. Indeed, a series of shared pertinent methodological questions—both specific and universal—emerge from this interface of scholarship that encompasses a wide geographic and temporal range of sources. How do we study an ephemeral object (such as restaurant menus) or a phenomenon (a public scandal) whose meaning is not readily obvious because of either temporal distance or disciplinary norms? What is the role of marginal objects (postcards and erotica) in constructing gender norms in different times and places? What can we glean from a historically informed understanding of how the media create popular mythologies? More broadly, what are the stakes of differentiating between “high” and “low” forms of cultural expression as we seek to understand a particular cultural moment? These and other questions open up constructive and dynamic conversations among practitioners of French Cultural Studies as they continue to bring to light previously unexplored archives in ways that often challenge and nuance our perceptions of historical moments and contexts. French Cultural Studies for the Twenty-First Century builds on both foundational works in Cultural Studies from the 1960s and 1970s and more recent studies addressing the relevance of this approach in French and Francophone contexts. Initial theoretical articulation of Cultural Studies as a field can be found in the work of British scholars such as Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, who were the first to consider the relationship between conceptions of “high” and “low” culture and the value of moving beyond the exclusively

Introduction  •  xv

“literary” in order to bring scholarly attention to a broader range of cultural production.2 This approach was, at its core, profoundly political in its desire to democratize intellectual study and to valorize all forms of cultural expression, not merely elite ones. In this sense, “culture” itself is a polyvalent term that designates what Wendy Griswold has identified as “the expressive aspect of human existence”; this can mean nearly any social phenomenon that can be studied, from literature and film to language, cuisine, and religious practices.3 The discipline of Cultural Studies, then, incorporates such diverse sources as television, advertisements, and popular music as socially and politically relevant areas of study.4 Although pioneering studies of popular culture initially appeared in the British academy and subsequently spread to American universities, the use of Cultural Studies as a methodological approach to analyzing cultural production has also gained considerable ground in the field of French Studies over the past two decades. Several scholarly journals (e.g., French Cultural Studies, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, and Contemporary French Civilization) and edited volumes set out to investigate the relationship between British Cultural Studies and French Studies and to reflect on ways in which French Studies as a field can be enriched by and at the same time contribute to Cultural Studies as a whole. In a 1997 issue of Contemporary French Civilization devoted entirely to the application of the Anglophone Cultural Studies methodology to French Studies, editors Jean-François Fourny and Lawrence Schehr suggested that intellectual trends (including Women’s Studies and Postcolonial Studies) pointed toward “a rethinking of ‘the order of things.’”5 While some essays in their 1997 issue reflected a concern about the inchoate nature of Cultural Studies’ methodology and about the limits of the discipline within the university structure, Fourny and Schehr posited that there is in fact no conflict between Cultural Studies and more traditional disciplines such as History and Literature. Instead, they argued, Cultural Studies provides a “nuanced examination of all of our ‘cultural capital,’” including canonical sources of historical and literary studies.6 These discussions were reprised at a 2001 conference entitled “French Cultural Studies: The State of the Art,”7 followed by a publication of selected essays in the 2002 issue of Contemporary French Civilization. The aim of the conference, and of the publication, was to assess this rapidly changing field and its place in the global context as well as within the American academy. As Lawrence Schehr writes in his introduction to the 2002 issue, the challenges to traditional disciplines stemming from Cultural Studies “provide a new dynamic and a renewed dynamism within the traditional areas of the humanities.”8 The conference and the subsequent journal articles reflected a

xvi  •   Masha Belenky, Kathryn Kleppinger, and Anne O’Neil-Henry

“more maturely developing discipline”9 and thus marked an important milestone in establishing Cultural Studies as a legitimate intellectual practice within French Studies. Subsequent volumes published in 2000 (French Cultural Studies: Criticism at the Crossroads, edited by Marie-Pierre Le Hir and Dana Strand) and 2013 (Imagining the Popular in Contemporary French Culture, edited by Diana Holmes and David Looseley) testify to the centrality of Cultural Studies methodologies and their potential for opening up French Studies. Le Hir and Strand seek to establish the legitimacy of Cultural Studies within the discipline of French (by pointing out that Cultural Studies can be the site of renewal for the field),10 while Holmes and Looseley propose to consider more concretely how to define Cultural Studies, specifically through concepts such as “culture de masse” and “culture populaire.”11 Both volumes also address a foundational question underpinning the field: how to define French Cultural Studies given its use of wide-ranging source material. Holmes and Loosely note that “‘popular culture’ is an amorphous, polysemic category,”12 and Le Hir and Strand raise similar considerations by observing that “[d]iversity may easily be perceived as a lack of focus.”13 While both volumes acknowledge the potential pitfalls stemming from the diverse nature of their subjects, the very existence of these edited collections demonstrates a commonly shared understanding of the contours of the field. That French Cultural Studies has received sustained and in-depth attention in many publications over the past two decades—each of which identifies similar questions and challenges— testifies to the ongoing relevance of this approach to French Studies in the twenty-first century. French Cultural Studies for the Twenty-First Century contributes to these lively debates by self-reflexively considering a methodological challenge inherent to research on a broad range of non-traditional cultural objects: how do we study these materials in a way that maintains scholarly rigor while teasing out their full aesthetic, historical, and social significance? While literary, cinematic, and historical studies can each be situated within specific disciplines that have their own established debates and methodological protocols, scholars of French Cultural Studies often find themselves at the crossroads of several disciplines. Within the American academy, the majority of practitioners of French Cultural Studies have been trained in traditional disciplines (nearly all in literary studies). In engaging with cultural artifacts outside the established bounds of literary studies, these scholars articulate new methodological strategies to account for the complexities of an object in its context. Such approaches are necessarily interdisciplinary: it is through the nexus of literary, historical, and sociological methods that we

Introduction  •  xvii

can account most fully for the object’s cultural, aesthetic, and socio-political valence. Yet, if interdisciplinarity provides an enriching perspective on often poorly understood cultural phenomena, it also imposes complex challenges on scholars who need to rethink existing methodologies for an ever-expanding pool of primary source materials. From menus to literary magazines, from film to fashion, how do we articulate a methodology of French Cultural Studies as it is practiced today? Moving past debates seeking to validate the legitimacy of Cultural Studies, and expanding upon existing scholarship that has attempted to define French Cultural Studies, French Cultural Studies for the Twenty-First Century proposes a vision of the field that is both flexible and focused: it asks what French Cultural Studies looks like in practice and how scholars of different historical and geographical foci develop fresh ways of studying new sources of inquiry. The volume is structured according to four guiding themes, each of which engages with both the possibilities and constraints of interdisciplinarity within the specific context of French Studies. Each section juxtaposes essays that differ in their temporal and geographical emphasis but whose methodological approaches expose the commonalities subtending such seemingly disparate projects. The first part, “Press and Literary Culture,” includes chapters by Elizabeth Emery and Chelsea Stieber that consider how extra-literary or regional sources can complicate common understandings of “high” and “low” literary genres. Emery studies interviews and images from La Revue illustrée, a widely read illustrated periodical from the 1890s that featured wellknown authors in their own homes. These interviews, she argues, served to create elite public personae for their subjects that ultimately contributed to the formation of the literary canon. Beyond examining the cultural meaning of these photo-interviews, Emery also critically reflects on ways to approach studying such hybrid texts. Stieber focuses on the independent Haitian press, arguing for its importance in understanding Haitian culture. She explores Haitian literary magazines to show how early twentieth-century Haitian intellectuals used this hybrid medium—an amalgam of both “high” and “low,” cosmopolitan and local culture—to conceptualize Haitian national identity. Through close attention to formal aspects of these primary texts as well as to their cultural and historical contexts, both essays look to periodicals as a means to accomplish political and cultural goals. Entitled “Race and Identity in Popular Performance,” the second part of our volume includes contributions by Lise Schreier and Mehammed Mack. Schreier tackles the extremely popular yet under-examined genre of vaudeville theater in nineteenth-century France, arguing for its political, social, and cultural significance. In looking at the representation of race in vaude-

xviii  •   Masha Belenky, Kathryn Kleppinger, and Anne O’Neil-Henry

ville plays as well as their reception and censorship files, Schreier exposes unexpected political and social arguments at the heart of this genre commonly deemed by scholars as one-dimensional. Mack focuses on another dismissed genre, contemporary pornography featuring Franco-Arab performers. Through study of the porn and its critical reception, along with interviews with actors and directors, Mack’s analysis reveals the postcolonial politics underpinning this medium. Both contributors decode these popular genres as spaces where questions of sexual and racial marginality are worked through and new perspectives on sensitive social and political debates are provided. In the volume’s third part, “Repurposed Images,” Michael Garval and Susan Hiner study objects that, though ephemeral, participate in the construction of cultural mythologies. Garval’s exploration of a previously unexamined archive of illustrated menus from Third Republic France analyzes the visual, formal, and thematic elements of these artifacts while also exposing the political discourse embedded within them. In doing so, Garval provides important insights into the development of culinary culture and the links between culture and politics more generally in the fin de siècle. Susan Hiner addresses the interplay between text and image through her work on massproduced postcards featuring the figure of the catherinette, an unwed young woman who came to embody fin-de-siècle anxieties about female celibacy. These cultural ephemera, while seemingly marginal, emblematize existing tensions surrounding marriage and celibacy and shed new light on received ideas about femininity in fin-de-siècle France. Although Garval’s menus reached a more elite audience than the widely consumed postcards analyzed by Hiner, both essays reveal inherent complexities that undermine the ostensible purpose of the objects themselves. These items are more than simply postcards or menus; they are keys to understanding the social and cultural dynamics shaping French society at the time of their production. The volume’s final part, “Media Storms,” features chapters that address public polemics from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Leslie Kealhofer-Kemp explores recent transatlantic media debates surrounding Intouchables, the 2011 film that broke box office records but received mixed reviews from critics. She interrogates the complexities of race relations in contemporary France through the lens of the international critical reception of this blockbuster. Anne Brancky examines the polemic spurred by Marguerite Duras’s 1985 intervention into the Affaire Villemin, a well-known fait divers regarding the alleged murder of a young boy. Duras’s article “Sublime, forcément sublime Christine V,” [“Sublime, Necessarily Sublime Christine V.”] which both accused the boy’s mother of the murder and defended her supposed actions, provoked contradictory responses that, as Brancky argues,

Introduction  •  xix

testify to the power of the media and call into question the role of literature in the public sphere. Finally, Rachel Mesch analyzes the Affaire Tinayre: a fin-de-siècle media scandal involving the presumptive nomination of novelist Marcelle Tinayre as knight of the French Legion of Honor and the subsequent media response to Tinyare’s lighthearted comments about her nomination. This affaire, which ultimately prompted the revocation of Tinayre’s nomination, reveals the elaborate relationship between late-nineteenthcentury mass media culture and modern femininity as well as the overlap between literary history and the popular press. These three essays from different historical moments demonstrate the power of the media to construct a shared understanding of an event as they show how more complicated questions of race, gender, and genre can be implicated in such public conversations. Together, the chapters in this collection take on a kaleidoscopic multiplicity of topics that derive from a variety of theoretical frameworks. Yet what we want to emphasize here is the remarkable coherence of the volume as a whole. If earlier criticism of French Cultural Studies (and Cultural Studies in general) suggested an inherent lack of disciplinary rigor, the essays in French Cultural Studies for the Twenty-First Century vividly demonstrate that this concern was unfounded. Although wide ranging in historical and geographic foci, here the coherence emerges from the effort behind each essay to reflect critically on methods of analysis as it is practiced in French Cultural Studies today. These contributions ultimately employ a similar approach to their source materials by combining a sustained close reading with analysis of historical, political, or social contexts. The essays privilege the interconnection of text and context as their authors interpret the source material for underlying historical, aesthetic, and social stakes. The French Cultural Studies that emerges here asserts the importance of focused textual analysis but does not engage in pure formalism; rather, it foregrounds the crucial importance of the broader social and historical settings such analyses illuminate. In bringing these essays together, we hope to generate a productive synergy from interactions along the edges and fault lines of different disciplines, a synergy that, going forward, will articulate useful new paradigms for future study.

Notes 1.  Here we use “French Cultural Studies” to refer to existing conceptions of the field, which include cultural production from both metropolitan France and Francophone regions. In light of recent debates about the term Francophone, we have chosen this term in order not to draw a distinction between French and Francophone sources, although our contributors do work on materials from various areas of the French-speaking world.

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  2.  As Raymond Williams observed in Culture & Society, 1780–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), common usage of the word “culture” shifted fundamentally during the nineteenth century. Whereas “culture” in the pre-Industrial era referred to what he calls “tending of natural growth” (xiv) (in the sense of agriculture), “culture” in the nineteenth century came to signify “new kinds of personal and social relationships”(xvi) that served to categorize people according to social classes. As Williams notes, “Where culture meant a state or habit of the mind, or the body of intellectual and moral activities, it means now, also, a whole way of life” (xvi–xvii). This conception of culture as a form of human expression that also reveals fundamental aspects of its producers’ and consumers’ lives—such as their interests and anxieties—has paved the way for many subsequent studies of popular forms of expression.  3. Wendy Griswold, Cultures and Societies in a Changing World (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2004), 1.   4.  As Stuart Hall notes, however, studies of various forms of cultural production cannot always be reduced to one model. Hall and Jessica Evans argue in their introduction to Visual Culture: The Reader (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1999) that analysis of images requires “a complex set of practices which lie behind and make possible the image and its capacity to convey meaning, each of which requires its own conceptualization” (4). While images must be studied closely, they cannot simply be “read” as semiotic texts. An effective analysis of a visual object therefore necessitates attention to traditions of visual representation as well as to the conditions of production and consumption in the era in which the object appeared.   5.  Jean-François Fourny and Lawrence Schehr, “Haven’t We Been Through All This Before?” Contemporary French Civilization 21, no. 2 (1997): 1.  6. Ibid., 2.  7. “French Cultural Studies: The State of the Art” conference, held October 11–13, 2001 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.   8.  Lawrence Schehr, “Stating the Art of French Cultural Studies,” Contemporary French Civilization 26, no. 2 (2002): 147.  9. Ibid, 147. 10.  As the authors note, “in spite of its much-rumored decline, the field at large has never stopped making ground-breaking advances.” Marie-Pierre Le Hir and Dana Strand, eds., French Cultural Studies: Criticism at the Crossroads (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 2. 11.  Diana Holmes and David Looseley, eds., Imagining the Popular in Contemporary French Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 8. 12.  Ibid., 1. 13.  Le Hir and Strand, French Cultural Studies, 1. Even the flagship journal French Cultural Studies defines itself as addressing “the full range of work being done on all aspects of modern French culture.” See the journal website at http://frc.sagepub.com/.

PART I

PRESS AND LITERARY CULTURE

CHAPTER ONE

Methods and Challenges in Deciphering Representations of Authorial Intimacy in Late NineteenthCentury French Photoreportages Elizabeth Emery

A popular Romantic myth holds that writers sequester themselves in ivory towers where they dedicate themselves solely to the production of literature, a myth that has contributed to the international popularity of museums established in writers’ former homes and haunts.1 This misconception has long been reinforced and perpetuated by visual media such as paintings, drawings, and photographs, which emphasize the solitary nature of the literary endeavor. Figure 1.1, a photograph of well-known playwright Victorien Sardou, a member of the Académie Française, provides a good example. Here, Sardou writes at a desk entirely covered with books and papers. The light entering from the window in front of him casts a near-mystical glow over the products of his intense concentration while the full wastebasket at bottom left and the white papers overflowing onto the sofa at far right visually bookend his prodigious intellectual labor. Today, reproductions of paintings or photographs of writers adopting similar poses circulate widely to accompany print and online literary anthologies and encyclopedias, blogs, Facebook, Pinterest, or Tumblr accounts. Yet such visual media can do no more than suggest, through an assortment of carefully organized objects, intellectual work that is, by its very nature, invisible. Derived from a nineteenth-century photographic tradition itself inspired by painted portraits and informed by the eighteenth-century cult of the “great man,”2 they have become visual shorthand for signifying intellectual labor.

3

4  •  Elizabeth Emery

Figure 1.1.   Dornac. Victorien Sardou photographed for Nos Contemporains chez eux. Photo: Elizabeth Emery.

Today’s viewers, used to the immediacy of digital photography, tend to accept such images without questioning the complex social and technological forces that led to their adoption as an accepted visual form of literary representation. In this chapter I explore the methodological challenges that arise when analyzing such photographs of writers at work, focusing on a set of photoreportages conducted by the illustrated journal La Revue Illustrée in the 1890s. Although “nontraditional” media such as illustrated magazine interviews may seem innocuous to twenty-first century readers, photographs have, from their inception in the nineteenth century, played an important role in the canonization of literary figures.3 In fact, nascent nineteenth-century photojournalism laid out the conventions still visible in Vanity Fair print interviews or MTV Cribs video interviews, where celebrities show off homes full of trophies, clothing, cars, and swimming pools. Figure 1.1 may represent Sardou hard at work, but another photograph from the same period, published as part of an illustrated article documenting a visit to his summer home in Marly, presents him in an entirely different light.4 In Figure 1.2 he poses, hands on hips, on a tennis court, his small figure dwarfed by the opulent grounds of the eighteenth-century chateau visible in the background. Unlike Figure 1.1, which plays into the

Methods and Challenges in Deciphering Author Representations   •  5

accepted visual trope of the writer at work, adopting an angle that allows the viewer to recognize Sardou’s features (and customary beret), Figure 1.2 is difficult to interpret. Who is this man and where is he? Figure 1.2’s caption, “Le lawn-tennis,” the expansive grounds, and his bourgeois attire suggest that he is a man of means (tennis courts were a status symbol in 1890s Europe5), but there is nothing here to suggest that the small figure might be an internationally celebrated French playwright. This particular photograph gains much more resonance when it is placed into its publication context, as part of a ten-page illustrated interview for La Revue Illustrée; it is one of eight images (two of them full-page) embedded within Eugène Tardieu’s written account of a visit to Sardou’s sumptuously restored eighteenth-century castle in Marly. In this article, viewers see him on the grounds, having a glass of wine on the veranda, opening the door to gilded rooms, posing with antique furniture, and, in the expected writer pose: seated at his desk in his book-lined study. Text and image collaborate

Figure 1.2.   Henri Mairet. “Le lawn-tennis.” “Une Heure chez Victorien Sardou.” La Revue Illustrée. September 15, 1892. Photo: Elizabeth Emery.

6  •  Elizabeth Emery

to celebrate Sardou’s rags to riches story. Rich, erudite, and tasteful, he has earned a place as a revered member of the Parisian elite, a status confirmed by the images as much as by his inclusion in the pages of La Revue Illustrée.6 Tardieu’s interview of Sardou was part of an 1891 initiative instigated by the editorial board of La Revue Illustrée, one of the leading illustrated French publications produced for affluent readers.7 Its owners took advantage of new developments in flash photography and printing reproduction to document residences of Belle Epoque celebrities. Consisting of five- to ten-page collaborations between reporters and photographers, the new series came to be entitled “Une Heure chez” (An hour at home with . . . ).8 Over the next decade, the magazine would open doors (visually) to some fifty homes and offices of French writers, actors, musicians, scientists, politicians, and other important cultural figures. This was a remarkable innovation, made possible by photographer Henri Mairet, who had invented a smokeless flash photography technique, and who was engaged by La Revue Illustrée as its official photographer. The resulting photo-interviews, published at the height of the nineteenth-century French vogue for collecting and interior decorating as forms of self-expression,9 were unique in their day and understood as “relics of history,” as historically truthful documents captured by the scientific lens of photography.10 La Revue Illustrée’s new initiative likely was a response to the popularity of a number of other international series featuring well-known public figures, such as the nonillustrated British “Celebrities at Home” series published from 1876 in the World, or the French Nos Contemporains chez eux, a photographic series begun in 1889 in which Dornac (Paul Cardon) posed hundreds of photographs of celebrities “at home,” in the semi-public space of their studies (see Figure 1.1). These images reinforced the symbolic resonance of the writer hard at work behind his or her desk, and they were circulated through photography stores, engraved and printed in Le Monde Illustré, and licensed to other illustrated periodicals around the world.11 Interestingly, this now canonical scene of the writer at work, chin posed on fist or pen poised in hand, arose in part from physical constraints: Dornac, and other colleagues who worked without a flash, required a thirty-second pose time, even in bright rooms on sunny days.12 The pensive pose provided subjects with a way to hold still. Smokeless flash photography, developed by Henri Mairet for theatrical photographs and then commissioned by La Revue Illustrée, makes the “Une Heure” series special. Photographers could travel with reporters to interview celebrities in any room and at any time, not just on sunny days. Dornac’s photographs contain no information about the subject, address, or date,

Methods and Challenges in Deciphering Author Representations   •  7

while La Revue Illustrée’s photographs were embedded, as we have seen for Sardou, within a new kind of multi-media document leading the reader visually from one room to the next; the text situates the house or apartment within a particular neighborhood, building, floor, and time frame. Such journalistic incursions into private homes were a new development that reflected the progressive importance and popularity of investigative reporting in late nineteenth-century France. The interview, imported from America in the 1870s, transformed the relationship between writer and reader by shifting attention from the brilliance of literary works composed by inaccessible authors in their book-lined studies to the personality responsible for creating such works.13 Were they as truly exceptional as had always been assumed? The reporter’s goal was to find out, to violate privacy and to expose the private home as evidence of the “real” and possibly “flawed” character behind the alleged “demi-god.”14 Some of the thousands of mundane interview questions asked of writers in the 1880s include: What do you think about tobacco? What do you think about top hats? What do you think about women’s cycling costumes? About handwriting?15 Sardou’s commentary on the links between his home life and literary output responds directly to this popular curiosity about writers’ personalities. The care Tardieu takes to provide markers of time and space in the text (“J’écoutais, tout heureux, dans le grand calme de cette après-midi d’été la parole joyeuse, gouailleuse un peu du maître” [I happily listened to the master’s joyful and cheeky chatter from the summer afternoon’s deep calm]) and the journal’s attention to photographic captions (“Le lawn-tennis,” “Le grand salon,” “Le cabinet de travail” [The tennis court, the large sitting room, the office]), emulate the experience of spending an intimate “hour” with Sardou, as does the frequent use of dialogue: —Votre vocation théâtrale vous a merveilleusement servi, mon cher maître. —Oui! s’écria-t-il en riant, et dire que mon père ne voulait pas que je fisse du théâtre, il m’avait condamné à la médecine! [—Your theatrical calling has served you marvelously well, my dear master. —Yes! he chuckled, and to think that my father did not want me to go into the theatre, he had condemned me to medicine!]

It is as if readers are eavesdropping on this private conversation between Sardou and Tardieu, learning more about the personal obstacles the writer has overcome to achieve his present success. The text thus offers temporal and social cues with which to read the photographs, while the photographs visually confirm what is said in the narrative. Together, text and image create a complex representation of writers and their motivations.

8  •  Elizabeth Emery

One of the primary methodological challenges in approaching such documents comes from the fact that, as editor Ludovic Baschet admitted in 1891, they were intended to cater to readers’ fascination with celebrity culture, to allow a glimpse of the homes of celebrity figures previously known only from painted portraits or photographs. They may be “relics of history,” yet if the explosion of the Internet in the twenty-first century has taught us anything it is that we should maintain a healthy suspicion of both text and images, always recognizing the ways in which they can be manipulated. Houses can be tidied and props staged. A photograph of Sardou in his slippers lounging behind a table with two glasses and a carafe of wine is clearly calculated to express his hominess and hospitality. It is thus important to approach nineteenth-century documents such as these with caution. Text and image were just as easy to alter in the nineteenth century, particularly if one considers that photomechanical reproduction had not yet been perfected. Most of La Revue Illustrée’s images are lithographs based on Mairet’s photographs. Similarly, as Dorothy Speirs has noted, interviews have long been discounted as serious source material because of the notorious unreliability of reporters, which led writers such as Emile Zola to proclaim that he would never admit to having said anything other than what he had himself written.16 In the 1890s, “reporters” tended to be moonlighting novelists or poets and quite often close friends (or enemies) of their subjects; interviews could be fabricated, published to praise (or denounce) colleagues, or to correct perceived errors in the public record. Tardieu, for example, was a regular contributor to the newspaper L’Echo de Paris, but also a friend of Sardou. He did not disclose this relationship. Another example can be seen in an 1893 La Revue Illustrée photo-interview with Alexandre Dumas fils, intended specifically to mend the playwright’s reputation, as admitted by the reporter, his friend and fellow author and translator Ely Halpérine-Kaminsky.17 He describes Dumas’s home life over twelve pages as the seven photographs of the playwright’s “chateau” in Marly (not far from Sardou’s) bear witness to what he says. The article begins with an acknowledgment of rumors that Dumas has often been accused of self-interest, greed, and plagiarism.18 The “stupidity” of such legends is put to rest in favor of descriptions of the writer’s life; he has exiled himself from the drama and struggles of the Paris literary scene. As Halpérine-Kaminsky’s prose casts Dumas fils as a misunderstood genius, readers follow along through the photographs, which confirm the narrative’s description of him as eminently “simple” and “sincere.” They enter the writer’s tidy bedroom with its carefully made bed, Oriental carpet, floral-patterned drapes, and nine framed works of art.19 They see him alone, looking pensively out the

Methods and Challenges in Deciphering Author Representations   •  9

window of his greenhouse before visiting his cozy sitting room, hung with Oriental tapestries and lined with cushioned chairs; a table piled with books faces a fireplace well stocked with wood. Another photograph shows off the attached greenhouse (a nineteenth-century fashion) as Dumas and his grandson pose in a corner of it. His book-lined study features a picture window (tactfully draped against the sun). Much more spare than the sitting room, its parquet floor, spartan wooden chairs, long trestle desk piled with the accoutrements of a busy writer suggest a simplicity absent from the other rooms

Figure 1.3.  Henri Mairet. “Le cabinet de travail d’Alexandre Dumas.” La Revue Illustrée. June 15, 1893. Photo: Elizabeth Emery.

10  •  Elizabeth Emery

(Figure 1.3). The final image is of the billiard room, yet another fixture of the stylish fin-de-siècle home. After having set the record straight in his narrative, Halpérine-Kaminsky calls on the photos as proof. The simplicity of Dumas’s bedroom is “characteristic” of his humble nature (he sleeps with the window open and takes long walks in the countryside) and the many important artworks surrounding him confirm his status as an artist: “En rendant justice à la puissance créatrice de l’écrivain, il devient impossible de ne pas reconnaître en même temps la réalité des vertus de l’homme privé, tellement l’auteur et l’oeuvre se sont pour ainsi dire identifiés” [Given the marked conflation of author and work, it is impossible to avoid acknowledging the virtues of the private man when trying to do justice to the writer’s creative power].20 How, Halpérine-Kaminsky concludes, could one possibly believe such a “virtuous” man capable of the rumors attributed to him? Text and image thus conspire to retouch Dumas’s negative reputation by emphasizing his healthy work habits, his family, his art collection, and the books that surround him. As in the case of Sardou, Dumas’s home is co-opted in the process of canonizing him as a recognized member of the literary elite. The tendency to read home life as a direct transposition of literary work was a constant at the end of the nineteenth century: the home was seen as a mirror of a person’s achievements.21 Most of the other photo-interviews follow a similar pattern: home decoration is interpreted through the narrative to reflect professional success, no matter the field. This is the case even for Emile Zola, whose eclectic home was so filled with tapestries, sculptures, and stained glass that visitors were dumbfounded. When reporter Jules Huret comments on the seeming disconnect between naturalist novels and this fantastical interior, Zola justifies it as literary, a reflection of his childhood infatuation with Romantic poetry and theatre. He mentions Hugo and paraphrases Balzac: “Quand un homme arrive, il réalise toujours le luxe qu’il rêvait dans sa jeunesse” [A successful man always fulfills the luxurious dreams of his youth].22 Such rationalization of private life in terms of literary work exemplifies another pitfall in studying these photoreportages. On the one hand, they purport to reveal the truth about allegedly great men, to reveal their “flaws” and bad habits, as Halpérine-Kaminsky puts it in his interview with Dumas: they cater to readers’ “désir de savoir si la propre vie de ces ‘pasteurs d’âmes’ est en harmonie avec la morale qu’ils prêchent” [desire to know whether the actual life of these ‘ministers of souls’ is in harmony with the morals they preach]. Readers thus turn to La Revue Illustrée as a corrective to stories and photographs depicting writers as “idols” or “demi-gods.”23 And yet, most

Methods and Challenges in Deciphering Author Representations   •  11

reporters do not expose writers as frauds; as we have seen in the cases of Sardou, Dumas, and Zola, they tend to use the information they have learned to reinforce or correct preconceived ideas about them.24 In many cases this is because the reporter is not truly neutral, but a close friend of his subject, working, like Halpérine-Kaminsky or Tardieu, to help revise a reputation. Conversely, the writer may be helping a journalist make money by providing juicy details for public consumption. As a result, such series generally do not reveal writers’ “flaws” as they say they will; rather, they tend to stress their “greatness.” La Revue Illustrée’s opulent photo-interviews resoundingly celebrate bourgeois success, as much an illustration of what Thorstein Veblen called “conspicuous consumption”25 as modern television productions such as Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous or MTV Cribs. No impoverished writers are interviewed for the “Une Heure chez” series and even the least ostentatious home is resoundingly bourgeois; it belongs to devout Catholic and virulent anti-Semite Edouard Drumont, who lives simply in a small Paris apartment.26 The anonymous author of this piece seems unimpressed with Drumont’s anti-Semitic writings, equating his apartment (and by extension Drumont himself) to the faded provincial home of a compulsively clean (and somewhat unsettling) devout maiden aunt living in the shadow of a church: symmetrical furniture lining the walls, alabaster vases perfectly placed with respect to the gilded brass Empire clock, and everything reeking of the past.27 The photograph (Figure 1.4) of Drumont lunching alone in a small dining room with china plates hung on wallpaper in front of a mantel mirrors this verbal description. The table, laid for one (unlike Sardou, no extra glass or plate has been offered the reporter), confirms Drumont’s self-imposed solitude. Even in this least opulent of photointerviews, however, the reporter portrays Drumont’s muted petit bourgeois home as the perfect expression of his professional persona: an eccentric and disagreeable defender of old Catholic France. Given the tenuous nature of these photoreportages as historical documents, one might ask why I choose to make them the subject of research. When responding, I align myself with scholars from Michel Foucault and Marshall McLuhan to Bruno Latour, Tim Ingold, and Jérome Meizoz, all of whom have argued that the boundaries between “high” and “low” culture and the complex forces involved in cultural production are much more porous than the academy has traditionally allowed.28 Many of the genres, activities, and frames of reference common today (like the ubiquitous “author at work” photographs exemplified by Figure 1.1) derive from intellectual frameworks established in earlier periods and whose widespread acceptance has caused other genres to be forgotten or excluded, even those that were influential

Figure 1.4.  Photographer unknown. “Le déjeuner du directeur de la Libre Parole (Drumont).” “Une Heure avec Edouard Drumont.” La Revue Illustrée. June 15, 1892. Photo: Elizabeth Emery.

Methods and Challenges in Deciphering Author Representations   •  13

in their own time. The illustrated interviews I have examined in this essay provide an excellent example of the now-marginalized, but once rich collaboration—what anthropologist Tim Ingold describes as a “meshwork of entangled lines of life, growth and movement”29—that took place in the late nineteenth century among writers, reporters, photographers, editors, engravers, and reading public. The kinds of photoreportage I have discussed reveal in stunning complexity the liveliness of social life in nineteenth-century France, where writers did not just sit in their gilded castles, thinking deep thoughts from within the confines of book-lined libraries. Instead, they were often simultaneously engaged in activities such as exercise (Figure 1.2), meal preparation and consumption (Figure 1.4), child care, or professional and social causes. The photoreportages are thus not nearly as interesting for revealing what they say they reveal (writers’ “defects” as exposed in their homes), than for what they reveal without saying: the social contexts, the “meshworks,” in which these writers were implicated. Taken together, text and image provide remarkable details not just about historical and architectural preferences, the topography of writers’ homes, and decorating fads (Orientalism, medievalism, japonisme, rococo, lawn tennis, billiard rooms, and greenhouses), but particularly about relationships. The proximity of writer homes within Paris and in the countryside suggests much more sociability and cross-pollination of ideas than the photographs of writers in their book-lined studies indicate. Indeed, cultural historians have shown just how important salon culture was to the development of all kinds of late nineteenth-century artistic, scientific, and commercial initiatives.30 La Revue Illustrée’s photo-interviews testify to similar forms of sociability that take place outdoors, what one might call fresh air collaboration: playing tennis, going for walks in the countryside, hunting, and gardening. Others hint at group writing: friends, secretaries, spouses, and even children serve as sounding boards and collaborators in literary endeavors. These texts and their accompanying photographs provide particularly valuable insights into the importance of the press in the 1890s: the fascination with interviews, the prevalence of serialized fiction, the rise of the mass media, and the influence of the press in shaping reputations. Above all, they dispel the illusion—fostered by decontextualized photographs—of nineteenth-century writers as working in ivory towers, immune to the pressures of the outside world. Zola, for example, complains about the frequency of reporter visits and about the frenzied composition of his novels: the newspaper contracts he has signed oblige him to write more quickly than he would like to. His greatest wish is to hide away in a quiet attic.31 Such interviews also

14  •  Elizabeth Emery

emphasize the fact that French writers of the late nineteenth century did not simply write the novels, plays, and poetry for which they are now remembered; they also attended performances and wrote reviews of what they had seen. They contributed opinion pieces to newspapers about current events and, like Zola, many first published serially what we now read in the form of books and volumes of poetry.32 Others supported themselves financially by penning articles about art, fashion, music, and daily happenings.33 Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, for example, pseudonymously directed and wrote a fashion magazine, La Dernière Mode, long considered a puzzling “popular” activity because of his reputation as a supremely reclusive figure, but now understood as a creative outlet intimately related to his poetic production.34 Although such writers’ social contributions have long been considered extraneous to their literary production, in recent years sociologists and cultural historians have dedicated ever-increasing resources to studying writers’ engagement with the press. A number of French scholars, led by Marie-Eve Thérenty and Alain Vaillant, have worked tirelessly over the last decade to bring attention to the critical importance of the periodical press as a space of artistic experimentation where writers, artists, technicians, and businessmen all collaborated in the creation of influential new forms and new genres.35 Examining the kinds of collaboration that went on in the pages of publications such as La Revue Illustrée allows twenty-first-century scholars to reassess the importance of nineteenth-century French journalism, long considered an accessory to literature rather than as a literary endeavor or a catalyst for literary innovation. In fact, nineteenth-century France was a time much like our own: disruptive historical events (the French Revolution and its aftermath) and new technologies—in transportation, lighting, photography, and printing, to name just a few—made old social structures seem less relevant while encouraging new forms of collaboration such as those seen in newspapers and magazines. Photoreportages such as those in La Revue Illustrée document an emerging symbiotic relationship linking public, writers, and the press. New interactive genres such as mass market interviews, photo galleries, surveys, autographs, and literary pantheons designed for the general public all reflect authors’ struggles to position themselves within a changing cultural landscape.36 Interviews documenting private homes satisfied the public’s hunger for information about celebrity personalities, but they were also, paradoxically, a way of maintaining privacy: writers only had to open their door once, for the reporters’ visit. Given the popular belief that the home reflected the person, there was nothing easier than presenting one’s home as one wished it to be interpreted (Sardou’s theatrical opulence, Dumas’s “simplicity,”

Methods and Challenges in Deciphering Author Representations   •  15

Drumont’s Catholic piety, Zola’s childhood Romanticism). It is no coincidence that flash photography was first used in the theatre and associated with documenting sets and backstage activities. In these liberally illustrated texts, writers cultivate the myth of their reclusion and all-consuming work ethic as they perform a simulacrum of domesticity for reporters: they fashion “high culture” public personae whose dedication to literature and historical research distinguishes them from other kinds of writers.37 Illustrated interviews provided writers with a mechanism for perpetuating the myth incarnated in “writers at work” photographs such as Figure 1.1. As the press flourished, it became a convenient foil for distinguishing “high culture,” serious writers with a substantial and quality body of critically acclaimed work published in expensive or exclusive newspapers, magazines, and books, from “low,” those who wrote for newspapers to earn a living, or who produced unpublished plays for popular theatres. The passage from interviewer to interviewee was itself a process that established a superiority of one class of writer (the interviewee, worthy of an interview) to another (the reporter sent to collect the information). This staging of authorial intimacy—“high culture” writers reverently visited at home by “low culture” reporters at work—thus also perpetuated a false hierarchy among writers during the infancy of professional journalism. The divide between high and low culture was further reinforced in this period through the institution of a Republican educational system that adopted a new curriculum and developed new reading lists that identified the French “high culture” to be taught to the masses.38 Gustave Lanson’s Histoire de la littérature française, initially published in 1894 and still the basis for the French literary canon,39 was chief among the works distinguishing this culture; it privileged single-authored works and genres such as plays, novels, and poetry.40 Curiously, those authors who capitalized on the press to validate their works seem to have had an advantage over others: Lanson’s Histoire includes a remarkable number of writers with a strong press presence—from Zola and Jules Lemaître to Paul Bourget and Maurice Maeterlinck. Commercial success did not guarantee “canonization” (on the contrary), but intellectual engagement in the press did (even in small specialized journals, as in the case of Symbolist writers who tended to eschew publicity). Those who wrote manifestos and participated in public debates about literature and contemporary issues (even deigning to debate the relative merits of top hats and ladies’ cycling outfits or to be photographed) were most often those who made it onto reading lists. While some have fallen off, very few (if any) have been added.41

16  •  Elizabeth Emery

Canon formation is a complicated question and I mention only this aspect of it in closing because the staging of public persona and its effect on literary posterity raises interesting questions about what literature is and how much the lists of works considered “literary” today still derive from earlier centuries’ conception of high and low culture, a conception not immune to authors’ self-posturing.42 Looking back at social context can reveal interesting epistemological breaks—as Foucault noted in L’Archéologie du savoir—in what scholars too often consider universal givens: reading lists and university curricula and disciplinary boundaries, for example. Studying “nontraditional materials” forces one to define what one means by “traditional sources,” thereby calling into question systems of knowledge that may be taken for granted. This essay has argued, for example, that the solitary author photographs and headshots now accepted as an integral part of the media process were, in fact, less a straightforward reflection of nineteenth-century literary work than innovative attempts to express cultural identity visually during a time marked by profound disruptions in the distribution and consumption of information. Like these nineteenth-century photographs, many research materials that may not initially seem important have the potential to reveal a great deal about the lively and textured patterns of engagement among cultural producers and their effects upon historical and sociological trends.

Notes 1.  This chapter was made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. 2.  See Olivier Nora, “La Visite au grand écrivain,” in Les Lieux de Mémoire, Pierre Nora, ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 2: 2131–55; Elizabeth Emery, Photojournalism and the Origins of the French Writer House Museum (1881–1914) (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012). 3.  See, for example, Adeline Wrona, Face au portrait. De Sainte-Beuve à Facebook (Paris: Hermann, 2012). 4.  Eugène Tardieu, “Une Heure chez Victorien Sardou,” La Revue Illustrée (July 15, 1892): 209–18. Repr. in Emery, En toute intimité...Quand la presse people de la Belle Époque s’invitait chez les célébrités (Paris: Parigramme, 2015), 48–65. 5. Heiner Gillmeister, Tennis: Cultural History (London: Leicester University Press, 1998), 223–33. 6.  I analyze Sardou’s careful self-positioning in “Staging Domesticity in La Revue Illustrée’s Photo-Interviews: Belle Epoque Celebrity Homes in the Periodical Press,” in Designing the French Interior: The Modern Home and Mass Media, eds. Anca Lasc, Georgina Downey, and Mark Taylor (London: Bloomsbury, 2015): 157–66. Michael Garval’s “A Dream of Stone”: Fame, Vision, and Monumentality in Nineteenth-Century

Methods and Challenges in Deciphering Author Representations   •  17

French Literature (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004) provides a rich discussion of the workings of literary canonization over the nineteenth century.  7. La Revue Illustrée was among the most important illustrated magazines of this time dedicated to visual culture (along with L’Illustration and Le Monde Illustré) and directed toward affluent readers. The prices listed on issues from 1891 are 1.5 francs per issue or 36 francs per year. See Jean Watelet, “La Presse Illustrée en France, 1814–1914” (PhD diss., Université Panthéon-Assas, 1998), I: 256, 303–6. Like its competitors, the biweekly La Revue Illustrée featured literary works and musical compositions, travel narratives, celebrity portraits, summaries of recent plays and social happenings, and a fashion section. But La Revue Illustrée also considered itself much more “artistic” than the others because it did not initially focus on current events (article from December 1885: iv).   8.  For a selection of these interviews, see Elizabeth Emery, En toute intimité.  9. See, for example, Henri Havard’s L’Art dans la maison. La Grammaire de l’ameublement (Paris: E. Rouveyre et G. Blond, 1884), which proposed that the home was a reflection of its owner. 10.  The expression comes from Gaston Tissandier in an article describing a photograph of Louis Pasteur by Dornac. “Nos savants chez eux: M. Pasteur,” La Nature 976 (February 1892): 168–70. 11.  They appeared in all illustrated French periodicals as well as in a number of British and American ones and were subsequently used to illustrate books. Marie Mallard provides a list of the Dornac photographs she located in many French magazines (the list is not comprehensive). “Etude de la série de Dornac: nos contemporains chez eux, 1887–1917” (MA thesis, Université Paris IV, 1999). See Elizabeth Emery, Photojournalism, 67–107, 130–50, for an analysis of the photographs and their social context. 12.  See Tissandier, “Nos Savants,” 170. 13. See Dorothy Speirs, “Un genre résolument moderne,” Romance Quarterly 3–4 (1990): 301–7, and Martine Lavaud and Marie-Eve Thérenty, “Avant-Propos,” L’Interview d’écrivain, special issue of Lieux littéraires 9–10 (2006): 7–25. 14. Emery, Photojournalism, 48–55. Antoine Lilti, in Figures publiques: L’invention de la célébrité 1750–1850 (Paris: Hermann, 2014), also identifies the profusion of new journalistic genres developed in the 1880s and 1890s to expose the private life as a turning point in treatment of celebrities (349–51). 15.  These are all questions that were put to Stéphane Mallarmé in the 1890s. See Gordon Millan, Documents Stéphane Mallarmé, Nouvelle série I (Paris: Librairie Nizet, 1998). 16.  See Speirs, “Un genre,” and Lavaud and Thérenty, L’Interview d’Ecriviain, for the many ways in which authors were misquoted, interviews fabricated, or scores settled through interviews. 17.  Ely Halpérine-Kaminsky, “Alexandre Dumas intime,” La Revue Illustrée (June 15, 1893): 11–22. 18.  Ibid., 12–13.

18  •  Elizabeth Emery

19.  I am describing the pictures in order. All of them can be consulted in Emery, En toute intimité, 113–35. 20.  Halpérine-Kamisky, “Dumas intime,” 15. 21.  See Havard, L’Art dans la maison, and Emery, Photojournalism, for the preservation of homes as an extension of their creative spirit. 22.  Jules Huret, “Une Heure chez Emile Zola,” La Revue Illustrée (January–June 1892), 349. 23.  Halpérine-Kaminsky, “Dumas intime,” 11–12. 24.  Jean-Marie Seillan describes the remarkable consistency of interview methodology in his Joris-Karl Huysmans. Interviews (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2002). 25. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Macmillan, 1892). 26.  X, “Une Heure avec Edouard Drumont,” La Revue Illustrée (January-December 1892): 301–6. 27.  Ibid., 301. 28.  Michel Foucault, L’Archéologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969); Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962); Bruno Latour, Science in Action, How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (London: Routledge, 2011); Jérome Meizoz, Postures littéraires. Mises en scène modernes de l’auteur (Geneva: Slatkine Erudition, 2007). 29.  See Ingold, Being Alive, 63–64. 30.  Anne Martin-Fugier, Les salons de la IIIe République (Paris: Perrin, 2009). 31.  Huret, “Une heure chez Emile Zola,” 354. 32.  Much of this material is now available to the public as French publishers such as Classiques Garnier, Honoré Champion, and Flammarion dedicate book series to publishing previously neglected “nontraditional” works of many canonical writers. A prime example is the “journaliste” series published by Flammarion, which currently features Balzac journaliste, Hugo journaliste, and Zola journaliste. 33.  See Marie-Eve Thérenty and Alain Vaillant, eds., Presse et Plumes. Journalisme et littérature au XIXe siècle (Paris: Nouveau monde éditions, 2004), and Christian Delporte, Les Journalistes en France, 1880–1950 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1999). 34.  Musée Mallarmé, Velours et Guipure. Mallarmé’s undeserved reputation as a recluse has been corrected in many recent works, such as Rosemary Lloyd’s Mallarmé and His Circle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1999), which place the poet back into his social context. P.N. Furbank and A.M. Cain’s introduction to their translation of La Dernière Mode insists on the seemingly “nontraditional” work’s importance for understanding Mallarmé’s artistic drive. Mallarmé on Fashion: A Translation of the Fashion Magazine La Dernière Mode (London: Bloomsbury, 2004). 35.  See Thérenty and Vaillant, Presse et Plumes; Dominique Kalifa et al., eds., La Civilisation du journal. Histoire culturelle et littéraire de la presse française au XIXe siècle

Methods and Challenges in Deciphering Author Representations   •  19

(Paris: Nouveau monde éditions, 2012); Guillaume Pinson, L’Imaginaire médiathique. Histoire et fiction du journal au XIXe siècle (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2012). 36.  In the United States, Erving Goffman’s and Leo Braudy’s work on fame has been influential in the rise of “celebrity studies” and the staging of authorial identity, while in France, Jérôme Meizoz’s concept of “postures” derives from Pierre Bourdieu’s work on cultural production; Meizoz considers all authorial engagement, from writing and speeches to press releases and interviews, as in integral part of a writer’s literary production. 37. For some of these techniques, see Speirs, “Un genre,” and Lavaud and Thérenty, L’Interview d’écrivain. 38.  Christophe Charle, Les intellectuels en Europe au XIXe siècle (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1996). 39.  See, for example, Antoine Compagnon, La Troisième République des lettres: de Flaubert à Proust (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1983). 40.  On the development of this tradition, see Compagnon, La Troisième République des lettres. 41.  The author-centric nature of Lanson’s work is evident in his lukewarm response to anonymous medieval texts, for example, which he critiques for their lack of an identifiable style. 42.  Postmodern theorists have exposed the extent to which the concept of literature is subjective, always changing as a product of times and tastes. See, for example, Terry Eagleton’s Introduction to Literary Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 1–14.

CHAPTER TWO

The Haitian Literary Magazine in Francophone Postcolonial Literary and Cultural Production Chelsea Stieber

The literary magazine1 remains a largely untapped source in Francophone literary and cultural studies, particularly when it comes to questions of materiality and editorial concerns. Monographs and bound anthologies endure as the privileged source base for interrogating intellectual and cultural production in the postcolonial Francophone world, while literary magazines are rarely analyzed in their totality as cultural objects. Instead, critical accounts tend to treat literary content and the editorial intentionality of the magazine as two separate aspects. As a result, we get, on the one hand, accounts of literary movements or trends that rely on disembodied poems extracted from their original site of publication, and on the other, sweeping accounts of the social and political significance of a literary magazine and its contributors that eschews close reading. Take the example of Haiti, whose heritage of postcolonial intellectual and cultural production in French is one of the longest in the field, dating back to the declaration of Haitian independence in 1804. Throughout the entirety of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, the majority of Haitian monographs and anthologies were published in France. It follows that to rely primarily on bound books and anthologies in the study of the first 125 years of Haitian postcolonial literary and cultural production is to rely on a medium that necessarily implies an engagement with—and deference to—what Pascale Casanova calls an “international literary space.”2 Within this space are exerted “relations of force and a violence peculiar to them—in short a literary domination” that undoubtedly shape the literary and cultural material 21

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that enter into it.3 In the case of Haiti, writers and intellectuals who sought to have their books and anthologies published in Parisian publishing houses were subject to the specific tastes, preferences, and editorial exigencies of that market. Printed books and anthologies tell only a partial story about Haitian postcolonial intellectual and cultural production. By contrast, Haitian literary magazines tell another side of the story—the one that operated on the margins of the international literary space. Whereas printed books and anthologies required Haitian writers and intellectuals to move from periphery to center in order to engage with the forces of the Parisian market, Haitian magazines remained firmly anchored in their New World context. In terms of the material conditions of their production, Haitian magazines were published much more quickly than bound books were, concerned less with future posterity than with engagement with the present day on the ground in Haiti. This is not to say that Haitian magazines turned blindly inward, refusing all engagement with the world republic of letters (or its “center of all centers,” Paris),4 but rather that Haitian magazines engaged with the international literary space from a vantage point that was decidedly peripheral or decentered. In this chapter, I establish the literary magazine as a crucial source for understanding postcolonial literary and cultural production in Haiti. The form of the literary magazine, the material conditions of its production, and its marginal status in relation to the international literary field, I argue, created a space for the articulation of a decentered cultural nationalist ideology that nevertheless remained engaged with new horizons of world literature beyond Haiti’s borders. In the first section, I analyze the origins of the Haitian press and its development throughout the nineteenth century; in the second section, I trace the development of a new, decentered cultural nationalist ideology in the pages of La Revue indigène, published in Port-au-Prince from 1927 to 1928. As we will see, the magazine allows us to map Haiti’s evolving attitudes toward the literary and cultural production of the former metropole and toward the emerging global literary field of the early twentieth century.

The Colonial Continuities of the Haitian Press To understand the importance of the literary magazine in Haitian postcolonial intellectual and cultural production, it is necessary first to analyze the origins of the independent press in Haiti. Jean-Jacques Dessalines’s declaration of Haitian independence on January 1, 1804—printed on a colonial press newly repurposed as the Imprimerie du Gouvernement—marked the start of the new nation. However, the origins of the Haitian press extend back to the

The Haitian Literary Magazine   •  23

installation of the first printing press in colonial Saint-Domingue, in 1763 in Cap FranÇais (now Cap-Haïtien) and another in Port-au-Prince a few years later. While these presses were primarily installed for administrative purposes and official colonial documentation, they also became the organs of intellectual and journalistic activity on the island, printing newspapers and even plays.5 By the time Napoleon dispatched the Leclerc expedition to retake the island in 1802, Saint-Domingue was home to a thriving press-based intellectual community with over fifty newspapers and numerous cabinets littéraires (reading rooms) in the island’s bigger port cities.6 While the declaration of Haitian independence would mark a profound and radical shift in the political and economic orientation of the former colony—the emergence of the world’s first black republic and the transition in labor practices from the plantation economy toward a “counterplantation” system7—not all institutions were so thoroughly transformed. As historian Justin Emmanuel Castera argues in his landmark study of the Haitian press, one of the primary continuities of colonial rule on the island lay in domain of the press: “la presse haïtienne est restée très largement tributaire de celle de l’exmétropole, et ce tant au niveau technique qu’en ce qui a trait à ses préoccupations et à son contenu.” [The Haitian press remained largely dependent upon its colonial predecessor, both at a technical level as well as with regard to its preoccupations and content].8 For example, Haiti’s first independent newspaper, the Gazette politique et commerciale d’Haïti (1804–1806) was a continuation of the colonial Gazette officielle de Saint-Domingue (1791– 1804). Indeed, aside from names, not much changed in the fundamental inner workings of the press industry: some colonial publishers, such as Pierre Roux, simply transitioned their presses into the new independent government, while Haitian publishers took over both the material components of the press industry (machines, ink, paper) as well as the technical savoir-faire of how to run it. Haiti’s early independent newspapers were manned by men such as Juste Chanlatte and Jules Solime Milscent, both of whom had been educated in France and who had worked in the publishing industry during the colonial era. In this sense, we might see the Haitian press as always already mediated by the material form of the publication, and by the conditions of its production. The story of the independent Haitian press is thus one that is constantly negotiating its relationship to the former metropole. Though considerable research remains to be done on the material conditions of the nineteenth-century Haitian press, we can still draw a number of conclusions for the over four hundred titles (journaux, bulletins, gazettes, and revues) that appeared between 1804 and 1915.9 We know, for example, that throughout the first half of the century there were two to three functioning

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presses in each of Haiti’s major port cities of Cap-Haïtien, les Cayes, and Port-au-Prince.10 A different publisher ran each press—the state usually controlled one, and the others were run by wealthy businessmen who had enough means to fund their operations. The cost of paper remained very high throughout most of the nineteenth century; paper was also likely difficult for publishers to obtain, as it was a commodity that they would have needed to import. This expense rendered subscriptions to periodicals out of reach even for literate Haitians. A yearly subscription to L’Abeille Haytienne (Port-auPrince, 1817–1821) cost 25 Haitian gourdes, prohibitively expensive but for “une petite minorité de la population” [a small minority of the population].11 To put this price in perspective, during the same time period, a barrel of imported wheat flour (roughly two hundred pounds) cost 22 gourdes, “faisant d’une revue un produit de luxe” [making the magazine a luxury product].12 In terms of circulation, periodicals were distributed via an internal postal system that functioned in conjunction with the army (gendarme monté) until Haiti was brought into the international postal service in 1879 under President Lysius Salomon. Periodicals were printed in one city and then distributed to as many as thirteen other regional centers, including those across the border on the eastern part of the island, such as Santo Domingo and Puerto Plata.13 Censorship differed in theory and practice: under the Republican Constitution of 1806, freedom from censorship was guaranteed for all forms of writing according to Article 26: “Nul ne peut être empêché de dire, écrire et publier sa pensée. Les écrits ne peuvent être soumis à aucune censure avant leur publication. Nul ne peut être responsable de ce qu’il a écrit ou publié que dans les cas prévus par la loi” [No one shall be forbidden to say, write and publish his opinions. No writing may be subject to any censorship before publication. No one shall be responsible for what he has written or published except as otherwise provided by law].14 However, as Castera points out, in practice it was the Haitian proverb “konstitisyon se papye, bayonèt se fè” that reigned (in English the phrase means “the constitution is paper, but the bayonet is iron”—in other words, it is weapons and military might that ultimately make the laws).15 The government shut down a number of newspapers and magazines over the century, particularly under President Jean-Pierre Boyer. As for readership and the size of print runs, there are almost no official numbers, press archives, or publishing records for press publications in Haiti. The question of readership of literary magazines therefore requires us to make extrapolations and educated guesses based on the information we do have, including population numbers, literacy rates, reading practices, and

The Haitian Literary Magazine   •  25

the material objects themselves. Take, for example, the literary magazine La Ronde, which was published in Port-au-Prince from 1898 to 1902. Subscription information and price for both Port-au-Prince and “province” are listed on the title page. The back cover page lists three different locations with names and addresses—ostensibly private residences—where subscribers or perhaps even potential readers could find La Ronde locally in Port-au-Prince. It also lists the “Agents de la Province” for twelve cities throughout Haiti’s various departments—those to whom potential subscribers or readers should address themselves in order to obtain a copy or start a subscription. The price, 2 gourdes per year in Port-au-Prince and 2.30 outside of the capital city, was relatively cheap in comparison to prices for periodicals earlier in the century, suggesting that cost was not an insurmountable impediment to access. La Ronde had a long and only briefly interrupted three-year run, appearing with regularity on the fifteenth of every month (except for a suspension, from November 1899 to August 1900, which was not uncommon for Haitian magazines). The average issue ran twenty pages with rather ornate and professional front matter and typesetting, and included a roster of contributors and editors that ranked among the most notable intellectuals of the period (Dantès Bellegarde, Georges Sylvain, and Etzer Vilaire, for example). Finally, a full run of the magazine exists today (both in hard copy and microform), which suggests that enough issues were printed, purchased, and preserved in private collections to allow the magazine to weather the passage of time intact.16 From this information, we can reasonably assume that La Ronde was one of the most well financed, widely circulated and widely read literary magazines of the time period. But what does widely read mean in the Haitian context, especially if we do not have official numbers? If we take the population of Haiti at the turn of the century, roughly 1.5 million people, and literacy rates of five to ten percent, La Ronde could reach at most 150,000 literate readers.17 We can further adjust this number by taking into consideration reading practices during the period, which were based on shared access to materials, usually in learned societies and clubs, or in the private libraries of wealthy men and women. Furthermore, the specialized nature of the literary magazine, designed to carve out a new space in relation to its predecessors for its particular approach to Haitian literature and culture, suggests that its editors did not aim for it to be read by all literate men and women. Still, the presence of agents in twelve provincial cities, and the fact that journalism was a widely practiced, highly respected profession in which most educated men engaged, indicates that the magazine still had a wide appeal. Based on these considerations, we would make an educated guess that somewhere around

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three hundred copies of the magazine were printed, and that they were read by a far greater number of men and women. The specialized nature of La Ronde literary magazine also tells us much about the material transformation of the Haitian press at the turn of the century, which was fueled primarily by changes in the production of paper and print technology. Paper, which was once a scarce and expensive commodity, became cheap and widely available when production technology shifted from cotton rag to wood pulp at the end of the nineteenth century.18 The associated drastic drop in cost, along with the advent of the rotary press and the Linotype machine, helped to create a steady stream of new, specialized publications entering the Haitian market. Whereas earlier magazines and newspapers followed the same basic structure (columns covering some variation of “Intérieur,” “Finances,” “Agriculture,” “Politique,” and “Littérature”), turn-of-the-century periodicals were able to further specialize their content. This led to the appearance of a cheaper, mass press (such as the still-extant daily Le Nouvelliste, founded in 1898) and alongside it, the specialized literary magazine devoted primarily to literary criticism and creation.19 By the early 1910s, each of the major publishing cities (Les Cayes, Cap-Haïtien, and Port-au-Prince) had daily and weekly newspapers, and at least one literary magazine, with others appearing in Jérémie and Gonaïves in the 1920s. Together with the emergence of the mass press and specialized literary magazines, the early twentieth century also marked a profound shift in Haitian intellectual and cultural production toward a decidedly cultural nationalistic stance. While nineteenth-century periodicals sought to identify and bring forward the unique characteristics and inspirations that led Haitian literature beyond a simple imitation of French letters, they nevertheless remained oriented toward French literary production. Conversely, editors reconceived of the role of early twentieth-century literary magazines in Haitian cultural and intellectual production, and shifted their focus toward local, national, and indigenous forms of expression. To use historian Olivier Compagnon’s term, Haiti’s cultural nationalist reorientation was part of a larger “mutation intellectuelle” [intellectual shift] that was taking place in Latin America and the Caribbean, which he characterizes as a “tournant identitaire” [identity turn]. Intellectuals devoted increasing attention to questions of the nation and identity, which led to “l’émergence d’un nationalisme politique et culturel particulièrement prégnant durant l’entre-deux-guerres” [the emergence of a significant political and cultural nationalism during the interwar period].20 Historian and anthropologist Kate Ramsey offers a comprehensive presentation of the international literary and political landscape

The Haitian Literary Magazine   •  27

within which this new concept of Haitian cultural nationalism, known as indigénisme, developed: Catalyzed, in part by the shock of imperial domination, the poetics of what became known as indigénisme emerged in dialogue with a confluence of other post-World War I literary and political currents . . . Dada and surrealism, the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance, Garveysim, Pan-Africanism, Marxist anti-colonialism, Spengler’s theory of Western decadence, the burgeoning afrocubanismo cultural movement in Havana, and indigenismo literary currents throughout Latin America.21

The genesis of this early twentieth-century cultural nationalist reorientation is multifaceted and hemispheric, as Compagnon and Ramsey both point out. What is missing from their accounts of the period, however, is the importance of literary magazines in the articulation of this new identitarian, cultural nationalist stance. The various postwar literary and political currents that Ramsey lists, as well as the identitarian crisis that Compagnon explores (the search for argentinidad, brasilidade, haïtienneté in Latin America and the Caribbean) were literary and cultural movements that developed almost universally in the pages of literary magazines. My interest here is to further develop Ramsey and Compagnon’s analysis of cultural nationalism in the Americas, showing how the space of the literary magazine served to bolster and even shape nascent cultural nationalist movements in the early twentieth century. Building on Eric Bulson’s idea that the development of early twentieth-century “non-Western” literary magazines created a “decentered literary universe,” I propose that the Haitian literary magazine offered an alternative space for writers and intellectuals to conceive of their role outside of, or on the margins of, the French literary scene.22 No longer primarily focused on the metropole, Haitian literary magazines provided intellectuals with a new space in which to explore what was specific to Haitian culture, while also imagining new ways of situating Haitian national literature in the world.

La Revue indigène as a Cultural Object We find a prime example of this turn toward a more identitarian-focused cultural nationalism in La Revue indigène, a specialized literary magazine published in Port-au-Prince from 1927 to 1928. La Revue indigène is one of the most well-known Haitian literary magazines and yet it has never been studied in its totality as a cultural object. Most scholarly treatments of the

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magazine extract select poems to analyze in detail, but decline to engage in any substantive way with the editorials, advertising, essays, and various paratext that comprise the totality of the magazine. This kind of selective reading leads to an incomplete consideration of what is in actuality a complex and sometimes conflicting cultural nationalist project. Furthermore, this selective practice has made it easier to conflate La Revue indigène’s discrete cultural nationalist project with subsequent cultural and political movements that advocated more narrow, closed nationalist ideologies (as presented in Les Griots scientific and literary magazine in the late 1930s).23 It is worth noting here that most recent scholarly analyses of La Revue indigène work from a reproduction of the original magazine that, though not indicated, has been stripped of all inside cover and back cover matter, as well as the errata attached to each issue.24 In the section that follows, I propose a close reading of a single issue of the magazine using a complete, original hard copy set of the magazine’s short run (five bound issues, including one double issue).25 As I show, it is through the material space of the magazine that we can best grasp the varied, sometimes seemingly contradictory nature of the magazine’s “indigénisme.” La Revue indigène’s cultural nationalist project is at once highly local and cosmopolitan in scope; at once closed off, filled with arcane referents discernable only to initiated insiders, and open to new horizons in world literature. Here, Bulson’s idea of the decentered literary universe is key: the writers and intellectuals who contributed to La Revue indigène reoriented their focus away from Paris and toward Port-au-Prince, which served as their new center or “Greenwich Meridian” of literary production (to use Casanova’s term). However, this does not mean that they turned blindly inward, toward a militant localism. Instead, this young generation of writers and intellectuals sought to produce a national cultural “school” that reflected Haiti’s unique sensibilities (as they defined them), but that remained in conversation with world literatures and literary markets beyond Haiti’s borders (see figure 2.1). Issue No. 3 dates from September 1927. The front cover matter is printed on coarse, thick raspberry pink paper and contains the issue number, date, title, members of the magazine’s team (divided between director, managing editor, and founders), summary of the issue’s content, and the imprint, name, and address of the publishing house. The title font, in all capitals, evokes the local, yet cosmopolitan nature of the magazine: the gothic-style typeface is both ornate and somewhat rustic, as if the characters were stamped out of hand-carved woodcuts. There is a border that suggests a similar ornate, but artisanal woodcut feel. On the inside cover there is a full-page advertisement for a local Port-au-Prince business, the Suzon photo studio. The inside back

Figure 2.1.   Front cover of La Revue indigène. Image courtesy of the Fonds patrimoniaux of the Médiathèque Valery Larbaud.

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cover contains two advertisements, both for businesses located in Portau-Prince: one for the Abraham & Savain photographers, who specialize in developing photo negatives for “amateurs photographes,” the other for Sroco, an optical factory and laboratory (see figure 2.2). Opposite the back cover there are three advertisements for local businesses: the terrace at the El Dorado that claims to serve the best drinks; Edouard Mathon’s factory that makes various sizes of paper bags that are cheaper (and are less hassle to order) than those made abroad; and André Isidore, a master tailor who specializes in modern cuts and suits for every occasion. The back cover contains a full-page ad with subscription information for La Revue mondiale, a literary magazine published in Paris, as well as the contact information for its publishing arm, Les Editions de la Revue Mondiale, which published a number of Haitian poetry collections and anthologies under the series title “Collection haïtienne d’expression française.”26 The format of the magazine follows the basic international publishing conventions that governed literary magazines of the era—a printed front cover with an artfully designed title font, a list of the magazine’s main contributors and of the content of the current issue, with advertisements printed on the inside front and back covers—which rendered it legible or accessible to readers beyond Haiti’s borders. What was being advertised, however, was local: La Revue indigène was published on the ground in Port-au-Prince at the Imprimerie Modèle, and relied on local businesses for advertising rev-

Figure 2.2.  Advertisement for a local Port-au-Prince business from the inside back cover of La Revue indigène. Image courtesy of the Fonds patrimoniaux of the Médiathèque Valery Larbaud.

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enue. Even the advertisement for La Revue mondiale, though originating in Paris, was tailored to a local Haitian readership. The presence of these local Haitian advertisements in La Revue indigène is significant because Haitian publishers had only just begun in the early 1920s to use the inside front and back covers as advertising space, exploring new capabilities in graphic design and photo reproduction. Up to this point, Haitian readers had only experienced advertisements as a paratext in foreign literary magazines that were shipped from France, such as La Nouvelle revue française, La Revue mondiale, and Mercure de France, among many others. These French magazines were filled with advertisements that ranged from highbrow (Parisian publishing houses, literary magazines, and art dealers) to pedestrian (pills for “intestinal reeducation” and classified ads), each referencing names, addresses, and events that had little connection to Port-au-Prince. The preponderance of local Haitian businesses and establishments among the advertisements in La Revue indigène—names of businessmen, local addresses, well-known restaurants and bars—had an impact on Haitian readers’ experience of the material object of the magazine. These local paratexts created a sense of familiarity or homeyness for the reader within the space of the magazine itself, which we can understand in relation to the sense of dépaysement or unhomeyness likely created by the space of a French literary magazine. Here, I see Robert Scholes’s call to consider art and advertising as a central, inescapable pairing in Anglophone modernist magazines as equally applicable to early twentiethcentury Haitian literary magazines.27 Far from extraneous paratexts that warrant removal from reprints or bound library volumes, advertisements are a key component to understanding the way in which Haitian readers experienced the Haitian literary magazine as a cultural space. Beyond the paratextual apparatus that was common to most international literary magazines, La Revue indigène’s content was also standard for literary magazines of the era, with an opening editorial piece (usually from the magazine’s director or managing editor) interspersed with selected excerpts from well-known writers, as well as poems, interviews, essays, and short stories. As we can see from its table of contents, Issue No. 3 contains: an opening editorial by the magazine’s director, Emile Roumer, seeking to clarify the magazine’s cultural project, followed by a selection of poems by a contemporary Cuban poet, Rafael García Barcéna, translated by one of the founders of the magazine, Jacques Roumain; a selected essay from La Poésie pure by French literary critic and member of the Académie française Henri Brémond; a short essay by one of the magazine’s founders, Carl Brouard, dedicated to the young, deceased French modernist poet Raymond Radiguet followed by a poem written in memoriam of Radiguet by the managing edi-

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tor Philippe-Thoby Marcelin; an essay by Marcelin on the French novelist Francis de Miomandre followed by a selection from Miomandre’s novel Écrit sur de l’eau; a transcription of an interview between one of the magazine’s founders, Antonio Vieux, and Roumain, followed by a short collection of Roumain’s poems entitled “Le Buvard,” and a vignette he wrote on bullfighting while living in Spain; an excerpt of a short story by German writer Hanns Heinz Ewers (identified in the magazine erroneously as Frank Braun, a character in Ewers’s novels), translated by Roumain; a short modernist poem by a founding member of the magazine, Daniel Heurtelou, followed by a diptych of poems by Roumer; an unattributed translation (though likely done by Roumain, the magazine’s resident polyglot) of a poem by Dominican poet Fabio Fiallo; a selection from the Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran’s (or Gebran Kalil Gebran, as he is referred to in the magazine) collection entitled Le Prophète, translated by one of the magazine’s contributors, Salim Aun; and finally, an installment of a short story written by Marcelin that the magazine was publishing in serial. The magazine’s content was eclectic, certainly, but not simply for the sake of appearing erudite or to differentiate the magazine from its competitors or literary forefathers. The magazine’s founders and contributors sought to curate a specific cultural object that was at once patriotic, grounded in Haitian soil, and outward looking, with a more cosmopolitan worldview. As I have argued elsewhere,28 La Revue indigène espoused a form of cosmopolitan cultural nationalism, a term that I develop from Kwame Anthony Appiah’s notion of cosmopolitan patriotism in which the worldly and the local are productively deployed together in postcolonial intellectual production.29 Emile Roumer’s editorial “Eclaircissements” touches on these two main poles—the cosmopolitan and the cultural nationalist—of La Revue indigène’s project in the first sentences of his essay. Responding to criticism from the older, established intellectual class in Haiti that the young contributors were iconoclasts who sought to provoke their literary forefathers, Roumer states resolutely: “Nous ne sommes pas incendiaires et notre souci est d’écrire assez bien pour que notre école nationale puisse avoir une place honorable dans la littérature haïtienne” [We are not instigators and our concern is with writing well enough so that our national school might have an honorable place within Haitian letters].30 He staunchly defends the magazine’s motives as nationalist, even patriotic, but does not see this as mutually exclusive of a worldview that looks outside of the nation for inspiration and enrichment. In fact, Roumer sees La Revue indigène’s “national school” as having force only if and when it is able to reach beyond the borders of the island nation and engage with other national literatures: “Nos écrivains ne sont pas con-

The Haitian Literary Magazine   •  33

nus dans le monde . . . nous voulons modifier cet état de choses injustes et que la Muse haïtienne puisse placer son mot dans les aspirations passionnées des autres peuples” [Our writers are not known in the world . . . we want to change this unjust state of affairs so that the Haitian Muse might inspire the passionate yearnings of other peoples].31 The young poet Jacques Roumain further expounds upon Roumer’s description of La Revue indigène’s project in his interview with Vieux in the same issue: “Je crois que ceux qui nous ont précédés . . . sont complètement désintéressés de la marche de la littérature mondiale . . . Aux XXe siècle . . . on est un citoyen du monde” [I think that those who came before us . . . were completely uninterested in the evolution of world literature . . . In the twentieth century . . . we are world citizens].32 Roumain’s belief in world citizenship and a new era of “littérature mondiale” was shared by the young generation of men who contributed to La Revue indigène; they had all studied abroad in Europe in the early 1920s, and returned home to Haiti with a sense that literature was much broader than the francocentric conceptions of their Haitian predecessors accounted for. The magazine devoted considerable space to exploring this new world literature for its readership—a literary space that Roumain described as his generation’s duty to explore: “des horizons insoupçonnés qu’on se doit de découvrir” [unexpected horizons that we have a duty to discover].33 In order to bring these new horizons of world literature to their readers, the magazine included works from neighboring regions and across the globe, becoming one of the first Haitian literary magazines to consistently publish work in translation. Beyond the poems, short stories, and literary selections from the Dominican Republic, Germany, and Lebanon that we see in Issue No. 3, other issues of the magazine included contemporary work from Cuba, Mexico, and the United States, as well as essays and epigraphs dedicated to early Persian lyric poets. In addition to advertisements, editorial essays, and translated work, the magazine also curated original poetic work by La Revue indigène’s founding members, as well as by other young Port-au-Princean intellectuals and artists. What is interesting about these poetic contributions is that, though avant-garde and experimental, their form nevertheless remains closely tied to the trends and innovations of the reigning early twentieth-century maîtres of French avant-garde poetry. For example, Roumain’s “Le Buvard” poetry collection in Issue No. 3 reads very much like a series of image poems styled after Pierre Reverdy. Written in unrhymed free verse and making generous use of enjambment, the simply titled poems “Insomnie,” “Orage,” and “Calme,” evoke the short image poems in Reverdy’s Les Epaves du ciel, such as “Matin,” “Air,” “Rue,” “Orage,” and “Regard,” to name a few. Other poetic

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contributions to the magazine, such as Heurtelou’s “Poème” in Issue No. 3, are styled in the more futurist vein of Guillaume Apollinaire or F.T. Marinetti. His short fourteen-line free verse poem uses rhythm and enjambment to personify Port-au-Prince’s main thoroughfare, describing it as a “ventre insatiable” [insatiable belly] that swallows up automobiles as they sputter between its banks. Conversely, though Roumer pugnaciously defends his fellow contributors’ use of free verse in his programmatic editorial “Eclaircissements” [clarifications], his own poetic contributions eschew modernist verslibrisme [free verse] and are instead structured using rhythm, rhyme, and metered verse in the style of early twentieth-century French poets of the lighthearted post-Symbolist école fantaisiste, such as Tristan Derème and Paul-Jean Toulet. At first glance, it seems inconsistent that La Revue’s indigène’s writers would proclaim themselves an “école nationale” [national school] while drawing heavily from literary authorities of the former metropole. How are we to make sense of the inclusion of excerpts from literary authorities such as Henri Brémond, Georges Duhamel, and Rainer Maria Rilke (who, though Austrian, wrote numerous poems in French), or the inclusion of panegyric essays written on French modernists such as Raymond Radiguet, Valery Larbaud, and Pierre Reverdy? Roumain addresses this seeming contradiction in his interview with Vieux: “Que nous allions chercher les maîtres de notre forme parmi les écrivains français, rien de plus naturel. Mais qu’ils ne deviennent tout de même pas les maîtres de notre sensibilité” [It is only natural that we would seek out the masters of our form among French writers. But may they never become the masters of our sensibility].34 His distinction between “forme” and “sensibilité” is illuminating: for Roumain it is not the formal means by which the poem is communicated that constitutes its originality or its effect, but rather the feeling that the poet is able to communicate through the use of both form and content. Indeed, the magazine’s poets believed strongly that avant-garde formal innovations provided them with new strategies and techniques to more accurately portray a properly Haitian “sensibilité” to the reader than did the highly structured, finely wrought alexandrine verse favored by the older Haitian literary establishment. By combining French avant-garde techniques with uniquely Haitian referents, La Revue indigène poets sought to capture the impression of the more intangible qualities of the Haitian lived reality—sensory experiences and the rhythm of daily life. In all of the original poetic contributions to the magazine—Heurtelou’s short futurist vignettes, Roumain’s Reverdian image poems, or Roumer’s Derèmian contre-rimes—the “sensibilité” evoked by each is wholly Haitian.

The Haitian Literary Magazine   •  35

The poets are successful in creating a properly Haitian feel primarily through content: Haitian referents (kreyòl phrases and culture-specific terms), images (flora, fauna, local color), and culture (folklore and Vodou) render their literary production both relevant and compelling in a “world literature” context, and also unmistakably Haitian. In so doing, their poetry attempts to capture the impression or even recreate through verse the more intangible qualities of the Haitian lived reality. These poetic contributions are in keeping with the magazine’s larger cultural project, which was to both rejuvenate and modernize Haitian literary production at home, and also reassert this national literary production within a more worldly intellectual constellation.

Conclusion There are a number of twentieth-century Francophone literary magazines that remain to be studied in their totality as cultural objects: Légitime défense (1932), Tropiques (1941–45), Bingo (1953–83), and Ethiopiques (1975–), to name only a few of the most well known. Each has a story to tell about the ways in which different intellectual, geographic, and generational groups negotiated their relationship to the former metropole through the space of the magazine. In the case of Haiti, the magazine offers a privileged site for the evolving attitudes of postcolonial production toward literary and cultural production in the former metropole, allowing us to map Haiti’s changing relationship to French culture and the emerging global literary field of the early twentieth century. By analyzing the magazine in its entirety we gain insight into the complexities of the cultural nationalist ideology that Haitian intellectuals developed in the early twentieth century. The independent Haitian press—and the postcolonial Francophone press more broadly—is always in some way negotiating its relationship to the former metropole. The format of the magazine itself remains inextricably linked to Paris, and yet the transformations in the material conditions of its production at the turn of the twentieth century allowed the form to take on new significance as a cultural space. Through an analysis of the magazine’s paratextual apparatus as well as its editorial and poetic content, we see that the magazine allowed its contributors the freedom to work on the margins of the Eurocentric international literary space. The literary magazine became a decentered space in which writers and intellectuals refocused their worldview, moving from a narrow Francocentric gaze to a more properly Haitian vantage point. They were thus able to look anew at what constituted a national literary and cultural identity, and to consider

36  •  Chelsea Stieber

its place within a wider panorama of “la littérature mondiale” that was just beginning to come into focus.

Notes   1.  Known in French as the revue littéraire, the revista literaria in Spanish, and the “little magazine” or “small magazine” in Anglophone circles, the literary magazine was specifically devoted to literary creation and criticism. Haitian magazines certainly shared elements of the Anglophone “little magazine,” which Ezra Pound first defined in 1930 as the small modernist magazines that emerged alongside, and in response to, the emergence of mass magazines. Still, the two are not entirely comparable, and so I have chosen to use the English translation “literary magazine” instead of “little magazine” to avoid the narrower notion of the Anglophone “little magazine.”  2. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M.B. Debevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), xii. Casanova defines her term, via historian Fernand Braudel and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, as “a literary universe relatively independent of the everyday world and its political divisions, whose boundaries and operational laws are not reducible to those of ordinary political space” (xii).  3. Ibid.  4. Ibid.  5. Pierre Force, “Race et citoyenneté dans la carrière et les écrits de Charles Henri d’Estaing (1729–1794),” L’Esprit Créateur 56, no. 1 (2016): 68–81.   6.  Justin Emmanuel Castera, Bref coup d’oeil sur les origines de la presse haïtienne. 1764–1850 (Port-au-Prince: Henri Deschamps, 1986), 16.   7.  Laurent Dubois, “Thinking Haiti’s Nineteenth Century,” Small Axe 18, no. 2 (2014): 72.  8. Castera, Origines, 5. Frenand Léger, a PhD student at the University of Toronto, is currently preparing an article, “L’Histoire de la presse en Haïti,” that builds on Castera’s foundational study by focusing on the twentieth-century press in Haiti.   9.  Recent scholarship on early Haitian writers such as Jean Louis Vastey (Baron de) and Juste Chanlatte (Comte de Rosiers) has contributed greatly to our understanding of the role of the press in the immediate postindependence period. See Marlene Daut’s Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015); Chris Bongie, “The Cry of History: Juste Chanlatte and the Unsettling (Presence) of Race in Early Haitian Literature,” MLN 130, no. 4 (2015): 807–35; and Doris Garraway, “Print, Publics, and the Scene of Universal Equality in the Kingdom of Henry Christophe,” L’Esprit Créateur 56, no. 1 (2016): 82–100. 10.  When Simon Bolívar landed in les Cayes in 1815 seeking refuge during the independence fight in Latin America, Haitian president Alexandre Pétion provided him with arms, munitions, and soldiers, as well as access to a printing press in order to relaunch his offensive against the Spanish. 11. Castera, Origines, 42.

The Haitian Literary Magazine   •  37

12.  Ibid., 40–42. 13.  Ibid., 60, 96. 14.  Laurent Dubois, Julia Gaffield, and Michel Acacia, Constitutional Documents of Haiti 1790-1860 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 70. 15. Castera, Origines, 50. 16.  This is not the case for many Haitian periodicals, and certainly not for the more obscure, less well-financed magazines. Many from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries exist in incomplete runs, if they can be found at all. 17.  United States Bureau of the Census, Haiti: Summary of Biostatistics (Washington: Bureau of the Census, 1945), 33–34. 18. Richard Kaplan, “Press, Paper, and the Public Sphere: The Rise of Cheap Mass Press in the USA, 1870–1910,” Media History 21, no. 1 (2015): 44. 19. For more on the simultaneous appearance of mass periodicals and specialized literary magazines in the United States, see Robert Scholes’s Afterword “Small Magazines, Large Ones, and Those In-Between” in Little Magazines & Modernism: New Approaches, eds. Suzanne W. Churchill and Adam McKible (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007). 20.  Olivier Compagnon, L’Adieu à l’Europe: L’Amérique latine et la Grande Guerre (Paris: Fayard, 2013), 14. 21. Kate Ramsey, The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 178. 22.  Eric Bulson, “Little Magazine, World Form,” in The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, ed. Mark Wollager and Matt Eatough (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 270. 23.  See Lyonel Trouillot’s description of Duvalierism’s “récupération criminelle” of indigénisme in his roundtable discussion in Pierre Buteau, Michel Acacia, Lyonel Trouillot and Maurice Lévêque, “Table Ronde,” Conjonction 198 (1993): 116. 24.  Either the 1971 Kraus reprint: La Revue indigène: 1927–1928 (Nendeln, Lichtenstein: Krauss Reprint, 1971) or the 1982 Impressions Magiques reprint: La Revue indigène (Port-au-Prince: Impressions magiques, 1982). 25. I located this complete paper set in Valery Larbaud’s archives held at the Médiathèque Valery-Larbaud in Vichy, France. Larbaud, a consummate cosmopolitan man of letters, was fascinated by New World poets and writers and engaged in lengthy correspondence with many of them, including two of the main Reuve indigène officers, Emile Roumer and Philippe-Thoby Marcelin, who sent him issues of the magazine as they came out. 26.  This same publishing house would produce La Revue du monde noir just a few years later, from 1931 to 1932. 27.  See Robert Scholes, “Afterword: Small Magazines.” 28.  See Chelsea Stieber, “The Vocation of the Indigènes: Cosmopolitanism and Cultural Nationalism in la Revue indigène,” Francosphères 4, no. 1 (2015): 7–19. 29. Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Patriots,” Critical Inquiry 23, no. 3 (1997): 617–39. On modernity, cosmopolitanism, and indigenisme in Haiti, see

38  •  Chelsea Stieber

Valerie Kaussen, Migrant Revolutions: Haitian Literature, Globalization, and U.S. Imperialism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005). 30.  Emile Roumer, “Eclaircissements,” La Revue indigène 3 (1927): 89. 31.  Ibid., 89–90. 32.  Antonio Vieux, “Entre Nous: Jacques Roumain,” La Revue indigène 3 (1927): 103. 33. Ibid. 34.  Ibid., 33.

PART II

RACE AND IDENTITY IN POPULAR PERFORMANCE

CHAPTER THREE

Reading Race in NineteenthCentury French Vaudeville Lise Schreier

In 1811, vaudevilliste Charles-Augustin Sewrin “fit courir tout Paris” [became the toast of Paris] with a new play entitled Les Habitans des Landes.1 He delighted his audience for weeks with the story of Tremblin, a servant lost in the Landes countryside who, having just read a book about “Affrique,” believes himself to be surrounded by “Hottentots.”2 Engravings of the terrifying creatures he encounters provide information about their physical traits: the first one is pale, lean, and tall, and walks on stilts; the second is a woman of color dressed in what the public would have identified as a traditional African costume, replete with a headdress and a coral necklace (figure 3.1 and figure 3.2). Tremblin’s panic was comical because the audience understood that the frightening male “Hottentot” was also wearing a traditional outfit, that of a Landais shepherd, and that the woman was merely a black chambermaid stranded in the area when her mistress’s carriage broke down. Tremblin’s initial distress was one of the high points of the play. Not only did he not know how to identify people of color, but he also was afraid of them, contrary to the other characters––most of them French peasants––and the audience in the theatre, who were used to interracial encounters. This play is a typical example of the kind of humor displayed by vaudevillistes, who frequently created laughable characters who knew less than everybody else, both those on stage and in the audience. It is also representative of the presence of characters of color in vaudeville, a presence that has yet to be unpacked. “Les vaudevillistes sont innombrables, comme les sauterelles d’Egypte, avec qui ils ont plus d’une ressemblance” [vaudeville writers are countless, 41

Figure 3.1.  “Mlle. PAULINE, rôle de CLAREINE, dans les Habitans des Landes, Vaudeville.” Paris: Martinet Libraire, 1811. Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Figure 3.2.  “BRUNET, rôle de TREMBLIN dans les Habitans des Landes, Vaudeville.” Paris: Martinet Libraire, 1811. Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

44  •  Lise Schreier

like grasshoppers in Egypt, which they also resemble in more than one way], complained Théophile Gautier in his Histoire de l’art dramatique depuis vingtcinq ans.3 While this theatrical genre dating from the seventeenth century was not held in high esteem by many of those with grand literary ambitions, its commercial success was unrivaled at the time. Its stock characters, parodic tone, and songs so simple they could be sung by just about anyone delighted vast audiences. In a thriving theater culture, vaudeville productions outnumbered other popular genres by significant margins. Between 1815 and 1830, for instance, 1,300 new vaudevilles were staged in Paris, compared to 369 comedies, 280 melodramas, and 200 comic operas.4 More than half of the theatrical productions of the 1830s and 1840s were vaudevilles.5 Even more strikingly, by the end of the 1840s, the number of vaudeville tickets sold annually in Paris reached almost three million at a time when the population of the capital was scarcely a million.6 If the number of vaudevillistes was great, so too were the audiences of men and women who attended vaudeville productions night after night. The contempt of literary luminaries such as Gautier might explain why studies of nineteenth-century vaudeville theater are scarce.7 Indeed, these formulaic plays, often written in a few hours, hastily produced and centered on anecdotes and quips that are not easily legible today, have not been taken seriously by scholars interested in the canonical history of French letters. But the putative lack of literary value of these comedies is certainly not the only reason so little scholarship about vaudeville exists. The genre presents readers with significant methodological challenges. To begin with, simply mining this vast and somewhat opaquely catalogued corpus can be daunting. By some estimates, more than ten thousand vaudevilles were performed in Paris during the nineteenth century,8 and many of these still exist in both printed and manuscript form.9 In addition, we no longer have the cultural competence to access this particular genre. If a sense of vaudeville’s predictable plots, repetitive jokes, and normative endings provides us with a way to measure the distance between modern theatrical practices and those of nineteenth-century France, it does little to help us understand its appeal to vast audiences. Because vaudeville theater was an immediate product of its time, anyone wishing to access these texts today with any degree of precision needs to possess a nuanced understanding of French social, economic, and political history. Finally, vaudeville’s most fundamental aspect, its performative and interactive dimension—the public sang along and audibly reacted to a play during its representation—is all but lost to us. Attempting to decipher a form of entertainment based on a centuries-old visual, verbal, and musical system we no longer comprehend is an arduous task. All these obstacles

Reading Race in Nineteenth-Century French Vaudeville   •  45

have implications for the way that scholars, and performers, approach French vaudeville today. Challenges aside, this dominant form of mass entertainment can tell us much about the social mores, political issues, and thought patterns of its time. By way of example, in what follows I look at how people of color were presented to vaudeville audiences during the first half of the nineteenth century. I argue that the frequent and wildly diverging representations of blackness in these comedies offer us new and valuable insights into the perceptions of race in France. I investigate plays produced between two key historical moments, the 1794 and 1848 abolitions,10 to show that black characters were an integral component of vaudeville, and that the genre, for all of its predictability, presented them in ways that often transcended racial difference. I begin with a survey of these vaudevilles to demonstrate the varied and complex manner in which the genre presented “nègres” and “négresses.” Next, I turn to one of the most fundamental aspects of vaudeville, its music, to propose that its songs reveal significant information about nineteenth-century France’s understanding of race. The last part of this chapter focuses on how censors assessed these plays before they were put on stage, and suggests that those very first readers have much to teach us about initial responses to such representations of race.11 Here I show that vaudeville provides fruitful insights about nineteenth-century French society and history; my hope is that scholars of Cultural Studies will begin to explore the genre more extensively.

Staging Racial Difference Nonwhite characters abound in nineteenth-century plays. This is partly because off-stage encounters with various peoples were increasingly common as was a growing preoccupation with their status, and partly because exoticism was in vogue and writers knew that “race was a subject that paid.”12 Between the 1780s and the late 1840s, stage portrayals of blacks––many, but not all, identified as slaves––varied from benevolent to aggressively demeaning, as political, ideological, and economic contexts shifted. If vaudeville generally followed the same patterns as those of other theatrical genres in its representations of non-Europeans, it limited the range of emotions such characters elicited. Unlike melodrama, for instance, vaudeville never featured persecuted, heroic, or violent dark-skinned protagonists.13 Vaudeville, after all, aimed to draw laughter rather than pity, admiration, or horror. Quantifying the appearances of dark-skinned characters in French vaudevilles is a complex endeavor. Vaudevilles featuring protagonists of color are relatively easy to identify by title, as they often include words such as “nègre”

46  •  Lise Schreier

or “négresse.” Those including secondary black roles are harder to pinpoint, as is the case with Les Habitans des Landes. Nonspeaking parts of course are even more difficult to catalog, although costume and prop sections of technical handbooks written for playhouse directors such as Jean-Baptiste Colson’s Manuel dramatique indicate that black figurants were a regular presence on stage.14 A play’s success or failure provides additional information about the visibility of these characters in vaudeville theaters. If some productions did not last, others were immensely popular. Le Nègre aubergiste (1794),15 for instance, opened a few days after the first abolition of slavery and was performed for several months, in good part because it was a propaganda piece written along with the new law.16 Le Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1839) was equally successful, albeit for very different reasons, as an 1841 article from the Galerie de la presse indicates: Cent représentations n’ont pas terni la fraîcheur de ce vaudeville qui ramène la foule dans la salle des Variétés, salle charmante à laquelle manquait cependant, depuis quelque temps, le plus bel ornement, c’est-à-dire un public nombreux. Le Chevalier de Saint-Georges restera long-temps [sic] encore gravé dans la mémoire du caissier du théâtre. Soixante à quatre-vingt recettes de mille écus sont choses rares dans tous les théâtres et dans tous les temps: cela fait époque dans les annales dramatiques. [A hundred shows did not diminish the novelty of this vaudeville, which draws crowds back to the Variétés theater, a charming theater missing, however, until recently, the most beautiful feature, that is, a large audience. Le Chevalier de Saint-Georges will remain etched in the memory of the theater’s cashier for a long time. Sixty to eighty nights of a thousand écus are rare in any playhouse: it is a milestone in the history of theater.]17

Finally, many of these vaudevilles were published, which gave theater directors outside Paris the opportunity to present dark-skinned characters to other audiences as well. All this to say that while an exhaustive list of black vaudeville characters is all but impossible to compile, sufficient evidence is available to assert that they continually appeared on stage during the first half of the nineteenth century.18 Vaudevilles with leading roles attributed to black characters have two characteristics in common. First, they define the characters by their skin tone and identify them by the use of such words as “nègre,” “négresse,” “noir,” or “noire.” The plays provide no other information about their background or ethnicity, and geography is secondary at best. When characters of color are portrayed outside of metropolitan France, they reside in various places, such as Baltimore (Les Deux Colons, 1818), Senegal (Oréno, ou le bon nègre, 1826),

Reading Race in Nineteenth-Century French Vaudeville   •  47

New Orleans (M. Potard, ou le nègre blanc, 1835),19 or Haiti (La Fin d’une République ou Haïti en 1849, 1849), but their surroundings are described in such generic ways that they could just as well be living anywhere. A review of Malheureux comme un nègre (1847), which takes place in the Caribbean, shows the extent to which verisimilitude did not matter at the time, as the reviewer reported that the protagonist was scantily clad because “Il fait si chaud au Canada!” [It’s so hot in Canada!].20 This explains why a vaudevilliste could easily change the location of a plot from one locale to another, even when he had already produced a complete draft of a play. All that had to be done was to cross out the name of one country or city and replace it with an other, as the manuscript of Jouhaud’s unpublished Le Tremblement de terre de la Martinique (1840, subsequently titled Le Tremblement de terre de Mexico) indicates. With a few strokes of a red pen “Martinique” and “Saint-Pierre” became “Mexique” and “Mexico,” while no changes whatsoever were made to the black character.21 Second, all vaudeville plays including dark-skinned protagonists feature cross-racial desire, a theme frequently used to highlight or question the humanity of people of African descent. In La Négresse ou le pouvoir de la reconnaissance (1787), for example, young African Zilia meets a Frenchman, Dorval, stranded on her island after a shipwreck. They fall in love, and when the rescue mission led by Dorval’s father finally arrives, they decide to embark for France together and get married there. The hero’s father is delighted at the idea of taking the young woman along with them: “Venez, Zilia, venez en France montrer un modèle de bienfaisance et d’humanité” [Come, Zilia, come to France and serve as a model of benevolence and humanity].22 In contrast, Le Laquais d’un nègre (1852) presents a radically different picture. In this vaudeville, a black male character’s desire for a white woman is marked as illicit. Guadeloupean former slave Domingo apparently inherits money from his old master, moves to France, and falls in love with a white Parisian woman who refuses to marry him: “CORINNE, indignée: Jamais! . . . un mari noir!” [Corinne, indignant: I would never! . . . a black husband!].23 Domingo’s fortune, it turns out, was really Corinne’s father’s, a plot twist that defuses the threat of an interracial rapprochement. In the final scene, Domingo’s inferior status is reaffirmed, which proscribes any possibility of him consummating his desire: he becomes Corinne and her father’s servant, and they tell him that he will be stuffed like a monkey when he dies. If both plays center on the possibility of an interracial union, the first one celebrates it––despite the fact that mixed marriages would only become legal in 179124––while the other, written after the abolition of slavery, condemns it by presenting it as lunacy, and in so doing disputes Domingo’s very humanity.25

48  •  Lise Schreier

While representations of a black man’s desire had more threatening implications, vaudevilles also told love stories between dark-skinned men and white women that ended happily. This is the case with Arlequin Cruello, parodie d’Othello (1792), written and produced as Shakespeare’s Othello was being staged in Paris.26 In this vaudeville, Doulcemone’s father is first dismayed to learn that his daughter fell in love with Arlequin Cruello: Dis-moi, par quel affreux pouvoir Tu séduis une âme aussi blanche, Avec un visage aussi noir! [Tell me, by what horrible power do you seduce such a white soul With such a black face!]27

By the end of the play, he has given the young couple his blessing. Here the well-worn plot of the father opposing his daughter’s marriage has an interesting twist: Doulcemone’s father first objects to his daughter marrying Arlequin not because of his prospective son-in-law’s social standing, as is often the case in vaudeville, but because he is black. Arlequin, of course, is not traditionally a dark-skinned character; but this popular commedia dell’arte jester wears a black mask on stage—and has done so for centuries.28 Turning this familiar and beloved character into a French Othello at that particular moment underlines race’s performative dimension. It also emphasizes vaudeville’s unique capacity to play with and sometimes deemphasize racial constructs. In fact, this comedy’s final number states: C’est d’après sa façon de voir Qu’au théâtre on compose. Le sujet que l’un voit en noir, L’autre le voit en rose. [It is according one’s point of view That we tell stories in the theater. The subject that one sees as black, Another sees as pink.]29

Doulcemone’s love for Arlequin, in other words, should not be seen as a tragic event. Vaudevilles featuring secondary dark-skinned characters, perhaps more so than those with blacks protagonists, suggest that the appearance of people of color was frequently not presented as something out of the ordinary. Honorine

Reading Race in Nineteenth-Century French Vaudeville   •  49

ou la femme difficile à vivre (1795) is a case in point. The play (penned by one of the authors of La Négresse ou le pouvoir de la reconnaissance) centers around a marital dispute between a Frenchman and his spouse Honorine. In a subplot, their servant Zago falls in love with Honorine’s chambermaid Louise. While Zago is black and Louise is white, the romance between servants is a success. Zago’s skin color is noted but only to be downplayed: ZAGO Moi trop noir. LOUISE Je ne m’en aperçois plus guères [sic]. Duo de la Bohémienne En toi douceur, franchise, Aux yeux de ta Louise; Effacent ta couleur: Oui, mon cher, ton bon cœur Adoucit ta couleur. [ZAGO Me too black. LOUISE I hardly notice any more. Duet of La Bohémienne Your gentleness, honesty, In the eyes of your Louise; Erase your skin color: Yes, my dear, your good heart Softens your color.]30

The relationship between Zago and Louise highlights the permeability of racial barriers, in contrast to the dangers of Honorine’s problematic behavior, which could lead to divorce (a politically contested topic in the 1790s). Zago’s race is not just downplayed in the text; it is also banalized in a print portraying a member of the cast. The image includes Zago in the exact same way that vaudeville engravings depicted secondary characters in this period—smaller and in the distance. Exaggerated physical features frequently employed in representations of blacks are entirely absent here (figure 3.3 and 3.4).31 The abovementioned Tremblement de terre de la Martinique/du Mexique (1840) provides a later example of a secondary dark-skinned character whose inclusion in the plot points to the relative normalization of interracial encounters. Toward the end of the play, a white Frenchman settled in Saint-Pierre (Martinique) takes his black wife Nika to Paris. Even if the

Figure 3.3.   Honorine, ou la Femme difficile à vivre. Paris: Hautecoeur Martinet, 1795. Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Figure 3.4.   Les deux Lions. Paris: Martinet Imprimeur-Libraire, 1810. Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

52  •  Lise Schreier

jokes borne out of the parodic intensification of the other characters’ surprise when they realize Nika is black make a modern reader cringe, her “mariage d’inclination” to a rich white merchant is in itself neither fundamentally questioned, nor compromised. On the contrary, the Frenchman’s love for his wife is pictured in surprising detail for a theatrical genre not known for its attention to psychology. The besotted man depicts his wife as “une petite femme adorable” [an adorable little woman]32 with “une conversation très agréable” [a very pleasant conversation],33 who likes “les lettres et le dessin, mais pour la scène elle penche” [reading and drawing, but above all the theater].34 When asked why he married a black woman, he merely shrugs: “les goûts et les couleurs” [to each his own taste].35 Furthermore, if Nika is presented as a caricature of blackness (when asked to address the company, she utters: “Dig, taka mira bola, dong, dag!”), she is also depicted like a stereotypical woman, who travels to Paris to go shopping.36 Nika’s normalized presence in this play and her success in love suggest that in the space of vaudeville at least, interracial unions could be acceptable.37 Finally, this survey of black characters in French vaudeville suggests that no particular kind of representation of people of color predominated during the first half of the nineteenth century. A derisive or a laudatory depiction of non-Europeans does not seem to reflect an author’s ideological or racial biases, as we often find the same vaudevillistes depicting dark-skinned characters positively in one play and negatively in another. Mélesville, for instance, penned Ourika, ou la petite négresse with Pierre Carmouche in 1824, and Le Chevalier de Saint-Georges with Roger de Beauvoir in 1839.38 Both Ourika and the Chevalier display the most noble and irreproachable qualities. Mélesville went on to write Les Secondes noces, also with Carmouche, in 1840, which scornfully satirizes a dark-skinned male mulatto’s infatuation with a Parisian woman recently settled in Boston.39 In the same vein, particular playhouses were not associated with only one kind of approach to representing blackness. The programming of one of the most prominent vaudeville theaters, the Théâtre des Variétés, is a case in point. The playhouse staged both Ourika and later Malheureux comme un nègre, a vaudeville featuring a loving, god-fearing black family struggling to free itself from its master, and Gautier’s La Négresse et le pacha (1851), which takes place in a harem.40 In addition, plays with exemplary dark-skinned characters and demeaning or ridiculous ones might be run at the same time. From the above, we can infer that Zilia, Cruello, Zago, Nika are no more stereotypical than any other vaudeville characters. They have moral flaws, strong and sudden inclinations, and low positions in society much like their white counterparts. Les Habitans des Landes, mentioned at the beginning of

Reading Race in Nineteenth-Century French Vaudeville   •  53

this chapter, confirms this finding, as it plays on yet another paradigmatic resemblance between white and black vaudeville characters. Neither Tremblin nor Zoé, the black chambermaid he mistakes for a Hottentot, speak French properly: TREMBLIN, à part Queu drôle d’langage! ZOÉ Eh bien, toi pas approcher encore? TREMBLIN Pas . . . approcher? . . . ah! J’entends . . . s’il faut vous dire, je n’en ai pas grande envie. ZOÉ Air: Oui, noir n’est pas si diable Noire n’est pas si diable. TREMBLIN, à part C’en est bien la couleur. ZOÉ Être gentille, aimable… TREMBLIN Je suis vot’serviteur. ZOÉ Avoir toujours, toujours bon cœur, Si toi connaître moi, Toi plus du tout d’effroi . . . TREMBLIN Je n’ai pas peur . . . mais j’tremble. [TREMBLIN, to himself What funny patter! ZOÉ Well, you not come closer yet? TREMBLIN Not . . . come closer? . . . ah! I get it . . . I gotta say, I don’t really feel like it. ZOÉ Tune: Yes, Black is not so devilish A black woman is not so devilish. TREMBLIN, to himself It is indeed her color. ZOÉ To be nice, likable . . . TREMBLIN I’m at your service. ZOÉ

54  •  Lise Schreier

To always have a good heart, If you know me You not afraid no more . . . TREMBLIN I’m not afraid . . . but I’m trembling.] 41

If Tremblin trembles, if Zoé has a good heart, and if neither of them displays heroic dispositions or uses elevated speech, it is precisely because they are typical vaudeville characters. This indicates that vaudeville, unlike other theatrical forms, did not merely represent people of color for their exoticism. On the contrary, this extremely popular genre presented them as an intrinsic part of French society.

Music and Blackness: Singing Beyond the Stage Tremblin and Zoé’s exchange quoted above has another dimension that further emphasizes the degree to which characters of color were an integral part of vaudeville theater: it features them singing together. This is not merely secondary, for until the 1870s, vaudeville was first and foremost a musical genre. Early vaudeville playwrights put most of their efforts into recycling the hundreds of tunes already familiar to audiences.42 A typical vaudeville might include between twenty and fifty short songs,43 each simple enough to be sung “par le moindre artisan” [by the least talented worker].44 Not only did audiences sing along during a performance, but they also sang these tunes in the streets, in the army, in cafés and at home, which means that vaudeville music was not just a form of entertainment, it was an all-encompassing referential universe.45 The importance of these melodies, many of which circulated on and off stage for decades and in so doing acquired a vast set of connotations, cannot be overemphasized. Attempting to decipher this complex musical system is essential in developing a better understanding of vaudeville’s dark-skinned characters. Les Habitans des Landes includes several examples of the importance of musical intertextuality in portrayals of people of color. As seen above, when Zoé starts singing to reassure Tremblin, it is to the tune of “Oui, noir n’est pas si diable.” The audience would have recognized the melody, which was commonly used by vaudevillistes since Arlequin Cruello, and thus understood that much like Arlequin’s, Zoé’s skin color hardly matters.46 Tremblin, whose “trembling” indicates that he did not identify the tune, is further ridiculed. Interestingly, the fact that race is inconsequential is musically suggested even before Zoé’s appearance. At the beginning of the play, elderly Landes peasants sing to the tune “Vaud. D’Arlequin Cruello,”47 suggesting that even

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country people (vaudeville, it should be noted, was geared toward urban crowds) did not consider racial difference as consequential. Jama Stilwell has shown that “This patchwork style of composition was considered quite effective . . . given its potential to call to mind previous texts and cultural associations, creating endless possibilities for stock references, burlesque incongruities, and double entendres.”48 It is therefore not surprising to find that other plays featuring black characters relied on the audience’s deep knowledge of the genre as well. Honorine ou la femme difficile à vivre, for instance, also uses intermusicality, and does so ironically. When Zago complains about his mistress to Louise, it is to the tune of “L’orsque [sic] toi sortir de case (de Paul et Virginie).”49 Far from professing a slave-like fidelity to his employer, as would Domingue in Paul et Virginie, Zago signals his strong dislike for her—and his sense of humor—without using words. Beyond their comical dimension, these unspoken references add a measure of depth to black characters and further show to what extent they are an integral part of the fabric of vaudeville. In addition, music could be used to great effect when experimenting with crossing racial lines on stage. Oréno, ou le bon nègre (1826) provides an interesting example of the phenomenon. In the middle of the play, Oréno’s white servant sings to her besotted black employer a song about an enslaved woman of color: Maître à moi se fâche et menace; Bien souvent lui lever son bras; ... Il a p’tit’ maîtresse; Aime ses enfans Sont pas beaucoup blancs; Leur mère est négresse. ... Négresse toujours Fidèle en amour; Pas jamais volage, Faire beau panier, Ou joli collier; Soigne le ménage Et si maître blanc, Rentre bien méchant Colère est à craindre Toujours obéir, Quelque fois souffre, Mais jamais se plaindre.

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[Master get angry and get mad; Very often raise his fist; ... He owns littl’ mistress; Loves his children They not very white; Their mother is a black slave. ... Black slave always Faithful in love; Not never unfaithful, Make beautiful basket, Or beautiful necklace; Keeps the house And if white master, Comes home very mean Fear his anger Always obey, Sometimes suffers, But never complain.]50

Oréno’s reaction is unmitigated joy: “Oh! Je n’y tiens plus. (À part.) Il faut que je l’épouse, il faut que je l’épouse.” [I can’t take it any longer. (To himself.) I must marry her. I must marry her].51 What he sees as a picture of interracial marital bliss is of course the story of a slave abused by her master. The fact that he is Louise’s employer adds another twist to the song. Louise laments the fact that she, a white woman, might end up being at the mercy of a black man. Not only that, but also she expresses her dismay in pidgin French, crossing yet another (fantasmatic) racial line. What goes beyond Oréno’s understanding would not have been lost on theatergoers, who would have noted the change in Louise’s level of speech. If the song was comical, it was only a brief masquerade for Louise, who safely goes back to “being white” again as soon as she is done singing. Finally, music allowed vaudevillistes to bring up race even when no black characters appeared in their work. In Les Boucles d’oreille (1831), for example, protagonist Magloire is in love with Perpétue, his employer’s niece. He has an argument with his employer’s wife, who demands that he leave their house. The exchange must be quoted in its entirety to be fully understood: MAGLOIRE, se croisant les bras, et d’un ton énergique Mon paquet? Je ne le ferai pas! Mme DUVERNET

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Quoi! vous me résistez? MAGLOIRE C’est la première fois, mais ce ne sera pas la dernière! Je rentre dans ma dignité d’homme, que j’avais laissé tomber en désuétude, et je marche désormais sur ce pied-là! ... Air: Caché sous les habits d’un esclave africain Suis-je donc en ces lieux un esclave africain, Qu’on doit toujours traiter comme un vil mannequin? . . . Non! Je reprends courage, Et je deviens taquin! . . . Je brise mes menottes, Et, bravant les despotes, Je me fais aussi républicain! Mme DUVERNET Êtes-vous devenu fou? MAGLOIRE Fou? . . . Dans tous les cas, ça vaudrait encore mieux que d’être imbécille [sic]! . . . mais non! . . . Je sais seulement que la traite des noirs est supprimée par les lois du 8 janvier 1817, et 15 avril 1818. PERPÉTUE Ménagez-la! MAGLOIRE Ne craignez donc rien! . . . Elle a dit qu’elle ne savait pas les lois, il faut bien lui apprendre. (À madame Duvernet.) En conséquence de ce, Madame, je traiterai désormais avec vous d’égal à égal! [MAGLOIRE, folding his arms, energetically Pack? I won’t pack! Mme DUVERNET What? You resist my orders? MAGLOIRE It’s the first time, and it won’t be the last! I’m recovering my human dignity, I had let it go, but from now on it will guide me! Tune: Hidden under the clothing of an African slave Am I an African slave here? I am constantly treated like a lowly puppet! No, now I am brave, And I am ready to fight back! . . . I break my shackles, And, braving tyrants, I also become Republican! Mme DUVERNET

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Have you gone mad? MAGLOIRE Mad? . . . In any case, better than being an imbecile! . . . But no! . . . All I know is that the slave trade was abolished by the laws of January 8, 1817 and April 15, 1818. PERPÉTUE Spare her! MAGLOIRE Don’t you worry! . . . She told me she did not know about the laws, she needs to be educated. (To madame Duvernet). Therefore, Milady, I will henceforth interact with you as with a peer!]52

In this case, the choice of tune underlines what is already abundantly clear: Mme Duvernet is being unfair to Magloire. The tune adds a comical twist to the scene, however, because the young man is obviously not a slave nor is he black. More significantly, Les Boucles d’oreille indicates that debates and decisions about the slave trade were familiar to many (both dates, it should be noted, are accurate). It also shows the extent to which the audience was called upon to imagine its country as comprising not only metropolitan France, but also its colonies. In some ways the music in these plays is more revealing of the variety and pliability of representations of blackness than the texts themselves. The importance of music is underscored by the fact that these songs circulated widely, carrying their representations of race beyond the theatre. As another vaudeville character complained in 1841 et 1941, ou aujourd’hui et dans cent ans, they could be heard several times a day, every day: “Je suis depuis trente ans la victime des mélodies qui courent les rues! . . . Oh! Ça m’agace, ça me crispe! [. . . les airs] qu’on venait régulièrement crier sous mes fenêtres quatre fois par jour. . . . J’aurais sauté par la fenêtre… d’un rez-de-chaussée!” [I’ve been the victim of these incessant tunes for thirty years! Oh, it annoys me, it makes me tense! [. . . the tunes] people would regularly yell under my windows four times a day. . . . I would have jumped through the window . . . of the first floor!].53 One can only wonder how many times songs such as “Caché sous les habits d’un esclave africain” were sung during the first half of the nineteenth century.

Reading for the Ministère de l’Intérieur Another group of theater connoisseurs was particularly aware of vaudeville’s impact on its audience: government censors, whose reactions, opinions, and even tastes had to be taken into consideration by playwrights. Writing for

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the theater was particularly challenging during the first half of the nineteenth century. The authorities tightly restricted the number of playhouses and the genre of entertainment they were allowed to stage, and a significant number of topics were off-limits. For most of the period, manuscripts of plays had to be sent to the Ministère de l’Intérieur’s Bureau des Théâtres to get its endorsement.54 Censors read with an eye for anything that might constitute a threat to public order, while authors sometimes wrote multiple versions of plays in the hope of winning the authorization to stage one. Looking at the inventory of manuscripts submitted to the ministry, as well as the reports they inspired, sheds light on the ways these first readers dealt with vaudevilles featuring black characters. Official assessments of a play already mentioned in the second section of this chapter, Oréno, ou le bon nègre, provide interesting examples about how a black character had to be represented on stage during the Restoration. This vaudeville was written by Xavier, Duvert and Paulin and published in 1826 by Duvernois. It takes place in Senegal and features Oréno, an aging freed slave who inherited money from his old master; Louise, a young maidservant; and Charles, a sailor. Oréno hires Louise, then Charles, who are both white, as his servants, and both men subsequently fall for the woman. Louise prefers Charles, whom Oréno soon realizes is his old master’s son. Oréno gives away his fortune, his house, and Louise’s hand to the young man, proposing that they live together as father and children, an offer that the young couple gladly accepts. The play’s plot and characters are typical of nineteenth-century vaudevilles, and Oréno himself resembles other dark-skinned vaudeville protagonists. Cross-racial desire is presented as central, irrepressible but also temporary; the story ends with a satisfying resolution (a marriage and a multiracial family), and Oréno’s generosity fits with the decades-long portrayal of people of color whose main trait is “reconnaissance.” However, the two censors’ reports housed in the Archives Nationales under the slightly different title “Oréno, ou Le nègre” (F/21/972) paint a more convoluted picture than the text published by Duvernois. The first report, penned by censor Jacques-Corentin Royou, is in itself straightforward. Royou provided a summary of the plot and concluded, “Je ne vois rien à censurer à ce vaudeville” [I see nothing to censor in this vaudeville]. But he referred to the play not as “Oréno Le nègre” or “Oréno, ou le bon nègre,” but as “Le noir D’haïti [sic],” and noted that it takes place near Port-au-Prince. The storyline and the characters depicted in Royou’s report are otherwise identical to those of the manuscript of “Oréno, ou Le nègre” found at the Archives Nationales (F/18/655) and of Duvernois’s text, which both locate the plot in Africa. In addition, the report’s margins contain supplementary information scribbled

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by Royou’s supervisor, chef du Bureau des Théâtres Antoine-Marie Coupart. Remarkably, Coupart indicated that the vaudeville was staged at the Théâtre du Vaudeville under the title “Oréno ou Le nègre,” whereas Royou had stated that the play was intended for the Théâtre de Madame. Even more confusingly, Coupart crossed the title used by Royou, “Le noir D’haïti,” and replaced it with yet another, “Les Enfans du Colon.” This palimpsest, as well as the evolving play, manifested in a multiplicity of versions the censors seemed to have monitored, present an interpretive puzzle. The second report, written by the abovementioned Coupart, further complicates the situation, for it suggests that censors, who during the Restoration also worked as journalists and playwrights, did not simply function as obstacles to outmaneuver, but could participate in a sort of creative conversation with the credited authors.55 Coupart, regardless of his awareness of multiple versions of the plays and different venues, did not insist on any significant changes. His brief assessment mostly pointed to another play, of no apparent relation to the vaudeville at hand: “3 acteurs seulement figurent dans cette bluette fort agréable, mais qui est évidemment imitée de Jocrisse maître et valet” [There are only three actors in this pleasant romantic play, however it is evidently a version of Jocrisse maître et valet].56 However, the changes he ordered have nothing to do with Jocrisse. Rather, they reveal how censors often touched on creative issues, as opposed to simply those of public order. First, he asked that the title be changed. The new title, he insisted, should be “Oréno ou Le nègre,” as opposed to “L’Yolof,” having sensed, perhaps, that the ethno-linguistic category “Yolof” would mislead a Parisian audience.57 Second, in one of the most revealing examples of the unlikely set of circumstances in which vaudevilles were produced, he cut the final vaudeville number, but wrote out what he felt was a more appropriate closing song for the play.58 Both reports, filed together, thus point to significant changes in locales (Senegal/Haiti), venues (Théâtre du Vaudeville/Théâtre de Madame), and titles (“Oréno, ou Le nègre”/“Le noir D’haïti”/“Les Enfans du colon”/“L’Yolof”). The manuscript of “Oréno, ou Le nègre” (F/18/655) provides additional clues about the play, but the full picture only emerges when it is compared to another one, kept in a different box under the name “Les Enfans du colon” (AN F/18/653). At first sight, these two manuscripts do not seem to have much in common. Only Coupart’s scribbles on Royou’s report lead the reader to the second text. Not only that, their covers have different sets of titles: “Oréno ou L’Yolof Le nègre” and “Le Noir d’haïti Les Enfans du Colon (figure 3.5 and 3.6).” These covers do indicate, however, that both plays received the Ministère de l’Intérieur’s authorization to be staged on the

Figure 3.5.   Oréno, ou Le nègre. Manuscript cover, Archives Nationales F/18/655.

Figure 3.6.   Les Enfans du Colon. Manuscript cover, Archives Nationales F/18/653.

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same day: October 21, 1825. They also specify that Les Enfans premiered on November 9, 1825, while Oréno was first staged on June 7, 1826.59 As for the manuscripts themselves, they show that both plays have identical plots, respectively located in Senegal and in Haiti, and all but identical lines. Taken together, these archival documents reveal that the Bureau des Théâtres was presented with (at least) two versions of the same vaudeville at the same time, which were later produced in succession in two different theaters. This twin submission did not appear to have troubled the censors, who were used to reading well-worn plots and quasi-identical manuscripts, as Coupart’s notes about other plays demonstrate.60 It must not have troubled the vaudevillistes. Assuming the Haitian version was written first, turning Oréno into a Senegalese man was not a wrenching artistic decision. Indeed, not a single trait of his personality changes between the two versions. The fact that “Oréno, ou Le nègre” was a mere transposition of “Les Enfans du colon” did not bother theatergoers either, who acclaimed it as such a success the second time around that its authors decided to have it published that same year. Part of the pleasure must have come from the plot’s familiarity: vaudeville, after all, was often more about well-known stories and tunes than about novelty. But these documents do not merely show us how comedies such as Oréno were produced; they also indicate that famously finicky censors considered blacks to be stock vaudeville characters. If these Archives Nationales files shed light on vaudeville’s idiosyncrasies, they also help better illustrate the ways in which this pervasive theatrical genre was connected to current events. Indeed, while Oréno is a generic character, the play’s creators did not pick a completely random country when they first located the story near Port-au-Prince. France had finally recognized Haiti’s government a few months before, on April 17, 1825. Plays located in or alluding to Haiti, which had been forbidden since its independence, were now acceptable. Xavier, Duvert, and Paulin might have chosen Haiti for the Théâtre de Madame because they were looking for fresh and exciting material, as vaudevillistes were wont to do. They might have written the Senegalese version for the Théâtre du Vaudeville because they did not want to antagonize its director, Marc-Antoine Désaugiers, who had almost been killed during the slave insurrection of Saint-Domingue.61 The Ministère de l’Intérieur’s files, in other words, point to the tension between the desire for novelty and the complexity of representing a painful past, and show that if the two-dimensionality—and thus transposability—of vaudeville characters is indisputable, some location changes invite reflections on deeper historical motives.

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The Archives Nationales house one last document that provides today’s readers with additional information about representing Haiti and black characters on nineteenth-century vaudeville stages. As we recall, Coupart censored the original final number to replace it, in the Senegalese version, with his own. His decision led an unidentified author to scribble a furious note, inexplicably pinned on the Haitian version. The document states: Le manuscrit devait vous être remis ce matin, mais le commissionaire s’est trouvé accablé d’occupations. La pièce, sauf la phrase et le couplet coupé n’a aucun rapport avec Haïti, le titre étant changé. Mais pour le couplet au public, où il ne faut pas jouer de pièces dans lesquelles il y ait un noir où il est hors de toute espèce d’atteinte de la part de la censure il ne s’applique qu’au nègre de la pièce et je ne puis croire que vous persistiez à le supprimer. Ce serait vouloir, sans aucun motif, nous mettre dans l’embarras. [The manuscript was supposed to have been handed to you this morning, but the messenger got overburdened. The play, except for the censored sentence and song, has nothing to do with Haiti, given that we changed the title. As for the final number, in which a black character cannot appear, and which cannot be modified in any way by censorship, it only refers to the play’s black character, and I cannot believe you persist in cutting it. This amounts to embarrassing us without any reason.]62

These few lines indicate that censors might have initially expressed doubts about the Haitian version. Equally significantly, they show that specific rules applied to the “couplets au public,” which, as final musical numbers, were recognized as having a particular power to remain on the minds and lips of the audience members. It is unsurprising that the government had such a full appreciation of their powers, and thus prevented dark-skinned characters from singing them. If blacks were an integral part of early nineteenth-century vaudeville for French audiences, censors still hoped to keep the endings white. “Qu’une haute question morale, politique ou littéraire surgisse tout à coup, et voilà le vaudeville qui accourt en faisant grand bruit, non de grelots mais de noix vides” [Whenever a lofty moral, political, or literary question suddenly arises, vaudeville immediately surges forward with a great clamor—not that of little bells, but of empty nutshells], complained Gautier in his Histoire de l’art dramatique.63 While I do not dispute this closeted vaudevilliste’s characterization of the genre’s literary and intellectual frivolity, I hope to have shown that these seemingly thin plays are actually rich sources for French cultural history. The countless spectators that flocked to vaudeville shows indicate that these plays were a vitally important mode of expression, and,

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as such, these “empty nutshells” ring with otherwise forgotten perspectives of millions of people. Scholars interested in race representations and perceptions, in particular, will benefit from reading these comedies. As we have seen here, between 1794 and 1848, vaudeville consumers were presented with dark-skinned characters in far more diverse ways than one might expect. If vaudevillistes wrote for a public who went to the theater not so much to think, but to be entertained, they still created a significant number of plots and protagonists that depicted interracial encounters so varied that they might well have rescripted race in the minds of theatergoers. Of course, blacks were often derisively depicted on vaudeville stages, but not in substantively harsher tones than were women, servants, landlords, the English, or the elderly. Furthermore, Zilia, Zago, Nika, Oréno, and others participated not only in the public’s existence at night, during performances, but also during the day, for the songs associated with them took on a life of their own. In the end, the fact that these characters were integrally woven into the fabric of a parodic genre representing French society suggests that onstage, at least, racial difference was represented as simply another piece of the prosaic experience of everyday life.

Notes I would like to thank Masha Belenky, Michael Gasper, Kathryn Kleppinger, Anne O’Neil-Henry, and Joshua Schreier for their invaluable assistance. All translations are mine. 1.  Charles Monselet, “Histoire des théâtres de province,” Revue de Paris: journal critique, politique et littéraire (Paris: aux Bureaux de la Revue de Paris, 1855), vol. 28, 163. 2.  Charles-Augustin Sewrin, Les Habitans des Landes: comédie (Paris: Barba, 1811), 18. 3. Théophile Gautier, Histoire de l’art dramatique en France depuis vingt-cinq ans, Volume 1 (Paris: Hetzel, 1858), 197. Gautier, who lambasted vaudevilles and vaudevillistes on countless occasions, wrote a few vaudevilles himself. For more on Gautier and vaudeville, see Anne Ubersfeld, “Gautier ou l’anti-vaudeville,” Europe 786 (October 1994), notably her discussion of Carlotta Grisi’s break-up letter to her famous lover, in which the dancer contended: “Votre place est au Théâtre-Français, et non aux Variétés. Quand on s’appelle Théophile Gautier, on doit savoir conserver sa réputation” [Your place is at the Théâtre-Français, not at the Variétés. When one is called Théophile Gautier, one must know how to preserve one’s own reputation] (68). 4.  Jennifer Terni, “A Genre for Early Mass Culture: French Vaudeville and the City, 1830–1848,” Theater Journal 58 (2006): 222.

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 5. Lothar Matthes, Vaudeville, Untersuchungen zu Geschichte und literatursystematichem Ort einer Erfolgsgattung (Heidelberg: C. Winter, Universitätsverlag, 1983), 66.   6.  Terni, “A Genre for Early Mass Culture,” 222.   7.  Studies on French vaudeville published in the last fifty years are limited to three monographs, a special issue of Europe, and a handful of articles and book chapters. For monographs, see Matthes, Vaudeville; Henri Gidel, Le Vaudeville (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986); Henri Rossi, Le Diable dans le vaudeville français du XIXe siècle: avec une chronologie des pièces, un index des auteurs et un répertoire des revues et journaux (Paris: Lettres modernes Minard, 2003). For essays, see notably Barbara Cooper, “Playing it Again: A Study of Vaudeville and the Aesthetics of Incorporation in Restoration France,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 13, no. 2 (1989): 197–210; Odile Krakovitch, “Labiche et la censure ou un vaudeville de plus,” Revue Historique 284, no. 2 (1990): 341–57; Susan Maslan, “Susannah at Her Bath: Surveillance and Revolutionary Drama,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 34, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 421–39; François Cavaignac, “Le Vaudeville sous le Second Empire ou le règne de Perrichon,” in Les Spectacles sous le Second Empire, ed. Jean-Claude Yon (Paris: Armand Colin, 2010), 305–16; Johanna Danciu, “Le Vaudeville joue et se joue : allégorie, méta-théâtralité et politisation à la fin du XVIIIe siècle et au début du XIXe siècle,” Revue d’Histoire du Théâtre 265 (2015): 77–94; Violaine Heyraud, “Les Étrangers conquérants dans le vaudeville: Feydeau après Labiche” in L’Altérité en spectacle, 1789–1918, ed. Nathalie Coutelet and Isabelle Moindrot (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2015), 113–24.  8. Gérard Gengembre, Théâtre français au XIXe siècle, 1789-1900 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1999), 282.   9.  The Bibliothèque nationale holds an important collection of published vaudeville plays. A significant number of vaudevilles that were not deemed worthy of publication can be found at the Archives Nationales (AN), which holds more than 400 boxes of vaudeville manuscripts. Unfortunately, many more boxes were destroyed during the fire that burned down the Hôtel de Ville in 1871. For more on these boxes, see Odile Krakovitch, Les Pièces de théâtre soumises à la censure: 1800–1830: Inventaire des manuscrits des pièces (F/18/581 à 668) et des procès-verbaux des censeurs (F/21/966 à 995) (Paris: Archives Nationales, 1982) and Censure des répertoires des grands théâtres parisiens, 1830–1906 (Paris: Archives Nationales, 2003). 10.  Civil Commissioner Félicité-Léger Sonthonax first abolished slavery in SaintDomingue in 1793. Slavery was prohibited in all the French colonies a year later, only to be reinstated in 1802. France abolished slavery again only in 1848. 11.  I do not include here another key entry point to these vaudevilles, the study of their theatrical reviews. A commentary on the thousands of articles about these plays goes beyond the scope of this chapter. I do not examine the fact that these characters were generally played by white actors in blackface either, as I have extensively discussed make-up and black actors elsewhere. See Lise Schreier, “Esclaves de la scène: Blackface et acteurs noirs dans le vaudeville français du dix-neuvième siècle,” French

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Cultural Studies 27, no. 2 (2016): 135–54, and Gens de couleur dans trois vaudevilles du dix-neuvième siècle: Joseph Aude et J. H. d’Egville, Les Deux Colons, Clairville et Paul Siraudin, Malheureux comme un nègre, Duvert et Lauzanne, La Fin d’une République, ou Haïti en 1849 (Paris: L’Harmattan: 2017). 12.  Honoré de Balzac, Le Nègre, ed. Michelle Cheyne and Andrew Watts (Liverpool: Liverpool Online Series, 2014), 12, https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/media/livacuk/ modern-languages-and-cultures/liverpoolonline/Le-Negre.pdf. 13.  The educated and daring protagonist of Malheureux comme un nègre is a notable exception, as I show in “Esclaves de la scène,” and in Gens de couleur. For more information on dark-skinned characters in other French theatrical genres (notably in what the nineteenth-century press called “mélanodrame”), see Sylvie Chalaye, Du Noir au nègre: L’image du Noir au théâtre de Marguerite de Navarre à Jean Genet (1550–1960) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1988). For a thorough discussion of cross-racial desire in French theater during the 1820s, see Cheyne and Watts. 14.  See Jean-Baptiste Colson, Manuel dramatique, ou détails essentiels sur deux cent quarante opéras comiques en un, deux, trois et quatre actes, classés par ordre alphabétique, formant le fonds du répertoire des théâtres de France; et sur cent vaudevilles pris dans ceux qui ont obtenu le plus de succès à Paris: Ouvrage utile aux directeurs et entrepreneurs de spectacle, aux régisseurs, acteurs, à toutes les personnes chargées du service de la scène et aux amateurs du théâtre (Bordeaux: chez l’Auteur, 1817). 15.  See Charles-Jacob Guillemin, Le Nègre aubergiste, fait historique en un acte et en prose, mêlé de vaudevilles (Paris: Cailleau, 1794). 16.  Sylvie Chalaye, “Un théâtre en noir et blanc pour défendre les couleurs de la liberté,” Le Théâtre sous la Révolution: Politique du répertoire, ed. Martial Poirson (Paris: Desjonquères, 2008), 299. 17.  Louis Huart and Charles Philipon, “Mlle Sauvage,” Galerie de la presse, de la littérature et des beaux-arts, vol. 3, “34e livraison” (Paris: Au Bureau de la Publication, et chez Aubert, 1841). 18.  Limited space does not allow me to discuss offstage black characters. La Bonbonnière, ou comment les femmes se vengent (1844) provides an interesting example of their impact on vaudeville plots. Its entire story stems from the protagonist’s affair with a black woman from Martinique. See Félix Duvert and Auguste-Théodore de Lauzanne de Vauxroussel, La Bonbonnière, ou comment les femmes se vengent, vaudeville en 1 acte (Paris: Lacombe, 1844). 19.  See Nicolas Brazier and Michel Nicolas Balisson de Rougemont, M. Potard, ou le nègre blanc, AN F/18/782. 20. Review of Malheureux comme un nègre, L’Union Monarchique 193, July 12, 1847. 21.  See Auguste Jouhaud, Le Tremblement de terre de la Martinique, folie-vaudeville, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, collection Georges Douay, Ms. 2001, 1840. 22.  Jean Baptiste Radet, Pierre–Yon Barré, and C. François Lescot, La Négresse ou le pouvoir de la reconnaissance, comédie en un acte, en prose et en vaudevilles mêlée de divertissements (Paris: Imbault, 1787), 41.

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23. Edouard Brisebarre and Eugène Nyon, Le Laquais d’un nègre (Paris: Beck, 1852), 19. 24. Jennifer Heuer, “The One-Drop Rule in Reverse? Interracial Marriages in Napoleonic and Restoration France,” Law and History Review 27, no. 3 (2009): 521. 25.  This demeaning portrayal of a dark-skinned man did not seem to have shocked the public, as the brothers Goncourt’s summary of the play demonstrates: “Un Yolof: c’est [le célèbre acteur] Brasseur. — Toi bon nègre à moi; — moi aimer toi; — toi cirer bottes à moi; — moi rattacher bon blanc à la vie; — moi reluire comme lune; — moi vouloir petite blanche; — moi demeurer rue Blanche; — moi aimer bon Huart; — moi avoir abonnement au Charivari; — moi danser bamboula; — yo! yo! hi! hi! — une soulouquerie en deux actes” [A Yolof: it is [famous actor] Brasseur. –– You my good negro; — me love you; –– you shine my boots; –– me save good white’s man’s life; –– me shine like moon; –– me want little white woman; –– me live White Street; –– me like good Huart; –– me subscribe to Charivari; –– me dance bamboula; –– yo! yo! hi! hi! — a soulouquerie in two acts]. (Haitian leader Soulouque was mercilessly mocked by the French press at the time.) Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, “Chronique des théâtres. Folies-Dramatiques. Le Laquais d’un nègre, vaudeville en deux actes, par MM. Brisebarre et Nyon,” L’Éclair, revue hebdomadaire de la littérature, des théâtres et des arts 4, January 31, 1852. Incidentally, the play’s manuscript indicates that its original title was “Le Bureau de placement,” which indicates that its authors and/or the theater director who produced it thought that emphasizing Domingo’s blackness would appeal to audiences (AN F/18/993). 26.  Chalaye, “Un théâtre en noir,” 305. 27.  Jean-Baptiste Radet, François Guillaume Desfontaines, and Pierre–Yon Barré, Arlequin Cruello, parodie d’Othello, en deux actes, et en prose, mêlée de vaudevilles, par les auteurs d’Arlequin afficheur (Paris: Chez le libraire au Théâtre du Vaudeville, et à l’Imprimerie rue des Droits de l’Homme, 1792), 8. 28.  See, for instance, Verio’s painting Les Farceurs français et italiens depuis soixante ans et plus (1670), and an engraving produced for Arlequin, roy de Serendib (1721), in which Arlequin wears his black mask. Maryvonne de Saint Pulgent, L’Opéracomique: le Gavroche de la musique (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 13, 17. 29.  Radet, Desfontaines, and Barré, “Arlequin Cruello,” 50. 30.  Jean-Baptiste Radet, Honorine, ou la femme difficile à vivre (Paris: Théâtre du Vaudeville, 1797), 27. 31.  Remarkably, an 1843 adaptation of the play entitled Antonine ou la Créole cast Zago as a white character, while Louise became creole. See Edouard Lemaître, Antonine ou la Créole, comédie-vaudeville en trois actes (d’après Honorine, ou la femme difficile à vivre, de Radet) (Paris: Marchant, 1843). 32. Jouhaud, Le Tremblement de terre de la Martinique, f˚ 243. 33.  Ibid., f˚ 244. 34.  Ibid., f˚ 245. 35.  Ibid., f˚ 244. 36. Ibid.

Reading Race in Nineteenth-Century French Vaudeville   •  69

37.  For more on this unpublished vaudeville, see Cooper’s critical edition of Le Tremblement de terre de la Martinique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2014), Annex 3. This play by Auguste Jouhaud is a spoof of a drama of the same title, as was often the case with vaudevilles. 38.  See Mélesville and Pierre Carmouche, Ourika ou la petite négresse, drame en un acte, mêlé de couplets, imité du roman (Paris: Quoy, 1824). Ourika is labeled as a “drame” but it features all the characteristics of a vaudeville and it was written for the Variétés, a vaudeville theater. For more on stage adaptations of Claire de Duras’s novel, see Sylvie Chalaye, Les Ourikas du boulevard (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004). For more on Mélesville, see Mélesville and Roger de Beauvoir, Le Chevalier de SaintGeorges, comédie mêlée de chants en trois actes, ed. Sylvie Chalaye (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), xxvii. 39.  See Mélesville and Pierre Carmouche, Les Secondes noces (Paris: Tresse, 1841). 40.  See Théophile Gautier, La Négresse et le pacha, AN F/18/795/B. 41. Sewrin, Les Habitans des Landes, 20-21. 42.  Henri Lagrave, “Un marquis à la foire,” Europe 786 (October 1994): 20. 43.  Brigitte Brunet, Le Théâtre de boulevard (Paris: Armand Colin, 2005), 53. 44. Marin Mersenne, qtd. in Charles Mazouer, “L’Apparition du vaudeville,” Europe 786 (October 1994): 16. 45. Volumes containing hundreds of vaudeville songs were first published in the seventeenth century. For tunes used during the nineteenth century, see Pierre Capelle, La Clé du caveau à l’usage des chansonniers français et étrangers, des amateurs, auteurs, acteurs, chefs d’orchestre et de tous les amis du vaudeville et de la chanson (Paris: Cotelle, 1872). For more on vaudeville music, see Marc Régaldo, “Le Vaudeville pendant la Révolution (1789–1799),” Europe 786 (October 1994): 26–38; Cooper, “Playing it Again;” Jama Stilwell, “A New View of the Eighteenth-Century ‘Abduction’ Opera: Edification and Escape at the Parisian Théâtres de la Foire,” Music and Letters 91, no. 1 (February 2010), 51–82. 46.  Les Habitans des Landes’s author himself used the melody on several occasions. See, for instance, another vaudeville of Charles-Augustin Sewrin, Les Nouvelles réjouissances; ou, l’impromptu de Nanterre (Paris: Dondey-Dupré, 1811), which premiered the same year as Les Habitants. 47. Sewrin, Les Habitans des Landes, 12. 48.  Stilwell, “A New View,” 58. 49. Sewrin, Les Habitans des Landes, 57. 50.  Xavier, Duvert, and Paulin, Oréno ou le bon nègre, vaudeville en un acte (Paris: Duvernois, 1826), 22–23. 51.  Ibid., 23. 52.  Claude-Louis-Marie Rochefort, Les Boucles d’oreille, comédie vaudeville en un acte, représentée pour la première fois, à Paris, sur le théâtre du Vaudeville (Paris: Barba, 1831), 35. 53.  Théodore Cogniard and Théodore Muret, 1841 et 1941, ou aujourd’hui et dans cent ans (Paris: Beck, 1842), 9.

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54.  For more on this topic, see Gengembre, op. cit.; Victor Hallays-Dabot, Histoire de la censure théâtrale en France (Genève: Slatkine Reprints, 1970); F.W.J. Hemmings, Theatre and State in France, 1760–1905 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Krakovitch, Les Pièces de théâtre soumises à la censure and and Censure des répertoires des grands théâtres parisiens; Angela C. Pao, The Orient of the Boulevards: Exoticism, Empire, and Nineteenth-Century French Theater (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998). I also provide a detailed explanation of the process for Malheureux comme un nègre in Gens de couleur. 55.  Royou, for instance, was both censor and playwright, a perilous position: Royou était censeur; ses collègues approuvèrent sa tragédie. Les huées et les cris arrivèrent au quatrième acte à un tel point, que Royou, s’élançant de la coulisse, courut reprendre son manuscrit aux mains du souffleur. Ce n’était pas l’affaire des jeunes gens du parterre; ils voulaient bien ne pas entendre la pièce, mais ils prétendaient siffler jusqu’au bout; ils forcèrent les acteurs à continuer, et la tragédie de Royou dut être terminée. [Royou was a censor; his colleagues authorized his play. Boos and whistles got so loud during the fourth act that Royou, running from behind the stage, wrested the manuscript from the hands of the prompter. This did not please the young men standing in the pit; they were fine with not hearing the play, but they wanted to whistle until the end; they demanded that the actors continue, and Royou’s tradegy had to be played until its end.] (Hallays-Dabot, 271–72)

For more information on Royou, see Joseph Marie Quérard, La France littéraire ou dictionnaire bibliographique des savants, historiens et gens de lettres de la France, ainsi que des littérateurs étrangers qui ont écrit en français, plus particulièrement pendant les XVIIIe et XIXe siècles, Volume 8 (Paris: Didot, 1836), 269–70. Coupart was also a playwright. He penned about forty vaudevilles, wrote for L’Almanach des spectacles, and published many songs. See Antoine Coupart, Chansons d’un employé mis à la retraite (Paris: Théâtre des jeunes acteurs de M. Comte, 1829). For more on Coupart, see FrançoisJoseph Fétis, Bibliographie universelle des musiciens et bibliographie générale de la musique, vols. 3–4 (Bruxelles: Meline, Cans et Compagnie, 1837). 56. While Jocrisse-maître et Jocrisse-valet (1810) centers on a reversal of fortune as well (the master’s money really belonged to the valet), its plot differs significantly from that of Oréno, and it does not feature dark-skinned characters. Incidentally, Jocrisse was written by Sewrin, the author of Les Habitans des Landes. See CharlesAugustin Sewrin, Jocrisse-maître et Jocrisse-valet, comédie, en un acte et en prose (Paris: Mme Masson, Libraire, 1810). 57.  Paul et Virginie features a “Yolof” character, Domingue, a slave owned by Marguerite. Most Yolofs (Wolofs) live in Senegal. 58.  Duvernois’s text does not include the original ending, or Coupart’s song. The censor’s song can only be found in the manuscript of the play filed at the Archives Nationales under the title “Oréno, ou Le nègre.”

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59.  According to La Pandore, journal des spectacles, des lettres, des arts, des moeurs et des modes (November 5, 1825), Les Enfans du colon was performed by celebrated comedians Numa, Legrand, and Mlle Déjazet at the Théâtre de Madame during the first week of November. 60.  Coupart frequently noted in a report of a play under review that it resembled another. For instance, he wrote about La Femme respectable: “C’est d’ailleurs un sujet connu déjà traité. L’autorisation est sans danger” [It is, in any case, a familiar topic, already known to have been treated. Authorizing the play is harmless] (AN F/21/972). Une Heure de veuvage generated the same type of assessment: “La représentation de cette pièce a été autorisée il y a quelques mois, sous le titre du Deuil Supposé. On soumet à nouveau le manuscrit auquel les auteurs ont fait quelques corrections. . . . Il n’y a nul inconvénient à confirmer la première autorisation” [The staging of this play was authorized a few months ago, under the title Le Deuil supposé. We resubmit the manuscript to which the authors have added a few corrections. . . . There is no reason not to confirm the first authorization] (AN F/21/972). 61.  According to Philippe Le Bas, Désaugiers (who would become a successful vaudevilliste himself) lived in Saint-Domingue between 1792 and 1797: “Il partit pour Saint-Domingue avec sa sœur, qui venait d’épouser un colon de cette île. Il y était encore lorsque l’insurrection des noirs éclata; il combattit contre eux; il tomba entre leurs mains et il allait être fusillé, lorsqu’un accès subit de générosité de la part des insurgés lui sauva la vie” [He left for Saint-Domingue with his sister, who had just married one of the island’s colonists. He was still there when the blacks’ insurrection began; he fought them; he fell into their hands and was about to be shot to death, when a sudden gesture of generosity from the insurgents saved his life]. Philippe Le Bas, France. Dictionnaire encyclopédique (Paris: Didot, 1842), 483. Significantly, the Haitian version of the play indicates that Louise’s family was massacred during the insurrection. The Senegalese version does not contain any background information about her. 62.  AN F/18/653. 63.  Qtd. in Gengembre, op. cit., 24.

CHAPTER FOUR

Diversity, Exploitation, and Immigration Politics in French “Ethnic” Pornography Mehammed Mack

Tarek is a super handsome guy—lean and muscular, he knows how to fight . . . he’s afraid of nothing . . . he was born in Mantes La Jolie . . . right now, he’s in prison because of his drug trafficking . . . Tarek is hiding a huge secret in his sweatpants . . . a gigantic cock! . . . 24cm x 7cm . . . A Monster! . . . Which is to say, he gets respect . . . it’s what everyone confirmed in the showers . . . Tarek and his baseball cap are inseparable . . . and right now, he’s only got one thought in his mind: fucking . . . fucking! . . . FUCKING!!! —Le Gang: La Bande Dessinée Citébeur (2012)

Introduction: Fantasy, Porn, and the Politics of Banlieue Representation In the above quote, taken from the French gay porn studio Citébeur’s comic book “Le Gang,” one finds a number of controversial stereotypes about banlieue men neatly distilled.1 Piled on one after the other in an allegorical patchwork, they reflect the outlying alarmist perceptions of banlieuesards, or residents of the banlieues—France’s peri-urban, working class, and multi-ethnic suburbs. The accompanying image shows a tattooed man in his late twenties sporting a goatee, diamond studs, and a cocked baseball cap. He gazes back at the reader with a mixture of aggression and desire while standing against a brick wall covered in spray painted tags. The glossy spread conveys the idea that French prisons are overcrowded with Arabs, behind bars for

73

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infractions having to do with various “urban” pursuits: gang business, drugs, graffiti, and traffic in subterranean economies. The clichés that abound are physical (Arabs are universally well-endowed, with uncontrollable sex drives), mental (their “limited” intellects able to focus on only one idea at a time), and sartorial (they cover their sculpted bodies in the casual banlieue “uniform” of sweatpants, sneakers, chains, and baseball caps) in nature. The virile images on display suggest that Arabs perform well in patriarchal pecking orders, where their physical assets and provocative attitudes prevent them from becoming the dreaded “prison whore.” These physical assets are quantified on a previous page where Tarek is broken down into his attributes (height, weight, age, and penis length) in a way that assimilates his profile to a gay personal ad: the brute quantification of desire reflects a turn in gay self-marketing that Citébeur exploits in graphic form. Tarek thus becomes a figure that fantastically encapsulates fears of increasing criminality, gang activity, thuggishness, macho competitiveness, as well as the eroticization of Arab populations in French society. In much contemporary cultural production about the banlieues, authors and film directors have often chosen modes of ethnographic “realism” to relate their stories. Typical narratives frequently show native informants acting as passports through dilapidated towers, pointing out especially dangerous areas, identifying drug dealers, explaining local vernaculars, and enumerating the factors responsible for residents’ social and professional immobility. In this way, representations that aim for “realism” can slant away from objectivity when they move toward nonneutral images of overwhelming social decay. However, the fantastical, surreal, or science-fictional accounts that have depicted banlieue life in exaggerated colors arguably disclose more in the way of fantasies and anxieties regarding these areas than hyper-realistic portrayals that aim for sociological accuracy do. Instead of avoiding stereotypes, the authors of these accounts exploit them. They see creative opportunity in the manipulation and collage of stereotypes, which helps the authors deviate from the already-tread and “typical” paths usually associated with unmanipulated stereotypes. One cultural medium, often disparaged, manages to capture particularly well the projections and tensions surrounding the banlieues and their stereotypes: pornography. In this chapter, I examine what has been labeled “ethnic” porn featuring French Arab characters, both gay and straight, and mine this underestimated genre for its political content. I situate this body of work within French immigration debates that have in recent years reserved a key role for gender and sexuality, paying special attention to these debates’ consequences in the cultural arena. My intervention first analyzes the output

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and commentary of a French director who was the first to focus exclusively on banlieue men in gay male pornography: Stéphane Chibikh (and his production company Citébeur). Second, I focus on French Arab women who have also gained increasing visibility in heterosexual erotica over the course of the last decade, not without having to take on similarly stereotypical roles at a time when Muslim women occupied center stage in immigration polemics. I ask whether or not heterosexual porn is so different from gay erotica in its political messaging around minority sexuality that it precludes comparison between them. Through recourse to DVD content, personal interviews with directors and actors, comic books, and articles in the mainstream and alternative press, I will argue that this porn, especially the gay male production, can tackle issues of undigested colonial memory and contemporary race relations in a much more forthright and therapeutic (if politically incorrect) way than the traditional journalistic means available can. It is the fantasy element of erotica that provides novel insights into known material, allowing it to move beyond the impasses besetting cultural production that aims for sociological accuracy and ethnographic realism, cutting through political dilemmas in a comprehensive if casual way, and finally offering original “solutions.” In the final analysis, I choose to evaluate media reactions to “ethnic porn” just as much as the visual content itself because this porn genre has resonated as a media curiosity in the last decade, generating a robust discourse that betrays its own set of projections and anxieties.

Intellectual Foundations Pornography, as a cultural medium in France, has until relatively recently been dismissed as the subject of a branch of academic inquiry. It has been seen as illegitimate, superficial, or treading in the gutter of “low culture.” The pornography wars in feminist circles, Cultural Studies’s recovery of forms of “low culture,” as well as the emergence across the Atlantic of respected porn scholars have changed this.2 Pornography has also been taken more seriously because in the DVD and Internet eras it emerged as a multi-billion-dollar industry whose viewership now numbers in the hundreds of millions: it is both a highly capitalistic enterprise with real elements of exploitation, as well as a forum for the expression of sexual fantasy and intimacy not hindered by representational and political red lines. Directors of pornography do not have to “justify” or “apologize,” in regard to objectionable content, because they can cite the supposed lack of intentionality at the center of desire and sexual preferences.3

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French directors of gay “ethnic” porn have often delivered positive portrayals of attractive subversives otherwise seen as objectionable, like Citébeur’s Tarek, a figure who intertwines ethnic difference, virile eroticism, and (righteous) criminality. With much of this porn production, we see French multi-ethnic youth carrying out a playful eroticization of the delinquency that has fueled contemporary media scandals about a growing insécurité, or proliferation of crime, in France: the portrait of Tarek turns the mass incarceration of French Arabs and Muslims (studies estimate the French prison population to be between sixty to eighty percent Muslim) into the ideal enabler of mass orgies, for example.4 “Tarek” is as “sexy” as he is “delinquent”: moral judgment in the comic book takes second stage to esthetic appreciation. Many Arab protagonists take on an almost Robin Hood role, their willing “victims” (i.e., passive performers) benefiting from various privileges both economic and racial; white art gallerists, prison guards, and sex tourists all “pay” for their privilege with sexual gratification. This flattering portrayal of Tarek recalls Jean Genet’s erotic worship of “criminals,” and in an altogether other sense, his veneration of Palestinian and Black Power resistance fighters. There are of course many ambiguities to Genet’s stance: one perspective finds that he contests the secure norms of white French society by aligning himself with American blacks and Palestinians, yet he conditions his solidarity on a homo-eroticism that finds these subjects beautiful first and righteous second. Genet however took great pains to explain, in chronological terms, that beauty and righteousness are simultaneous (that Black Panthers are beautiful because they are already righteous), and that he is merely a witness who recognizes this. Others have objected to Genet’s idolizing the criminal, the thug, or the outcast qua outcast, and subsuming the Other into a zest for depravity that Genet might enjoy on an esthetic level, but which that Other might not find flattering. Many of these interpretive ambiguities with origins in Genet’s time also apply to the tropes of gay “ethnic” porn. Would Franco-Arab men find a flattering reflection in the aggressive and foul-mouthed Citébeur characters who, for some non-Arab homosexuals, represent a glorious and erotic subversion of French authority? Some contemporary thinkers have connected the social perception of banlieusards to theories first disseminated by the French gay intelligentsia of the 1960s and 1970s, including Jean Genet, Michel Foucault, and Guy Hocquenghem. Sociologist Nacira Guénif-Souilamas, author of the seminal Les féministes et le garçon arabe, helps contextualize the media’s current caricatural portraits of the much-too-macho banlieusards: “Virilism, that outrageous expression of masculinity constrained to its strict sexual limits, offers

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the advantage of illustrating the ideological proximity already underlined by Foucault between perversion and delinquency, which, as is publicly notorious, the Arabs of the projects practice in equal measure.”5 With Foucault’s finding in mind, it becomes possible to attempt a reading of virilist pornography that aims to unearth its possibly political ramifications. Analyzing the politics of ethnic representation in porn becomes a complicated task, however, in light of the porn market’s highly capitalistic nature and often untrustworthy entrepreneurs, who may conceal material gain under the veneer of radicalism, innovation, or inclusivity, as with best-selling porn that makes a point of featuring underrepresented minorities.

Citébeur and the Erotics of the Urban In 2008, Antoine Barde of Studio Press, the business team that releases the highly lucrative Citébeur video series, gave a compelling interview about the place of “ethnic porn” in the European pornography market.6 The “Cité” in Citébeur refers to the public housing “projects”: the series is one in which the racaille or thug stereotype abounds. Several videos pit suburban Arab and black teens in sportswear and chains against symbols of the negligent or abusive French State, such as policemen and administrators, on whom the actors repeatedly carry out what appears to be a sexualized revenge. The dénouements of the often hilariously inappropriate plots rarely deliver on their original menace, often concluding with both sexual partners deriving pleasure from the encounter, though perhaps for different reasons. Because they display so well the simultaneous demonization and eroticization of “ethnic” virilities in France, it is worth citing examples from the ample Citébeur corpus of clips, full-length films, comic strips, and erotic fiction. The titles of video releases evoke themes at the intersection of immigration, sexuality, and urban blight: the humorous eroticization of urbanization and the lack of green spaces (Bitume te met dans la lune/Pavement makes you see stars); the infiltration of the Mediterranean and the demographic redefinition of France (Med in France, wherein “Med” is also shorthand for “Mohammed”); or the transformation of the dingy sites of gangbangs and gang rapes into zones of pleasure (as in Caves à plaisirs/Pleasure Cellar).7 Barde and his business partner Stéphane Chibikh, the creator of Citébeur, started from a desire to provide an alternative to the formulaic and “colorless” output of the main porn studios. Business exploded, and in 2008 Barde bragged that Citébeur was the highest-grossing gay porn DVD studio in Europe.8 The partners were instrumental in turning a new consumer category, namely what is called “ethnic porn,” into a market force. Faced with

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aggressive yet playful images of French Arab men dominating what are alleged to be white dominators, many in the gay media establishment—especially in the pages of mainstream gay-interest magazines like Têtu—criticized Citébeur as taking a step backward and away from a humanist, egalitarian model of twenty-first-century gay relations.9 At the same time, a gay consumer public searching for titillating and slightly disturbing novelties quietly bought Citébeur products and spread the name. Since some journalists found “ethnic porn” a problematic curiosity, many questions, reproaches, and demands for explanation have been directed to porn producers, such that director commentary, as much as video content, has been instrumental in shaping the image of “ethnic porn” in the mainstream. Chibikh initially became a figure of controversy in the gay press, causing an apparent estrangement from the media. He was criticized for choosing to film in “caves,” those tower block cellars converted into congregation spaces that are often used as a symbol of suburban squalor, the site of a kind of nonbourgeois listlessness, while also being the supposedly preferred site for gang rapes and gangbangs (tournantes).10 As one of the most unapologetic forms of sexualization, pornography responds to the dystopian visions of immigrants and their descendants that often circulate in the French media. Some productions featuring French Arabs have engaged with the alleged breakdown of mixité11 in the banlieues by featuring fantasy scenes of tournantes. Numerous media exposés on tournantes have focused on this breakdown of relations between the sexes, controversially suggesting that collective youth rape is a feature specific to banlieue spaces that was never before seen in such numbers prior to the concentration of minorities and immigrants in these peripheries. Sociologists like Laurent Mucchielli however have questioned both the ethnicization of rape and also the “novelty” of tournantes, pointing to many earlier patterns of collective rape in recent French history (i.e., the blousons noirs gangs who were active in the mid-twentieth century, prior to mass immigration from North and Sub-Saharan Africa12). The pornosphere has in turn produced erotic exaggerations of these controversies to nightmarish and sometimes humorous extremes. Chibikh was accused of eroticizing poverty and romanticizing the daily routine of confrontation that dominates misérabiliste representations of the suburbs, in other words, those that depict a culture of poverty or failure.13 Citébeur’s initial media splash was mixed, partly because the gay press had not yet resolved its own anxieties about the figure of the Arab banlieusard, caught somewhere between fear, fetish, and frustration. In 2003, the “Porno” section of the then top gay-interest magazine Têtu profiled the emergent Citébeur studio, which had just released its first full-length DVD, Wesh Cousin

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(“What’s up bro?”).14 Journalist Louis Maury headlined the article “Praise song for thugs,” describing the release as a “porn video (which), with its rascal show-offs sprucing themselves up in front of the camera, is as irritating as it is exciting.” Under the subheading, Maury added, “Stéphane Chibikh, the director, explains himself (s’en explique),” as though Chibikh had been an undisciplined enfant terrible in need of a call to order. Maury captured the ambivalent strategy of Citébeur marketing, halfway between provocation and entertainment, but ridiculed the postures struck by the models in the DVD as annoyingly inauthentic, a mere rehash of ethnic stereotypes. He failed to remark however that these bothersome “types” had until then been noticeably absent from French gay pornography. Maury’s review is notable for the way it brings up competing claims about what constitutes the “authentic” when it comes to banlieue representation. Declaring the Cité actors “caricatural,” Maury shifted his focus to the “astonishing authenticity” of the lighting and sound, perfectly rendering the surrounding urban environs, an authenticity which he then positively compared with the “realist” production of a porn studio that predates Citébeur, JNRC (Jean Noël René Clair), known for its scenarios involving immigrants and construction workers hard-up for cash, often looking desperate and barely interested. “Authenticity,” of course, is a staple feature of the ethnographic realism trend in much banlieue cinema and literature that has widely been criticized in postcolonial critiques of banlieue representations. What realism does the search for authenticity provide, when, in order to be deemed “authentic,” representations of the banlieues must display copious scenes of poverty, violence, failure, sexual frustration, and affective isolation? More charitable than most journalists, Maury allowed Chibikh to respond to the accumulation of critiques: In the face of criticism, the young man listens, takes notes, and justifies his choices, . . . (showcasing) a disconcerting conversational ability and an undeniable sense of precision which rests upon a term that has become his catchphrase: ‘authenticity.’ ‘Why deform reality to make it more presentable?’ he asks from the start. ‘I didn’t want to make it “pretty,” but rather to make it “real.” In this film, everything is na-tu-ral!’ He addresses, point by point, our objections. The actors’ look? ‘They dress the way they want.’ The dialogue? ‘. . . If you have a big dick, you brag about it.’15

Maury and Chibikh deploy the highly ambivalent term “authenticity” in very different, perhaps incompatible ways, such that the debate about

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representational accuracy arrives at a relativist dead end: Chibikh insists the performers’ acting realistically approximates banlieue codes while Maury finds the actors’ behavior exaggerated. Maury’s surprise at Chibikh’s eloquence and entrepreneurial spirit is itself somewhat surprising, what with its ambiguous assumptions about Chibikh’s lack of education. Maury also assumes a majority of sorts behind his own objections, collapsing an entire gay viewing public—which may love Citébeur just as it is—with his own point of view. Against Maury’s assumptions of coercion, of directorial cues that reinforce stereotypes, and of artificial exaggerations of virility, Chibikh insists on free will and the creativity born of it: Citébeur scenes, to him at least, do not seem as artificially rehearsed or professionally edited as mainstream productions do.

Performer Demands, Viewer Needs When watching Citébeur pornography, it is not always clear that the viewer will get “what he wants,” which in turn creates suspense and undoes predictability. In this sense, free will is wrested from the consuming viewer and offered to the performer, who arouses the viewer through provocation and bodily denial. This special interaction between viewer and performer stems from Citébeur productions’ distinctive feature, that the actors in many solo scenes confidently lock eyes with the camera, use banlieue cruising vernacular and are relentlessly conversational and literally engaging. An example of dialogue from the DVD jackets for the Wesh Cousin series illustrates this feature, with the actor offering provocative yet inviting engagement: “You will check out my huge rod and you will want it. Impossible not to! Look at me right in the eyes and submit to my power. I know you are dying of envy for me to stuff it in your mouth and for me to detonate your little butt which is overheating and wet from checking out my huge caliber (weapon). Let yourself go, damn it!”16 Employing the imperative case while offering the services of a guide, this monologue plays on ethnographic stereotypes of the native informant by turning that guide into a bossy drill sergeant, who reads the transparently aroused body language of spectators who find a reluctant attraction to being dominated. These scenarios depart from the critique that the French Arab partner vengefully derives a one-way satisfaction at the expense of the white subject. The final objective for the French Arab performer still stands: to produce unparalleled pleasure in the scene partner. “Egalitarian” sex still occurs here, but it is more so an equality of complementarity between the “verbal top” and the “obedient bottom” (both of which are common and sought-after types in any online gay cruising setting). This radicalization of

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active and passive, performer and viewer, is achieved despite the prevailing encouragement in the gay mainstream media for ever more versatile sexual roles in homosexual relations, an injunction that is part of a “sexual modernity” that looks down on excessively virile and exclusively “active” men.17 Chibikh presents Citébeur’s unique actor engagement as a spontaneous occurrence, a mere consequence of cinéma vérité, and thus absolves himself of purposely staging virility. He notes that, “The masturbation scenes in my film resemble no others; these are interactive scenes. Filming this type of scene can often be annoying. For the spectator just as much as the actor. Here, the actor turns on and excites the spectator. With his own words. I won’t make him say things to furnish the scene.”18 The dialogue in Citébeur videos channel the style of aggressive pickups in public space. Such scenes are a far cry from the “barely there” stage presence and vacant expressions of actors in the productions of other gay porn studios specializing in “straightacting” men, in which actors often appear haggard, possibly drugged, their eyes never meeting the camera. Against the accusations of French Arab actors “provoking” supposedly white viewers with denials of bodily access (their clothes remaining on, also wearing hats, sunglasses), the direct eye contact and sustained verbal address to the spectator establish a visceral connection, difficult to refuse. The bond of intimacy between actor and spectator, as artificial as it can be in most pornography, is arguably more intense in this verbally “violent” production than in generic, mainstream porn wherein bodies may be visually available for the consumer all while the performers these bodies belong to appear mentally and verbally absent. While criticized for the “unethical” sexual relations it represents, Citébeur nevertheless distinguishes itself from other studios in what it communicates to consumers about its production methods and the way it treats performers. In his aforementioned interview with Têtu magazine, creator Chibikh emphasizes something underpublicized, namely, that all the scenes are strictly “safe sex,” a feature that contrasts with European and now American productions that lucratively bypass the use of condoms. “Bareback” porn usually outsells “safe sex” production and dominates today’s market. “It’s not because we’re from the projects that we are not sexually educated,” exclaims Chibikh, taking a shot at nascent rhetoric that casts banlieue residents as in dire need of sexual enlightenment, seen for instance in the activism of groups like Ni Putes, ni Soumises (“Neither Whores, Nor Doormats,” a banlieue women’s advocacy group with influence in the French Socialist Party).19 Chibikh additionally addresses the reproaches often made against producers like JNRC (to whom Chibikh is often compared) who seem to exploit the desperation of men hard on their luck. Chibikh and Barde have explained that they find

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their actors online amongst visitors to their website (receiving around three hundred answers to casting calls per month at the time of the interview). Maury acknowledges Chibikh’s greatest “ethical” innovation in a porn world short on ethics: “A rare practice in the porno universe, the director offers his models the chance to pull out after filming ends, in which case the rush footage is destroyed.”20 This practice may have come in response to a flurry of Internet gossip and urban legends surrounding the emergence of Citébeur, stories which alleged that actors ran the risk of being outed to friends and family who, according to supposed Arab honor codes, might banish them from the family home, carry out punishments or even resort to murder.

Dividing the Audience? The way Citébeur directly addresses the viewer brings up the question of just which audience is being engaged. Is the projected audience member the white petit bourgeois in need of exoticism and brute sensuality, the banlieusard who is tired of monochromatic porn offerings, or both? The virile posturing of performers and the insults directed at the imagined viewer (“You’re a real slut, aren’t you?”), have caused strong reactions among those paying customers who feel they are being maligned by the studio they have paid to service them, that these insults go beyond a fantasy form of sado-masochism and enter the realm of real race- and class-based resentment. Maury, the aforementioned Têtu journalist, appears to have deliberated this, issuing an almost insecure disclaimer about his experience watching Citébeur videos: “Without being frightened virgins or uptight bourgeois, one can get slightly irritated, right off the bat, while watching Wesh Cousin.” Chibikh responds to Maury’s intimation that his production company’s pornography divides the viewing public between bourgeois whites and banlieusard men of color: “It’s easy and reductive to say that . . . In the videos online and in this film, I mix some beur (French Arab) with some French, because the combination is realistic. White people are attracted to beurs, and vice versa. In terms of the viewing public, it’s the same: I want to attract whites and beurs.”21 Here, Chibikh alleviates the increasing fear of non-mixité by evoking the capacity of eroticism and mutual attraction to encourage social mobility and encounters outside of comfort zones and community limits. One can’t be sure whether Chibikh means by this that all manner of people are attracted to each other in general (mixité), or whether a specific attraction emerges from the eroticization of difference (in terms of race, social status, or power). The result is however the same, with the added mixité “benefit” of being exposed to other ethnicities one might not have discovered in ethnically uniform pornography.

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One of the matters that most contributed to the divisiveness surrounding Citébeur is the studio’s recourse to violence and weapons. Chibikh’s business partner, Antoine Barde, has refused however to consider the controlled masochism on display as pathological. He insists, instead, that consumers enjoy watching white (and sometimes Arab) men humbled or humiliated on screen by racaille types and that this mock violence could be the main draw for a significant portion of viewers who purchase Citébeur DVDs. The presence of firearms, albeit fake, in the videos is just one point of controversy in the Citébeur erotic strategy: “We don’t support, of course, the use of firearms,” Barde assures, seeming accustomed to his PR role, which is designed to calm down worried media inquirers who might see in Citébeur a sort of incitement to violence.22 In important ways, Citébeur has a paradoxical effect of addressing the fear of violence, sabotaging the expected outcome and cliché of conflict, while telling another story in its place that is not necessarily flattering for the parties involved, but nonetheless pleasurable.

Colonial? Postcolonial? Some critics of Citébeur say the studio is animated by the same mechanisms of exoticism and colonial Othering found in the works of Orientalist and neo-Orientalist authors and painters who depict the colonized spaces of North Africa as singularly licentious: full of sexual despots with control over clandestine harems, where a sexuality “unobtainable in Europe” could be sampled.23 Transposed to the banlieue, where modern-day reportages have cast banlieue men as hypersexual and violently possessive, the clandestine harems become the cellars of housing projects and the despots become the gang leaders organizing collective rape. This type of critique reproaches Citébeur for turning the banlieue into a postcolonial repository of colonial desire and anxiety.24 Yet with Citébeur, it is hard to ignore just how much the colonial tropes have been overturned. Chibikh’s upbringing, with Kabyle and Harki25 parents, born and raised in the French suburbs, explains his investment in the French urban environment, whereas other gay porn producers like the late Jean-Daniel Cadinot fetishized North Africa and sex tourism. “The homo-erotics of orientalism” is a concept that scholars like Joseph Boone have coined to describe the trope that extends from modern-day erotic illustrations back to the literature of André Gide or Joe Orton for example.26 In their literature, the predominant figure of desire was the fresh-faced North African youth of rare beauty, often anonymous in a paradisiacal menagerie of interchangeable boys always at one’s service. The Arab youth was also taken as a figure of alterity against

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which to evaluate European subjectivity. Gide, for example, compared his sickly “European” body to that of exuberant, bronze-skinned North African boys and young men. In Citébeur’s videos however, that image has been exchanged for the often-obscured French Arab model who, the opposite of naked, is somber and grinning provocatively under his baseball cap, wearing sunglasses or a kuffiyeh (the Palestinian black and white scarf) even while indoors. Actors are purposefully dissimulated by the cinéma vérité style of Chibikh’s handheld camera, which playfully hides actors in a way that frustrates the viewers’ desire for nudity, yet simultaneously generates the eroticism of delayed reward when more of the actor gets exposed. Though Citébeur does eventually give the client what he (or she) wants, as with any pornographic production, the client is actually paying to have the actors visually frustrate him (or her, as there is a growing female fan base for gay pornography). These dynamics create a new “pornotrope” that distinguishes the colonial nostalgia production from the banlieusard production: the difficult Arab boy, far removed from the always-available Arab boy of yesteryear. For Barde, the so-called authenticity of a clandestine sexuality thought to thrive in the banlieue is essential to Citébeur’s appeal, due in large part to the danger and possibility of surprise that creates sexual drama. For the filmmakers, this tension between secrecy and discovery provides a goldmine of eroticism for patrons bored with mainstream production. Describing this palpable tension, Barde recounts that “many times, while filming in stairwells or basements, we’ve startled policemen who, in a state verging on shock, said it was the first time they had seen anything like this, or even imagined such a thing were possible, in the projects at least.”27 Citébeur thus upends the structures that oppose the state apparatus and its police force to a surveilled Arab community. Barde and Chibikh here use the serendipitous occurrence of banlieusard homosexuality as a ruse, a surprise, or even a consciousnessraising initiative against established French anxieties about insécurité. When those accustomed to a monochromatic banlieue (here, policemen) “discover” its sexual diversity, they may take a startled step back and leave more room in the consideration of French Arab subjectivities for sexual alterity and the dispersal of ethnic stereotypes.

From Beur to Beurette, a Political Loss “Ethnic” porn has a highly lucrative heterosexual side, representing a much more sizable portion of the market. As with gay productions, Orientalist tropes have often been recycled from times past, visible in the proliferation of titles (most often made for men by men) depicting harems, the sexual

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despotism of Arab men, white men’s Muslim rape fantasies, as well as forced or voluntary unveilings that become erotic events following the sequence of a striptease. One of the most trendy figures emerging in post-1980s porn has been that of the beurette (or French Arab woman) in French heterosexual porn. It has become difficult if not impossible to perform Internet searches about nonsexual aspects of beurettes, so prevalent is their sexualization online. As with Citébeur and its promotion of the racaille, heterosexual porn studios have promoted the “girl from the projects” into a recognizable and sought-after type, such that zeitgeist publications like Les Inrockuptibles, which follows trends in pornography closely, have dubbed this trend “La Mode Beurette.” Citébeur and beurette productions strongly differ, however, in terms of the directors’ proximity and identification with the actors, and in terms of an arguably political activism on display. In the gay production, the intended audience can more easily confuse itself or even identify with the actors; in contrast, the heterosexual production is usually designed for the gratification of a hypothetically white male viewer. Heterosexual porn featuring beurettes does not showcase scenarios of resistance, role-reversal, or social reckonings to the same extent. As beurette porn star Yasmine describes, the racaille role is one that provided her the means to emerge (as in her breakout 2006 Dorcel title The Story of Yasmine or 2005’s Rachida et ses soeurs with the JTC Studio). It is a role she avoided later in her career, as it represents for her an unflattering image of a beurette de service (token Arab, but in another sense, “Arab at your service”) who hustles in the projects, for whom nothing is too degrading as long as it involves money.28 In the 2007 investigative report “Moroccans and the X-Rated: A Carnal Story,” organized by Francophone Moroccan magazine Tel Quel, writers described how this France-born trope infiltrated the Moroccan sexual imaginary.29 Interestingly, Yasmine has stated that the fantastical Orientalist tropes of the 1001 nights appeal to her above and beyond the more contemporary, “realist,” and “urban” roles available in banlieue porn.30 This comes in total opposition to Citébeur’s rejection of the service-oriented and sex-tourism-enabling Arab boy figure as a disempowering relic of the colonial era. Though Yasmine enjoyed a stratospheric yet temporary success, she was at the end of her journey underpaid, subject to extremely difficult working conditions, and left out to dry when her contract expired with the mega studio Dorcel.31 The prevailing representations of French Arab women in heterosexual porn for male audiences, are arguably less engaged with addressing postcolonial discrimination as an injustice to be dealt with on the level of sexual representation. Unlike in Citébeur’s productions, it is distinctly clear that

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the intended audience for mainstream heterosexual porn featuring Arab women is not the French Arab subject or even the white male viewer who would enjoy seeing women of North African background heroically employing sexual weapons toward anti-colonial, anti-oppression or anti-racist ends. There are of course exceptions, as in some women-directed crossover films that engage with the porn world: Baise-moi (Fuck me, incorrectly translated in its English version as Rape Me),32 which had been released to a wide audience in France and enjoyed some international success. It starred two beurette porn stars, the late Karen Bach and Rafaella Anderson, playing a sex worker and racaille rape survivor respectively, who join together to go on a killing spree and sex binge, displaying an agency rarely found amongst Arab women in heterosexual porn. Tel Quel documented the enthusiasm for the beurette trope in Morocco and in France among the Moroccan communities there. The culture magazine also explained the subsequent “Moroccan-ization” of this trope that occurred when Moroccan fans began making their own films, and placing market demands for models “closer-to-home” in terms of looks, figure, and especially their ability to speak in darija or Moroccan “dialect.” One of the authors of the investigative report, Hassan Hamdani, does not believe these pornographic cross-pollinations between Morocco and France amount to anything important in terms of esthetic innovation, ethnic visibility, or empowerment: Racism and sexism are two breasts upon which the producers of this sector are now feeding. By investing in realist XXX porn in the mid-1990s, they have inundated the market with films in which the ethnic component was the draw-in. The Arab has not escaped from marketing and even less from racial prejudice. . . . A “Yasmine,” as liberated as she may be, cannot serve as an example, Moroccan or otherwise.33

Unlike Citébeur, which arguably manages to manipulate stereotypes in innovative ways, to exploit the exploitation so to speak, this heterosexual ethnic porn does not manage to escape either the weight of stereotypes, or the strictures of a prejudiced realism in which the inclusion of ethnic difference often means the inclusion of ethnic failure. Tel Quel, however, subjected Yasmine to its own brand of sexism just as it tried to diagnose the porn industry’s racialized sexism. In an interview for the same issue, Yasmine told interviewer Mehdi Alaoui that she is a practicing Muslim.34 When asked about the current image of Arab women “today,” she lamented the loss of “certain traditional values”: when the interviewer

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expressed surprise that this kind of remark should originate with her, she expressed her own surprise at his question. As seen in the above quote, the journalist Hamdani conservatively deprives her of role model status in the name of progressive values, while Yasmine the porn star shows a more open-minded understanding of a moral conservatism that can be available to anyone, no matter the judgment placed upon their profession. Also, in the same interview, Hamdani assumes the male viewer can make a distinction between practicing Islam and engaging with the erotics of the veil; however the same distinction is not allowed for Yasmine: “Following the example of the American sites, the women don the veil, except that in France, this piece of cloth is invested with Islam in order to also sell the religious prohibition being transgressed. These sites warn that their content has nothing to do with Islam. Nevertheless, it’s the ‘Muslim woman who’s letting go’ that one is being sold.”35 In this ongoing comparison between Citébeur and heterosexual postimmigration porn, it should be noted however that negative testimony from Citébeur actors about their experiences is not as readily available: their experiences dealing with the studio may have been as problematic as Yasmine’s, if not as well-documented.36

Conclusion Fads in “ethnic” porn have spanned from colonial nostalgia for Arab servility to the eroticization of postimmigration violence in urban France. Yet what may have been irretrievably lost in this process is a sense of how French Arabs view and eroticize themselves in the absence of predominantly nonArab market forces. In a sense, Citébeur’s Arab fan base may not have come into existence had it not been for the initial round of promotion catering to a white viewership. Citébeur’s creator Stéphane Chibikh has insisted however that his company was born of a desire to fill a void: the success of his enterprise and recruitment efforts point to a familiarity with a pre-existing network of men who have sex with men in the banlieues, a network visibly absent from previous porn production. Another matter that complicates these claims about a mainly white audience is that it is not always certain whether Citébeur’s producers are indeed targeting a white, well-off, male viewer. The viewer dynamics of Citébeur completely bypass the metrosexual city center, long thought to be the focus of gay life. This is made evident by the self-fulfilling auto-eroticism of featured banlieusard actors, and the fact that the banlieue is no longer a space devoid of sexual opportunity necessitating stealthy trips to the Marais, Paris’s gay center. The actors’ “dirty talk” often reaches out to fellow banlieusards instead of to a white, middle-class

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viewer. This has created novel dynamics in which the non-banlieusard viewer acts as a voyeur peering into intra-banlieue sexual networks. As this chapter has shown, a series of persistent and interrelated tropes run through gay and straight “ethnic” pornography: the hypersexualization of single immigrant men; the “eroticization of banlieue poverty” as regards both women and men; the veil as striptease; and the homosexual “thug” type or “homothug” (caillera gay). Pornography stands outside the requirements of political correctness—it elucidates, but also exaggerates and distorts the sexualization of immigration and race relations. Porn studios have seized upon quite serious contemporary scandals involving everything from postimmigration exploitation, sex tourism, tournantes, sexual violence, and insécurité in the suburbs. Instead of heightening anxieties, the gay productions at least have sought to bring about a strange, and strangely effective, civic therapy using exaggeration, fantasy, but also honesty about the fears that may cause ethnic segregation in city space. Though Arabs are, in mainstream gay productions, more the objects of fantasy rather than the producers of fantasy, Arab performers also eroticize themselves in a way that is initially meant to frustrate, rather than excite, the assumed white viewer-consumer. Heterosexual “ethnic” pornography, made most often by heterosexual men for other heterosexual men, has not been as effective in providing politically subversive images, in exploiting the exploitation so to speak. Finally, this erotic recasting of the demonized banlieues as a space of cleverness, creativity, pleasure, and harmony allows for a crucial interrogation of pornography’s “low” cultural status, its academic marginalization, and its “limited” political potential.

Notes 1.  Parts of this chapter appeared in modified form in chapter 5 of my book, Sexagon: France, Muslims, and the Sexualization of National Culture (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017). 2.  On heterosexual production, see Linda Williams, Hardcore: Power, Pleasure, and the Frenzy of the Visible (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). On male homosexual production, see Tim Dean, Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Culture of Barebacking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). On women of color in heterosexual production, see Mireille Miller-Young, A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 3.  Exceptions must be made for discussions gathering steam on the Internet in regard to “sexual racism” in personal ads, which render racial preferences blameworthy. Nathan Manske, “‘You’re really nice, but I don’t date black guys’: Racism or Preference?” Huffington Post, December 31, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.

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com/nathan-manske/youre-really-sweet-im-just-not-into-black-guys-racism-orpreference_b_6401436.html.  4. Farhad Khosrokhavar, L’islam dans les prisons (Paris: Éditions Jacob-Duvernet, 2004).   5.  Nacira Guénif-Souilamas and Eric Macé, Les Féministes et le garçon arabe (La Tour d’Aigues, France: Editions de l’Aube, 2004), 74.   6.  Originally prepared for the LA Weekly, it was not published. Antoine Barde of Citébeur, interview by author, summer 2008.  7. The name of one of Citébeur’s most famous actors, “Bitume” translates to pavement but also connotes urban squalor and the absence of green space.   8.  Antoine Barde, interview.   9.  In the guise of policemen or prison guards, for example. This was the case at least in the initial output, in which active and passive roles were racialized, Arabs always “active” and Caucasians always “passive.” The studio has since switched up the role-assignments in unpredictable ways. 10. I mention the dual translation “gangbang” and “gang rape” for tournantes, because the scenes are sometimes represented as consensual (especially in gay porn) and sometimes not. 11.  The mixture of different social groups, ages, genders, ethnicities, and classes. It is a criterion often considered auspicious for the peace and prosperity of a given neighborhood. 12.  A Caucasian gang known for their “black jackets” (hence their moniker), they were known to practice collective rape, amidst other forms of crime and delinquency, long before collective rape had been blamed on the descendants of post-colonial immigrants. Laurent Mucchielli, “Regard Sur La Délinquance Juvénile Au Temps Des ‘Blousons Noirs,’” Enfances & PSY 4, no. 41 (2008): 132–39. 13. “Misérabilisme,” or in my usage “miserabilism,” denotes a representational trend that stresses inevitable (socio-economic) failure, an inescapable cycle of poverty, and an inability to improve upon previous generations. In this way it resembles the “culture of poverty” arguments often deployed against U.S. minorities. 14.  Louis Maury, “Cantique de la racaille,” Têtu, July–August 2003, 36. 15. Ibid. 16.  Stéphane Chibikh, Wesh Cousin (series) (Paris: Studio Presse, 2003–6). 17. An umbrella term, “sexual modernity” has been theorized by scholars like Eric Fassin, Nilufer Göle and Nacira Guénif-Souilamas: it variously includes strictly egalitarian sexual and affective relations, gender equality of a secular nature, as well as zero-tolerance of “exaggerated virilities” and “self-censoring” women (Muslims who wear the veil). 18.  Maury, “Cantique de la racaille,” 36. 19. Mayanthi L. Fernando, “Save the Muslim Woman, Save the Republic: Ni Putes Ni Soumises and the Ruse of Neoliberal Sovereignty,” Modern & Contemporary France 21, no. 2 (2013): 147–65. 20.  Maury, “Cantique de la racaille,” 36.

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21. Ibid. 22.  Antoine Barde, interview. 23.  Edward Saïd, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 190. 24.  My usage of the term “postcolonial” is limited to the context of Hexagonal France and the age of mass immigration from North and Sub-Saharan Africa, but I also discuss the dynamics of sexual commerce in post-independence North Africa. 25.  Algerian Muslim soldiers who fought on France’s side during the Algerian war of independence. 26.  Joseph Boone, The Homoerotics of Orientalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). 27.  Antoine Barde, interview. 28.  “The client wants the sordid and that’s what he’ll get from the demonized banlieue and beurettes presented as overworked maids (cosettes frustrées), ready to do whatever it takes to exit their social and sexual impoverishment.” Mehdi Sekkouri Alaoui and Hassan Hamdani, “Moroccans and the X-Rated: A Carnal Story,” Tel Quel, January 9, 2008, http://m.telquel-online.com/archives/296/couverture_296. shtml. 29.  Hamdani interviewed the sexologist Aboubakr Harakat for the article, sharing some of his insights here: Beurettes are cast in scenes that derive from the image of the “Muslim woman from the banlieues who wants to slum it with riff-raff (s’encanailler).” The discourse is always the same: a virgin girl wants to emancipate herself from moral pressures, to “let loose and have a good time” (s’éclater) as it is often specified, to uproot herself from “poverty,” to get her “thug-girl” on, but without forgetting to put on her veil which she removes little by little as the film progresses. This mass of clichés seduced Moroccans, who saw resonating within it their own erotic imaginary. “This archetype of the transgressed religious taboo is just as valid in the reality of Moroccan life. Prostitutes are increasingly donning the veil . . . as it is an excitement factor for clients . . .” explains (the sexologist) Aboubakr Harakat. (Alaoui and Hamdani, “Les Marocains et le X”)

30.  Most of these stereotypes have transatlantic origins, the journalist claims: “On American sites, the Arab girl is sold enrobed in pastel veils, half belly-dancer, half Sheherazade [sic] in Walt Disney’s Aladdin. This is the Orientalism of bazaars” (ibid.). 31.  Yasmine spoke very bitterly of her experience at Dorcel and her mostly unsuccessful attempts to branch out—with no support from her former employer—into film, publishing, or modeling. Philippe Vecchi, “Yasmine, ex-égérie Dorcel: ‘Maintenant je sais pourquoi je suis devenue hardeuse,’” lesinrocks.com, January 9, 2011. 32.  Baise-moi, directed by Coralie Trinh Thi and Virginie Despentes (Paris: Canal + Productions, 2000). 33.  Alaoui and Hamdani, “Les Marocains et le X.” 34.  Something not exclusive to Arab porn stars: many American performers, male and female, declare themselves practicing Christians, as with mega-star Jenna Jame-

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son, who has recently converted to Judaism. Alaoui and Hamdani, “Les Marocains et le X.” 35.  Alaoui and Hamdani, “Les Marocains et le X.” 36. Two interviews with Citébeur actors Jawel and Aurélien appeared on the French hip-hop radio station Skyrock’s blog dedicated to the “gaytto,” or in other words, the “gay ghetto.” Tazayas, “Interview de Jawel, 26 Ans, Acteur Pour Citébeur,” tazayas.skyrock.com, March 20, 2011, http://tazayas.skyrock.com/2986690241-Interview-de-Jawel-26-ans-acteur-pour-Citebeur-Comme-beaucoup-de.html.

PART III

REPURPOSED IMAGES

CHAPTER FIVE

Rediscovering Third Republic Illustrated Menus Michael Garval

Les cartes de mets accompagnées d’illustrations sont de création récente, ne remontant guère au delà d’une trentaine d’années. L’avenir leur appartient: c’est dans un siècle qu’il faudra faire leur iconographie. [Bills of fare accompanied by illustrations are a recent innovation, going back scarcely thirty years. The future is theirs: a century from now we will need to undertake their iconography.] —John Grand-Carteret, Vieux papiers, vieilles images, cartons d’un collectionneur (1896)

Illustrated menus proliferated under the Third Republic, springing from key parallel trends in modern France: the rise of visual culture and the rise of gastronomy. While the genre enjoyed a similar vogue across much of the globe during this period, especially in Europe and North America, the French corpus is of particular interest because of its quality and abundance, the richness and influence of the French gastronomic culture surrounding it, and the centrality of that culture to the construction of French national identity. French illustrated menus are noteworthy not only for their epicurean and aesthetic dimensions, but also for their spirited, imaginative dialogue with major preoccupations of their day, from republicanism, to colonialism, to the impact of new technologies. Little known outside collectors’ circles until recently, these documents have now begun to attract some scholarly attention, though far from what they merit, for they offer researchers—especially in

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French Studies—a complex, varied, revealing body of nontraditional source material to exploit in many different ways. Working with these menus requires dealing with their similarities and differences, and grappling with the quirks of their underlying “menu logic.” Juxtaposing word, image, and cuisine, illustrated menus vary in size, form, material, technique, style, and theme. Such diversity bespeaks the genre’s sophistication and inventiveness, as does a penchant for self-referentiality and miseen-abîme, with all sorts of self-conscious reflection upon the menu, the meal ahead, indeed the whole dining experience. Ultimately, illustrated menus appeal to the imagination, transporting consumers into a fanciful realm, an alternate reality, a world unto itself reminiscent of the everyday world, but where wondrous occurrences, apparitions, and transformations abound. This chapter will highlight salient features of French illustrated menus, along with the challenges and rewards of studying such extraordinary cultural artifacts. As most readers are likely unfamiliar with this corpus, I will start by reviewing scholarship in the field, providing necessary background on the history of the illustrated menu, and outlining the genre’s key characteristics. Then, in a more philosophical vein, I will explore the peculiar, idiosyncratic “world of the menu,” along with the distinctive “menu logic” governing it, serving as natural laws for this seemingly separate, parallel universe. In conclusion, and taking an opposite tack, we will turn to “the menu and the world”—to illustrated menus’ engagement with the actual world around them, and in particular with the major geopolitical realities of their day, from regionalism and nationalism to war and colonization.

The Illustrated Menu While late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French posters and postcards have been studied and reproduced widely, until recently little scholarly attention had been paid to illustrated menus from the same period. From the start, however, illustrated menus appealed to their contemporaries as curiosities, keepsakes, and objets d’art. This is the perspective of fin-de-siècle commentator Léon Maillard, who examines menus alongside related documents like invitations and theatrical programs.1 Maillard focuses on the work of artists responsible for this production, but also considers broader societal connections, and insofar as it is possible from his vantage point to chronicle a vogue that would last nearly another half-century, he considers historical developments like the rise of association dinners.2 In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a trio of books would take a retrospective look at the illustrated menu. Livio Cerini de Castegnate shares Mail-

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lard’s emphasis on the menu as aesthetic object, curiosity, and collectible, and for the first time reproduces a significant number of menus (over one hundred) in color, though unfortunately small in size.3 Philippe Mordacq’s two contributions, an overview of the illustrated menu and a volume just on royal menus, offer some helpful historical information, and above all reproduce hundreds of menus in full color, including many in large format.4 All three of these studies are international in scope, evoking the breadth of the illustrated menu phenomenon, but without focusing on the particularities of the French corpus. More recently, in an excellent chapter on nineteenthcentury Parisian menus, Barbara K. Wheaton emphasizes the menu’s place within French culinary history.5 Patrick Rambourg’s A table . . . le menu! offers a similar focus on the role that the menu, conceived in a broad sense, has played in the development of the arts of the table, from the Middle Ages to the present.6 The most significant study to date, however, is the collective volume Potage tortue, buisson d’écrevisses et bombe glacée . . . Histoire(s) de menus.7 It aims, as Pascal Ory notes in the opening remarks, to study “la culture française par le menu” [French culture through the menu].8 The first third of the book takes a historical and thematic approach, looking at the modern menu’s eighteenth-century precedents, its invention in the nineteenth century, or its place in the history of printing; and its role as “witness” of daily life, politics, and local history, or as medium for artists and advertisers. The remaining two-thirds of the volume detail the location and holdings of menu collections in France. Exemplary but not exhaustive in its analysis and cataloging of menus, this study constitutes a necessary first step to enable future research. As editor Caroline Poulain remarks, “Ce livre est la première pierre d’un long travail à venir sur le repérage des menus, leur traitement, leur valorisation et leur analyse” [This book lays the foundation for a long undertaking to come, on the identification of menus, their use, appreciation, and analysis].9 Mordacq’s and Poulain’s books provide an excellent introduction to the illustrated menu, along with ample reproductions to ponder, so for now some general remarks on the genre and its history should suffice to orient the rest of my analysis. First, we need to differentiate between distinct but related conceptions of the “menu.” The term initially designated only the detailed listing of dishes making up a meal. Such a listing could be written up more or less formally, and shared among hosts, restaurateurs, cooks, and diners, but typically this remained a singular document, posted somewhere perhaps, but not reproduced, nor offered to individual diners. The additional, modern meaning of menu designates the card (Fr. carte) upon which the “menu” (the listing of dishes) is inscribed. This definition came into currency in the 1840s and

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’50s, as it became increasingly common to offer individual guests or customers a document of this sort to contemplate before the meal. No longer just a listing of dishes, the “menu” in this sense was also a vehicle for that listing, a physical object whose distribution to diners generally required multiple copies. An artifact of material culture, the menu was particularly well-suited to an age of mechanical reproduction, and responsive to new developments in the graphic arts, as well as in printing technologies. We should also distinguish between special occasion menus (Figures 5.1, 5.7, and 5.10) and restaurant menus (Figures 5.4, 5.5, and 5.8). Following the Revolution, French society experienced a general democratization of fine dining, as the rising bourgeoisie sought the gastronomic refinement that had once been the privilege of the aristocracy. From the early nineteenth century onward, moreover, the popularization of service à la russe allowed for individual table service and a clear sequencing of dishes (rather than their simultaneous presentation in the older service à la française). Together, these trends lent themselves to the creation of individual menus detailing the meals offered up for events from wedding feasts to diplomatic dinners, and also for all manner of banquets (for alumni, civic boosters, regionalists, literati, art lovers, etc.), which enjoyed an extraordinary vogue during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see Figures 5.1, 5.7, and 1.10). The rise of the restaurant also propelled the development of the menu. While a mid eighteenth-century “invention,” the restaurant evolved tremendously in the latter years of the eighteenth century, and on through the nineteenth, becoming ever more elaborate and varied, while spreading from Paris to the rest of France, and across the world. Restaurant menus would develop along with the establishments they served, becoming more extensive and more sophisticated.10 In the first half of the nineteenth century most menus—whether for special occasions or for restaurants, and whether in the older sense of singular documents or in the newer one of reproduced copies for individual diners— were exclusively textual. They generally lacked what we would now call graphic design elements, notably illustration, and restaurant menus in particular could be text-heavy, bordering on the encyclopedic in their listing of food and drink options. The Second Empire already saw some graphic refinement, notably in special occasion menus, but on the whole this was limited to ornamental frames or cadres, with decorative motifs, sometimes colored or even gilt, around the bill of fare. This practice continued through the 1870s. By the 1880s, more complex, varied, and inventive illustrated menus, both for special occasions and restaurants, appeared and soon abounded. Through the start of World War II, the genre witnessed great creative fer-

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ment, prompted by factors including urbanization, the rise of tourism, the proliferation of restaurants, a vogue for banquets, artistic innovations (e.g., japonisme, art nouveau, art deco), and advances in printing technology that enabled the rise of other popular visual forms as well, like the poster, the postcard, the trade card, and the illustrated newspaper. However, in the very different postwar cultural landscape of new visual media (like Technicolor cinema and television), of greater informality, and of simpler, faster food, the illustrated menu declined, and soon largely vanished except in contexts invoking the elegance of a bygone day. Ocean liners and airlines in particular continued to favor illustrated menus, but these vestiges of a moribund genre could seem formulaic, insipid, and emptily nostalgic, in comparison with those produced earlier. Since the mid-twentieth century, menus from the genre’s heyday under the Third Republic have sunk into obscurity. Many thousands have been preserved in public and private collections, yet remain hidden from view— forgotten treasures. Sadly, for diners in the twenty-first century, “illustrated menu” might only evoke a contemporary Chinese restaurant’s takeout menu, with thumbnail photos of sweet and sour pork or General Tso’s chicken. But such pedestrian, literal-minded documents are a far cry from Third Republic illustrated menus, works of greater aesthetic and conceptual ambition that almost never depict the food they list in their texts in any straightforward way. Rather than providing a direct correlation between word and image, they offer the consumer (i.e., the reader-viewer-diner) a network of diverse, complex, and subtle interconnections to contemplate. Indeed these menus, with their interwoven verbal, visual, and gastronomic dimensions, should be understood as key components of meals that were conceived as a Gesamtkunstwerk, a totalizing experience that aims to envelop the diner in a web of multilayered pleasures. Third Republic illustrated menus are striking not only for their abundance, but also for their variety, in all respects: dimension (from pocket- to postersize); form (single-leaf to booklet, from straightforward rectangle to elaborate cutout); material (all manner of paper and card stock, fabric, leather, metal, glass, ceramic, stone, even cork); artistic and printing techniques (engraving, lithography, photography, embossing, etc.) used on their own or in combination; and theme (all the period’s preoccupations parade across the menu, from eroticism to trade unionism, from revanchism to exoticism, from the veneration of great men to a fascination with new technologies, and from the international diffusion or rayonnement of French culture to nostalgia for the local terroir [land]).

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The creators of illustrated menus competed with each other for the ingenuity and novelty of their designs. All means, whether iconographical, typographical, linguistic, or gastronomic, were used to embellish the menu, to tempt and dazzle the diner, and inspire an anticipatory or even retrospective reverie, since the menu also served as a souvenir and collectible. Varied in tone as well, these menus could be clever, charming, wistful, mordant, folksy, refined, humble, grandiose, or they could hit multiple notes at once. All circumstances, it seems, could provide a pretext for a handsome illustrated menu: official, commercial or association banquets; private meals and celebrations; major events in people’s lives, both individually (baptisms, communions, bachelor parties, weddings, housewarmings, birthdays, anniversaries, awarding of the légion d’honneur) and collectively (holidays, inaugurations of monuments, salons, agricultural fairs, political alliances, World’s Fairs, etc.). Indeed this vogue for illustrated menus was so widespread that no specific pretext was needed for creating them, as attested by the production of innumerable blank menus, where an illustrated frame surrounds an open space designed for inserting the menu du jour. Amid the tremendous profusion and prodigious diversity of illustrated menus however, we discover recurrent patterns of thought that are both a large part of the menus’ charm and a key to their meaning. In an earlier essay focused on one illustrated menu in particular, I took preliminary steps toward understanding this “menu logic” that reigns within the seemingly self-contained world of the menu.11 Here I offer a fuller exposition.

The World of the Menu A “menu” is, originally and fundamentally, a bill of fare. This detailing of food and drink options, the core of the illustrated menu, is essential even when absent. Images and graphic motifs alone, without room for a bill of fare, are just illustrations, not illustrated menus. Conversely, blank illustrated menus are not simply illustrations, but rather vehicles for the bill of fare, even if this list of offerings has not yet been inscribed in the space allotted for it. Whether examined on individual illustrated menus, across certain types or series (diplomatic menus, brasserie menus, menus for recurring association banquets, etc.), the bill of fare tells what was served where and when, in what setting or for what occasion, and how dishes and drinks varied over time, as gastronomic trends waxed and waned. Besides creating this record of history, there is also a rhetoric of French food and wine, as pairings, juxtapositions, and progressions contribute to the overall effect, and offerings

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generally complement but also sometimes contrast tellingly with the ethos and aesthetic that inform the rest of an illustrated menu—like otherwise exotic-themed menus serving only French items, or perhaps some exotic dishes but only French wines. While a vehicle for the bill of fare, an illustrated menu is also, fundamentally, a visual medium. Accordingly, many illustrated menus underscore their status as visual representations, and point to the broader importance of the visual within gastronomic culture. To wit, illustrator and painter Luigi Loir casts one 1905 menu as a painter’s palette, with food and drink options in place of colors, highlighting his creative work, analogous to that of the culinary artists concocting the menu items (Figure 5.1).12 Similarly, in a menu by Gaston Noury, a little cupid chef reaches out from within a parsley sprigframed vignette to create the menu before our eyes—and before the seated diner’s eyes—as he paints atop the blank page the word “MENU” (Figure 5.2). Linking everything in the composition, the parsley sprig runs from the diner’s dress hem, across the table, into the blank space on the page, and behind the little chef; at once art nouveau decorative motif and garnish, it emblematizes a broader conflation of visual and culinary artistry. Taking this thinking further, one menu (undated, but probably from the 1920s or 1930s, judging by the style) shows an astonished diner, alone at a table, fork and knife in hand, with the meal’s components arriving as a suc-

Figure 5.1.  Luigi Loir, banquet menu, January 20, 1905, 250e Dîner de la Marmite. Bibiliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris.

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Figure 5.2.   Gaston Noury, blank menu. Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris.

cession of visual representations (Figure 5.3). A waiter carries a canvas depicting a tureen of soup, followed by a chef with an image of a steaming roast, then a sommelier with one of a wine bottle and glass, and finally a bellhop with a painting of a pipe (recalling René Magritte’s 1929 La Trahison des images, subtitled “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” [This is not a pipe]). At the table and ready to eat, pausing to feast his eyes and visualize the epicurean pleasures ahead, the diner here stands or rather sits in for the hypothetical holder of this menu. In a different vein but along similar lines, a menu for a 1911 Amis de l’Art Japonais dinner depicts a bird eyeing and no doubt preparing to eat a fly, offering another clever mise-en-abîme of the diner viewing the menu and envisioning the feast to come.13 The illustrated menu Les Cinq Sens underscores the broader importance of sight within modern gastronomic culture, through an allegory of the five

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Figure 5.3.   Joseph Hémard, blank menu. Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris.

senses.14 A series of marginal vignettes framing the central blank space left for the bill of fare depicts the senses: hearing the dinner bell ring; smelling a ripe melon; touching food, and getting touched by it (a chef holding and pinched by a lobster); tasting food and wine, of course; but above all, literally and figuratively surmounting the composition, in by far the largest and most elaborate of the vignettes, a crowd of eager diners viewing the culinary delights spread out before them. It is at once a celebration and an early critique of the rise of the visual in the gastronomic realm, a development leading toward today’s massive consumption of “food porn,” with glossy gourmet magazines and televised cooking shows offering up vicarious gastro-visual pleasures.15 Menus like these also highlight the self-referentiality and mise-en-abîme that are such striking features of “menu logic.” Illustrated menus reflect insistently, and in so many ways, upon their own processes of representation and reception, and upon all that is connected with the promise of the meal to come—its provisioning, preparation, service, but not actual consumption—and also the event celebrated, location of the feast, and public at hand, as well as the menu’s conception, composition, production, dissemination, and contemplation. In other words, alongside their beautiful images and delectable fare, these menus serve up ample portions of visual-verbal meta-commentary. To wit, different illustrated menus focus on different points in a process leading up to but not including the meal itself, from cultivation and procurement of ingredients through table service. For example, a menu for the Restaurant Drouant offers a scene of oysters being harvested from its own oyster beds (Figure 5.4). Others, like a blank menu for the Parisian Restaurant Maire or an unnamed 1885 menu16, offer more elaborate supply chains, run-

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Figure 5.4.   A. Agulles, detail, lunch menu, September 12, 1926. Restaurant Drouant. Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris.

ning from bottom to top, as food and wine rise up from the terroir (or merroir [seafood raising environment]) below to the dining table above. Not surprisingly, the creation of menus is of particular interest to menu creators, as in Gaston Noury’s illustration of a chef painting the menu as we watch (Figure 5.2). Along similar lines, one artist’s ostensible inability to create a menu provides a pretext for elaborating that menu. This clever and graphically pleasing composition is organized around a central sketch of the artist, above which there extends the exclamation, “Je n’ai pas eu le temps de vous faire un menu!” [I didn’t have the time to make you a menu!], surmounted in turn by the menu items, radiating out like the rays of the sun, or perhaps of inspiration.17 So too a menu for a printing machinery builders’ banquet focuses on the menu’s printing. Its cover exhibits giant, modern presses, while inside a Léon Marotte print displays the bill of fare for this event written across—and presumably reproduced from—a massive lithographer’s stone, propped up against the workshop wall.18 Many other menu illustrations highlight the bill of fare being read or viewed, in suggestive mise-en-abîmes of the diner’s pre-dining experience. In one contemporary vignette, indecisive customers contemplate their food and drink options while the waiter waits impatiently (Figure 5.5). In a more

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Figure 5.5.   Jehan Testevuide, detail, dinner menu, September 28, 1928, Restaurant de Castellane. Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris.

fanciful vein, the mythological Jugement de Pâris, featuring the ancient shepherd’s difficult choice among three enticing goddesses, stands in for the diner’s analogous predicament, hesitating between similarly delightful menu options at the Café de Paris—a comparison underlined by this menu’s deliberate misspelling of the latter as “Café de Pâris.”19 Along similar lines, a December 9, 1900 menu in the form of a hand mirror places the bill of fare in the space where the reflective surface would be.20 While not literally reflective, this menu is reflexive, as the diner gazes at the meal to be consumed and incorporated, a vision of one’s own biological future. You are what you eat or, in Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s more sociological formulation, “Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es” [Tell me what you eat, I will tell you what you are]. Food and drink choices bespeak our ambitions and pretentions, and in this sense the menu reflects back a vision—whether accurate or aspirational—of the diner’s social identity. Focused on all that leads up to the meal, the menu is part of a broader anticipatory process and mindset, that spills over into what could be called the para-menu, consisting of all the other, similarly illustrated documents that also look eagerly toward the meal, like invitations (sometimes doubling as entrance tickets), flyers and brochures, advertising cards, and place setting

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cards (sometimes combined with the menu itself). On the menu, this sense of anticipation often gets filtered through the lens of sexual desire, as on a cover illustration for a January 1, 1908 dinner menu, that offers the (presumably male) diner a voyeuristic peek at a beautiful laundress’s stocking-clad leg. It is a hopeful, New Year’s Day vision, with the cover’s implicit carnal delights gesturing toward the culinary ones announced in detail on the following page. Whetting our appetite, sparking our curiosity, piquing our interest, and offering an anticipatory glimpse of epicurean pleasures ahead, the menu is in a broad sense an hors d’oeuvre—outside yet setting the stage for the main oeuvre of the meal. This is the conception of the menu conveyed by one undated menu, which features a parade of dancing hors d’oeuvre in the space above the bill of fare (Figure 5.6). Construed as a threshold, the menu stands between the diner’s workaday world and the special realm of the meal, particularly of a meal that has merited the composition of an illustrated menu. It is thus a threshold in both time and space. Part of a well-established ritual, menus are consulted at a pivotal, liminal moment, immediately preceding the meal. Menus mark temporal divisions, noting prominently the date, the meal to be served (déjeûner or dîner), and occasionally the hour; some menus even show servants ringing and diners hearing the bell or gong that summons them to the table (as in Les Cinq Sens, discussed above). Likewise, menu illustrations often depict spatial thresholds. In a more sober and realistic vein, one vignette leads us up a staircase and into the Restaurant Chartier dining room.21 In a more stylized, dramatic mode, on a blank menu likely by the same artist as Les Cinq Sens, elegant diners and servers bearing platters of food line up on either side of an entryway framed by a red, theatrical type curtain marked “Menu,” drawn back as if at the start of a performance, as a maître d’hôtel points the way down the stairs, into the dining room, and a little page strikes a gong, delimiting the threshold in time as well. Taking such thinking to its logical conclusion, the menu becomes an entry into the paradisiacal space of the meal, rendered in a paradigmatic example from the Café Riche as heaven, complete with clouds and angels.22 The menu is a place where fantasy reigns, a space distinct from the realities of everyday life, or even of the meal to be served. That fantasy is often erotically charged, for example, in the recurrent eroticization of champagne, with women shown straddling or even impaled upon champagne bottles, and frequent scenes emphasizing the cork’s ejaculatory pop. It is worth noting as well that while a good deal of champagne figures in bills of fare, a disproportionately larger quantity is depicted in menus, a state of affairs epitomized by an illustration for the January 21, 1898 Dîner de la Marmite showing an entire

Figure 5.6.   Anonymous, menu, Hors d’oeuvre. Michael Garval, personal collection.

Figure 5.7.  Fernand Le Quesne, banquet menu, January 21, 1898, La Marmite. Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris.

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landscape, and the whole menu upon which it’s drawn, awash in a flood of champagne (Figure 5.7). As with champagne, far more lobster appears in menu images than in the bill of fare, probably because lobsters are colorful, amusing, and potentially dangerous—a kind of visual exclamation point. There is also far more rabbit depicted than served on these menus, probably because rabbits are playful, fertile, and abundant, qualities all in keeping with the spirit of the menu itself. As such examples suggest, on illustrated menus what you see is not what you get, or at least it’s generally pretty far from what you get. Likewise what you see written is not necessarily what will be served, as underscored by one menu’s ironic take on the menu’s questionable reliability: after the title “Menu,” it notes “approximatif et aléatoire” [approximate and haphazard]; then, after various dishes, it adds “certainement” [certainly], “c’est probable” [it’s probable], “s’il est possible” [if it’s possible], or “si c’est écrit” [if it’s written down].23 There is moreover in these menus a general suspension of the realities and responsibilities of the diner’s everyday life. In a printer’s and lithographer’s banquet menu by Jules Chéret, a clown mans the press, while the chef falls down and spills the dinner he’s delivering, echoing and magnifying the spectacle of professional incompetence.24 Another menu displays a notary’s study, with a swarm of tiny, flying chefs bursting through the open window, spilling soup on documents, overturning inkwells, and scattering legal books and papers. Similarly, for a bibliophile’s dinner, the illustration stages an elaborate exploding and burning of books and printing presses. As such examples suggest, these menus often mock, undermine, even undo diners’ vocational and avocational commitments. The spirit of carnival allows momentary respite from, and critical distance toward, the social, political, and economic realities that normally govern our lives. The world of the menu is also, in many ways, a magical realm. Anthropomorphic vegetables dance. A giant golden snail slithers by the restaurant L’Escargot d’Or. Members of the literary-artistic association “La Marmite” have marmites, or kettles for heads. Statues spring to life. In one Georges Conrad-illustrated menu for a restaurant on the Place Denfert-Rochereau, the square’s bronze lion has left his pedestal and, transformed into an anthropomorphic party animal, cavorts with two female companions in a private room or cabinet particulier (Figure 5.8).25 Along similar lines, in the Gabriel Guay cover illustration for a Dîner Molière menu, the statue of the playwright known for the most famous animated statue in French literature (the commander’s statue in Dom Juan), leaps off his pedestal, invitation in hand, to rush off to the banquet in his honor. As with the Lion de Belfort, it is a double

Figure 5.8.   Georges Conrad, dinner menu, May 2, 1911. Café-Restaurant du Cadran. Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris.

Figure 5.9.   Unidentified artist, menu, January 25, 1889. Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris.

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transformation, with bronze turning to flesh, and Molière becoming his own creation.26 In another imaginative metamorphosis, and twist on the medieval device of the trickster tricked, a menu features rabbits preparing the chef, rather than the chef preparing rabbits (Figure 5.9). The trickster tricked is a cook cooked. The misadventures of hapless chefs like this one, on so many menus, belie the elaborate meals produced by the period’s kitchens and offered up in the bill of fare. Indeed, the frequent conceit of culinary incompetence goes handin-hand with an emergent myth of French culinary magic, for perhaps magic alone could explain the feasts coming from kitchens ostensibly officiated by such clods. In a broader sense, this intertwining of culinary incompetence and culinary magic underscores the degree of fancy, whimsy, or outright irreality in the topsy-turvy world of the menu. Yet, at the same time, illustrated menus also engage extensively and compellingly with the contemporary world’s geopolitical realities.

The World and the Menu Separate yet overlapping spheres of interest and influence—regional, national, and international—inform the Third Republic illustrated menu in many ways. The nation looms largest, not surprisingly, given the period’s progressive construction and affirmation of French national identity, a development played out in the political, economic, and military realms, but also in the cultural arena, through cuisine and gastronomy as through arts and letters. Bills of fare favor a broad-based, increasingly standardized, and codified “national” cuisine with international aspirations (in the spirit of Auguste Escoffier’s 1903 Guide culinaire), while menu illustrations feature abundant tricolor motifs, Gallic roosters, “RF” (République Française) insignia, and gastronomic-themed national heroes like Henri IV or Rabelais, with Marianne, symbol of the Republic, as the most common female figure. Illustrated menus also display visions of rayonnement, of French cultural imperialism, with images of globes and rays of sunlight, of a benevolent Pax Gallica predicated upon French influence—notably culinary influence— around the world. Yet there are also menus for diplomatic dinners, international conferences, and World’s Fairs or Expositions Universelles, where the French national superiority complex mixes with ideals of exchange and dialogue between countries. Equally worthy of attention is the emergence on menus, across this period, of French regional themes, motifs, and, more slowly, dishes. Certain types of menus could be particularly rewarding to study from this perspective, like those for Parisian banquets sponsored by re-

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gional associations, or for presidential visits to regional destinations. Each of these categories could, in its own way, illuminate the evolving relationships between Paris and the provinces, the nation and its regions, the center and the periphery, both within gastronomy and more broadly. The reign of illustrated menus covers a critical period in French history, running from just after the Franco-Prussian defeat, through the costly victory of the Great War, and on to the debacle of 1940. So the fantasy world of these menus, and of the escapist pleasures they promise, unfolds against a backdrop of tension, confrontation, violence, and destruction. Accordingly, war and conflict figure in the menu in many ways, through diverse echoes, resonances, repercussions, and references. There are broad attacks on the Kaiser, German “Kultur,” and German cuisine in particular. Alsatian scenes and motifs abound on French menus during the last two decades of the nineteenth century and first two of the twentieth, with intermingled nostalgia, solidarity, and revanchism. Less commonly but nonetheless interestingly, we find Alsatian menus written in German, with German food items, concert programs of German military music, and Kaiser’s birthday celebrations. There are subtle shifts, like German beers and notations for German visitors (“Mann spricht Deutsch”) dropped from brasserie menus after August 1914. There are telling ironies, like the July 12, 1914 banquet for the XIIIe Congrès National de Préparation Militaire [Thirteenth National Conference on Military Preparedness], whose images unwittingly point up shortcomings in France’s military preparedness: a decorative display features the trappings of old-fashioned warfare (sabers, trumpets, stirrups, breastplate armor, shako) that would soon prove so tragically irrelevant, while a vignette shows a French soldier with loaded backpack, rifle, and bayonet, proudly guarding the Franco-German border in the Vosges, which is of course not where the Kaiser’s forces would attack.27 There are even striking premonitions, like an Albert Robida menu image from April 29, 1913: in the middle of the scene, an artist paints an emphatically peaceful, pastoral landscape, as nymphs and a faun watch and birds sit upon his canvas, while all around the edges of the composition war breaks out, with explosions, soldiers killing each other, a dirigible in the sky, warships in the sea, and heavy artillery shooting at them.28 It is a prescient vision of this seemingly carefree world—with its elegant banquets and lovingly illustrated menus—dissolving into violence and chaos. Third Republic illustrated menus were also produced at the height of French expansion overseas, amid the extraordinary cultural and ideological ferment that accompanied the French colonial experience. Accordingly, they offer a suggestive array of colonial encounters, notably between exalted French cuisine and ostensibly exotic local fare, or between colonizer and

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Figure 5.10.   Franc-Lamy (known as Pierre Lamy) banquet menu, April 19, 1901. 222e Dîner de la Marmite, offert à Monsieur Doumer, Gouverneur Général de l’Indo-Chine, et à Madame Doumer. Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris.

colonized (Figure 5.10). What do these encounters tell us about the role of food, cuisine, and gastronomy within colonial networks of cultural and economic exchange? Why do some menus stage scenes of imagined, implied, or metaphorical cannibalism, that play on clichés about native savagery, provide more truthful images of colonial voracity devouring distant lands and

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peoples, or even anticipate decolonization, with French colonizers swallowed up, inexorably, by the colonized masses? Illustrated menus thus offer diverse perspectives on the broader nature of French colonialism and, perhaps most strikingly, call attention to discontinuities, contradictions, and fault lines foreshadowing the colonial system’s ultimate downfall. We can observe this happening, for example, in a particularly attractive Franc Lamy menu for the 222nd Dîner de la Marmite on April 19, 1901, an event in Paris honoring then-Colonial Governor of Indochina (and future President of the French Republic) Paul Doumer. The entire menu is framed by two decorative bamboo borders, an inner one around the text of the dinner menu, and an outer one around a lively depiction of colonial Saigon. This subtle composition plays with notions of field and frame, foreground and background, proximity and distance, that figure oppositions between colonized and colonizer. The dinner menu itself, in contrast to the Indochinese imagery surrounding it, offers up classic French banquet food and fine wine typical for the period (including ingredients and preparations integrated from other suitably European—Viennese, Polish, and Russian— cuisines). Ostensibly everything in the composition works to frame the inner menu, yet this component is markedly different, not just in theme but in appearance as it is flat, textual, and black-and-white, unlike the figurative, colorful images drawn in perspective. The missing bamboo border along the bottom edge dissolves into a vague white space, an indeterminate contact zone that lends ambiguity to the central menu. Do we read the latter as a signboard, or a standalone typographer’s inset; an architectonic feature rising up from the street, or a separate, foreign element cut off from its environs? Either way, the governor’s menu seems at once obtrusive (blocking the central portion of the Saigon street scene) and strangely irrelevant (with local life going on around it, oblivious to its presence). Similarly ambivalent, the governor’s palace appears far off at upper right, surmounted by a tricolor flag. On the one hand, this could represent power behind the scenes, controlling the colonial realm displayed so attractively before us, as in a store window. On the other, the palace seems almost lost in the background, while the vibrant bustle of everyday life in Saigon dominates the foreground. Here, porters in indigenous garb carry foodstuffs (local produce and a large covered dish) that presumably have nothing to do with the Gallic fare served Monsieur and Madame Doumer. An elephant driver also transports, on the creature’s back, a giant, steaming cauldron. It is the hallmark marmite that we find on each of the menus in the series, but this one looks different, with emphatic curves lending it a Far Eastern air. Given the pot’s distinctive appearance, its placement on a Saigon thoroughfare, and proximity to the other homegrown

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offerings, we infer that it contains local food as well. Moreover, steam billows from the marmite toward the palace, which this cloud already partly obscures and, with time, will erase from view. Tellingly, in this illustrated menu that serves up a vision of French cultural and geopolitical influence through a nexus of gastronomic and political authority, we glimpse the possibility of indigenous food and people prevailing. The advancing steam cloud, emerging from and carrying with it the pungent aromas of local cuisine, prefigures the faraway power’s eventual exit from the scene—a dénouement that would play out so tragically in the French Indochina War and its prolonged aftermath. Perhaps unwittingly but nonetheless compellingly, Lamy proffers a gastro-political premonitory vision of decolonization. In short, illustrated menus are of particular value to French Studies because they can help us think fruitfully about France’s relation to its constituent parts, its sense of a national identity, and its place within the broader international community. Yet there is also a lot else going on in these menus that could be of interest to scholars. Areas to explore include food fads and trends; theatricality and spectacle; the paradoxical intertwining of ostensible culinary incompetence and an emergent myth of French culinary magic (see above); the representation of women and especially women’s bodies; the dynamics of nostalgia and novelty, tradition, and innovation; the role of new transportation technologies (train, ocean liner, automobile, airplane) within French gastronomic culture; or, the development and practice of a broad-based gastronomic sociability, cutting across divergent contexts, from diplomacy, to avant-garde artistic circles, to the private sphere of French family life. Of course these are just some “menu options,” among many. More than a conclusion, this is a preview, and an invitation. Researchers might take a cue from the illustrated menu itself and enjoy their anticipatory reverie, as they envision abundant scholarly pleasures and discoveries ahead.

Notes 1.  Léon Maillard, Les Menus et programmes illustrés (Paris: Librairie artistique G. Boudet, 1898). 2.  “on peut voir nettement toutes les préoccupations sociales se refléter dans les petites oeuvres des graveurs, des peintres, des lithographes et des dessinateurs” [all sorts of social preoccupations can be seen clearly reflected in the small-scale works of engravers, painters, lithographers, and illustrators] (ibid., 384). 3. Livio Cerini de Castegnate, I menu famosi: Famous Menus (Milan: BE-MA Editrice, 1988).

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 4. Philippe Mordacq, Le Menu. Une histoire illustrée de 1751 à nos jours (Paris: Robert Laffont 1989]; and Mordacq, Il était une fois des menus royaux (Paris: Moët et Chandon, 1993).  5. “Tout comme d’autres aspects de l’histoire culinaire, le développement et l’élaboration des menus éclairent et illustrent les ‘moeurs’ des ‘milieux’ sociaux qu’ils reflètent” [Just like other aspects of culinary history, the development and elaboration of menus illuminates and illustrates the ‘mores’ of the social ‘milieux” they reflect]. Barbara K. Wheaton, “Le menu dans le Paris du XIXe siècle,” in À table au XIXe siècle, ed. Bruno Girveau (Paris: Éditions des musées nationaux, 2001): 101.  6. Patrick Rambourg, À table . . . le menu! (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2013).   7.  Caroline Poulain, ed., Potage tortue, buisson d’écrevisses et bombe glacée . . . Histoire(s) de menus (Paris: Agnès Viénot Éditions, 2011).  8. Ibid., 6.  9. Ibid., 11. 10.  Rebecca L. Spang, The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 11.  Michael Garval, “L’Avènement des yeux dévorateurs de la gastronomie moderne,” in L’Oeil écrit. Études sur des rapports entre texte et image, 1800–1940, ed. Derval Conroy and Johnny Gratton (Geneva: Éditions Slatkine, 2005): 191–205. 12.  This menu is in the collection of the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris (BHVP). Unless noted otherwise, all menus discussed here are from the BHVP, and photographed by the author. The other main collections consulted for this chapter are that of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Cabinet des Estampes (BNF Est); and of the Bibliothèque des Arts Décoratifs (BAD). 13.  BNF Est. Li 32 fo Vol. I. 14.  BAD, Maciet Collection; for a reproduction and more in-depth analysis of Les Cinq Sens, see Garval, “L’Avènement des yeux dévorateurs de la gastronomie moderne.” 15.  On food porn, see Andrew Chan, “’La grande bouffe’: Cooking Shows as Pornography,” Gastronomica 3:4 (2003): 47–53. 16.  BAD, Maciet Collection. 17.  BNF Est. LI 243 (4o), Boîte 42. 18.  BNF Est. Li 243 (4o), Boîte 48. 19. Mordacq, Le Menu, 111. 20.  In a private collection, but reproduced at https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.co m/736x/80/00/20/8000200947cc49e18d57f34f4f371491.jpg. 21.  K. Wheaton, “Le menu dans le Paris du XIXe siècle,” in À table au XIXe siècle, ed. Bruno Girveau (Paris: Éditions des musées nationaux, 2001), 96. 22.  BAD, Maciet Collection; Wheaton, “Le menu dans le Paris du XIXe siècle,” 91. 23.  Déjeûner Mariani, April 30, 1912 menu, Robida BNF Est. Li 243 4o Boite 48. 24.  The Menu for the 33e Banquet de la Chambre Syndicale des Imprimeurs-Lithographes de Paris, held April 23, 1884 at the Hôtel Continental, is reproduced in Maillard, Les Menus et programmes illustrés, 280–81.

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25.  This 1911 menu is for the Café-Restaurant du Cadran, on the corner of the Place Denfert-Rochereau and Avenue d’Orléans (now Avenue du Général Leclerc), across from Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s Lion de Belfort in the center of the square. 26.  The menu, for a January 22, 1907 banquet sponsored by the association Les Parisiens de Paris, depicts on its cover the Fontaine Molière, located at the junction of the Rue Molière and the Rue de Richelieu, with its central bronze statue of the playwright by Bernard-Gabriel Seurre. 27.  BNF Est. Li 67 (pet. fol.), Boîte 20. 28.  BNF Est. Li 243 (4o), Boîte 48.

CHAPTER SIX

Picturing the Catherinette Reinventing Tradition for the Postcard Age Susan Hiner

With a hatbox swinging from one arm and a delicate beribboned bonnet in her opposite hand, the smiling young woman pictured in this postcard poses as though inspecting, or perhaps admiring, the little lacy cap that duplicates the one she is wearing and is mirrored yet again in the box she holds (Figure 6.1).1 Dressed in the style of the Belle Époque, with a “pouter pigeon” bosom and tightly cinched waist, she resembles the fin de siècle painter Jean Béraud’s flirty modistes, who strolled the streets of Paris, unmistakable with their hatboxes and smart dress.2 But here there is no Parisian context; rather, this is a studio shot set against a mottled gray background that is making the pink stripes of her dress pop, no doubt multiplied many times over and sold in kiosks and shops at the height of what we now recognize as a postcard craze at the end of the nineteenth and into the early decades of the twentieth centuries. This girl’s assortment of bonnets along with her hatbox mark her as a modiste, or milliner, yet the caption at the card’s bottom provides further context: “Vive Ste Catherine” [Long live Saint Catherine].3 She represents a catherinette, or “Catherine” according to folklore, a young girl of marriageable age watched over by the patron Saint Catherine, believed to either help girls get married or accompany them in spinsterhood.4 Such postcards were customarily sent to unmarried girls of marriageable age on Saint Catherine’s feast day, November 25, with wishes that they would soon find a spouse. Yet here, the girl’s accoutrements (hatbox, multiple bonnets) conjure a modiste, a figure known for being a savvy saleswoman and fashion creator, while also evoking the innocent maiden of folklore, a 119

Figure 6.1.   “Vive Ste Catherine,” n.d. Susan Hiner, personal collection.

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catherinette pining for a husband. The card thus presents a conundrum: is she a modiste making her way in the world of work through the needle trades, or is she a catherinette, whose principal ambition is to wed? Modistes and catherinettes were typed in the popular imagination as opposites in the nineteenth century; but this image (and many others like it) suggests a convergence at the turn of the twentieth.5 I will return to this convergence at the end of this chapter, for, as we shall see, the intersection of the evolving folklore phenomenon of the catherinette with the postcard craze that lasted from the fin de siècle into the 1920s represents a meeting of tradition (the gendered imperative to marry) and modernity (mass production and circulation of images) that ultimately expresses the transformation of women’s roles in the early twentieth century. The central focus of this chapter is the new visual culture embodied by the postcard as it illustrated and shaped the tensions and expectations surrounding women in this period. Mass-produced and widely circulated ephemera from the era, postcards have, for the most part, escaped critical scrutiny.6 They have much to tell us, however, about working women and changing values associated with femininity in turn-of-the-century France. The era of their greatest impact coincides with women’s entry on a large scale into the urban workforce. Catherinette postcards were thus perpetuating a provincial folklore custom for the modern, urban age. Paradoxically, postcards, which at the time were viewed as an ultra-modern form of communication, were being used in this context to reinforce the most traditional of womanly ambitions: marriage. And yet, the cards morphed over the years as women, particularly those in the fashion trades such as modistes, entered the workforce in large numbers, and came to suggest decidedly different ambitions from those enforced by the folklore custom.7 At once reflective and creative of cultural norms, simultaneously representative and communicative in function, these postcards circulated popular images that adhered to a complex visual rhetoric both supporting and sometimes questioning traditional values of femininity through the ambiguity of their representations. In what follows, I explore the new visual culture of the postcard as it (re)invented the folklore figure of the catherinette in the fin de siècle and early decades of the twentieth century as a modern, urban, and ultimately self-conscious cultural practice. Following brief discussions of the phenomenon of the catherinette and the early history of the postcard genre, I examine in detail a set of postcards from the turn of the century that both illustrate the phenomenon and helped to create a space for working women in fin-de-siècle and early twentieth-century France to eschew marriage and pursue work honorably.

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“Faites que je me marie . . .” [“Get me married . . .”] Who were the catherinettes, how were they represented, and what was their connection to the needle trades? Ethnographer Anne Monjaret, following the lead of Yvonne Verdier, explains that the ancient folklore festival of Saint Catherine originally designated a rite of passage. When girls reached the marriageable age of fifteen, they put order to their unruly girlish hair with the help of hairpins, épingles, or by donning the bonnet, and could then “coiffer Sainte Catherine,” meaning both wear the bonnet that signified their coming of age and create a bonnet to ornament the saint herself:8 “Célébrée dans les campagnes françaises, la Sainte-Catherine, fête catholique mais aussi de classe d’âge, se définit comme un rite de passage féminin. A partir de la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle et sans doute avant, les ‘filles à marier’ habitant la ville n’oublient pas non plus de vénérer la sainte et les couturières la choisissent comme patronne” [Celebrated in the French countryside, Saint Catherine’s Day is not only a catholic festival but also a feast day celebrating coeval maidens and other young people, and defined as a female rite of passage. Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century and likely even earlier, “eligible girls” living in the city did not neglect to venerate the saint, and the seamstresses would choose her as their patron].9 Patron saint of virgins and spinsters, Saint Catherine was thus also the patron saint of couturières and modistes. Saint Catherine of Alexandria, who refused to marry the Roman emperor Maxentius, was condemned to death by the wheel (hence, the torture device known as the Catherine wheel), but it miraculously broke apart, and she was not harmed. She was, however, subsequently beheaded and thus martyred, and the wheel is pictured in much of the iconography of the saint. Originating in rural society, the ritual of “coiffing” Saint Catherine marked an initiation but concerned all unmarried girls and women, filles à marier [eligible girls] as well as vieilles filles [old maids], and, as Monjaret explains, the task originally was to “coiffer” the statue of the saint, not oneself. But toward the end of the nineteenth century, under the influence of a secularizing Paris, the ritual transformed: “Désormais, seules les jeunes filles de vingt-cinq ans coiffent sainte Catherine et portent le bonnet” [From then on, only girls of twenty-five years ‘coiffe’ Saint Catherine and wear the bonnet].10 It is at this juncture, at the end of the nineteenth century, when the opposition between marriage and celibacy started to be associated with a conflict between marriage and paid work: at twenty-five years, “célibat ou mariage se présentent comme deux modes de vie entre lesquels elle devra choisir. . . . Dans un monde où seul l’emploi masculin est valorisé, ces jeunes

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filles de condition modeste sont, elles, obligées de travailler pour subvenir à leurs besoins. Au statut de célibataire, il faut donc associer celui de travailleuse” [remaining single or marrying emerge as two life paths from which she will have to choose. . . . In a world where only male work is valued, these young women of modest means must work to support themselves. Celibacy is thus associated with work].11 Celibacy, or singlehood, and regular work were thus intimately linked; married women in the needle trades often moved to piece work or homework, which was even less well-paid than regular salaried work for women. But celibacy for older women was also stigmatized and so, by association, was work.12 Michelle Perrot has documented the disgrace attached to spinsterhood, remarking that, across classes, marriage was considered the unique pathway to female social belonging and utility, which inevitably meant the creation of family, the “cellule de base de la société civile” [the basic unit of civil society].13 The celibate alternative, Perrot continues, both placed unmarried women in danger of penury and made them “dangerous.”14 It is no wonder, then, that unmarried young women would seek to marry to avoid such stigma, and prayers to Saint Catherine proliferated. But might work eventually offer a shelter equivalent to marriage? Work for women would have to be destigmatized.15 The prayer to Saint Catherine depicted in Figure 6.2, entitled “prière d’une jeune fille sur le point de coiffer Sainte-Catherine” [prayer of a maiden on the verge of “coiffing” Saint Catherine], was a common theme in postcards of this genre. The image illustrates a young woman on the cusp of eligible womanhood: her long hair left down signifies her girlish state, but the card’s title and her pose of supplication indicate that this is a threshold moment; perhaps she is entering her twenty-fifth year, in which case she would be on the cusp of eternal celibacy. The poem-prayer at the base of the card playfully recites an inventory of potential suitors, each attached to the name of a male saint possessing certain qualities. Assuming the voice of the catherinette herself, the prayer articulates the singular importance of passage to the marriageable state and achieving the desired result before the fateful age: “Faites que je me marie . . .” Frequently, a long list of desirable traits was proposed in the course of the poem-prayers of such postcards, but inevitably, they all emphasize the notion that marriage at any cost is preferable to spinsterhood. There is, however, clearly an odd irony at work here: the maiden’s “coiffing” of Saint Catherine signified at once that she was eligible and that she was celibate; and so if she coiffed for too many years (that is, didn’t find a husband), she began the marginalizing passage into spinsterhood. After the age of twenty-five, celibacy would overtake eligibility, and women could no

Figure 6.2.  “Prière d’une jeune fille sur le point de coiffer Sainte-Catherine,” n.d. Susan Hiner, personal collection.

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longer don the coiffe.16 Saint Catherine was thus the patron saint of unwed maidens and of old maids since, as legend has it, Catherine of Alexandria entered into a mystical marriage with Christ when she converted to Christianity in the fourth century and refused the hand of her smitten persecutor. Catherine was thus both “married” and celibate (having rejected earthly marriage). The bonnet the maiden wears signals marriageability only up to a certain point, after which treasured virginity overripens into dreaded spinsterhood. In the discussion that follows, we shall see how the imperative to marry was transmitted on a mass scale through the new medium of postcards at the turn of the century and beyond. Functioning both as a response to cultural changes in women’s roles and, paradoxically, as an engine of change themselves, the catherinette postcards, like the catherinette herself, carried multiple, and sometimes opposing, messages.

Circulating Ideologies Our common perception of postcards today is that they represent places and are primarily attached to travel. Indeed, through their “landmarking,” massproduction, and circulation, they transform geographical sites into tourist destinations, such that certain places and monuments, memorialized on postcards, become enshrined as essential sites to see. In her groundbreaking 1992 essay on the genre and impact of the postcard, Naomi Schor makes the case that Parisian view cards of the turn of the twentieth century were essential to the construction of what rapidly became the broadly disseminated idea of Paris.17 In a similar way, the postcards I discuss here also invented something—what we might call a tradition, rather than a tourist site—for the modern age based on the cultural practices surrounding the rite of passage of the catherinette. For these cards illustrated, reproduced, and circulated on a mass scale the imperative to marry that was inculcated in girls throughout the course of their education. At the same time, through the mass circulation of images of the catherinette, this ritual figure, existing originally in rural practices rooted in religion, became increasingly visible, which thus legitimized the unmarried girl as a social type who might or might not follow the prescribed path of marriage.18 Further legitimacy was accorded through the contents of the verso of the postcard: that is, the personalized messages on the reverse side of the catherinette image offered a view into the real existence and communicative experience of individuals who were aware of the symbolic meanings of the Saint Catherine’s Day ritual and likely its progressive transformation in the modern age.

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Costing only 5 centimes to mail at the height of their popularity, postcards were the cheapest way to communicate by post in the late nineteenth century. To the contemporary scholar, they offer glimpses into the everyday, some might say trivial, preoccupations, travels, greetings and other communications of past cultures, and thus reflect historical experience not readily accessible elsewhere. Blending the visual with the textual, they ask us to consider the relationship between word and image; and yet context is often absent and messages truncated, complicating the interpreter’s efforts to elucidate that relationship. Short, often terse messaging, for want of space, leads to an economy of words that the image frequently overshadows in its grandeur and space allocation. The individualized message is attached to a mass-produced image, thus producing a hybridity not only of word and image, but also of private and public, unique and multiplied, personal and impersonal. The technological innovation that made the mass production of postcards possible was called photolithography, a process that merged photography with lithography, and an invention that allowed the quick and cheap reproduction of images, thus making them ubiquitous and accessible.19 The postcard’s privileging of the image, in its immediacy and its “legibility,” coupled with its mass reproducibility and wide circulation, made it a particularly potent medium for conveying ideas, for consolidating values, indeed, for mythmaking. In recent years, particularly in the wake of Schor’s essay, the study of postcards, or deltiology, has entered academic discourse. According to Frank Staff, their so-called “golden age” occurred from 1895 to 1914. Evolving from the “trade cards of the seventeenth century, the visiting cards of the eighteenth century . . . tradesmen’s letterheads of the early nineteenth century, etc.,” they got their biggest popular boost with the 1900 Paris Exhibition.20 But postcards also repeated features, such as poses and composition, from the vital print culture of the nineteenth century and, like prints, they swiftly became collectible: the decorative value of the print was converted to a communicative value in the postcard.21 From the 1890s to the Great War, postcards were bought and sold everywhere, chronicling consumers’ travels, staging the expansion of the urban metropolis, advertising goods for sale, showcasing Belle Époque design, picturing scantily clothed Parisian (as well as colonized) women, and serving to record the musings and messages of countless correspondents. There was a boom in postcard circulation during this period, and due to the advantages this medium presented over more traditional forms of communication, such as private letters, as Benjamin Weiss has asserted, this “new communication technology” was in many ways

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“disruptive.”22 For this form of communication was not only spectacularly public, but it was also democratic because of its low cost and widespread availability, even as it served to reinforce ideologies that could be readily linked to traditional values. New media such as postcards and, to a much greater extent, film produced new ways of seeing, new ways of organizing perceptions of society. Postcards were modern in a variety of ways: the speed of their travel between correspondents, the brevity of the messaging and the hybridity of forms (reproduced image and individualized message) they contained, and their blurring of barriers between public and private (since there was no envelope, anyone could read the personal messages on them). Postcards of this era bear a striking resemblance to earlier forms of visual culture and spectacle (such as celebrity illustrations of vaudeville stars) and they also share characteristics of the emergent spectacular form of film. Indeed, many catherinette cards were printed in series of four or five cards, each featuring females in a slightly different pose, thus suggesting narrative development and filmic progression through shots. And yet these postcards also worked to (re)invent a practice around the catherinette, just as the view cards created tourist venues, thus giving a custom the weight of tradition. Might this valorization in fact be tied to a desire to oppose new practices, such as the increased employment of women? While catherinette cards certainly worked to reinforce tradition, they also help to tell the story of the liberation of young women from social expectations as they moved toward choice in the work they wanted to pursue. Lynda Klich points to the fact that the postcard craze occurred in tandem with the mass entry of women into the workplace and into the public eye more generally, making women particularly charged subjects of the cards’ images.23 Klich focuses specifically on eroticized postcards depicting women in various states of undress and argues that they represented a response to anxieties induced by the advent of the femme nouvelle [new woman].24 In spite of their erotic nature, these cards nonetheless reinforced traditional standards of femininity: “Clothed or unclothed, the women that populate fin-de-siècle Parisian postcards . . . remain agreeable, frivolous, eager to please, and most significantly, nonthreatening and feminine to the extreme.”25 The catherinette cards, a subclass of postcards depicting women that Klich does not analyze but that also saw their heyday at the fin-de-siècle and into the first decades of the twentieth century, operated both to reinforce traditional values and perceptions and to contest them. Furthermore, they help chronicle the shifting values of working women during the same period.26

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Visual Rhetorics of the Postcards In an age when women were entering the workforce in record numbers and leaving their rural communities behind, the mass circulation of catherinette postcards consolidated and broadcast traditional feminine roles. Postcards clearly had cultural potency and were thus an ideal medium through which to transmit their messages, invariably reinforcing the notion of compulsory marriage coupled with the tragic alternative of female celibacy. The textual messages of these cards often repeated their visual rhetoric, driving home in multiple communicative forms the desired values of the culture that both produced and circulated the messages. Dressed in pastel colors befitting a young, unmarried woman, the girl pictured in Figure 6.3 demurely looks down, submitting to social obligations and contemplating the sobering message of the poem, a message she illustrates as an ideal for the recipient, for whom she is a stand-in, to emulate. Mass-printed messages inscribed the dictates of the traditional expectations of young women into little poems, often apparently playful but with implications that normalized feminine behavior: Catherinette: Hâtez-vous, belle aux doux yeux, Ne faites plus de malheureux Qui cherchent la sœur de leur âme Et brûlent de vous avoir pour femme! Mais n’hésitez plus longtemps, Jeunesse n’a qu’un moment Et ne dure pas des années . . . On n’achète pas les fleurs fanées! [Catherinette: Hurry up, beautiful lovely-eyed girl, don’t make unhappy any more men who seek their soul’s sister and burn to make you their wife! Don’t hesitate any longer: Youth only has a moment and doesn’t last years . . . No one buys wilted flowers!]

The slightly larger font used in the last line of this card visually reinforces at once the flattering (and stereotyped) comparison of the girl and flower and the grim fate of flowers (and women) past their prime: this is Ronsard popularized, and the comparison would have been universally recognizable.27 A

Figure 6.3.   “Catherinette,” Dix, Paris, n.d. Susan Hiner, personal collection.

Figure 6.4.   “Catherinette,” Dix, Paris, n.d. Susan Hiner, personal collection.

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similar message enjoins the catherinette of Figure 6.4 to conform to behavioral norms befitting appropriately submissive femininity: Catherinette: Quel est celui qui oserait, Se croyant assez parfait, Solliciter votre main blanche! Pour que votre mariage se déclanche [sic], Il faudrait réchauffer, ma foi, Votre cœur beaucoup trop froid. Autrement, je le devine Vous coifferez longtemps Ste Catherine! [Who would dare imagine himself so perfect as to ask for your white hand! For your marriage to come to pass, indeed you should warm up your too-cold heart. Otherwise, I’m guessing you’ll coiffe Saint Catherine for a long time!]

As we saw before, here, the card’s visual rhetoric and its textual rhetoric are mutually reinforcing: this time dressed in yellow and pink with dainty hands held up, the girl mimics the pink rose she holds next to her face. The parallelism established by the verticality of flower and female form along with their similar color palette express visually the equation that the poem articulates. And, once again, what begins as flattery ends as a punitive warning.28 These cards present not only standards of feminine beauty through their imagery and language (“belle aux doux yeux,” “main blanche”), but also standards of appropriate feminine behavior and the choices mandated by the actions prescribed by the messages. Both of these cards assume the voice of a suitor, or perhaps an older advisor, who paints a bleak picture of the celibate life. Cards representing prayers to Saint Catherine were also frequently offered, as noted above, illustrating photographically the performance of a catherinette, as in Figure 6.5, where the subject is staged bedside in the act of praying to the saint for her salvation: O grande Sainte Catherine Je vous demande à deux genoux Un mari doux Que j’aimerais Tant qu’il voudrait. O grande Sainte Catherine!

Figure 6.5.   “Saint Catherine,” J.K., n.d. Susan Hiner, personal collection.

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[O great Saint Catherine I’m asking you on bended knees for a sweet husband whom I would love as much as he likes O great Saint Catherine!]

With her outward, upturned gaze, this young woman ostensibly directs her energies to Saint Catherine, but effectively toward the card’s viewer, thus offering the recipient a paradigm on which to model her own prayerful postures. At the same time, she is presenting herself, packaged and posing appropriately, as much for a potential suitor as for the saint who might grant her one. The card’s visual overload of flowers (in vases, on the woman’s dress, in motifs on the carpet and bed hangings, and even forming the letters of the saint’s name) repeats the message of the narrow window of possibility for marraige, the fleeting nature of beauty and eligibility: the shelf life of the flower is that of the maiden. It is hardly surprising, then, that the catherinettes (already identified as such through the ritual hat fabrication and donning) would be associated with hats and coiffes—these are, after all, the most fragile and ephemeral of fashion’s adornments for women and had themselves for more than a century been traditionally bedecked with flowers.29 The card represented in Figure 6.6 (one of a series featuring the same model) was sent in 1906 on the eve of Saint Catherine’s Day to Mademoiselle Léontine Bonneau. Might Léontine have been a young fashion worker herself? The eighteenth arrondissement where she lived was certainly home to many working-class women at the turn of the century, as Arsène Alexandre details in his 1902 panorama of the needle trades, Les Reines de l’aiguille. Describing the “rivers” of female fashion workers, all dressed in somber hues as they converge each morning in the fashion industry’s centers of the Sentier, Opéra, and the rue de la Paix, Alexandre writes: “De Montmartre et de Batignolles, ils [les fleuves] s’écoulent principalement soit par les rues des Martyrs et Rochechouart, soit par celles d’Amsterdam et de Clichy, celle-ci se continuant par la chaussée d’Antin. On pourrait baptiser cette dernière voie, de la place Clichy à la place de l’Opéra, le Chemin des Modistes” [from Montmartre and Batignolles, they flow mainly either through Martyrs and Rochechouart streets, or through Amsterdam or Clichy streets, this last one continuing through the road d’Antin. One could call this last path, from the place Clichy to the place de l’Opéra, the trail of the milliners].30 The ritual of the catherinette, in any case, makes every maiden into a modiste in a sense, as she creates a hat of ribbon and flowers to present to the saint in exchange for a husband.

Figure 6.6.   “La Sainte Catherine,” J.M., Paris, n.d. Susan Hiner, personal collection.

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The exchange of the catherinette’s bonnet for the bridal veil is summarized in the visual divide between the lower left and upper right corners of this card (Figure 6.6): the catherinette wearing the customary color of the saint—yellow for faith—in the lower left is transformed through prayer and appropriate behavior into the bride on the arm of her new husband. The two vignettes are separated (and simultaneously joined) by a bouquet including the flower used to decorate the bonnet and orange blossoms, the traditional flower of the marriage bouquet, whose motif we find repeatedly on these cards. The vision in the upper right of the card is the catherinette’s reward for becoming appropriately feminine, conforming to the role, and entering into the institution, prescribed for her. As the card’s message indicates: La Sainte qui est toujours bonne Vous trouvera un gentil époux Dans l’année, pour qu’on vous le donne C’est le vœu que je forme pour vous. [The saint who is always good will find you a nice husband within the year this is my wish for you]

This particular card bears an interesting personalized inscription—sent to a cousin, Mademoiselle Meisonnier. The sender writes not to send her recipient good wishes, for this mademoiselle has already found her happy ending in an engagement with M. Chabert. Note the initials that the sender has overlaid on the image: the wedding party is identified as “L.C.” and “J.M.,” thus transposing the universal narrative into an individualized framework. She writes instead to congratulate the girl and to ask for good wishes in return; significantly, the sender does not explicitly wish for a husband, but rather for “success.” Perhaps she had other plans and paths in mind. Often the message on a postcard was short, as in Figures 6.7 and 6.8—simply “Vive Sainte-Catherine”—and the image itself served as a shorthand for the Saint Catherine ritual and its familiar messages. In this card (Figure 6.7), a catherinette with a deceptively modest expression breaches the faux frame of a kind of mirror that itself is topped with a giant coiffe à la Sainte Catherine, a bonnet of white lace and pastel ribbon; her coy look and hand gestures perhaps suggest that she may be about to throw off the bonnet, having found a husband. A much later card, likely from the 1930s or later, corroborates this reading, where “Vive Ste Catherine” clearly indicates the saint’s success (Figure 6.8). For, having found a suitable partner, the catherinette pictured here no longer needs a superfluous bonnet, nor is she required to wear one.

Figure 6.7.   “Vive Ste Catherine,” n.d. Susan Hiner, personal collection.

Figure 6.8.   Vive Ste Catherine,” P.C., Paris, n.d. Susan Hiner, personal collection.

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Other cards still might have miniature hats attached, crafted from swatches of tulle and ribbon, many handmade and containing simulacra of hat pins— épingles—which, as Verdier reminds us, are crucial to the ritual’s unfolding. Needles (aiguilles) are for sewing and constructing, and are associated with women’s work and eventually with the celibacy of spinsterhood, while pins are related to female coquetterie.31 Ornamental, they served to keep hair and hats in place, were often offered by suitors, and could be removed by the lucky groom: they are thus related to the virginal eligibility of the young woman. And not to lose sight of the nineteenth-century modistes, while they obviously had recourse to aiguilles for the purpose of fabricating their wares, the épingle features more prominently in visual and literary representations of them, an iconography that contributed to the modiste’s reputation for seduction.

Ambiguities of Messaging Other cards indicate a potentially subversive alternative to the Saint Catherine ritual, such as the one pictured in Figure 6.9, which proposes that its young woman might find happiness outside of marriage: Catherinette: De ce joli bonnet ne soyez point marrie Ne trouve-t-on l’amour que quand on se marie? Abandonnez-le donc au petit dieu malin: Jetez-le franchement par dessus les moulins! [Don’t be bothered by this pretty bonnet Don’t we only find love when we marry? Abandon it to the mischievous Cupid; Enjoy your life, and don’t worry about what others will think!]

While the first part of the card’s message conveys the necessity of the ritual to achieving the goal of marriage, the second part can be read as offering a playful rejection of the marriage imperative. For “jeter son bonnet par dessus les moulins” means roughly to let go of public opinion and conventional propriety—thus, to throw off the bonnet here, higher even than the windmills, suggests something like to “throw caution to the wind!”32 This expression was frequently used in the press to discuss euphemistically the sexual behaviors of young working women; a maiden whose hat could be carried off by the wind was not a virginal catherinette!33 The girl’s off-the-shoulder gown and string of pearls compete with the implied modesty of her lace cap, suggesting eligibility and all but erasing celibacy. The message is perhaps deliberately ambiguous, however—throwing off the bonnet could just as easily signal that

Figure 6.9.   “Catherinette,” n.d. Susan Hiner, personal collection.

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she has decided to marry. Nonetheless, in either interpretation, this card acknowledges the power of the bonnet to contain female desire and sexuality, as well as hair. Both earnest and ironic representations of the Saint Catherine ritual seem to have been in circulation simultaneously. The ambiguity inherent in some of these cards implies an instability regarding the appropriate pathway for young women. This instability, coupled with the new visibility produced by a mass-circulating media, is what makes the convergence of the postcard genre with the folklore custom of the catherinette so curious. In Figure 6.10, for example, the subject in question celebrates Saint Catherine by thumbing her nose at the bonnet, as if to indicate either that she no longer needs it, having found a husband, or that she mocks the ritual entirely. The young woman makes a gesture known in French as faire un pied de nez [thumbing one’s nose]; often interpreted to suggest contempt, it originates in the term used for measurements. Since “un pied” is a foot, the gesture aims to put a symbolic distance between the woman and the dreaded bonnet. Her impudent gesture communicates that she no longer needs the bonnet: having found love, the “hateful” (vilain) bonnet is flung away, and floats off in the sky to torment another loveless girl. The bonnet was indeed often depicted as menacing, further expressing the unrelenting pressure to marry. Indeed, the maiden at the center of Figure 6.11, with her hands clasped in the now familiar gesture of prayer, appears to be under fire as the two young women on either side of her dodge whizzing bonnets. Proliferating in the fantasy background of this postcard, the bonnet-missiles, which signal potential spinsterhood, are cast as dangerous projectiles threatening to attach themselves to the heads of passing girls. The caption explains the urgency of their movements: “Vite, mariez-vous, si vous êtes coquette/Car il pleut des Bonnets autour de votre tête” [Hurry, get married, if you’re pretty/because it’s raining bonnets around your head]. Are they avoiding the bonnets or trying to catch them? The ambiguity of the imagery again suggests the instability of the tradition itself. To be free of the bonnet and its potential humiliations, one must marry, and to pass one’s twenty-fifth birthday unwed was to court danger, as one postcard’s caption reads: “A vingt-cinq ans le cœur court un bien grand danger/Si l’on n’accepte pas le bouquet d’oranger” [At twenty-five years the heart takes a big risk/if one doesn’t accept the orange blossom bouquet] (Figure 6.12). Here, there is no catherinette pictured; rather, the dapper gentleman in the image gazes out with a haughty look at the card’s recipient, holding a bonnet in one hand and an orange blossom in the other. Along with his menacing warning as voiced in the caption, he is apparently proposing an exchange of bonnet for marriage. Indeed, woe unto the young woman who

Figure 6.10.   “Adieu,” E.L.D., n.d. Susan Hiner, personal collection.

Picturing the Catherinette  •  141

Figure 6.11.   “Ste Catherine,” n.d. Susan Hiner, personal collection.

has no such suitor, for she is condemned yet again to wear the bonnet and wait, as the weeping maiden surrounded by her symbolic finery in the image of Figure 6.13 suggests. The requisite flowers and bonnet make their appearance here, but unlike in many of the other more light-hearted cards, the distressing message of failure and impending solitude is made explicit in the maiden’s tearful gesture. For, as she ages, tradition dictates that her chances of married bliss recede. These postcards, featuring quaint photos with their stylized poses, pithy rhymes, and industrious, expectant maidens, thinly veil a kind of social violence and in fact sanction a rigid ideology that imposes marriage as the only acceptable pathway for young women to follow.34 It is clear that most cards reinforce on a mass scale the traditional imperative to marry young, transmitting through this new, inexpensive, and wildly popular medium traditional values about appropriate female roles at precisely the moment when young women were flooding the ateliers of Paris’s booming fashion industry, hoping to escape the drudgery of unremunerated housework or a life of servitude in someone else’s house.35 The mostly brief personalized messages written on the backs of the cards suggest that they were sometimes sent by family members or friends, sometimes signed more formally, and addressed, almost always, to a Mademoiselle.36 Yet we have also seen that some of the cards could be winkingly ironic, at least hinting at the possibility that there might be another path for the recipient and an alternate reading.

Figure 6.12.   “Ste Catherine,” B.C.I., n.d. Susan Hiner, personal collection.

Figure 6.13.   “Ste Catherine,” M.F., Paris, n.d. Susan Hiner, personal collection.

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For the very proliferation of the cards also increased the visibility of the catherinette, and gradual variations, even slyly questioning the tradition, as we have seen, made their way into the imagery of the circulating catherinettes. As the genre of the catherinette postcard became more established, irony could seep in, and some cards thus clearly demonstrate a certain degree of self-consciousness.

Appropriation and Transformation of the Ritual Indeed, the ritual of the catherinette, while apparently sustaining the most important of patriarchal institutions—marriage—and sanctioning those women who eschewed it or were unlucky enough not to find it, was appropriated and reconceived by the fashion workers of Paris [les ouvrières en aiguille] at the dawn of the twentieth century to celebrate single working girls. How this shift took place is a complex story, the contours of which come into focus by examining visual evidence related to both the modiste and the catherinette. Monjaret draws the links: “En raison de sa virginité, sainte Catherine est invoquée par des jeunes filles célibataires, celles-là mêmes qui peuplent les maisons de couture et de mode” [Because of her virginity, Saint Catherine is invoked by young unmarried girls, the very same ones who people the fashion houses].37 The nexus of the wheel, spinning, and fashion was central in the cultural imaginary of nineteenth-century France, and Saint Catherine was thus the obvious patroness for women in the needle trades. In the late nineteenth century, when the fashion industry expanded dramatically in Paris and women entered the work force in droves, the term catherinettes began to designate the (mostly unmarried) needleworkers of Paris. The folklore festival, the memory and practice of which the young workers had carried with them from their provinces, became for some, instead of a bittersweet acceptance of spinsterhood or an official entry into the marriage market, an embrace of celibacy (through the autonomy of work) and the (sexual) freedoms it might afford: “Déjà au début du siècle, des femmes âgées de vingt-cinq ans se consacrent entièrement à leur carrière professionnelle et n’envisagent plus le mariage en terme de nécessité. Simultanément, la peur de coiffer sainte Catherine s’efface” [Already, by the beginning of the century, women of twenty-five were giving themselves entirely to their professional careers and no longer envisioning marriage as a necessity. Simultaneously, the fear of “coiffing” Saint Catherine begins to recede].38 Instead of marking a somber closure, the festival of Saint Catherine could mark a beginning, an entry point into sexuality and an initiation to a work community. The hat became a multivalent sign in the milliners’

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parades through Paris on November 25 (Figure 6.14): “A Paris, au début du XXe siècle, seule la catherinette porte le bonnet de dentelle, accompagnée de ses comparses, couturières ou modistes, affublées de coiffures originales mais distinctes de la sienne” [In Paris, at the beginning of the twentieth century, only the catherinette wore the lace bonnet, accompanied by her sidekicks, seamstresses or milliners, decked out in eccentric headgear that was nonetheless distinct from her own].39 The catherinette, at the dawn of the twentieth century still defined by her virginity and marked by her hat, nonetheless had her place in the parades celebrating women working in the needle trades; and over time, as Monjaret explains, the distinct bonnet gave way to fantasy hats of the workers’ own creation. Just as the hats took on greater variation and become symbols of self-expression, “les femmes peuvent vivre indépendantes grâce à leur travail et choisir le mari qui leur plaît” [women can live independent lives thanks to their work and choose a husband that pleases them].40 For centuries understood as the indispensable accessory of modesty and appropriateness, ritually associated with a girl’s coming of age and covering her sexualized hair, the hat could now be turned on its head and serve as a sign of sexual availability, or at least as a ludic reinterpretation of the moralizing strictures governing women’s roles.

Figure 6.14.   “25-11-20, Ste Catherine [catherinettes dans la rue],” 1925. Courtesy of Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

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Conclusion The catherinette postcards I have examined here were liminal, crystallizing a moment of multiple transitions and suggesting that the long-silent girls of tradition might now be licensed to exercise choice, as the image in Figure 6.15 seems to indicate. For here, the catherinette is surrounded by a constellation of potential suitors, whose six portraits form a frame, interspersed with flowers, around the maiden, who is superimposed upon a painted pastoral landscape. She gazes out at the viewer, holding a sprig of orange blossom in one hand and a bouquet that seems to rest upon a bonnet in the other. We find in it roses and pansies, as well as daisies, the flower used to determine the fate of love: “he loves me, he loves me not.” Instead of desperation and inevitable solitude, this image implies choice, and the choice lies with the young woman. As the milliners and seamstresses of the early twentieth century appropriated the festival of Saint Catherine, the notion of choice seems to have expanded beyond just a choice of suitors to include the option of work and the new circumstances that working can bring. Circulating precisely during a period of layered transitions—the geographical transition from province to urban center, the temporal transition from nineteenth to twentieth century, the social transition from entrenched female roles to an acceptance of working women, and the cultural transition from folklore, family, and religion to work and community—these postcards express ambiguities that contain past and future. In doing so, they reveal how it became possible to shift from a celebration of marriage and family as the single pathway for women to a celebration of workspace dynamics and the new family models brought into being through communities of workers. In the fashion ateliers and in the streets of Paris, the festival of Saint Catherine became a moment in the year when working girls could celebrate their status, use their creative skill to fashion their own fantasy hats, and promenade through the city arm-inarm showcasing their talent and their freedom.41 The story of the catherinette reaches back through the history of the modiste, with the ephemera produced in and around the ateliers of fashion—pins, headforms, hatboxes, hats, prints, vaudevilles, photos, and most importantly perhaps, thanks to their immense visibility and role within everyday practices, postcards with their spidery messages—to tell the story of evolving feminine identities through France’s long nineteenth century.

Figure 6.15.   ”Vive Ste Catherine,” n.d. Susan Hiner, personal collection.

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Notes 1.  All postcards belong to my private collection and are in the public domain. I would like to thank the editors of this volume for inviting me to participate in the symposium at its origin; I also sincerely thank Pauline LeVen and Lise Schreier for their generous and expert help at various stages of the drafting of this essay; finally, I am grateful to Steven Taylor for photo credits of all images except Figure 6.14. 2.  The “pouter pigeon” look was characterized by a full, unarticulated bosom and was created through the use of a corset popular at the turn of the century that shaped the torso into an “S”-bend silhouette. 3.  All translations are mine. 4.  Commemorating Saint Catherine’s Day on November 25, catherinette cards like this one were greeting cards and were a subset of postcards, whose ubiquity, cheapness, and popularity at the turn of the last century made them the ideal medium for transmitting such greetings. I am particularly grateful to Lise Schreier, who first showed me a prayer postcard to Saint Catherine and introduced me to the phenomenon of the catherinette. 5.  My book in progress, Behind the Seams: Women, Fashion, and Work in NineteenthCentury France, examines figures such as the modiste and the catherinette, among others, in order to recover the hidden work of female producers of the fashion economy. One of the areas of investigation in the book is the thriving print culture surrounding the nineteenth-century modiste; popular prints, or estampes, have been understood to be important forerunners of postcards. See Aline Ripert and Claude Frère, La Carte postale, sa fonction sociale (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1983), 175. 6.  The most famous major critical rumination on postcards, which took this object as a pretext for philosophical exploration, was Derrida’s. Jacques Derrida, La Carte postale: De Socrate à Freud et au-delà (Paris: Flammarion, 1980). Other important and more recent critical inquiries into postcards include: Naomi Schor, “Cartes Postales: Representing Paris 1900,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 2 (1992): 188–244; Tom Phillips, “The Postcard Vision” in Tom Phillips, Works and Texts (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1992): 76–79; Lynda Klich and Benjamin Weiss, The Postcard Age (Boston: MFA, 2012). For a recent and very cogent overview of the postcard’s early history, see Michael Garval, “Visions of Pork Production, Past and Future, on French Belle Époque Pig Postcards,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide: A Journal of NineteenthCentury Visual Culture 14, no. 1 (Spring 2015), http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/ index.php/spring15/garval-on-visions-of-pork-production-past-and-future-frenchbelle-epoque-postcards#_ftnref4. 7.  See the pioneering work of Anne Monjaret for the cultural history of the catherinette, La Sainte-Catherine: Culture festive dans l’entreprise, preface by Martine Segalen (Paris: Editions du C.T.H.S., 1997), referred to hereafter as La Sainte-Catherine, and Les Catherinettes en fête (Paris: Archives et Culture, 2008), referred to hereafter as Les Catherinettes. I have relied primarily on these two works for my understanding of the phenomenon of the catherinette.

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  8.  Monjaret traces the origins of the ritual to the twelfth century in the area of Rouen, where, as legend has it, relics of the saint were housed. Like other saints’ day festivals, it punctuated the calendar even as it served as a “régulation matrimoniale au sein de la communauté villageoise” [matrimonial regulation in the heart of the village community], Les Catherinettes, 7. Throughout this essay, I have not translated the French verb “coiffer,” which means at once to do one’s hair, to put on a hat, and, in the case of the catherinette, to dress the head of the saint’s statue.   9.  Martine Segalen, “Preface” in Monjaret, La Sainte-Catherine, 16. 10. Monjaret, La Sainte-Catherine, 36. 11.  Ibid., 37. Monjaret explains that this stereotype remained active through the 1960s. 12. “Les politiques des employeurs renforcent cette tendance en réservant les emplois réguliers et (relativement) mieux rémunérés aux femmes célibataires” [Employer policies reinforced this trend by reserving regular and (relatively) better paid jobs for unmarried women]. Françoise Battagliola, Histoire du travail des femmes (Paris: Éditions de la Découverte, 2000), 13–14. On the history of women and work in nineteenth-century France, see also Judith Coffin, The Politics of Women’s Work (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996) and Louise A. Tilly and Joan W. Scott, Women, Work and Family (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978). 13.  Michelle Perrot, “De la vieille fille à la garçonne: la femme célibataire au XIXe siècle,” in Célibataires (Paris: Autrement, 1981), 222. 14.  Perrot cites Balzac’s Cousine Bette, who wreaks havoc on an entire family as a result of her vengeful fury against her married cousin, as the most famous literary example of this figure. But the “danger” represented by the unwed working woman was also located in her substandard wage, which frequently drove her to prostitution. See Tilly and Scott, Women, Work and Family. 15. Celibacy among female fashion workers was not necessarily a first choice. Monjaret reports, “Cette situation n’est pas forcément choisie, les circonstances de la vie l’imposent. Certaines femmes supporteront leur célibat, d’autres, en revanche, vont devoir se résigner à le vivre, accepter la solitude et l’image de la vieille fille véhiculée par la société” [This situation is not necessarily a choice; rather life circumstances impose it. Some women bear their unmarried status, while others will have to resign themselves to it, accepting the solitude and the image of the old maid conveyed by society]. La Sainte-Catherine, 38. 16. “Dès qu’elles avaient dépassé la vingt-cinquième année, elles cédaient ce privilège à de moins mûres et c’est pourquoi on disait d’elles: elles ont coiffé Sainte Catherine” [As soon as they had passed their twenty-fifth year, they ceded this privilege to younger girls and this is why it was said of them: they have ‘coiffed’ Saint Catherine]. G. Lenotre, “Catherinettes” in Le Monde illustré, November 25, 1922, http://gallica.bnf.fr.libproxy.vassar.edu/ark:/12148/bpt6k6204797n/f2.image. r=catherinette.langFR. 17.  See Schor, “Cartes postales.”

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18. I am grateful to Erica Schauer for the insights into this point, which she made in a conference talk, “Catherinettes, prêtes pour la fête!,” at the Colloquium in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, October 2014. Schauer focused on the press and its attention to the spectacle of the “concours des catherinettes” (race of the catherinettes), but her argument regarding increased legitimacy through increased visibility is equally applicable to the postcard phenomenon. 19.  See David Prochaska, “Thinking Postcards,” Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation 17, no. 4, (2011), 384. 20.  Frank Staff, The Picture Postcard and Its Origins (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1966), 7. 21.  See Ripert and Frère, La Carte postale. 22.  Benjamin Weiss, “The Craze,” in Lynda Klich and Benjamin Weiss, The Postcard Age (Boston: MFA, 2012), 37. 23.  Lynda Klich, “Women,” in The Postcard Age, 103–29. The types of postcards studied in this volume include travel view cards, art cards, and those containing erotic portraits of women. 24.  The “femme nouvelle,” or New Woman, was a phenomenon associated with the turn of the century in Europe and North America. See especially Mary Louise Roberts, Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-Siècle France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 25.  Lynda Klich, “Little Women: The Female Nude in the Golden Age of Picture Postcards,” Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation 17, no. 4 (2011), 436. 26.  While the femme nouvelle is a middle-class woman, the catherinette usually was a petit-bourgeois/working-class girl. Anxieties surrounding the issue of women working nonetheless crept across class. Given that one of the “dangers” of fashion workers was that they might pass as bourgeois, it is not surprising that the femme nouvelle image would apply to working girls as an aspirational model. 27.  One of the most cited poems in French literature, Ronsard’s “Ode à Cassandre,” written in 1545, offers an allegory of a rose’s short life in order to persuade the object of the poet’s passion to reciprocate his love: Cueillez, cueillez votre jeunesse: Comme à cette fleur la vieillesse Fera ternir votre beauté. [Seize, seize your youth For just as to this flower, old age Will tarnish your beauty.]

The font used here and in other similar cards is the same as that used in intertitles for silent films. The dark background and rectangular shape of these cards also suggests the film screen, another important connection to the more radical new form of

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visual culture in this period. I offer my thanks to Eva Woods Peiró for pointing this out to me. 28.  Again, Ronsard is an obvious reference. His 1587 “Sonnet à Hélène” fastforwards the flower metaphor and warns the object of his passion that she will be old and faded soon, with nothing left to do but sit by the fire weaving: Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir, à la chandelle, Assise auprès du feu, dévidant et filant, Direz, chantant mes vers, en vous émerveillant : Ronsard me célébrait du temps que j’étais belle. [When you are very old, in the evening, by candlelight, Seated by the fire, unwinding and spinning, You will say, singing my verses, in amazement: Ronsard celebrated me when I was beautiful.]

29.  The association of women and flowers was certainly clichéd by the nineteenth century. Fashion capitalized on this association, incorporating flowers into design, fabric, and even suggesting the identification of women and flowers in particular with the oversized hats of the Belle Époque. For a discussion of the use of flowers in hat wear, see Florence Müller and Lydia Kamitsis, Les Chapeaux: une histoire de tête (Paris: Syros-Alternative, 1993). 30.  Arsène Alexandre, Les Reines de l’aiguille: modistes et couturières (étude parisienne) (Paris: Théophile Belin, 1902), 12. 31.  See Yvonne Verdier, Façons de dire, façons de faire: la laveuse, la couturière, la cuisinière (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), 238–46. 32.  Littré indicates that the expression originates in fairy tales, and is a “phrase par laquelle on terminait les contes que l’on faisait aux enfants, et qui signifie je ne sais comment finir le conte. . . .Dans un autre sens, aujourd’hui usité, jeter son bonnet par-dessus les moulins, braver l’opinion, les bienséances” [phrase on which tales for children ended that signifies I don’t know how to end the story. . . . In another sense, today in common use, to throw one’s bonnet beyond the windmills, means to defy opinion and propriety], http://www.littre.org/definition/bonnet. For further exploration of the phrase, see also http://www.expressio.fr/expressions/jeter-son-bonnet-pardessus-les-moulins.php. 33. Monjaret, Les Catherinettes, 20. 34.  Their proliferation can be construed as a response on the level of representation to the choice of so many girls to enter the workforce. This discussion is too complex for the scope of the present essay, but please see the works of Joan Scott and Judith Coffin. They both examine the impact of women’s entering the workforce over the course of the nineteenth century. 35.  Along with work in the needle trades, domestic service was the most common form of employment for women in this period. Prostitution offered an alternative option.

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36. Some of the addressees of the cards in my collection include Mlle Jeanne Bourbiause, Mlle Marguerite Leclercq, Mlle Joséphine Calles, Mlle Marie Rivet, Mlle Bayle, Mlle Charlotte Darras, Mlle Marguerite Bouquets, Mlle Marthe Dussolon, Mlle Léa Racine, Mlle Marie Josserand, Mlle Alice Touquet, Mlle Adrienne Volant, Mlle Henriette Defauquet, and Mlle Laure Depue. 37. Monjaret, La Sainte-Catherine, 47. 38.  Ibid., 41. 39. Monjaret, Les Catherinettes, 20. 40.  Ibid., 22. 41.  Ibid., see especially 28–42. There is much more to be explored regarding the transformation of this ritual in the early twentieth century.

PART IV

MEDIA STORMS

CHAPTER SEVEN

Unpacking the Success and Criticisms of Intouchables(2011) Leslie Kealhofer-Kemp

After its release in French theaters in November 2011, the film Intouchables [The Intouchables], directed by Éric Toledano and Olivier Nakache, broke box office records for a French film both in France and internationally and was the object of a remarkable amount of media attention. Indeed, the success of Intouchables was immediate. On the day that it opened, the French magazine L’Express wrote of the film: “C’est le film dont tout le monde parle. Celui qu’il faut avoir vu et que vous irez forcément revoir” [It’s the film that everyone is talking about, that you have to have seen and will inevitably see again].1 Twelve days later, an article in Libération stated: “[Intouchables] n’est déjà plus un film mais, du haut de ses plus de 2 millions d’entrées, un de ces fameux phénomènes de société qui contraint à se poser la question de l’unanimité” [(Intouchables), with more than 2 million tickets sold, is no longer merely a film, but one of these famous social trends that leads us to consider the question of unanimity].2 The film would go on to sell over 21 million tickets in France, becoming the most successful French film of all time, as well as nearly 40 million in Europe as a whole, and over 1.6 million in the United States.3 It has now become the French film the most widely seen outside of France.4 These box office figures only tell part of the story, however. The reception of Intouchables was in fact far more complex than these record-breaking numbers would suggest, and the film provoked various—and sometimes contradictory—interpretations on the part of critics and viewers. Intouchables also came under some fierce criticism, and thus despite the tremendous mainstream success of this “feel-good” comedy, it was far from universally lauded. 155

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Certain reviewers denounced Intouchables for its clichéd portrayal of two men from different social classes, while others, notably in the United States (and to a lesser extent in France), condemned as stereotypical or even racist the depiction of the relationship between a black employee and a white employer. Certain American reviews even provoked a highly unusual intervention in the media on the part of the directors: Toledano and Nakache were so unhappy with the way the film was reviewed before its release in the United States, and specifically the critics’ focus on the question of ethnic difference, that they published an editorial in English in the Huffington Post with the aim of denouncing a specific interpretation of the film and setting the record straight. This chapter will critically examine the “phénomène de société” (to borrow the words of Libération) that was Intouchables in order to analyze the complexity of its reception in France and the United States, specifically as it relates to the portrayal of social and racial differences between the protagonists. My analysis will be guided by two overarching questions: first, what are the key factors that led Intouchables to become at once a massive popular success at the box office and the subject of intense media scrutiny, notably with regard to the film’s representations of ethnic and class differences? Second, what is the significance of the film’s treatment of difference when considered in a larger social and historical context? In order to evaluate the various tensions exposed through the diverse interpretations of the film while also considering the broader cultural and social significance of this blockbuster, I have adopted a two-pronged analytical approach grounded in film analysis and reception studies. This interdisciplinary approach reveals that Intouchables is in fact a much more complex cultural phenomenon than its impressive box office figures alone would suggest. This chapter will first consider the popular reception of the film and analyze specific aspects of Intouchables that made it so appealing to the general public. It will focus in particular on the way that the movie draws on the generic conventions of two film genres that are extremely popular in France: the comedy and the buddy film. Then, it will examine the reception of Intouchables in the media in both France and the United States in order to analyze the at times very diverse critiques that it generated. This analysis will draw on articles and reviews that appeared in a variety of media outlets and will also consider the responses that the reviews generated from readers. The sources in question range from comments posted online by readers to the aforementioned editorial by the film’s directors that appeared in the Huffington Post. The final part of the chapter will closely examine the most controversial aspect relating to reception that was raised in the media and in

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public reviews: the treatment (or nontreatment) of ethnic differences. It will argue that Intouchables neglects to explore in any meaningful way the causes of the deeply rooted socio-economic differences between its protagonists.

The Public Appeal of Intouchables The question of difference lies at the heart of the narrative of Intouchables. The film depicts an unlikely friendship between Philippe (François Cluzet), an immensely wealthy man who was paralyzed in a paragliding accident years before, and Driss (Omar Sy), a young Frenchman of Senegalese origin from a socially disadvantaged neighborhood outside of Paris (la banlieue) who was recently released from prison. They meet when Philippe is interviewing for a caretaker position. Driss arrives at Philippe’s Parisian home seeking a signature on his unemployment papers to prove to the government-run agency that he “attempted” to find a job and was refused. But instead of signing his papers, Philippe challenges Driss to try out the job for a month, and it is there that their relationship begins. The directors were inspired to make the film after seeing the documentary A la vie, à la mort [In Life, In Death] about the unlikely friendship between a wealthy quadriplegic, Philippe Pozzo di Borgo, and his caretaker, Abdel Sellou.5 This narrative clearly struck a chord with moviegoers, yet which particular aspects of Intouchables contributed most significantly to its strong appeal to large and diverse audiences? First of all, the film draws on the generic conventions of the comedy and the buddy film, two genres that are immensely popular in France and elsewhere. As Will Higbee has noted, comedy is “the popular French genre, par excellence.”6 The narrative structure of Intouchables is constructed largely around what Daniela Berghahn has termed “the polarity of similarity and difference,” which, as she observes, is common to “ethnic comedies” in which people with cultural, ethnic, and often social differences find common ground.7 For Charlie Michael, cinematographer Mathieu Vadepied and directors Toledano and Nakache “created a film that portrays the City of Lights in a strikingly bipolar manner, adopting a cinematography that both highlights and draws stark distinctions between the worlds of the ‘haves’ and the have-nots.’”8 Indeed, it is by playing up this dichotomy that Intouchables produces its most comedic moments. Early in the film, for example, we see Driss in a tiny bathtub in his family’s apartment, with no privacy, and a few scenes later we witness his reaction when he discovers the palatial bathroom and large bathtub that will be his in Philippe’s home. The comedic elements of this scene would have been much less effective had Driss’s apartment resembled the one Abdel Sellou actually lived in when he

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worked for Philippe Pozzo di Borgo. As Sellou describes in his memoir, his lodging was a small, simple studio, not a spacious and opulent apartment like the one depicted in the film.9 The scene in question thus reflects a clear desire on the part of the filmmakers to exaggerate for comedic effect the differences between certain aspects of the men’s lives. Intouchables also readily makes use of clichés associated with different social classes in order to suggest initially that the protagonists have nothing in common, and thus it is all the more rewarding for spectators when they become friends. Their conflicting perspectives are most evident in discussions about art and music: Philippe likes modern art, Driss does not understand it and says anyone could do it; Philippe likes classical music and opera, while Driss finds them boring and prefers the music of Earth, Wind & Fire and Kool & the Gang. This treatment of differences, paired with a resolution through the working out of these differences, is also a feature of the buddy film genre. As Brian Locke highlights in his discussion of Hollywood buddy films featuring a black and a white protagonist, the main characters bond in the face of a common enemy (in the films that he considers, the common enemy is an Asian character).10 In the case of Philippe and Driss, the common enemies they face are social exclusion and perceptions resulting from their status as a physically handicapped man and as a young man from une cité de banlieue, respectively. Intouchables fits neatly into the “interracial buddy paradigm” as outlined by Melvin Donalson in his study of Hollywood interracial buddy films. For Donalson, there are four characteristics common to these films, some of which may be emphasized to a greater extent than the others: first, the two men are heterosexual. Second, the relationship between them (which often starts out as an antagonistic one) is the main focus of the narrative. Third, the “emotional, personal, and professional lives of the interracial males are intertwined, often in regard to life-changing and/or life-and-death issues, dilemmas, and situations.” Finally, “the two males achieve a union that acknowledges personal sharing and sacrifice for one another—personal demands that go beyond the conveniences of a friendship.”11 These characteristics are all part of the narrative of Intouchables. The protagonists’ (at first antagonistic) professional connection quickly turns personal as Driss and Philippe become friends and come to rely on one another as they face lifechanging—and for Philippe, potentially life-threatening—challenges. It is also by drawing on the conventions of the buddy film broadly speaking—one might even call it a “bromance”—that Intouchables makes a friendship between such dissimilar men believable. They talk about women, soup up Philippe’s wheelchair so that it can go faster, race around Paris in

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Philippe’s Maserati sports car, and bring out the other’s competitive nature by making bets and pushing limits. This relationship is emphasized from the very first scene of the film, when together they dupe the police into letting them out of a speeding ticket by pretending that Philippe is having a health crisis and that they are on their way to the hospital. Beyond the conventions of the buddy film and comedy, the film’s popular success could also be attributed to other formal and external factors. Omar Sy and François Cluzet provide solid acting performances, and the happy ending emphasizes how two “underdogs” have overcome challenges together. In addition, the fact that the film was inspired by a true story adds weight to the believability of the narrative (even if the directors had taken ample liberties in writing the screenplay), undoubtedly impacting the extent to which it resonated with audiences.12 This aspect of the film is clearly indicated not once but twice in Intouchables—at the beginning, with the establishing title on the screen (“Based on a True Story”), and again as it concludes, when a screen text briefly explains what Philippe and Abdel have become, and footage then shows the two men together. Finally, the success of Intouchables could also be attributed to the timing of the film’s release: it came out during an economic crisis, and its optimism struck a chord with viewers who wanted to be distracted from reality and were happy to be entertained by a kind of contemporary fairy tale. As reviewers at Libération noted, “le succès du film est le fruit d’un conte de fées cauchemardesque: bienvenue dans un monde sans. Sans conflits sociaux, sans effet de groupe, sans modernité, sans crise. A ce titre, en cet automne, il est LE film de la crise” [The success of the film is the product of a nightmarish fairy tale: welcome to a world without. Without social conflicts, without a group herd effect, without modernity, without a crisis. In this respect, this fall it is THE film of the crisis].13 Similarly, a critic in Marianne went so far as to dub Intouchables as “le film antidépresseur” [the antidepressant film].14 These elements all contributed to the creation of a very enjoyable film that would become a “phénomène de société” in France. Yet, the media hype and critical reception paint a much more complex picture of this film and its success at the box office.

Intouchables in the Press Intouchables was the object of significant attention in the press from the film’s release in France in November 2011 to its release in American theaters in May 2012 (and even beyond). While the film attracted more moviegoers in countries like Germany and Spain than in the United States, this chapter focuses specifically on the film’s treatment in the press in the United States

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for three reasons.15 First, the reviews of Intouchables in several prominent American media outlets were strikingly different from those in France in that they offered a much more critical assessment of the film. Second, the reviews by some American critics attracted the attention of the French press and even prompted coverage there. Third, some of the strongest criticisms of Intouchables came from reviewers in American publications, which then sparked online debates and prompted a very unusual course of action from the directors, who decided to publicly defend their film in the Huffington Post. In doing so, they sought to influence the reception of the film by American viewers who had yet to see it. A common critique shared by the strongest critics of the film in the American press was the film’s portrayal of ethnic differences. The most notable review came from Variety critic Jay Weissberg, whose article was published before Intouchables even came out in French theaters. Weissberg’s review of the film, and in particular the depiction of Driss, was scathing. He wrote: Driss is treated as nothing but a performance monkey (with all the racist associations of such a term), teaching the stuck-up white folk how to get “down” by replacing Vivaldi with “Boogie Wonderland” and showing off his moves on the dance floor. It’s painful to see [Omar] Sy, a joyfully charismatic performer, in a role barely removed from the jolly house slave of yore, entertaining the master while embodying all the usual stereotypes about class and race.16

Weissberg’s review represented by far the harshest criticism of Intouchables in the American press, as well as the only review in a major publication that openly called the film’s portrayal of Driss racist. In the words of Weissberg, “[t]hough never known for their subtlety, . . . Eric Toledano and Olivier Nakache have never delivered a film as offensive as ‘Untouchable,’ which flings about the kind of Uncle Tom racism one hopes has permanently exited American screens.”17 A.O. Scott’s review in the New York Times was also very critical of the film’s treatment race and difference, but it did not label the film as racist. While Scott praised Cluzet’s and Sy’s performances and the film’s message of tolerance, he criticized what he called the film’s “genial parade of stereotypes” and lack of “self-consciousness.” For Scott, You can easily imagine this movie—you probably have already seen it—with Richard Pryor or Eddie Murphy in Mr. Sy’s role. In the post-civil-rights, postblaxploitation era, entertainments based on the clash of white squareness and black soul had a certain novelty and charm. Nowadays they are more likely to be layered with self-consciousness, winking at their own conventions.18

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Scott did concede, however, that “[r]ace, in France as in the United States, is a perpetual source of confusion and discomfort; to address it is always, in some way, to get it wrong.” David Denby of the New Yorker also praised Cluzet’s acting, yet called the film “an embarrassment” and the plot “disastrously condescending: the black man, who’s crude, sexy, and a great dancer, liberates the frozen white man.”19 Michael O’Sullivan’s review in The Washington Post echoed the critiques by Weissberg and Scott. He highlighted the strength of the acting as well as some of the comedic moments yet criticized the film’s portrayal of Driss. For O’Sullivan, Driss’s role “comes dangerously close to what’s known as the ‘Magic Negro’ syndrome. Driss, whose primary function seems to be as a conduit for Philippe to reconnect with the life force he’s forgotten, could use a little less condescension to avoid becoming a racial cliche.”20 These reviewers all suggest that the superficial and stereotypical treatment of race and difference in Intouchables is well behind the times when compared to American cinema (and films like Trading Places) that explored similar dynamics decades before and then moved on to more complex approaches to the same questions. In contrast to the opinions of these critics, however, online reviews of Intouchables by the general public as expressed on a number of American websites were overwhelmingly positive. Indeed, the reception of the film by mainstream audiences in the United States was similar to that of the general public in France. At the time of writing, for example, there have been over eight hundred audience reviews of the film posted on the film review website Rotten Tomatoes, and the majority of those awarded it four or five stars. Recurrent praise of the film echoes the elements that made the film so popular upon its release: the fact that Intouchables was a “feel good” and heartwarming film, that it benefited from great acting performances, and that it depicted characters who overcome differences. Opinions were also very positive in nature on the site IMDb (Internet Movie Database). Of the 268 written reviews posted from viewers, only thirty-two of these (just under twelve percent) did not accord the film eight or more stars out of ten. With regard to audience members who gave the film a simple “star” rating (with no written review)—328,708 in total—the film averaged 8.6 out of 10 stars. Audience ratings on Netflix paint a similar picture: out of 728,978 subscribers who rated the film, the average score was 4.4 out of 5 stars. It should also be noted that Scott’s review in the New York Times provoked online responses from forty-four readers, thirty-eight of whom strongly disagreed with his take on the film. Many argued that the film is not about race, but class, some suggested that Scott must have been having a bad day when he wrote his review, and yet others went as far as to insult Scott for his take on the film.21

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These statistics and reviews are thus useful in elucidating the contours of the perceptions of Intouchables not only within a single national context, but also within an international framework, between the United States and France, where the film also provoked strong reactions, though not necessarily for the same reasons. In the French context, there were many positive reviews of the film in the media. These praised, among other things, the acting performances of Cluzet and relative newcomer Sy, the positive portrayal of a minority ethnic man from a disadvantaged neighborhood, as well as the fact that the film gives a lead role to a handicapped character.22 Intouchables also remained in the media spotlight in France for several months thanks to its remarkable box-office figures in France and abroad and its nominations and awards at national and international ceremonies (such as the César awards and Golden Globes). Nevertheless, there were also a significant number of reviews in major newspapers that were critical of Intouchables, though these obviously had little bearing on the popular success of the film. Unlike in the American press, where criticisms of the film largely focused on race, critics in the French media honed in on the portrayal of class difference. Articles that appeared in L’Humanité and Marianne criticized the film, for example, for its use of clichés to depict a young man from la banlieue and a man from la grande bourgeoisie [the elite social class].23 Other reviewers condemned the film for making light of or glossing over the complexity of deeply entrenched socio-economic disparities in France. An article by Jean-Jacques Delfour in Libération opened with the following words: “Ce conte de Noël, la rencontre entre un Black des banlieues et un richissime bourgeois de la capitale, trame d’autres fils: sadisme, pathétique (du mélodrame en barre) et déni de la réalité sociale. En fait, un remake de Cendrillon. D’où le succès” [This Christmas tale, the meeting between a black man from la banlieue and an ultra-rich bourgeois from Paris, also weaves together other threads: sadism, pity (with excessive melodrama) and denial of social reality. In fact, it’s a remake of Cinderella. Hence its success]. He continued: “[Intouchables] [n]aturalis[e] la violence sociale et masqu[e] cette opération par du racolage aux affects” [(Intouchables) naturalizes social violence and masks this process by eliciting emotions].24 For a reviewer for Les Inrockuptibles, Intouchables is one of three contemporary comedies (the others being Les femmes du 6e étage [The Women on the Sixth Floor] and Mon pire cauchemar [My Worst Nightmare]) whose success is due, among other things, to the representation of a utopian vision of French society where love, friendship, and solidarity can overcome class differences.25 If the majority of French reviewers elided the racial dynamic of the film, a few critics did, however, take note. In fact, some of the reviewers saw the

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film’s treatment of race in a positive light. For example, an article in Le Nouvel Observateur noted that Intouchables was the first French film in which “un fils d’immigré noir emporte le premier rôle dans un film où l’on rit avec lui. Et jamais de lui” [a son of a black immigrant carries the lead role in a film in which we laugh with him, and never at him]. In the same article, historian Pascal Blanchard commented on the casting of Omar Sy in the lead role and deemed the film to be “une vraie révolution: un Noir porte le long-métrage le plus bankable de l’année en France” [a true revolution: a black man carries the most bankable feature film of the year in France].26 Conversely, Thierry de Cabarrus, writing for the opinion pages of Le Nouvel Observateur, echoed the criticisms of the reviewers in the American press. De Cabarrus condemned, among other things, a representation of Driss that in his view harkens back to the image of Uncle Ben (in the role of a servant) on bags of rice.27 Significantly, this short piece provoked 649 online responses from readers, many of whom disagreed with him and argued that the film was about class, not race. Some readers insulted him, citing his intellectual pretension and lack of knowledge about other (i.e., lower) social classes, while others accused him of racism, suggesting that he was seeing a problem that was not there. In proactively entering into dialogue with the media in the form of an editorial in The Huffington Post, directors Olivier Nakache and Éric Toledano sought to reign in the interpretations of the film in the American context by denouncing the focus on the question of racial difference. In their editorial, they discussed their disappointment at discovering that several American critics had deemed the character of Driss to be “a reductive stereotype” (they do not mention the piece by Thierry de Cabarrus, however, or any other articles published in the French media). “Why such a claim?” they asked. “And why now, when this hasn’t been raised during the film’s release in other countries? We understand America’s sensitivity to matters of race. But we wonder if Americans who aren’t as familiar with France’s current social issues might be missing the context of our film.”28 They went on to say that they wrote the role for Omar Sy, hence the reason they did not cast an actor of North African descent in the role of Abdel (who was born in Algeria and came to France as a child). They maintained that Omar, who grew up in a disadvantaged neighborhood outside of Paris, was their “guarantee of authenticity from the clothing down to the subtle local slang.” According to the directors: In America, this transformation from Arabic to African-American would have far-reaching implications; but in France, such distinctions have little consequence. Light or dark-skinned, North or Sub-Saharan African, immigrants from all parts of the world live in the same neighborhoods and share the same

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limited options in France’s socio-economic system, regardless of their community of origin.29

In their view, then, the film is about class difference, and thus altering the ethnic origins of a character should have no bearing on the film, yet what is most striking here is that American reviewers did not actually criticize the film for changing the ethnic origins of the character. Rather, they were critical of how this particular black character and his relationship with his white boss were represented, which, in their view, played into existing stereotypes. Indeed, it is likely that the American critics would have reacted differently had the directors cast an actor of North African origin in the role of Driss in the first place, given that the stereotypes to which the critics refer are largely associated with black characters that have a legacy in a specifically American context. The directors’ focus on the ethnic transformation of the lead character deserves further consideration. What are the stakes of this change (from Abdel to Driss) and the treatment—or lack thereof—of ethnic differences and social class in the film more generally, when considered in the French context?

Representing Ethnic Difference and Diversity These debates about ethnicity, class, and la banlieue in French cinema are uncannily similar to those that occurred sixteen years before Intouchables and were provoked by Mathieu Kassovitz’s La haine [Hate]. This film, released in 1995, follows three young men—one white, one black, one Arab—in a disadvantaged neighborhood after an incident of police brutality and a subsequent riot, and it forced into the national spotlight discussions about social exclusion in underprivileged French suburbs. It won the prestigious Prix de la mise en scène [Best Director Award] at the Cannes Film Festival and received significant attention in the media. As Carrie Tarr has observed, in interviews about the film, director Kassovitz “avoided talking about ethnic differences, emphasizing instead the commonality of experiences which unite young people on the estates.”30 For Tarr, “Kassovitz provides a positive representation of inter-ethnic male bonding within an oppositional underclass youth culture [. . .] but [. . .] the question of racism and ethnic difference tends in the process to become marginalised, if not effaced.”31 This choice to focus on class difference and to avoid a discussion of ethnic difference is in line with France’s model of color-blind integration, and it can help shed light on Nakache and Toledano’s editorial. As Erik Bleich highlights, “issues that would be interpreted in the United States as containing a racial dimension are

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typically viewed through a different lens in France. The integration model focuses attention on problems and social divides associated with culture, class, geography, and citizenship status rather than race or skin color.”32 This does not mean, of course, that racism does not exist or that ethnic minorities are on an equal socio-economic playing field with their majority ethnic counterparts. With regard to Intouchables, by not exploring in any meaningful way the root causes of the very obvious social differences that exist between Driss and Philippe, this film adopts a safe (i.e., noncontroversial) approach to the questions of racial difference and integration. This approach is problematic for several reasons. If both protagonists are “untouchables” and face social exclusion, the reasons for the exclusion are vastly different. While Philippe’s exclusion is the result of an unfortunate accident, in the case of Driss it can be attributed to the fact that he is part of a postcolonial, and visible, ethnic minority, yet this is not openly acknowledged in the film. Instead, the film ascribes Driss’s social exclusion solely to social class and to the fact that he is from la banlieue, implying that his problems will end if he leaves this disadvantaged space. The film suggests that Driss’s encounter and friendship with Philippe lead to greater integration into French society, symbolized by his successful job interview with a delivery company at the end of the film. In real life, however, the meeting between Abdel and Philippe did not have the same outcome, and this integration did not occur. Abdel chose not only to leave la banlieue but also to leave France entirely. He moved to Algeria, the country he had left as a young child, to start a business and raise his children. The film seems particularly evasive when examined alongside Abdel Sellou’s memoir, which was published in 2012 (after the film’s release). The screenplay and comedic tone of Intouchables, of which Philippe Pozzo di Borgo was firmly in favor, sweep under the rug the social disenfranchisement and experiences of racism that Abdel Sellou describes in his book.33 One telling example is an incident of racial profiling he encountered while driving his employer’s car: “I got arrested at the wheel of the Jaguar. I wasn’t even speeding, I hadn’t run any lights. Two undercover cops pinned me on the sidewalk, flashing lights on, siren wailing. They saw a poorly shaved, poorly dressed North African in a luxury car and didn’t ask any more questions. I ended up lying face down on the hood without having had any time to explain myself.”34 In the film, the same episode is presented in a very different light. Driss is also pulled over by the police while driving, but there is a justifiable reason: he is driving dangerously fast through the streets of Paris, attempting to outrun the police. It is revealing that in the French language version of his book, Abdel also uses words such as “bicot” and “petit Arabe”

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to describe himself, derogatory racist terms that inflect the heritage of France’s colonial presence in North Africa and provide insight into Abdel’s view of how he is perceived by others. This particular vocabulary brings us back to the question of casting and the creation of the character of Driss. Nakache and Toledano wrote that changing a character from Arab to black is of “little consequence” in the French context, yet this casting choice fails to acknowledge any specific references to Abdel’s experience as a person of North African origin in France. In addition, this substitution does not take into account the differences in representations in film and the media of the North African and black populations in France. There are significantly more films depicting people of North African than West African descent in France. Although these characters have not always been cast in a positive light, they have become much more varied, complex, and nuanced over the years.35 The fact that there have been few successful French films in which the main character is a black man means that a film like Intouchables will necessarily have a significant potential to impact perceptions and shape mentalities about this population. Moreover, replacing a North African character with a black one appears to ignore the respective histories of migration of these populations, notably the legacy of slavery and key events such as the Algerian war, which shape public perceptions of these groups. Although the two respective populations share some important similarities, especially when it comes to a history of social exclusion in France, the total denial of differences by the directors in the case of Intouchables points to a telling blind spot in the film, and one that may have been more deliberate than the directors would care to admit. This blind spot is especially revealing given that Nakache and Toledano’s previous film, Tellement proches [So Close], explicitly addressed perceptions and stereotypes of black men in France and used them for comedic effect. The comedy depicts a (white) dysfunctional extended family in France, and Omar Sy plays Bruno, the love interest of one of the protagonists, Roxanne. Bruno is a doctor, but the people that he meets assume that he is, among other things, a nurse, an orderly, and a delivery man, simply because he is black. At one point, Bruno even beats up someone who thinks that he is trying to sell postcards and Eiffel Tower trinkets, a scene that once again seeks to highlight, and critique, the existence of racial and ethnic stereotypes in France. Near the end of the film, Bruno’s anger finally boils over. After the family member of a patient automatically assumes that he is not a doctor because he is black and refuses to take him at his word, he yells: “Vous n’avez jamais vu un médecin noir?” [Have you never seen a black doctor?]. It is thus naive at best for the directors to maintain that the kind of casting change that they chose to

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make in Intouchables could have no deeper implications for their film and its reception. Furthermore, instead of addressing the potential consequences of this change, the directors simply justified their casting choice by highlighting Omar Sy’s socio-economic origins. These criticisms aside, the fact that they did take the risk of casting a black actor in a lead role at a time when there were no “bankable” black actors in France to speak of should be acknowledged. There were, and still are, far more bankable actors of Maghrebi origin, such as Roschdy Zem and Tahar Rahim, who could have been cast in the role of Abdel. Yet, Nakache and Toledano chose to give this opportunity to Omar Sy, for whom they had written this comedic role in the first place.36 I cannot end this chapter without briefly mentioning another blockbuster comedy that took France by storm when it was released in theaters in April of 2014: Qu’est-ce qu’on a fait au Bon Dieu? [Serial Bad Weddings].37 The film sold over 12 million tickets in France and is on the top ten list of the most viewed French films of all time (in France). It depicts the Verneuil family, a wealthy, Catholic, and traditional family with four grown daughters. Much to the parents’ chagrin, the first three daughters marry men of Maghrebi, Jewish, and Chinese origin, respectively, and the plot of the film is driven by the youngest daughter’s decision to marry a Catholic man of Senegalese origin and the wedding planning that ensues. Like Intouchables, this film plays up differences—between the generations, diverse couples, and families—for comedic effect and has an inevitable happy ending. Unlike Intouchables, however, ethnic and religious differences are a key source of conversation and conflict in Qu’est-ce qu’on a fait au Bon Dieu?, and the film suggests that everyone has preconceived notions about other people. While Intouchables focuses on class distinctions and glosses over ethnic difference, this more recent comedy does the opposite: it brings to the fore debates on ethnic and religious differences and stereotypes (if somewhat superficially) while avoiding the subject of class difference. The husbands and husband-to-be all belong to the middle to upper-middle classes, as they are a lawyer, banker, entrepreneur, and actor, respectively; and their partners are also employed. The Senegalese family of Charles, who plans to wed the youngest Verneuil daughter, is also shown to be in a comfortable financial situation. Part of the recipe for success for these two comedies, then, has been to address class or ethnic differences with regard to characters rooted in France (as opposed to immigrants), but not both. It is also worth noting that Qu’est-ce qu’on a fait au Bon Dieu? did not find a distributor in the United States or United Kingdom because it was deemed to be too politically incorrect vis-à-vis its treatment of ethnic differences.38

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In conclusion, Intouchables is a very entertaining film, yet it remains problematic precisely because it is so enjoyable, so appealing, and such a “feelgood” movie that it does not incite viewers to scratch beyond the surface to think about deeper questions. It is by examining this film in a larger context and in light of the reactions and reviews that it generated (and the dialogue that these created in turn) that the complexities of this cultural production can be fully appreciated. The directors did not intend for the film to be part of a dialogue about representations of France’s ethnic minorities and the legacy of colonialism, yet this became the case as much because of what the film does as what it does not do. In this sense, the film took on a life of its own. Intouchables may even have inadvertently created space for other films to engage more directly with the question of ethnic and social differences in France. This includes Chocolat (2016), a film that tells the story of a Cubanborn slave who became the first black clown in the French circus. He was a star performer at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, alongside his performance partner, a white clown. A product of the colonial ideology of the times, their act consisted of the white clown humiliating the black clown for comedic effect.39 The film is directed by Roschdy Zem, and in the lead role of Chocolat is none other than Omar Sy.

Notes 1.  “Intouchables: Chronique d’un succès annoncé,” L’Express, November 2, 2011. 2.  Gérard Lefort, Didier Péron, and Bruno Icher, “‘Intouchables’? Ben si . . .,” Libération, November 14, 2011. 3.  Box office figures are cited from Lumiere, the database on admissions of films released in Europe, www.lumiere.obs.coe.int. 4.  “‘Intouchables’ film français le plus vu au monde: ‘Miraculeux’ pour Cluzet,” Agence France Presse, September 10, 2012. 5.  A la vie, à la mort [In Life, In Death], directed by Jean-Pierre Devillers and Isabelle Cottenceau (Paris: MD Productions/ Centre National de la Cinématographie, 2003). 6. Will Higbee, Post-Beur Cinema: North African Émigré and Maghrebi-French Filmmaking in France Since 2000 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 27. 7.  Daniela Berghahn, Far-Flung Families in Film: The Diasporic Family in Contemporary European Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 5. 8.  Charlie Michael, “Interpreting Intouchables: Competing Transnationalisms in Contemporary French Cinema,” SubStance 43, no. 1 (2014): 132. 9.  Abdel Sellou with Caroline Andrieu, You Changed My Life, trans. Lauren Sentuc (New York: Weinstein Books, 2012), 105.

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10.  Brian Locke, Racial Stigma on the Hollywood Screen from World War II to the Present: The Orientalist Buddy Film (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 11.  Melvin Donalson, Masculinity in the Interracial Buddy Film (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006), 10. It is worth mentioning that Omar Sy’s subsequent film, De l’autre côté du pérph’ (2011), also fits in to this paradigm. 12.  Writing about the artistic liberties that directors Toledano and Nakache took with the script of Intouchables, Philippe Pozzo di Borgo has said: “Les contraintes du long-métrage et leur imagination les amenèrent à simplifier, modifier, élaguer ou inventer de nombreuses situations” [The constraints of the feature film, and their imagination, led them to simplify, modify, edit, or invent numerous situations], Le Second Souffle (Paris: Bayard, 2011), 10. 13.  Lefort, Péron, and Icher, “‘Intouchables’?” 14. Elodie Emery, “Intouchables, le film antidépresseur,” Marianne, November 12–18, 2011. 15. Since 2011, 1,377,751 tickets have been sold in Switzerland, 8,883,259 in Germany, and 2,580,856 Spain, while only 1,651,268 have been sold in the United States. 16.  Jay Weissberg, “Review: ‘Untouchable,’” Variety, September 29, 2011. 17. Ibid. 18.  A.O. Scott, “Helping a White Man Relearn Joie de Vivre: ‘The Intouchables’ Arrives from France,” New York Times, May 24, 2012. 19.  David Denby, “Strongmen: The Dictator and The Intouchables,” New Yorker, May 28, 2012. 20.  Michael O’Sullivan, “The Intouchables (Intouchable),” Washington Post, June 1, 2012. 21.  Reviews such as these must of course be taken with a grain of salt, since the people most likely to respond to such articles are those who feel strongly about them in one way or another. 22.  See, for example: “A la Courneuve, des silences et un tonnere d’applaudissements pour Intouchables,” Le Monde, December 2, 2012; “Intouchables a modifié le regard sur le handicap,” Le Figaro, November 7, 2012. 23.  Vincent Ostria, “Par ici les sorties,” L’Humanité, November 2, 2011; Danièle Heymann, “Non au tombereau de vannes exténuantes,” Marianne, November 12–18, 2011. 24.  Jean-Jacques Delfour, “Intouchables: Cendrillon des temps modernes,” Libération, November 29, 2011. 25. Jean-Marc Lalanne and Jean-Baptiste Morain, “Briser les classes,” Les Inrockuptibles, November 23, 2011. 26. Bérénice Rocfort-Giovanni and Elsa Vigoureux, “Le phénomène Intouchables,” Le Nouvel Observateur, December 1, 2011. 27.  Thierry De Cabarrus, “Intouchables: pourquoi je déteste ce film et son succès,” Le Nouvel Observateur, December 5, 2011.

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28.  Éric Toledano and Olivier Nakache, “An Intouchable World?” Huffington Post, May 7, 2012. 29. Ibid. 30. Carrie Tarr, Reframing Difference: Beur and Banlieue Filmmaking in France (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 68. 31.  Ibid., 68. 32. Erik Bleich, “The French Model: Color-Blind Integration,” in Color Lines: Affirmative Action, Immigration, and Civil Rights Options for America, ed. John David Skrentny (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 274. 33. Abdel Sellou with Caroline Andrieu, You Changed My Life, trans. Lauren Sentuc (New York: Weinstein Books, 2012). 34.  Ibid., 158. 35. Julien Gaertner, “Aspects et représentations du personnage arabe dans le cinéma français: 1995–2005, retour sur une décennie,” Confluences Méditerranée no. 55 (2005): 189–201. 36.  Toledano and Nakache, “An Intouchable World?” 37.  Qu’est-ce qu’on a fait au Bon Dieu? [Serial Bad Weddings], directed by Philippe de Chauveron (Paris: Les Films du 24, 2014). 38.  Marc Fourny, “‘Qu’est-ce qu’on a fait au Bon Dieu?’ trop polémique pour les États-Unis!” Le Point, October 10, 2014. 39.  See Gérard Noiriel, Chocolat, clown nègre: l’histoire oubliée du premier artiste noir de la scène française (Montrouge: Bayard, 2012).

CHAPTER EIGHT

Writing Transgressions Marguerite Duras, the Villemin Affair, and Public Literature Anne Brancky

On July 17, 1985, nine months after the mysterious murder of four-year-old Grégory Villemin in a small town in the East of France, Marguerite Duras published a three-page article in Libération about the fait divers entitled “Sublime, forcément sublime Christine V.” [“Sublime, necessarily sublime Christine V.”]. For months, the French media had been consumed by the unsolved murder of the child, whose body was discovered in the Vologne River on October 16, 1984. Reports traced the longtime harassment of the Villemin family by a mysterious corbeau (poison-pen letter writer), accusations against a “jealous” uncle, his vengeful murder by the child’s father even after the uncle’s exoneration, and the arrest and subsequent release of Grégory’s pregnant mother, Christine Villemin, for infanticide. Duras’s now-famous rewriting of the crime ignores the conventional presumption of innocence and explicitly accuses the mother of murdering her child at the same time it defends her for having done so. Based entirely on Duras’s own identification with the presumed killer through intuition and artistic sensibility, her article created a scandal. “Sublime” started a polemic in the press and was thereby transformed into a fait divers in its own right; this written object became the site of a new kind of crime for which Duras was duly vilified in the media. What for Duras was an exploration of the conditions for extreme transgression effectively influenced public opinion to such an extent that, regardless of the official case (which remains unsolved to this day), Christine Villemin was permanently marked with the charge of infanticide.

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In anticipation of intense reader reactions to this confounding article, Serge July, the editor of Libération,1 prefaced Duras’s article in a short inset called “La transgression de l’écriture” [The Transgression of Writing], in which he writes that Duras’s article “n’est pas un travail de journaliste, d’enquêter à la recherche de la vérité. Mais celui d’un écrivain en plein travail, fantasmant la réalité en quête d’une vérité qui n’est sans doute pas la vérité, mais une vérité quand même, à savoir celle du texte écrit” [is not the work of a journalist, investigating the truth. But that of a writer at work, fantasizing about reality in search of a truth that is surely not the truth, but a truth nevertheless, that is to say, that of the written text].2 July thereby situates “Sublime, forcément sublime Christine V.” outside of journalism and squarely in the realm of the literary, even though it is printed in the pages of his newspaper. While this disclaimer attempted to alert readers to the ways in which “Sublime” refused journalistic standards of investigation and objectivity in favor of a “fantasized” version of events, it did nothing to prevent the outrage that followed. Whereas some readers were confused about how to understand Duras’s article and the implications it would have for Christine Villemin, others were simply fed up with what they perceived to be the media saturation of the author and her overall out-of-proportion public persona. July’s “preface” also points toward important methodological questions that I will explore in this chapter about how to approach “Sublime” along with Duras’s many journalistic articles and other paraliterary texts.3 Because “Sublime,” like much of her writing for the popular press, shares strong thematic and aesthetic links with her literary works, it is tempting to consider the piece as a misplaced work of fiction. However, it did appear in the newspaper in an attempt for its author to engage in an ongoing public discussion about a particular crime, and it raised social questions about family violence and judicial inefficacy. It is therefore important to understand the article within the media context in which it appeared. “Sublime” reached a wide audience and elicited responses from regular Libération readers and specialized Duras critics alike, reinforcing the inherently dialogical and unstable nature of news media. This chapter looks at the way in which Duras entered into the public conversation around one of the most famous criminal investigations of twentieth-century France and in so doing called attention to the tenuous limits between literature and the public sphere. I study the way that Duras’s article functions rhetorically in a journalistic space and supplement this analysis with an assessment of the article’s reception within both the popular press and literary criticism to demonstrate how the effects created by the

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article are indissociable from Duras’s public image. As I consider “Sublime, forcément sublime Christine V.” in its full potential as a cultural object that complicates distinctions between different writing practices, I interrogate the relationship between literature and more popular cultural phenomena in an increasingly interpenetrative landscape. In the first section, I briefly survey Duras’s journalistic work throughout her career to remind us that “Sublime” was not unprecedented in terms of her subjective approach to journalism. In the second section, I look at the way in which the writer inscribes her idiosyncratic reading and rewriting of the crime in an already-established tendency within the media to discuss the real-life case as a public romance. With this gesture, Duras tells her own tale of women’s lived experience in twentieth-century France. In the third section, I examine the way that readers, journalists, writers, and intellectuals wrote back to Duras in the press and both praised and vilified her defense of infanticide. I show that readers reacted just as much to Duras’s outsized media presence as to what she wrote in her article. Because of Duras’s notoriety, her masterful literary chops, and the placement of her article in a leading French daily, “Sublime, forcément sublime Christine V.” confounded readers at the time of publication and continues to raise provocative questions about the growing reciprocity between literature and the media. In fact, over the years, a number of literary critics have written about this polemical article.4 Many of them study its relationship to Duras’s literary works through the figure of the “mad mother,” the sublime, or even the interaction between truth and fiction; several have analyzed the importance of this article within Duras’s larger relationship to the media. Leslie Hill has addressed the changing media landscape throughout Duras’s lifetime that led to her increasingly public presence and involvement in current events, Christophe Meurée has studied how “Sublime” marshals Duras’s mass popularity to reaffirm the figure of the writer and the “savoir [. . .] de la littérature” [knowledge of literature], Alexandra Saemmer has argued that “Sublime” contributed to the mediatization of the author. Daniela Veres has discussed responses to the article in the press and James S. Williams has considered the political implications of this article and Duras’s other appearances in the Media.5 In this chapter, I hope to further recognize Duras’s relationship to the media to show how she mobilized literary tropes in a public voice that was fundamentally different from her literary “I” to make claims that lie outside of the bounds of the literary. That is, instead of looking simply at what Duras is doing in the text of her article, I also analyze how what she was doing in the media when the article appeared helps us to understand not only the backlash against her but also the way that her article transgresses the boundaries of literature to act transitively in the real world.

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Tout Journaliste Est un Moraliste “Il n’y a pas de journalisme sans morale. Tout journaliste est un moraliste. C’est absolument inevitable” [There is no journalism without morality. Every journalist is a moralist. It is absolutely inevitable].6 So begins Outside (1981), the first published collection of Marguerite Duras’s contributions to various newspapers throughout her career, which includes interviews, literary and art reviews, and social and political commentaries. The writer insists on the absolute impossibility of objective journalism, and argues that the image of the journalist as an impartial authority is a complete illusion: “il ne peut pas à la fois faire ce travail et ne pas juger ce qu’il voit. C’est impossible. Autrement dit, l’information objective est un leurre total. C’est un mensonge. Il n’y a pas de journalisme objectif, il n’y a pas de journalisme objectif” [he cannot at the same time do this work and not judge what he sees. It is impossible. In other words, objective information is a total illusion. It is a lie. There is no objective journalism, there is no objective journalism].7 Duras therefore rejects pretentions of objectivity in her own journalistic writing, and privileges instead a clear personal standpoint in the story. She expresses her point of view through her choice of subjects, framing the world around amour fou (crazy love), crimes passionnels (crimes of passion), violence, and the marginal, as well as through her subjective judgment of these topics in articles. Although there is a long-established tendency in French journalism to mix commentary (commentaires) and information (faits) in both the presse d’opinion and the presse populaire, Duras takes the subjective inflection of journalism to a new level as she writes about what attracts her in order to voice particular ideological and literary projects.8 Indeed, Duras prefers a literary journalism that manifests its own bias, as this work would surpass information by infusing the story with the potentially more compelling interpretation of the author. “Quelquefois je pense que le journalisme tendancieux, flétri comme tel, est le meilleur journalisme, au moins il rétablit l’ignorance, il fait douter de la version de l’évènement. On y accède alors pour le corriger. On peut se l’approprier” [Sometimes I think that biased journalism, corrupted as such, is the best journalism, at least it reestablishes ignorance, it makes you doubt the version of the event. One can then access it to correct it. One can appropriate it for oneself], writes Duras in La Vie matérielle in 1987.9 This kind of partial and intuitive reporting reveals the limitations of a certain mode of journalism by highlighting its inevitable subjectivity. Duras’s journalism, therefore, attempts to “rétablir l’ignorance” [reestablish ignorance] by casting doubt on the accepted version of the event; that is, she critiques dominant narratives by constructing her

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own account from her self-avowed ignorance and her personal reading. Just as she writes from l’inconnu [the unknown] in her literary work, in her journalism, Duras focuses her practice on gaps in narration, the unspeakable, and the obscure.10 Further, she appropriates the story to create her own account, thereby transcending the journalistic medium and blurring the boundaries between documentation and interpretation, between the personal and the public, and indeed between journalism and literature. However, journalistic writing is also a way for Duras to pursue the ethical commitment that she had professed since her time in the Resistance during the Occupation. While she considered her literary writing to be “intransitive,”11 she believed journalism should activate readers around specific causes. In fact, its very function is to create “une opinion publique autour d’évènements qui, autrement, passeraient inaperçus. Je ne pense pas qu’il puisse exister une objectivité professionnelle: je préfère une nette ‘prise de position.’ Une espèce de posture morale. Ce dont un écrivain peut parfaitement se passer dans ses propres livres” [a public opinion about events that would otherwise pass unnoticed. I don’t think that a professional objectivity can exist: I prefer a clear stance. A kind of moral position, which a writer can easily avoid in her own books].12 Though her journalistic articles share much aesthetically and thematically with the author’s other published writing, she endeavors for them to functionally raise readers’ awareness about underrepresented individuals and issues.13 In this spirit, Duras took up the Affaire Villemin in order to make an argument not about infanticide itself, but rather about the kind of oppressive patriarchal system that can lead a woman to kill her child. As she reaffirms in an interview about her article, the woman is a victim, and the death of the child is a mere articulation of this universal fact: “Le crime de Christine Villemin est la faute de quelqu’un qui, avant tout, comme toute femme, était une victime: être reléguée à la matérialité de l’existence, incapable de se relever de là, condamnée à l’artifice d’une vie non voulue” [Christine Villemin’s crime is the fault of someone who was above all, like all women, a victim: relegated to the materiality of existence, incapable of getting out of it, condemned to the artifice of an unwanted life].14 By raising this point in her article, and by glossing it once again in this interview to reiterate her argument, Duras uses the public space outside of literature to make a claim that will reach the wide audiences she believes it affects.

A Serial Novel Although Duras indeed made a political statement through her rewriting of the Villemin family tragedy for Libération, in order to do so, she undeniably

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transformed their misfortune into a Durassian literary tale. In fact, the framing of her article indicates that the writer was explicitly asked to look at the story as the award-winning author she was known to be. In addition to Serge July’s disclaimer assuring readers that Duras’s article should be read as a literary text rather than a faithful recounting of “the news,” the paper’s editors presented the story as Marguerite Duras’s very own interpretation: “Nous avions demandé à Marguerite Duras de nous raconter sa ‘Christine V.’” [We had asked Marguerite Duras to tell us the story of her “Christine V.”], they point out in the pages preceding her article.15 On the cover of the July 17th Libération, Duras’s contribution is highlighted as “un texte de Marguerite Duras: Sublime, forcément sublime Christine V. L’auteur de ‘l’Amant’ et de ‘la Douleur’, et aussi de ‘Outside’ et de ‘Détruire, dit-elle…’ a voulu écrire cette ‘folie,’ ‘celle des femmes des collines nues’ qui ‘peut-être tuent sans savoir comme j’écris sans savoir’… ” [a text by Marguerite Duras: Sublime, forcément sublime Christine V. The author of “l’Amant” and of “la Douleur,” and also “Outside” and “Détruire, dit-elle” wanted to write this “madness,” “that of women of empty hills” who “perhaps kill without knowing just as I write without knowing”].16 The editors insist that Duras’s story is un texte, thereby distinguishing it from other articles, reportages, or investigative reports in the paper. Further, by listing a number of her novels on the front page of the paper, they situate her article among her literary works in an effort to contextualize the celebrated author for readers and to insist on its literary nature. As we approach Duras’s article, therefore, there are signposts indicating that Duras’s story will not recount “the news,” but that instead she will be telling her own tale, “this madness,” in a way that will be familiar to fans of her fiction. In fact, in the style of a gonzo journalist, it is Duras’s first-hand testimony that grounds her article through reliance on a personal identification with Christine V.17 Like Anne Desbaresdes in Moderato cantabile, who returns to the scene of the murder in the café to strengthen her identification with the victim, Duras needed to travel to Lépanges-sur-Vologne where she could see the Villemin house in person, and from there intuit what took place in order to write about the crime. As critics have pointed out, the writer approaches the story through the faculty of vision, representing herself as a kind of “seer” with privileged insight into the events: “Dès que je vois la maison, je crie que le crime a existé. C’est ce que je crois. C’est au delà de la raison” [As soon as I see the house, I cry out that the crime did happen. This is what I believe. It is beyond reason].18 Despite all “reason,” let alone any forensic evidence, the mere sight of the Villemin house provides access to the narrative of the crime: “L’enfant a dû être tué à l’intérieur de la maison. Ensuite il a dû être noyé. C’est ce que je vois. C’est au-delà de la raison” [The child must have

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been killed inside the house. Then he must have been drowned. This is what I see. It is beyond reason].19 Furthermore, Duras claims to have been compelled to write about the murder after seeing an image of Christine Villemin in the newspaper, though she will never see the woman in real life. Indeed, the opening sentence of her article, “Je ne verrai jamais Christine V.,” [I will never see Christine V.] seems to liberate her from any responsibility to the truth: because Duras will never see the real Christine Villemin, she can invent a fictional character to serve a narrative that will teach readers a lesson regardless of the actual events of the crime.20 Through this newly formed literary character, Marguerite Duras debunks the myth of an instinctive, unconditional maternal love. She imagines that Christine V. had never wanted to be a mother in the first place, and that consequently, she may not have experienced the culturally idealized maternal love for her son. The barren yard, the “colline nue,” [empty hill] in front of the Villemin home confirms for Duras that “l’enfant ne devait pas être le plus important dans la vie de Christine V. Il ne devait rien y avoir de plus important dans sa vie à elle qu’elle-même” [the child must not have been the most important thing in Christine V.’s life. There must have been nothing more important than her in her life].21 The writer points to the fact that some women do not wish to be mothers, do not love their children, their domestic lives, nor their husbands. She also intuits that Christine V. was the victim of sexual and domestic violence, which led her to destroy the family structure. Duras suggests that the husband ran his house according to a “loi du couple [. . .] faite par l’homme” [law of the couple [. . .] made by man], a patriarchal order that was imposed upon the compliant but resentful wife.22 In Duras’s understanding of the case, Christine V. herself was a victim, and her only way to transgress the law was to murder her child, the symbol of her domestic unhappiness, and the link to her abusive husband. In this way, Duras transforms a heinous crime into a practical solution for survival. Furthermore, because Duras sees this infanticide as an effective means to escape the brutality of a husband and the mediocrity of life in Lépanges, Duras unequivocally absolves Christine V. of any guilt: “coupable, non, elle ne l’a pas été” [guilty, no, she was not guilty].23 In a later interview, Duras would add: “Christine Villemin était le prototype d’une féminité subjuguée par l’homme qui établit, une fois pour toutes, les lois du couple, du sexe, du désir. Des femmes comme elle sont partout, incapables de dire, exténuées par le vide qui les entoure: les enfants ne sont rien d’autre qu’un lien ultérieur qui attente à la réalisation de soi” [Christine Villemin was the prototype of a femininity subjugated by a man who established, once and for all, the laws of the couple, of sex, of desire. Women like her are

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everywhere, incapable of speaking, wearied by the emptiness that surrounds them: children are nothing but a subsequent link that threatens the realization of the self].24 These remarks confirm that for Duras, Christine V. became an example of a universal condition féminine—trapped by social expectations and imposed desires, silenced by a brutal patriarchal authority. The author links Christine V.’s condition to a historical lineage of subjugated women, and murder thereby takes on an absolute form of refusal that transcends the singularity of the incident and stands as a model of the sublime. Duras emphasizes the extraordinary, awe-inspiring quality that stems from the incomprehensible violence of infanticide. Once a meek, obedient wife, Christine V. defied human discernment in an astoundingly powerful act that landed her all over French newspapers, magazines, and television. Duras writes: “Ce qui aurait fait criminelle Christine V. c’est un secret de toutes les femmes, commun. Je parle du crime commis sur l’enfant, désormais accompli, mais aussi je parle du crime opéré sur elle, la mère. Et cela me regarde [. . .] Christine V. est sublime, forcément sublime” [What would have made Christine V. criminal is a secret shared by all women. I am talking about the crime committed against the child, already accomplished, but I am also talking about the crime perpetrated on her, the mother. And that is my business [. . .] Christine V. is sublime, necessarily sublime].25 In this powerful line and in the title of the piece, Duras plays with the polyvalent register of the word “sublime” in the French consciousness. On the one hand, French readers would understand “sublime” to refer to the colloquial use of the word as unequivocal approbation. On the other hand, it also references an aesthetic tradition that has described the sublime to be both terrifying and transcendent, rebuffing contemporary human laws and ethics, beyond our ability to comprehend. In a sense, then, though “unimaginable” or “unthinkable”— Christine V.’s “sublime” act of murder falls in line with neither Immanuel Kant’s incomprehensible magnitude nor Jean-François Lyotard’s sublime aporia.26 For Duras can understand the act and recognizes its sublimity by universalizing Christine V.’s condition through her own identification: “et cela me regarde” [and that concerns me/and that is my business], she reminds us. Duras sees Christine V.’s tragedy as relating to her personally through an extraordinary amount of empathic identification as well as through the creative impulse to appropriate her story. Duras further identifies with Christine V. when she writes that the woman might have committed the crime without knowing it, just as the author writes without knowing it: “peut-être [elle] a tué sans savoir comme moi j’écris sans savoir” [perhaps (she) killed without knowing just as I write without knowing].27 The scene of the crime is thus linked to the scene of writ-

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ing—the darkness of the imminent unknown envelopes both women as they commit their acts. Duras, of course, had long characterized her own writing as criminal transgression. However, in this case, her identification with the criminal exceeds the level of metaphor and enters into a strange fetishization of a kind of absolute power available to both figures.28 Duras can give birth to a character and later efface her, just as she suggests that Christine V. did to her son in real life. Christine V., the victimized woman, enters into the space of violence blindly, intuitively, and disrupts the family system as it is, in the same way that Duras the writer disrupts reader expectations in her writerly transgressions (including, here, her indifference toward genre conventions and her interference in an ongoing criminal case).29 However, unlike Christine V., Duras enjoyed a socially reinforced sense of autonomy and the verbal prowess (not to mention the audience) to express herself. Duras’s article contends that Christine V. acted out of desperation. To equate her impetuous violence with Duras’s own tirelessly deliberate verbal mastery is to refuse distinctions between the real and the imaginary, reinforcing within the narrative the claims the author makes about her own journalism. If Duras’s literary journalism is intended to act in the real world, the violence caused by her article is just as real as Christine V.’s alleged murder of her son, which validates a parallelism that at first seemed to be a mere rhetorical flourish. In fact, the impact of Duras’s accusations on Christine Villemin’s life was so real that in 1993, when the charges against her were fully dropped, the woman sued Marguerite Duras for defamation of character (for one million francs) but lost the case a year later.30 Duras’s piece, in the end, is validated as criminal transgression, for even though she was never made to pay reparations, she had to account for her actions in the court of law.

Un Feuilleton Vrai While her conflation of the real and the imaginary had some alarming realworld implications, Duras was certainly not the first to treat the murder of little Grégory as fiction. As Alexandra Saemmer points out, other journalists had already been discussing the crime as though it were a real-life romance, a living detective novel, a serial drama.31 In Libération on July 6 and 7 (ten days before Duras’s article appeared), articles ran with headlines like, “L’étrange héroïne” [The Strange Heroine] and “Le destin de Christine: rêve en Harlequin, vie en Série Noire” [Christine’s Destiny: Harlequin Dream, Hard-Boiled Reality].32 These headlines not only link Christine Villemin to literary fiction, but they also connect her specifically to the popular, colorful genres of harlequin and série noire. Serge July in particular was eager to

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romanticize Christine Villemin as a literary heroine and her story as a “feuilleton télévisé” [soap opera]. In his editorial “L’étrange héroïne,” he calls her “la vedette d’un feuilleton policier” [the star of a police drama], a French working-class version of the famous American primetime television soap opera Dallas. He then lands on a most striking and relevant articulation of the nature of the story: a “feuilleton vrai” [a real-life soap opera]—the prototype of what would become reality TV, foreshadowing the highly mediated stories of other infanticidal mothers in the press, like Véronique Courjault, Céline Lesage, or Casey Anthony. Prior to Duras’s involvement, Christine Villemin had become the vehicle for the fantasies of the viewing public, the heroine of a modern myth, representing the disintegration of the contemporary family as well as the “monstrous” mother, televised for the world to see. July also implicitly points to two important factors in a July 17 article. One is that the story, in its very makeup, contains many of the elements we recognize from fiction: longtime family drama, anonymous harassment, revenge killings, infanticide, and betrayal. The other aspect of the case underscored by July, however, is the way that the media worked to blur the lines between fact and fiction to attract readers and spectators. What was a true criminal investigation came to be seen as entertainment.33 Certainly, Serge July was not the only one to acknowledge that the entire affaire was being presented as a serial novel under the guise of a search for justice. Laurence Lacour, one of the first journalists to pursue the case with Denis Robert (the author of “Le destin de Christine: rêve en Harlequin, vie en Série Noire”), admits in her massive book about the case, Le Bûcher des innocents, that from very early on, “la vérité importe peu. La presse construit déjà son feuilleton quotidien” [the truth matters little. The media is already creating its daily soap].34

From Fait Diversier to Fait Divers True to the hypermediated nature of the case, readers seemed nearly as interested in Duras’s article as they had been in the crime itself. In an attempt to capitalize on the public debate that Duras’s article provoked, on July 21, 1985, Libération published six selected reader responses to Duras’s article that signaled immediate outrage and scandal among their public.35 One finds that Duras, a novelist, steps out of line when attempting to establish culpability in a crime about which she could know nothing. “Les écrivains à leur roman. Les juges à leurs decisions” [Leave writers to their novels, judges to their verdicts], reasons the reader.36 Another calls Duras to task for ascribing guilt to a suspect who, under French law, should be presumed innocent until proven guilty—a point of outrage that would reemerge in 2011 when photographs of

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a handcuffed Dominique Strauss-Kahn appeared in American papers before his trial.37 The reader also accuses Duras of inappropriately excusing infanticide because of the poor treatment of women by men.38 Another letter strikes straight at the writer herself by alluding to rumors of her alcoholism, asking if the article was “le résultat d’une crise de delirium tremens de Marguerite Duras” [the result of Marguerite Duras’s delirium tremens] or simply “des élucubrations hautement intello-merdico” [bullshit intellectual ranting].39 Two days later, on July 23, Duras responded to several of these assaults on her writing and her intentions in the pages of Libération. For example, she snidely suggests to the woman who accuses her of meddling that she might not want to read the paper if she does not believe in getting involved in other people’s business: “Si vous pensez: chacun son métier, les juges à leur décision, si vous croyez vraiment qu’il ne faut pas se mêler des affaires du voisin, faut rien lire du tout ni article ni livre ni journal, ça ne vous servirait à rien pas la peine de nous fatiguer. Amitiés. M.D.” [If you think: everyone stick to their job, leave judges to their verdicts; if you really think that you should not get involved in your neighbor’s business, do not read anything at all, no book, no newspaper, it won’t do you any good, no need to bother us. Best wishes. M.D.].40 She also strikes back at Max Clos, the journalist who wrote a scathing response to “Sublime” in Le Figaro on July 18: “On dit que vous me trouvez passible de l’asile psychiatrique [. . .] je ne peux pas jurer que je n’irai jamais dans un asile psychiatrique. Par contre je peux jurer que vous non, que vous, vous resterez là où vous êtes” [I hear that you find me bound for the psychiatric hospital [. . .] I can’t promise that I won’t end up in a psychiatric hospital. However I can promise that you, no, you’ll remain right where you are].41 While her defensiveness is palpable in these responses, she continues to reinforce her stance on subjective, provocative journalism. Tracing the media climate in the weeks following the publication of “Sublime” therefore helps us to understand that Duras felt justified in making statements about the death of the young boy in the press. By July 27, Libération had received so many more responses that they published two full pages of very mixed reader reactions to the article. Some take on a very poetic, a very writerly (Durassian, even?) voice in their professed admiration for her article.42 Others continue to criticize Duras for interfering in an ongoing criminal case. However, it quickly became clear that the real scandal caused by the article came as much from the perception that Duras irresponsibly abused her influence to bolster her version as from her version itself. In an article in L’Événement du jeudi entitled “Quand Marguerite Duras scandalise ses consœurs” [When Marguerite Duras Shocks Her Female Peers], Jérôme Garcin interviews several other well-known women writers to gauge

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their reactions to Duras’s article. Where Edmonde Charles-Roux makes a qualified defense of Duras, the others, including Simone Signoret, Françoise Mallet-Joris, Françoise Sagan, Benoîte Groult, Régine Desforges, and Michèle Perrein all criticize their fellow writer for inappropriately composing literature about a tragic fait divers and in so doing taking pleasure in the suffering of real people. Yet Jérôme Garcin admits that the entire discussion has so much traction because Duras saturates the public sphere: “la vedette numéro un des librairies, des salles de théâtre et de cinéma [. . .] Duras omniprésente, adorée par les uns, détestée par les autres” [the number one star of bookstores, movie theaters and film [. . .] Duras omnipresent, loved by some, hated by others].43 Angelo Rinaldi makes similar claims about Duras’s omnipresence in a response printed in L’Express on July 26, 1985. For Rinaldi, Duras is motivated by her own vanity. He alludes to her notorious behavior (“une source inépuisable d’anecdotes” [an inexhaustible source of anecdotes]) and her recent Prix Goncourt win and attributes her interest in the story to her wish to shore up her cultural ubiquity: “elle n’a que le souci d’exhiber à la Une les frissons de son Moi en perpétuelle expansion” [her only concern is to expose the thrills of her perpetually expanding Self on the front page].44 The evergrowing public persona of the writer lent an unparalleled gravity to what she wrote in terms of its reception, and as we have seen, her way of connecting the Villemin tragedy to herself only fueled her critics. In December 1985, writer, historian, and professor Nelcya Delanoë also took issue with Duras’s article for reasons associated with the author’s celebrity in her own letter to Duras published in Libération.45 In it, she takes Duras to task for a narrative she describes as “déterministe, universaliste, éternaliste et essentialiste” [determinist, universalist, eternalist and essentialist].46 Delanoë bristles under Duras’s enveloping argument that implicates her as a woman in Christine Villemin’s presumed infanticide. She rejects Duras’s claim to speak for her as a woman, especially if that means being capable of murder in return for a life condemned to victimhood at the hands of men. She writes that Duras is free to invent these kinds of characters in the pages of her literature, but not in the newspaper when it has to do with a real woman: “Duras s’est placée ‘au-delà de la raison’ pour fonder une conviction qui attente à la liberté et à la personne d’autrui” [Duras placed herself “beyond reason” to establish a conviction that threatens the liberty of another individual].47 While Duras’s way of blurring the boundaries between “intransitive” writing practices and popular public discourse concerns Delanoë, what seems perhaps to offend her most is precisely Duras’s fame and the responsibility that should come with it: “Votre notoriété madame, vous

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rend inexcusable” [Your fame, madame, makes you inexcusable].48 According to Delanoë, because the author has such a significant public influence, she should be held accountable for what she writes and where she writes it. While Duras’s article did indeed have a negative impact on the life of Christine Villemin and her family, many of those who called her to task for this fact were in fact equally as motivated by a general weariness toward Duras in the media. Looking at “Sublime” together with responses to it provides a better understanding of the stakes of the article because that reveals how, in attempting to mobilize the media for her own purposes, Duras herself fell victim to public outrage. This case therefore offers a complex example of how the media, an increasingly significant vehicle of literary promotion, can instead undermine the legitimacy of the writer it is intended to promote.

Duras Everywhere Duras’s public influence and the media craze associated with her article should not be underestimated. Serge Maury confirms the absolute sensation provoked by “Sublime” in L’Événement du jeudi: “Pendant plusieurs jours, pas un dîner en ville où il n’ait été question de l’article de Duras” [For a number of days, there was not a dinner in town Duras’s where article wasn’t in question].49 Indeed, by the mid-1980s, Duras seemed to be everywhere. After taking a break from writing in the seventies and focusing on films, she returned to writing in the early eighties with a multitude of new publications, from L’Été 80 (published first in weekly installments in Libération and later as a collection) and Agatha, to Outside, Savannah Bay, La Douleur, and La Musica deuxième. Much of her newer work, including La Maladie de la mort, L’Homme assis dans le couloir, and even L’Amant, deals with explicit sexuality, murder, incest, and pedophilia, which only amplifies subtler themes in earlier works. Furthermore, she won the Prix Goncourt in 1984 for L’Amant, which quickly became a best-seller and was translated into more than forty languages, and was invited on the popular television show Apostrophes where she titillated audiences with intimate revelations about her personal life. As Aliette Armel points out, in the French context, being commercially successful can hurt the legitimacy of the literary work and the reputation of the writer.50 Detractors of L’Amant (and Duras) criticized her popular romancestyle title and her overt promotion of the book in the media, yet fans wanted to know more about the author’s personal life, and the media in turn complied.51 As Alice Delmotte-Halter explains, “[d]ès son passage à Apostrophes, la romancière doit davantage son renom aux scandales qu’elle est capable de générer qu’à la reconnaissance par le public de ses talents littéraires” [since her appearance on Apostrophes, the writer owes more of her renown to the

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scandals she is capable of generating than to the public’s recognition of her literary talents].52 She not only became a lieu commun (commonplace), but the presumed distinctions between her private life and her literary works became extremely blurry. Her literature came to reflect more and more directly what was happening in her personal life, and her life began to reflect more and more the types of issues she dealt with in her literature. As her books became increasingly auto-referential, and even her media glosses on previous works implicated her autobiography more in her fictions, critical backlash was stirred that attacked both her work and her character. Patrick Rambaud wrote unflattering pastiches of her work under the pseudonym Marguerite Duraille in Virginie Q. in 1988 and in Mururoa mon amour in 1996. Also in 1996, Olivier Le Naire wrote in L’Express, “Au cours de ces quinze derniers années, la folie durassienne a plus agacé qu’amusé” [Over the course of the last fifteen years, Durassian madness has irritated more than amused].53 His article, “Les Éclats de Marguerite,” details Duras’s huge media persona and how she became a star to the point of saturation. He claims that her defense of “les causes les plus désespérées” [the most hopeless causes] became more and more outlandish as she began to defend indefensible misconduct, an opinion shared by the critics of her article on Christine Villemin.54 Thomas Ferenczi wrote in an article in Le Monde in 1988, “[il] est à Paris quelques écrivains qui suscitent volontiers le sarcasme dans le ‘microcosme.’ Leur œuvre littéraire n’est pas en cause. Non, ce qui provoque le rire, l’agacement ou l’invective, ce sont plutôt les activités médiatiques de ces personnages, dont l’assurance tranquille passe, au choix, pour de l’arrogance ou de la provocation” [In Paris, there are some writers who readily arouse sarcasm within the “microcosm.” It is not a question of their literary work. No, what elicits laughter, irritation, or insult more are the media activities of these characters, whose calm self-assurance comes off as either arrogance or provocation], and Marguerite Duras was one of them.55 What complicates Duras’s case, however, is that because her “activités médiatiques” [media activities] rode such a fine line between “provocation” and literature, they implicated her literary reputation in interesting ways. The ambient surfeit of Duras pleased the masses and increased her sales at the same time as it ignited her critics against her.

Cela Me Regarde As Serge July forecast in his prefatory remarks to “Sublime, forcément sublime Christine V.” Duras’s audacious claims made as a celebrated writer placed her in the position of a criminal, indirectly destroying the life of a

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real woman by using her exceptional public influence to accuse Christine Villemin of infanticide. While Duras’s influence reveals preexisting prejudices in public opinion and serious flaws in the criminal investigation, it nevertheless demonstrates that Duras, though claiming to take seriously her political responsibility as a writer, took a near-sighted view of what that means. For while she did try to raise awareness about the condition of all women by pointing to indications of domestic violence in the Villemin story and showing readers how Christine V. could have been driven to madness by her unhappy life, she also privileged her own vision over the real transitivity of her journalistic writing. Her identification allowed her to appropriate the story for her own ends, “correcting” other dominant hypotheses and all the while turning public opinion against a real woman. “Cela me regarde” [That is my business], the phrase that Duras used to justify weighing in on the ongoing criminal case, became a kind of art poétique of Duras’s later career. Her interest in particular, isolated events as representations of universal realities, reached an all-time high with “Sublime, forcément sublime Christine V.,” while interest in her literary output came to focus more and more on Marguerite Duras herself. As Leslie Hill argues, Duras encouraged this interest, for, “not only did the avowedly autobiographical content of Duras’s writing increase, but also in interviews [. . .] the author’s own recourse to autobiographical explanations or reinterpretations of her work became more frequent.”56 Accordingly, the “cela me regarde,” in her famous article becomes also “that is looking at me” or even better, regardez-moi (“look at me”). She seems to acknowledge that, when she writes, her audience looks beyond the text to see the writer behind it. This indicates a double movement where, on the one hand, the nature of media consumption has led to an increased appetite for biographical gossip and therefore to a larger focus on such material. On the other hand, Duras increasingly catered to this interest, offering more and more of her singular voice to public conversations and biographical morsels to a hungry audience. Where Duras’s personal interest directed her toward this compelling fait divers, she now became a media story herself, at the center of a great deal of media attention that she used not to protect an accused criminal, but rather to continue to cultivate her understanding of the nature of crime, her views on the function of writing, and even her own image. As we have seen, Duras did not cease to be the lens through which the public viewed the Villemin crime once her article was published. She wrote back to readers in the pages of Libération, she persisted in defending herself against her critics in her 1988 interview with Luce Perrot on TF1, Au-delà des pages, and she even justified her position in a long-form Italian interview

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with Leopoldina Palotta della Torre conducted in 1987–89. As is typical with Duras’s work, she continued to “rewrite” the story of the crime, transposing the narrative and the fallout into different media contexts all the while continuing to develop her story. In this sense, the story maintains the aura of the fait divers, moving from source to source, picking up speed as it collects anecdotes and opinions. However, Duras was not content to leave the case within the media. In fact, in the Marguerite Duras archives at the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC), there is evidence that she intended to rework and republish the article. Among the several dossiers devoted to the piece, one of them contains photocopies of the article that appeared in Libération with notes and revisions scribbled across them, as though Duras treated them more as a manuscript than a published news article. Another contains the exact text that was printed in Libération laid out on the page like the proofs of a novel. On it, in her cryptic handwriting, Duras has written extensive revisions, additions, and notes for what was to be, according to the IMEC inventory, “un petit livre” [a small book]. Duras seems to have intended to reconfigure the article as a text published in the form of a book that would include not only further reflections on the Affaire Villemin but also respond to some of her critics relating to the publication of the article in Libération. This transposition further complicates the status of the text and the relationship between literary and “outside” writing in Duras’s oeuvre. For, while Duras considers including elements to defend herself against her detractors (“elles ont été nombreuses contre moi” [there were a number of them against me], “les femmes qui aboient contre moi” [the woman who bark at me], etc.), she also seems to wish to add much to the text that would render it a more virulent critique of “la vieille justice” [old justice] and “la bêtise judiciaire” [judiciary incompetence].57 Certainly, the criticism leveled against Duras for this article took issue with the way that her literary persona endowed her with an undue influence on public opinion. Rather than back away from this judgment, the writer instead considered republishing the piece in a context that would further emphasize its distance from “the news” and its more subjective, essayistic, Durassian nature. For the real power of Duras’s article lies in the success of the narrative and the absolutely compelling way she tells a certain story about the family.58 Duras’s version completely convinced the public of Christine Villemin’s guilt, which in turn helped to confound the judicial process, reminding us of the power of rhetoric and narrative in both the literary and the judicial spheres.

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Because of the real-world impact of the article, the literary nature of the text becomes even more fascinating as Duras’s identification, projection, and accusation takes on a political significance that completely surpasses the very limits of fiction. If one writer’s article can completely transform the judicial outcomes of a case, it effectively points to dangerous fissures and failures in the criminal justice system. If a real-life case can be transformed by a fantasized, avowedly literary text, this text does what much of Duras’s other journalism does—that is, indict the media, the police, and the judicial system for failing to enact justice. For Duras, journalism, because it is writing, should absolutely be subjective, biased, passionate; the system that condemns people for their acts should not be. Throughout her career, faits divers had a special status for Duras as a space for social critique, and her interest in them always seemed equally preoccupied with the aberrant content of the system as it was with the way that it incites fascination in readers. She saw in the fait divers revelations of deep human mechanisms and society’s gross misunderstandings of such structures; the news item offered her in this way a space to revel in the unpredictable, acausal, and turbulent sides of human nature and to chide the bad readers— those who jump too quickly to conclusions, or overlook essential elements. In her rewritings of faits divers in France Observateur in the 1950s and 1960s, Duras would approach the stories as a reader herself, deconstructing previously reported versions and rewriting them to shed new light on the story that would often indict the media or the judicial system for what she saw as failing to understand the true stakes of the crime. In her literature, she appropriated faits divers to think about the ways that the stories they contain undermine rationalist discourses and dedicate a social space for the marginal (L’Amante anglaise, Dix heures et demie du soir en été, Moderato cantabile). The destabilization of the boundary between mass culture and literature proved to Duras to be a fruitful site of interrogation of the kinds of dominant discursive strategies that construct our world. The porosity of this boundary of course had negative impacts on both Christine Villemin and Marguerite Duras. However, Duras’s article did help to ignite public debates around the case about the miscarriage of justice and administrative negligence on the one hand, and the role of literature in the public sphere on the other. Despite the criticism she endured for the article, she once again demonstrated that the sensationalism of a fait divers can be deployed to ask fundamental social questions. While some critics have worked to legitimize Duras in spite of her popularity (especially in her later career), it is perhaps more useful to think about how she uses popular themes

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and genres in the service of complex, sophisticated, but often ambiguous literary ends. Her pervasive stature can open her work up to some new and interesting readings that deal precisely with the status of the popular, with mass consumption, and with the hyper-mediated. Perhaps her very fame, rather than being a limitation, is a starting point for a new approach.

Notes 1.  We may recall that Libération is a left-leaning newspaper founded in 1973 by Serge July and Jean-Paul Sartre that emphasized freedom of expression and supported public intellectuals, often inviting writers to contribute to its pages. 2.  Serge July, “La transgression de l’écriture,” Libération, July 17, 1985, 4. 3.  Over the course of her long career, she wrote more than one hundred newspaper articles on everything from politics to book reviews, from interviews with stage actresses to rewritings of faits divers. Other such “paraliterary” works include art and film reviews, prefaces and essay collections as well as radio interviews, television broadcasts, and audio and film recordings. 4.  Many critics have commented on how Duras transforms Christine V. into a fictional character that resembles other Durassian characters. See David Amar and Pierre Yana, “Sublime, forcément sublime: à propos d’un article paru dans Libération,” Revue des sciences humaines 73, no. 202 (April–June 1986): 153–176; Aliette Armel, “De la mendiante à Christine V., les errances féminines de M. Duras,” Remue. net (March 6, 2006); Philippe Vilain, “La Sublimation du crime,” in Marguerite Duras (Paris: Le Magazine Littéraire [Nouveaux Regards], 2013), 153–57. 5.  See Leslie Hill, Marguerite Duras: Apocalyptic Desires (New York: Routledge, 1993); Christophe Meurée, “Ét cela me regarde: Duras et l’actualité” (paper presented at L’Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain, Belgium, March 2011); James S. Williams, The Erotics of Passage: Pleasure, Politics, and Form in the Later Work of Marguerite Duras (New York: St. Martin’s Press/Liverpool UP, 1997). In her thesis, Daniela Veres does a thorough reception study of Duras’s work and media interventions in “Duras et ses lecteurs/(Étude de la réception de l’oeuvre dans le paysage littéraire et journalistique français)” (PhD diss., Université Lumière Lyon 2, 2008). In Marguerite Duras et l’autobiographie (Paris: Le Castor Astral, 1990), Aliette Armel writes about Duras’s many interventions in the public sphere in a comprehensive study of the relationship between Duras’s life and her work. See also Alain Arnaud, who writes about Duras’s public use of subjectivity and her disregard for generic boundaries, namely, the line between literature and journalism in “L’Impudeur: Les Interventions publiques de M. Duras,” in Lire Duras, ed. Claude Burgelin and Pierre de Gaulmyn (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2000), 569–81. Alexandra Saemmer looks at the fictionalization of the story by other journalists and Duras’s work in the media in “Marguerite Duras et l’affaire Villemin,” in Tout contre le réel: Miroirs du fait divers, ed. Emmanuelle André, et al. (Paris: Éditions Le Manuscrit, 2008), 55–70.

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 6. Marguerite Duras, Outside (Paris: P.O.L., 1984), 11. Outside was integrated into the Pléiade edition of her oeuvres complètes in 2014, further attesting to the importance of her journalism to her overall body of work.  7. Duras, Outside, 11.   8.  Laurence Corroy and Émilie Roche explain: [i]l existe deux traditions du journalisme ‘à la française.’ La première repose sur un journalisme de combat, de critique, qui se réfère au journalisme de reportage tel qu’il s’est développé au XIXe et XXe siècles en France. La seconde tradition est un journalisme de chronique et de témoignage avec un constant mélange du commentaire et de l’information, à l’opposé du journalisme anglo-saxon qui prône la séparation des faits (news) et de leurs commentaires (editorials). [There are two French journalistic traditions. The first is based in combat journalism, criticism, which refers to reporting as it developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in France. The second tradition is one of columns and testimonials with a constant mix of commentary and information, as opposed to Anglo-Saxon journalism that advocates for the separation between facts (news) and commentary (editorials).] (La Presse en France depuis 1945 [Paris: Ellipses (Collection “Infocom”), 2010], 27–28)

  9.  Marguerite Duras and Jérôme Beaujour, La Vie matérielle (Paris: P.O.L., 1987), 110–11. 10.  Marguerite Duras, Écrire (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 28, 52. 11.  She says in an interview with Roland Thélu in Gai pied that “l’écriture est le jaillissement intransitif, sans adresse, sans but aucun que celui de sa propre finalité, de nature essentiellement inutile” [writing is an intransitive eruption, without skill, without any end save for its own finality, by nature essentially useless] (qtd. in Martin Crowley, “‘C’est curieux un mort’: Duras on Homosexuality,” Modern Language Review 93, no. 3 [July 1998]: 659). 12.  Marguerite Duras, La passion suspendue: Entretiens avec Leopoldina Pallotta della Torre, trans. René de Ceccatty (Paris: Seuil, 2013), 44. 13.  Indeed, in her newspaper reporting, she writes on everything from denunciations of French racism during the Algerian War, to the Tiananmen Square protests, to commentaries on François Mitterrand’s presidency, to critiques of the judicial system for its gross misjudgments of certain criminals. 14. Duras, La passion suspendue, 46. 15.  Denis Robert, “La Liberté sous condition de Christine Villemin,” Libération, July 17, 1985, 2; emphasis added. 16.  July 17, 1985. Emphasis added. 17.  “Christine V.” refers throughout to Duras’s fantasized version of the real-world woman Christine Villemin. 18.  Marguerite Duras, “Sublime, forcément sublime Christine V.,” Libération, July 17, 1985, 4. See, for example, Anne Cousseau, “Le discours de vérité, in Lire Duras,

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ed. Claude Burgelin and Pierre de Gaulmyn (Lyon: Pressses Universitaires de Lyon, 2000), 545–56. James S. Williams, The Erotics of Passage, 116. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. Both Alexandra Saemmer and Anne Cousseau write about how the photograph of Christine Villemin permits Duras to suppress the real woman in favor of a literary character written to Duras’s specifications. See also James S. Williams who contends that Duras “is nonetheless invoking Christine Villemin as Christine V. all the better to silence her” (The Erotics of Passage 117). David Amar rightly points out that contrary to the usual tendency of the writer to take up the pen to defend the innocent, Duras appropriates the mythic figure of the infanticidal mother to express her own vision of quiet desperation, and Christine Villemin, the historical individual, is sacrificed in the process (Amar and Yana, “Sublime,” 156). 21.  Duras, “Sublime,” 4. 22. Ibid. 23.  Ibid., 6. She then explains, “[d]ans ce cas, la mort de l’enfant aurait été le seul moyen qui lui serait resté, parce qu’il aurait été le plus sûr. J’ose avancer que si Christine V. est consciente de l’injustice qui lui a été faite durant la traversée du long tunnel qu’a été sa vie, elle est complètement étrangère à cette culpabilité que l’on réclame d’elle” [in this case, the death of the child would have been the only means that would have remained for her, because it would have been the most certain. I dare to suggest that if Christine V. is conscious of the injustice done to her during the crossing of the long tunnel that had been her life, she is totally foreign to the guilt that is expected of her] (ibid.). For Duras, this case is divorced from questions of guilt and innocence; it lies outside of justice because the crime committed was a personal means of liberation: “La justice paraît insuffisante, lointaine, inutile même, elle devient superfétatoire du moment qu’elle est rendue” [Justice seems insufficient, remote, useless even; it becomes superfluous the moment it is meted out] (ibid.). 24. Duras, La passion suspendue, 46. 25.  Duras, “Sublime,” 6. 26.  Barbara Freeman recalls that for Lyotard, “the sublime is not the presentation of the unpresentable, but the presentation of the fact that the unpresentable exists,” The Feminine Sublime: Gender and Excess in Women’s Fiction (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 11. 27.  Duras, “Sublime,” 4. 28.  Philippe Vilain contends that Duras is fascinated by the figures of both the writer and the criminal to the extent that they both have the godlike power to impose life and death on another (“La Sublimation du crime,” 156). Leslie Hill also explores the ways in which these marginal figures, the killer and the writer, share in the sublime (Marguerite Duras: Apocalyptic Desires, 31). 29. Arnaud finds her indifference towards genre to be her greatest transgression: “Ce qui fait scandale, et la marque de son impudeur, se manifesteraient dans l’irrespect à l’égard des conventions qui circonscrivent les genres journalistique, artistique, littéraire, critique, politique” [What creates scandal, and is the mark of her

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shamelessness, would manifest itself in the lack of respect for the conventions that define journalistic, artistic, literary, critical and political genres] (“L’Impudeur,” 572). 30.  See “Christine Villemin perd son procès contre Marguerite Duras,” Le Monde, January 28, 1994. In 2006, history repeated itself once again when Philippe Besson published L’Enfant d’octobre (Grasset), a novel based on the case that also accused Christine Villemin of infanticide. The Villemins sued the author and Besson was made to pay reparations totaling 40,000 euros. See “Philippe Besson condamné à indemniser les Villemin,” Le Nouvel Observateur, September 20, 2007. 31.  See Saemmer, “Marguerite Duras et l’affaire Villemin.” 32.  Denis Robert, “Le destin de Christine: rêve en Harlequin, vie en Série Noire,” Libération, July 6–7, 1985; Serge July, “L’étrange héroïne,” Libération, July 6–7, 1985. 33. July places significant emphasis on the interpenetration between literature and the media: Non seulement le crime de Lépanges réunissait toutes les conditions pour faire fantasmer un peuple qui apprend à lire dans Georges Simenon, mais en plus, il s’est offert aux téléspectateurs que nous sommes également comme le plus formidable des feuilletons. Le plus performant, c’est-à-dire le plus efficace, puisque c’est un feuilleton vrai où les enfants, les hommes et les femmes meurent et se déchirent vraiment, quasiment en direct. Dès lors, ce feuilleton ‘vrai’ se mêle aux autres, à toutes ces fictions françaises ou américaines que l’on consomme avec plus ou moins de plaisir. Et de fait, la télévision en retour a transformé ce fait divers bien réel en fiction. [Not only did the crime in Lépanges bring together all of the conditions necessary to make a public who learned to read in Georges Simenon fantasize, but it also offered itself to us as TV viewers as the most exciting soap opera. The most efficient, the most effective, because it is a true soap where children, men and women die and destroy each other in reality, practically live on TV. From that point on, this “true” soap blended with others, with all of these French or American fictions that we consume with more or less pleasure. In fact, TV transformed this very real fait divers into fiction.] (July, Le Miroir de Lépanges, Liberation, July 17, 1985, 3)

34.  Laurence Lacour, Le Bûcher des innocents: L’affaire Villemin (Paris: Plon, 1993), 30. 35. Duras was aware of the way that Libération exploited her fame to provoke scandal. She explained to Luce Perrot for Au-delà des pages, “C’est qu’ils exploitent le scandale Duras eux aussi, Libé. Ils sont un petit peu à bout de course, ils ne savent plus très bien quoi dire, ils sont ennuyeux, et ils veulent revenir à la tradition méchante, la gale. La gale, c’est Libé dans ses beaux jours. Et je leur sers à ça” [The thing is that they exploit the Duras scandal too, Libé. They are on their last leg, they don’t really know what to say, they are boring, they want to return to malicious traditions, scabies. Scabies, that’s Libé in its best days. And I fill that role for them]. Qtd. in Jean Vallier, C’Etait Marguerite Duras, Vol. 2: 1946–1996 (Paris: Fayard, 2010), 943, fn. 53. 36.  Charlotte, “Courrier des lecteurs,” Libération, January 20/21, 1985, 32.

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37.  Media speculation about a detained suspect’s guilt continues to be a point of controversy in the French press, as we saw when very similar indignation was provoked when Dominique Strauss-Kahn, then the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, was pictured handcuffed in American newspapers after having been accused of sexually assaulting a housekeeper in his New York hotel room. This incriminatory image outraged many French readers who felt he had been unduly inculpated before the trial had taken place, which violated the highly valued presumption of innocence. 38.  Docteur François Nataf, “Courrier des lecteurs,” Libération, July 20/21, 1985, 32. 39. Mylène Flohic and Solange Rivelo, “Courrier des lecteurs,” Libération, July 20/21, 1985, 32. 40. Marguerite Duras, “Réponse aux courriers des lecteurs,” Libération, July 23, 1985: 33. 41. Ibid. 42.  Some of the letters resemble fan letters: “Nous avons lu votre article . . . Ce matin-là, la pluie tombait violemment contre la façade de ma fenêtre gauche, lorsque je ressentis le besoin de crier. Alors, j’ai crié ! Je ne sais toujours pas pourquoi” [We read your article [. . .] That morning, rain was falling violently against the window on the left, when I felt the need to cry out. So I cried out! I still don’t know why] (Lucas Martial and Tannery Barbara, “Courrier des lecteurs,” Libération, July 27/28, 1985, 30). Or: “Merci Marguerite Duras de ce que vous avez écrit sur Christine V. [. . .] et si proche à l’imaginer que, vous lisant, je pleure: sur elle, sur moi, sur mon enfant qui s’est donné la mort comme en un holocauste, croyant que cela me libérerait d’elle” [Thank you Marguerite Duras for what you wrote about Christine V. [. . .] and I was so close to imagining it that, reading you, I cry: for her, for me, for my child who killed herself as in a holocaust, believing that it would free me from her.] (Dominique G., “Courrier des lecteurs,” Libération, July 27/28, 1985, 30) 43. Jérôme Garcin, “Quand Marguerite Duras scandalise ses consœurs . . . ,” L’Événement du jeudi, July 25–31 1985: 29. 44. Angelo Rinaldi, “Marguerite Duras comme détective,” L’Express, July 26, 1985. 45.  “Ascenseur pour l’échafaud” is in fact an excerpt of a longer letter Nelcya Delanoë wrote to Duras and published in Libération in December of 1985. “Ascenseur pour l’échafaud” was taken from Esprit, July 16, 1986, 85–86. 46.  Delanoë, “Ascenseur,” 85. 47. Ibid. 48.  Ibid., 86. 49. Serge Maury, “Les Intellos dans la tourmente,” L’Événement du jeudi, July 25–31, 1985: 28. 50. Armel, Marguerite Duras et l’autobiographie, 59. 51.  Ibid., 55.

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52.  Alice Delmotte-Halter, Duras d’une écriture de la violence au travail de l’obscène (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010), 20. See also Michelle Royer, “L’écriture du vécu: L’oeuvre paralittéraire de Marguerite Duras,” in Duras, Femme du siècle, eds. Stella Harvey and Kate Ince (New York: Rodopi, 2001, 73–86.) 53.  Olivier Le Naire, “Les Eclats de Marguerite,” L’Express, March 7, 1996. 54.  Ibid. Le Naire cites, for example, her defense of Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi’s television channel: “Comme la liste de ses succès littéraires, son palmarès de gaffes n’est pas mince” [Like the list of her literary successes, her record of blunders is not short]. 55.  Thomas Ferenczi, “Marguerite en son miroir,” Le Monde, June 26, 1988, 21. 56. Hill, Marguerite Duras: Apocalyptic Desires, 16. Hill references Armel here. 57.  Marguerite Duras, “Sublime, forcément sublime Christine V.” Fonds Duras. DRS 40.24. Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine. Caen, France. See also DRS 40.23. 58.  According to Nancy Huston, “Duras turned The Death of Little Gregory into a novel by Marguerite Duras. She invented a beginning and a middle and an end for it and made it more credible to the French public than Villemin herself had been able to do. Indeed, Villemin became one of the characters . . . Truth never quite got as interesting as fiction again, and the journalists turned away from Christine Villemin in search of fresher bait” (Longings and Belongings [Toronto: McArthur & Company, 2005], 68–69).

CHAPTER NINE

Understanding the Tinayre Affair New Media, New Methods for the Belle Epoque Rachel Mesch

In the first days of 1908, novelist Marcelle Tinayre was reported to be a presumptive nominee to become a knight of the French Legion of Honor, only to have her name rescinded shortly thereafter in response to remarks she made that were deemed overly coquettish. The media storm that ensued— quickly dubbed “L’Affaire Tinayre”—highlighted the speed and force of the Belle Epoque mass press and its power to whip up a certain kind of decidedly modern fury within its own self-enclosed parameters. In earlier research, I have examined the episode as a means of exploring an ideological disconnect between certain mainstream sectors of the press and two innovative women’s photographic magazines through which Tinayre became a new kind of female role model.1 In this chapter, I reflect on that research more broadly, as a window into new scholarly methodologies for understanding the relationships between literature, history, and broader cultural practices: in this case, celebrity and media culture and shifting gender norms. In his essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” Baudelaire describes the modern poet’s work as an effort to “distill the eternal from the transitory.”2 We might similarly conceive the nineteenth-century journalism that emerged, at least in part, from a fascination with the fleeting moments of modernity. Over a century later, however, the scholar looking back at the mass press is often left with a record of something so transitory that it is difficult to fully recognize or decipher. Indeed, because of the dynamic nature of the rapidly developing new media of the Belle Epoque, understanding what happened to Tinayre is akin to trying to decipher the relationship between a Facebook 195

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update, an Instagram post, and a Tweet decades later: it requires an understanding of each medium, their intended audiences (plural), and their modes of signifying, which were often indirect and sometimes contradictory. Using the Tinayre Affair as an example, I want to propose here a way of harnessing literary and historical methodologies, along with the tools of Cultural Studies, as a means of exposing the transitory moments of the media past. As we will see, the early women’s magazines Femina and La Vie Heureuse offer one of the keys to deciphering Tinayre’s blunder in the more mainstream media outlets where she was quoted. Tinayre frequently appeared in these publications, both through excerpts of her writing and in feature stories. Femina and La Vie Heureuse used innovative photographic technologies and new kinds of writing to present Tinayre and her peers as modern female role models. But the articles disparaging Tinayre’s remarks about the Legion of Honor were published in mainstream newspapers that communicated through a more traditional format. Tinayre was, of course, a writer herself—one whose popular fictions featured women not unlike her, grappling with shifting gender expectations during this time; fiction therefore represents another textual mode through which Belle Epoque readers were sorting out the issues raised by the controversy. The Tinayre Affair thus requires us to consider an interlocking network of discourses—magazines, newspapers, and novels—through which female identities were staged during the Belle Epoque as well as their relationships to one another; moreover, it requires us to take into account not just what these texts were saying about shifting gender roles, but how they were saying it. In order to understand these discourses in all the complex dynamics that the Foucauldian term suggests, we must not only consider historical context, but we also must pay careful attention to their signifying practices, both textually and visually. An attention to the aesthetic codes of the press allows us to tease out contradictions and ambivalence; at the same time, the layers of meaning in the visual and textual sources acquire nuance and significance through an attention to cultural history. By bringing these approaches to bear upon each other, we can engage with the mass press as a multi-dimensional form of expression as well as a series of richly interconnected historical documents.

The Affair: A Brief Synopsis Tinayre had first gained critical acclaim for the best-selling 1902 novel La Maison du péché (The House of Sin), which blended naturalist detail with searing emotional drama.3 She was a popular figure on the Belle Epoque

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literary scene, and was celebrated in women’s magazines for her balance of domestic and professional obligations while also touted by male critics for her “virile” writing.4 Following the announcement of her nomination to the Legion of Honor in 1908, the conservative-leaning dailies La Patrie and La Liberté featured personal interviews with her, and the more moderate Le Temps published a letter from her reflecting on the news. In these personal accounts, she expressed amusement and surprise over her public approbation, and joked about how ordinary folks—including her own husband and son—might respond to her if she wore the famous red ribbon associated with the prize. “Me! A knight!” she gushed to a reporter from La Patrie, with her signature self-effacing charm. “No, it’s too funny.”5 She had no interest in celebrity, she assured La Liberté, or in “being noticed by the corner grocer.” When Minister of Justice Aristide Briand had mentioned to her the possibility of earning the coveted red ribbon, she recounted, “I laughed and declared that a lovely chain of pearls would give me more pleasure than a little bit of red ribbon.”6 To Tinayre’s great surprise, the publication of these remarks unleashed a torrent of angry responses. The vast majority of voices opposed Tinayre’s nomination, citing her mockery of French tradition and the performance of a hyper-feminized modesty that was deemed disingenuous: her letters looked to many like a calculated publicity stunt, as a popular caricature by Henriot from January 1908 attests. In this series of images, an elegant woman in the distance descends a well-appointed staircase as throngs of people swarm the street below her; the caption reads: “It’s the woman who did not want to be decorated in order to avoid being noticed.”7 Over the course of the next six days, Tinayre’s words were relentlessly parsed, and her feminism, maternal obligations, and career choice became fodder for dozens of articles and caricatures in publications of nearly every sort. When the official list of nominees was finally released on January 13, Tinayre’s name no longer appeared on the roster.

Analyzing the Storm While Tinayre’s remarks seemed to irritate many, taken together, the multiple, disparate commentaries illustrate that it was never entirely clear why everyone was so irritated—even to critics at the time, so many of whom piled on in order to offer their take on what precisely Tinayre had done wrong. This in itself underlines the difficulty of analyzing an event that took place almost entirely within the media, while also pointing to its rich scholarly possibilities. Such events can be a prism onto a multivalent society, and provide a snapshot of a culture attempting to understand itself.

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In her highly informative article, historian Gabrielle Houbre, the first modern scholar to write about the Affair, suggests that misogyny and prevailing discomfort with women inhabiting new roles were surely part of the controversy. Of the journalists who generated the media frenzy, she writes: “If their prose is revealing of the conflicts that literary and journalistic realms were experiencing, it also expresses the tenacious misogyny and antifeminism of the Belle Epoque.”8 Houbre recognizes the Affair as the product of a new kind of journalistic practice, one that also offers proof of the reigning misogyny of the Belle Epoque and its enduring resistance to women writers. But this explanation fails to account for the extent of the ire directed toward Tinayre, and more importantly, does not fully explore the direct relationship between those new journalistic practices and shifting views about women. The Tinayre Affair is fascinating not as a record of Belle Epoque misogyny, I suggest, but because it brings into dramatic relief the ways that the fate of a nascent media culture was intertwined with the fate of a certain form of modern femininity, also in its early stages, during this time. Moreover, as a network of long-ago media responses during a time of rapid change, both social and journalistic, it is an endlessly slippery subject that encapsulates the challenges of trying to study media in a historic context: for how does one study a mode in which everything that is depicted as truth may also be evidence of quite the opposite? Houbre’s conclusion, to my mind, succumbs to the age-old problem of history being written by the victors. But the burgeoning mass press of the Belle Epoque leaves an extensive archive, as Houbre herself acknowledges in her thorough study. Scholars of popular culture can thus recover not just the conclusion to the story or its dominant voices, but also the multivalent nature of the debates. In Tinayre’s case, that archive was immediately helped by conservative commentator Jean Ernest-Charles, who was so particularly irritated by Tinayre that once the Conseil de l’Ordre de la Légion d’honneur failed to ratify her nomination, he compiled all the most critical journalistic responses in the January 18 edition of his own publication, Le Censeur Politique et Littéraire, itself a rather marginal right-wing pamphlet. “There aren’t enough occasions to laugh in this world,” he coyly explains in his prologue to twenty-nine pages of Tinayre documents. Ernest-Charles was not just an anti-feminist reactionary eager to disparage a potential female heroine; he also seems to have understood that there was a bigger story here, one that would be of interest to “all those who are curious about the history of literary practices (mœurs littéraires), or more simply the history of our current way of life (mœurs de notre temps).”9 It is worth pausing on Ernest-Charles’s selfconscious moment: he was quite aware that he was recording an event that

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was not really about Tinayre, but rather about his society. This comment serves as a reminder to contemporary readers to look beyond the surface of what writers were saying about the Affair and to find within these remarks a broader commentary on modern values. Perhaps more crucially, it points to the fact that these values were embedded in the shifting textual practices of the Belle Epoque, and the expansion of nearly all realms of publishing during this time, from the mass press to popular novels. Ernest-Charles recognized that there was a key relationship between this expansion and contemporary values, by which he likely meant, the role of women therein. He had already regularly complained about the increase in women writers, often accusing them of being publicity hounds.10 That same criticism is rehearsed here: Tinayre, he argued, did not understand how to behave in public. Her success “was magnified and adulterated by all her snobbery and self-promotion.”11 This not wholly incorrect summary still masks the complex positioning of the dozens of newspaper clippings that Ernest-Charles himself compiled. The commentaries that he collected reveal the extent to which shifting views of women and the shifting role of the press were intertwined and conflated in ways that are not easily summarized. Tinayre was criticized for: mocking French tradition; belittling the honor of being nominated to the Legion, but seeking the nomination out; neglecting her domestic duties; mentioning her husband and son; being too consumed with her femininity; not being feminine enough; being disingenuous; faking her modesty; and seeking out publicity, among other things. Indeed, as the Henriot cartoon mentioned above demonstrates, many were discomfited by Tinayre’s all-too visibly constructed performance—of a sort to which twenty-first-century consumers of mass culture are now subject with regularity. In all of this, readers failed to understand both the purpose of Tinayre’s behavior in creating a cognitive space for a certain model of feminine achievement and its role as a product of new kind of journalistic enterprise. This, in fact, has everything to do with the relationship between “the history of literary practices” and “the history of our current way of life,” a relationship that cannot be gleaned by taking the journalistic comments that ErnestCharles compiled at face value. Rather, one has to consider Tinayre’s situation within Parisian literary spheres, and in particular her relationship to Femina and La Vie Heureuse, which were innovative women’s photographic magazines of an entirely different format from mainstream outlets like La Patrie and Le Temps, where her remarks had first appeared. The complex literary-cultural-historical-visual layers to the Tinayre Affair are bound up in these women’s magazines, both of which featured dynamic visual displays and innovative feats of technology, as well as celebrity interviews and

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feature stories, surveys, and poetry contests. Both were also defined by a shared and concerted effort to visualize, through their use of photography, what the modern achieving woman should look like, while carefully steering clear of any references to feminism or politics.12 In this way, Femina and La Vie Heureuse often constructed a reality that signified, in part, through their very constructedness, implicitly claiming verisimilitude often at the same time that the magazines called attention to the contours of their own fictional framework. This “airbrushed” version of reality (often relying on primitive early technologies for doctoring photos) is quite telling now, revealing less a shared mindset than a window onto what the magazines wanted women to believe. For this reason, understanding Femina and La Vie Heureuse requires an attention to representational practices offered through literary and visual methodologies, which allow for recognition and interpretation of indirect modes of communication and conflicting messages. In the past decade, Lenard Berlanstein, Colette Cosnier, Sylvie Ducas, and Margot Irvine have devoted important critical attention to Femina and La Vie Heureuse; however, this work (which for Berlanstein and Cosnier is focused entirely on Femina) includes little to no analysis of the magazines’ representational practices: the relationship between word and image; the relationship between different kinds of content; analysis of the rhetoric used; the magazines’ place in the history of photography; and their situation within Belle Epoque visual culture and the Art Nouveau movement.13 The representation of women writers in Femina and La Vie Heureuse is a perfect way to demonstrate the central nature of these practices to the work of the magazines and to a historical understanding of the Tinayre Affair, since the woman writer was the most consistent canvas on which both Femina and La Vie Heureuse did their aesthetic—and ideological—work. Tinayre played a central role in Femina and La Vie Heureuse’s visual messaging, featured alongside other Belle Epoque media darlings like Anna de Noailles, Daniel Lesueur, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, Myriam Harry, and Gérard d’Houville. These alluring best-selling authors were touted in lavish feature stories that worked directly and explicitly against the nineteenth-century visual legacy of the femme de lettres as desiccated hag or man-destroying virago—the pernicious associations of the reviled nineteenth-century woman writer as bas bleu (bluestocking). They worked, then, against a certain historical model. But they did so not by arguing for equal rights or “emancipation”; rather, they put forth their claims through visual messaging and stories meant to emphasize the nonthreatening nature of women’s writing by demonstrating its natural affinities with domesticity.

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An image of Tinayre from 1903 in the pages of La Vie Heureuse demonstrates most vividly the messaging at work in the construction of the model of femininity promoted by the Belle Epoque women’s press (Figure 9.1). The very mise-en-page (layout) suggests a perfect expression of a new ideal through its expertly staged, carefully crafted symmetry. The image brings into harmony the two reigning visual tropes of Femina and La Vie Heureuse when it comes to depicting the femme de lettres: the former’s “woman writer at her desk” series—through which the magazine depicted the woman writer’s intellectual parity with male counterparts, without requiring her to leave the domestic sphere; and the “books and babies” theme—which provided compelling visual evidence that writing books could be part of a harmonious household and did not prevent procreation, as nineteenth-century thinking had dictated.14 The significance of these visual tropes is amplified through an understanding of the social and cultural context out of which both publications emerged: one in which the woman writer, alongside the so-called “New Woman,” was a figure to be feared. Like the Art Nouveau- inspired swirls that delicately frame this image of Tinayre, the placement of conventionally feminine women at the center of Femina and La Vie Heureuse was a way of recreating a certain kind of traditional femininity within French culture so as to work against these perceived threats. The magazines are in themselves examples of Debora Silverman’s argument that Art Nouveau’s emphasis on feminine forms helped to restore women as “queen of the interior.”15 Photographs like this one of Tinayre normalized a figure long-associated with the breakdown of traditional social structures, creating a mental framework in which to imagine her otherwise. Witness Tinayre’s daughter in the image, clutching a baby doll herself, reassuringly repeating, then, the maternal role modeled by her mother. The Tinayre photograph also seems to be a deliberate reconstruction of one of Honoré Daumier’s most famous caricatures from his openly hostile 1844 bas bleus series, in which a woman writer, back turned, writes furiously, ignoring the child flailing upside down in the bathtub next to her (Figure 9.2). “The woman is in the heat of composition. The child is in the bathwater!” reads the caption. In contrast, the very composition of La Vie Heureuse’s scene of woman, desk, and child provides a visual corrective to the nineteenth-century working mother’s perceived failures. The accompanying caption insistently continues the work of the photograph, guiding the reader directly toward what she is supposed to see: “Between the started manuscript, and the child to whom she extends her hand, Madame Tinayre, even while composing wonderful books, has kept the very spirit of feminine life- a tender heart, love for little ones, and a taste for decorating the home.”

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Figure 9.1.   Marcelle Tinayre in La Vie Heureuse, March 1903. Rachel Mesch, personal collection.

The editors of La Vie Heureuse were thus just as self-conscious and deliberate as Jean Ernest-Charles in the workings of their publication. In the early days of media, just as the nascent advertising industry was exploring these kinds of approaches, they seemed to understand how to engage multiple cognitive vectors simultaneously in order to get their message across.16 In this case, they appealed to their readers’ engagement with popular fictions, celebrity culture, visual codes, and French traditions through this single image, accompanied by an article that repeated the same messages: “Tinayre is the very opposite of what men call, a little disdainfully, a woman of letters.”17 If it was finally possible to be both woman and writer without drowning babies or eschewing domestic roles, it required saying, and repeating, in images and texts, insistently and often, to convince readers. The caption’s explicitness suggests that the magazine was still uncertain of its own image’s blatant power to convey meaning, reminding us of the newness of this medium and the magazine’s lack of confidence in deploying its own most powerful tools. It is also a reminder that if such a thing needed to be said so insistently and overtly, many elements of French society outside of the magazine’s readership likely would have remained unconvinced. Rather than take these magazines at face value, then, as proof of the “mainstreaming of feminism in the Belle Epoque,” as Berlanstein has argued of Femina’s triumphant portrayal of modern women, I believe that they suggest something more nuanced.18 The deliberateness of this narrative, I would suggest, also makes visible its inherent vulnerability; it allows us to see not just the dream of work-life balance or compelling female roles, but

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Figure 9.2.   Honoré Daumier, “Les Bas Bleus.” Le Charivari. February 26, 1844.

also the way in which figures like Daumier and Barbey d’Aurevilly, who had written his own scathing treatise on the bas bleus in 1878, were still casting a shadow.19 Indeed, it was almost certainly in trying to be unlike these bas bleus but rather more like the glamorous successful women writers of the presse féminine that Tinayre mentioned her preference for a strand of pearls, continuing the efforts of Femina and La Vie Heureuse to create a new set of associations with the femme de lettres. In exploring women’s changing roles in and out of the home, the magazines were also engaged in the same kind of creative work as fiction of the

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time. They excerpted some of these novels in their publications, and frequently commented upon them. Tinayre’s story thus also exposes a shifting line between where the imaginative work of popular women’s novels and that of women’s magazines begins and ends. Colette Yver’s 1907 novel Princesses de science, for example, sparked much debate for its portrayal of a female doctor who ultimately gives up her thriving practice to tend to her husband’s needs. In August of that year, La Vie Heureuse published a scathing critique of the novel by Camille Marbo, followed by Yver’s own reply and a survey asking men if they would marry a working woman. In Tinayre’s own novel La Rebelle, the protagonist works at a women’s magazine compared to Femina and La Vie Heureuse. Both authors portray their heroines as struggling to find their way among many different models of modern female identity.20 Reading novels like these in the context both of Femina and La Vie Heureuse, where they were reviewed, debated, and commented upon, reveals a far-reaching discursive space through which Belle Epoque women were sorting out what it meant to be modern. The uncertain voices of both Tinayre’s and Yver’s heroines can serve as instructive filters for examining the glistening images of modern femininity in the pages of Femina and La Vie Heureuse. Through them, the fragility of Tinayre’s 1903 stance shines through, its temporary perfectness also nodding to its status as a fantasy, perhaps even a collective thought experiment, but certainly, a construction, an extension even of the literary enterprise through which Tinayre herself earned a living. It is also one of the pretenses of which Tinayre was almost certainly fully aware. In La Rebelle, her heroine works at a similar magazine, Le Monde Féminin, and notes the artifice of what the magazine chooses to highlight, remarking sardonically on how “all the women were pretty; almost all were virtuous; all the men were ‘talented.’”21

Merging Frameworks The American Cultural Studies tradition—which takes popular culture as its object and investigates its constructions of power, identity, and social relations—provides a helpful framework for interpreting images like those found in Femina and La Vie Heureuse. This practice takes a close reading- and semiotics-based approach and identifies nontraditional objects from popular culture as texts to be interpreted. This technique is of course indebted to the French: in addition to taking cues from the explication de texte and its attention to relationships between form and content, Roland Barthes’s Mythologies might be seen as the founding text of what later became an American discursive practice. In his collection of essays, Barthes demonstrates the ways in

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which cultural signifiers carry embedded meanings. In the essay “Novels and Children,” Barthes analyzes an image of women writers within the pages of a women’s magazine—the Nov. 22, 1954 issue of Elle, under which a headline declares “Women Writers Make Their Presence Known!” Accompanying the double-page photograph, a caption identifies the featured writers as follows: “Natalie Sarraute, 3 filles, 2 romans”; “Marguerite Yourcenar, 5 romans”; “Francoise Sagan, 1 roman.” Barthes critiques the magazine’s circumscription of the 1950s woman writer according to her procreative function, only permitted to write to the extent that she performs her feminine duties: “One novel, one child, a little feminism, a little connubiality. Let us tie the adventure of art to the strong pillars of the home . . . Write, if you want to, we women will all be very proud of it; but don’t forget on the other hand to produce children. It is your destiny.”22 Barthes’s reading is compelling and perhaps even feminist, as far as Elle in 1954 was concerned, and the similarity to La Vie Heureuse’s own messages about women writers and domesticity is striking. But Barthes also helps us to see where Cultural Studies falls short without the work of cultural history. Without the rigor of a historical framework, this kind of interpretation is either an amusing exercise, or the very reason that the feminism of these magazines was slow to be recognized. On the other hand, when we join the attention that Cultural Studies pays to signifying codes and embedded meanings with rigorous historical attention to cultural context, we are able to see something quite different: that feminism itself is not a constant. When we historicize Barthes’s critique, we see that the conscientious construction of a new model of feminine achievement in the Belle Epoque (limited as it might seem by our own cultural standards) was not for its time a retrenchment of women’s roles. Belle Epoque women were not being told that if they wanted to be writers they needed also to have babies to prove they were still women—as in 1954—but rather, that they did not have to renounce having babies if they wanted to write. The historic framework, then, allows us to see Femina and La Vie Heureuse as progressive, while the close reading approach allows us to tease out all the mixed messages of both the visual and textual material that signal contradiction and ambivalence. This methodological bridge forces a revision of the (conflicting) feminist interpretations offered by Cosnier and Berlanstein: the situation in cultural history challenges Cosnier’s argument that Femina was not feminist by showing how feminism is in fact a culturally specific set of challenges to gender roles that changes over time; the literary and visual perspective, on the other hand, nuances Berlanstein’s claims about Femina’s feminism by showing how the magazine was not a straightforward depiction

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of reality but rather a series of highly charged signifiers working to construct a specific version of reality that did not yet exist as such. This multidisciplinary methodology works against the kind of teleological approach to feminist historiography criticized by Joan W. Scott, and allows instead for a reading of “the repetitions and conflicts of feminism.”23 Indeed, Tinayre’s complex identifications and the representational dynamics of Femina and La Vie Heureuse require a nuanced and necessarily historicized understanding of feminism for which Mary Louise Roberts’s interdisciplinary work on the Belle Epoque is instructive. Roberts argues for recognizing resistance in women’s lives as “a diverse language in which [political] feminism is simply one, albeit very important, dialect.”24 This framework expands the terms through which we can recognize challenges to gender norms through a more capacious—and historically grounded—understanding of feminism. As a crystallized moment of rapidly shifting gender roles and rapidly shifting ways in which to express them, the Tinayre Affair only make sense, then, when one applies multiple critical lenses. Without this sort of plural vision, the nature of Marcelle Tinayre’s performance—for that is what it was—was lost on most of the mainstream readers of Le Temps, La Patrie, and La Liberté, for whom Tinayre’s act was quite simply illegible, to borrow Roberts’s term.25 She uses this notion of illegibility to describe the difficulty of interpreting the behavior of certain Belle Epoque women who refused convention in new and unfamiliar ways while seeking “cultural visibility.”26 Like hers, my methodology seeks to bring back into focus parts of the past that have been obscured in part because of their multivalent nature. Part of Tinayre’s illegibility stemmed from the multiplicity of her identities. “It’s the writer who is decorated, but it’s the woman who has to wear the decoration!” Tinayre was quoted as saying in her 1908 interview with Le Temps—a comment that elicited extensive commentary.27 While that tension between woman and writer in itself is not historically surprising, rooted in the lingering anxiety around the bas bleu, the Tinayre Affair highlights the ways in which the relationship between the two identities was not at all binary. Within femme and écrivain (writer), it turns out, there were multiple identities being circulated by an increasingly multivalent media culture, so that one woman writer could exist in plural and often contradictory forms— forms that were not always translatable or even recognizable from one audience to another. While the editors of Femina seemed to understand what Tinayre was up to, placing an image of her on the inside cover directly after the controversy (February 1, 1908) and applauding her almost-nomination, other women puzzled over her response.28 “I was stupefied when I read Madame Tinayre’s letter,” wrote Louise Abbéma in L’Eclair, unable to believe

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that Tinayre could have seemingly belittled her honor.29 If Tinayre’s female contemporaries could not always agree upon how to view her, how much the more challenging for scholars today.30 Roberts coined the term “disruptive acts” to designate the ways in which women like Colette, Gyp, Marguerite Durand, and even Tinayre herself resisted gender norms through performative acts of rebellion. To Roberts’s important reframing of Belle Epoque feminism, I have added what I describe as the “imaginative acts” of Femina and La Vie Heureuse (which, importantly, were trying very hard to not be disruptive)—a phrase meant to carry with it all the ambivalences that I have described. Part of the media storm of the Tinayre Affair, I suggest, was that of an audience not accustomed to these kinds of imaginative acts and unable to assimilate them. It was a disconnect between the world of Femina and La Vie Heureuse, which were actually quite progressive in their journalistic approach, and that of the stodgy mainstream press; between the imaginative acts of Belle Epoque feminism and a more straight-forward print journalism; between the innovative new female role models being construed in one market share, and those models that French tradition and patrimony were ready to celebrate in another. In this sense, the Tinayre Affair wasn’t a failure of feminism, or a sign of antifeminism or misogyny, so much as a failure of imagination. At the same time, I am suggesting that the cultural imagination of the Belle Epoque is not impossible to reconstitute, as it might at first seem to be, but is rather on vivid display through the multiple dimensions of its publications. Tinayre’s comments were wildly misunderstood outside of the women’s press because they were taken too literally. But many of her female peers understood exactly what was going on. As Régine Martial wrote in the January 18 issue of Le Gil Blas: Through a bunch of unfortunate clichés we have decreed that the woman writer should necessarily be ridiculous and not much of a woman because she is a writer. However, [women writers] don’t want to look like dinosaurs, so out of a desire to affirm her femininity, one of them decided to exaggerate this act to the point of childishness. . . . Madame Tinayre, who finished her previous interview with Le Matin by citing Pascal, must certainly have said after her nomination, “if I talk about serious things, I’m going to annoy them.” So she borrowed her son’s socks and went about playing hoops with the cross of the Legion of Honor. But it’s her time period that’s at fault, rather than her intelligence.

Martial, an actress herself, describes Tinayre as engaged in a proverbial juggling act avant la lettre, that of the modern Belle Epoque woman who tried

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to balance not just career and family, but also competing sets of expectations and associations surrounding her ways of combining femininity and authorship. Like Ernest-Charles, Martial recognizes the role of her “time period.” Indeed, there is a startling self-consciousness by the journalists engaged in this early media storm, many of whom seem aware that they are commenting not simply on Tinayre, but on their society, offering, then, “a history of our current way of life.” Tinayre’s Legion of Honor blunder demonstrated that the celebrity woman writer that she had tried to embody did not actually exist. Many of the responses in the mass press seemed intent on making her feel bad about precisely that—but as Martial rightly notes, she and her female peers already understood this implicitly. Femina and La Vie Heureuse allowed women to imagine themselves with achievements they did not yet have, mirroring a crucial gap between aspiration and reality that has made it difficult to measure women’s progress during the Belle Epoque. The notion of the French lag, or décalage, is most often evoked in relationship to the delay in French women’s suffrage.31 The expression refers not simply to the time lapse, but also to the discrepancy between the existence of a cultural mindset seemingly prepared for change and the enactment of actual institutional and legal reforms.32 I would argue that that precise gap between fantasy and reality is a crucial object of study in itself, made visible precisely through the multivalent nature of the mass press in the Belle Epoque. The nexus of historical, literary, and cultural studies offers a way of exploring the décalage, not to explain it or account for it, but to actually analyze it according to its own terms, through the very cultural artifacts that express it—in this case, through the multiple and often conflicting images of modern femininity that such an approach finally makes legible.

Notes 1.  Rachel Mesch, Having It All in the Belle Epoque: How French Women’s Magazines Invented the Modern Woman (Stanford University Press: Stanford, 2013), 155–71; Mesch, “A Belle Epoque Media Storm: Gender, Celebrity, and the Marcelle Tinayre Affair,” French Historical Studies 35, no.1 (Winter 2012): 93–121. 2.  Charles Baudelaire, Le Peintre de la vie moderne. In Oeuvres completes, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 690. For a history of mass culture in nineteenth-century Paris and its relationship to Baudelaire’s vision of modernity, see Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 3. For a complete biography of Tinayre and her extended family, see Alain Quella-Villéger, Belles et rebelles. Le roman vrai des Chasteau-Tinayre (Bordeaux: Aubéron, 2000).

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  4.  Paul Flat saw her as having a virile temperament, which he equated with objectivity and intelligence. See Nos femmes de lettres (Paris: Perrin, 1909).   5.  Edmond Epardau, “Le Ruban Rouge,” La Patrie (January 7, 1908).   6.  René de Valfori, “Conversation avec Mme Tinayre,” La Liberté (January 7, 1908).   7.  The Henriot cartoon appeared in the January 19, 1908, issue of the Le Petit Journal. Tinayre was accused repeatedly of false modesty. For an analysis of the way in which this episode exposed the gendered nature of pride, see Mesch, “A Belle Epoque Media Storm,” 109–13.  8. Gabrielle Houbre, “L’honneur perdu de Marcelle Tinayre. L’Affaire de la Légion d’honneur rate,” Jean-Jacques Lefrère et al., eds., Les Ratés de la littérature (Tusson, Charente: Du Léron, 1999), 89–101.  9. Jean Ernest-Charles, “L’Aventure de Mme Marcelle Tinayre,” Le Censeur Politique et Littéraire, January 18, 1908. 10.  See Jean Ernest-Charles, Samedis littéraires (Paris: Perrin et Cie, 1903, 1905), 1:376–86, 3:125. 11.  Ernest-Charles, “L’Aventure de Mme Marcelle Tinayre,” 65. 12.  For more on this particular model of femininity in the context of Belle Epoque feminisms, see Mesch, Having It All. 13.  Berlanstein, Ducas, and Irvine do not include any images in their studies; Cosnier includes many images from the magazine illustratively but does not interrogate their representational modes. See Lenard R. Berlanstein, “Selling Modern Femininity: Femina, a Forgotten Feminist Publishing Success in Belle Epoque France,” French Historical Studies 30, no. 4 (Fall 2007): 624–50; Colette Cosnier, Les Dames de Femina. Un féminisme mystifié (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009); Sylvie Ducas, “Le Prix Femina: La consécration littéraire au feminine,” Recherches Féministes 16, no. 1 (2009): 43–95; Margot Irvine, “The Role of Women’s Magazines in the Creation of the Prix Vie Heureuse,” in Francophone Women’s Magazines: Inside and Outside France, ed. Annabelle Cone and Dawn Marley (New Orleans: University Press of the South, 2010), 23–31. Both magazines have been entirely overlooked in the history of photography, despite the recognition of Pierre Lafitte’s (Femina’s publisher) other publications, La Vie au Grand Air and the short-lived Excelsior, as important to this history (Thierry Gervais and Gaëlle Morel, La Photographie [Paris: Larousse, 2011], 113–16). 14.  For a fuller analysis of this and other images, see Mesch, Having it All, 55–81. On the perceived danger of intellectual exertion for women, see Rachel Mesch, The Hysteric’s Revenge: French Women Writers at the Fin-de-Siecle (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2006), 15–21. 15.  Debora L. Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology, Style (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 157. 16.  On the relationship of the French advertising industry to cultural traditions, see Marjorie Beale, The Modernist Enterprise: French Elites and the Threat of Modernity, 1900–1940 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 5.

210  •  Rachel Mesch

17.  During the Tinayre Affair, a few commentators applauded Tinayre’s desire to “stay in her role,” echoing this sentiment. These more positive views of her behavior were left out of Ernest-Charles’s compilation. Houbre, “L’honneur perdu,” 98. 18. Berlanstein, “Selling Modern Femininity,” 625. At the opposite extreme, Colette Cosnier refuses to acknowledge the feminism of Femina at all because of the conservative nature of so much of its discourse. For the debate between these scholars, see Cosnier, Les Dames de Femina, 285-303, and Lenard R. Berlanstein’s review of Les Dames de Femina. Un féminisme mystifié, by Colette Cosnier, H-France Review 9, no. 134 (November 2009): 566. 19.  Barbey is referenced explicitly in a 1905 article: he is imagined as waving a flag of surrender before the stunning talents of Belle Epoque women writers. Henri Duvernois, “Oeuvres de femmes,” Femina (April 15, 1905). 20.  For a more extensive reading of these novels and their relationship to the magazines, see Mesch, Having It All, 123–43. 21.  Marcelle Tinayre, La Rebelle (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1905), 44. 22.  Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957), 55. 23.  Joan W. Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 3. 24.  Mary Louise Roberts, Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-Siècle France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 9 25.  Of the Belle Epoque women journalists and performers who engaged in “disruptive acts,” Roberts writes: “Their very illegibility—their refusal to fall in with conventional categories of womanhood—led to multiple readings of their behavior, some more politically subversive than others,” Disruptive Acts, 15. 26.  Ibid., 11. 27.  Marcelle Tinayre, “Lettre à M. Adrien Hébrard,” Le Temps, January 7–8, 1908. 28.  The frontispiece to the February 1, 1908 issue of Femina shows Tinayre at her desk, with the following caption: “Our eminent collaborator, the much-lauded author of La Rançon, La Maison du Péché, La Rebelle, and so many other witty and pleasing sketches, was on the list of nominees for the most recent Legion of Honor. Everyone was thrilled for an honor so well earned, when we learned that the news had been premature. It should only be a postponement.” 29.  Louise Abbéma is quoted in “L’Opinion des Femmes décorées,” L’Eclair (January 9, 1908). 30. Tinayre has been reclaimed recently by literary scholars of Belle Epoque women’s fiction alternately as a feminist and a femme nouvelle, despite her own complicated relationship, if not outright resistance, to these labels. Diana Holmes and Carrie Tarr, for example, have described Tinayre as “a public New Woman” who published “uncompromisingly feminist articles.” Diana Holmes and Carrie Tarr, “New Republic, New Women? Feminism and Modernity in the Belle Epoque,” in A Belle Epoque? Women and Feminism in French Society and Culture, 1880–1914, eds. Holmes and Tarr (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 20. 31.  It is also sometimes referred to as le retard français. See Mesch, Having It All, 187.

Understanding the Tinayre Affair   •  211

32. For a discussion of the French lag, see Charles Sowerwine, “Revising the Sexual Contract: Women’s Citizenship and Republicanism in France, 1789–1944,” Confronting Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle France, ed. Christopher E. Forth and Elinor Accampo (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 19–42.

Index

1841 et 1941, 58 Abbéma, Louise, 206, 210n28 Abeille Haytienne, 24 Abraham & Savain photographers, 30 Académie Française, 3, 31 Academy, 11; American, xiii, xvi; British, xv advertisements, xv, 30–31, 33 Affaire Tinayre. See Tinayre Affaire Affaire Villemin, xviii, 171, 175, 186, 188, 191 Alaoui, Mehdi, 86, 90 Alexandre, Arsène, 132 Algerian War, 90n24, 166, 189n13 Amar, David, 188, 190 Anderson, Rafaella, 86 Anthony, Casey, 180 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 34 Apostrophes, 183–84 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 32 Archives Nationales, 59, 63–64, 66n9 Arlequin Cruello, parodie d’Othello (vaudeville play), 48, 58 Armel, Aliette, 183, 188n5 Arnaud, Alain, 188, 190

art nouveau, 99, 101, 200–201 association dinners, 96, 100 audience, xviii, 44–45, 64, 68, 82, 85– 87, 157, 161, 175, 179, 185, 196, 207 Aun, Salim, 32 Aurélien, 91 d’Aurevilly, Barbey, 203 avant-garde art, 33–34, 116 Bach, Karen, 86 Balzac, Honoré de, 10, 18, 67, 149 banlieue: cultural production about the, 74, 79, 164; gay porn depicting, 75, 78, 80, 84–85, 87–88; social exclusion and, 165; stereotypes of men in, 73, 83, 162 banlieusards 76, 78, 82, 84, 88 Barcéna, Rafael Garcia, 31 Barde, Antoine, 77, 81, 83–84 Barthes, Roland, 204–05 Bartholdi, Frédéric Auguste, Lion de Belfort, 109 Baschet, Ludovic, 8 Baudelaire, Charles, “The Painter of Modern Life”, 195

213

214  •  Index

Beauvoir, Roger de, 52, 69 Belle Époque: design, 126; female identities in, 196, 198, 202, 204– 208; mass press, 195, 201; media darlings of, 200; style: 119, 151n29; textual practices in, 199 Bellegarde, Dantès, 25 Béraud, Jean, 119 Berghahn, Daniela, 157, 168 Berlanstein, Lenard, 200, 202, 205, 209n13 beurette, 85–86, 90n27. See also banlieues; porn. Bingo, 35 blackface, 66 blackness, representations, 45, 52, 58, 68 blacks, representations of, 45, 48–49, 63–65 Blanchard, Pascale, 163 Bleich, Erik, 164 blousons noirs gangs, 78 La Bon-bonnière, ou comment les femmes se vengent, 67n18 Bonneau, Léontine, 132 Boone, Joseph, 83 Bourget, Paul, 15 Boyer, Jean-Pierre, 24 Brémond, Henri, 31, 34 Briand, Aristide, 197 Brillat-Savarin, Jean Anthelme, 105 Bulson, Eric, 27–28 Bureau des Théâtres, 59–60, 63 Burnier, Michel-Antoine, 184 Cabarrus, Thierry de, 163 Cadinot, Jean-Daniel, 83 Café de Paris, 105 Café Riche, 106 Café-Restaurant du Cadran, 110, 118n25 Cannes Film Festival, 164 canon, literary, xvii, 16

canonization, literary, 4, 15, 16–17n6 Cap Français/Cap-Haïtien, 23–24, 26 Caribbean, 26–27, 47 Carmouche, Pierre, 52 Casanova, Pascale, 21, 28, 36n2 Castera, Justin Emmanuel, 23–24 catherinette, xviii, 121, 123, 125, 127–128, 129, 130, 132, 134, 137, 138, 139, 144–46, 148n4–5, 149n8, 149–50n18, 150n26 les Cayes, 24, 26, 36 “Celebrities at Home” series, World, 6 celebrities, 4, 6, 14, 17n14 celibacy, xviii, 122–23, 128, 137, 144, 149n15 censors, 45, 58–60, 63–64 censorship, xviii, 24, 64 Cerini de Castegnate, Livio, 96 Chanlatte, Juste, 23, 36n8 Les Cinq Sens, 102, 106 Charles-Roux, Edmonde, 182 Chauveron, Phillippe de, Qu’est-ce qu’on a fait au Bon Dieu, 167 Chéret, Jules, 109 Chibikh, Stéphane, 75, 77–84, 87 cinema: American, 161; French, 164; banlieue, 79; Technicolor, 99; vérité, 81, 84 circulation, 24, 121, 125–26, 128, 139 Citébeur, 75, 77; cinéma vérité in, 80–81, 84; comic books, 73, 75–77; comparison to heterosexual postimmigration porn, 87; criticism of, 78, 83; direct address in, 82; French Arab characters in, 74, 76, 84–86; marketing strategy of, 79; quantification of desire in, 74; unethical sexual relations in. Films: Baise-moi, 86, 90; Bitume te met dans la lune (Pavement makes you see stars), 77; Caves à plaisirs/Pleasure Cellar, 77 Clair, Jean Noël René, 79

Index  •  215

class, xx, 32, , 73, 82, 87, 89n10, 123, 132, 150n26, 156, 158, 160–65, 167, 180. See also difference Clos, Max, 181 Cluzet, François, 157, 159–62, 168 Coffin, Judith, 151n34 colonialism, 58, 66, 95–6, 115, 168; anti-, 27 Colson, Jean-Baptiste, 46 comedy, 44–45, 48, 63, 65, 155–57, 159, 162, 167 Compagnon, Olivier, 27 Conrad, Georges, 109, 110. See also Café-Restaurant du Cadran Contemporary French Civilization, xv cosmopolitanism, xvii, 28, 32 Cosnier, Colette, 200, 205, 210n18 Coupart, Antoine-Marie, 60, 63–64, 70–71; “Les Enfans du Colon”, 60, 62, 63, 71n59 Courjault, Véronique, 180 Cousseau, Anne, 188n5, 190n20 crime: 74, 76, 174, 179, 185 criticism: of French Cultural Studies, xix; literary, 26, 36n1, 172 cuisine, xv, 96, 113–16; national, 112 cultural history, 64, 148n7, 196, 205 cultural production, xix-xx, 11, 19n36, 21–22, 26, 35, 74–75, 168 Cultural Studies, xi, xiii-xix, 21, 45, 75, 196, 204–05 darija, 86 Daumier, Honoré, 201, 203, 203; bas bleus series, 201, 203 Delanoë, Nelcya, 182–83, 192n45 Delmotte-Halter, Alice, 183–84 deltiology, 126. See also postcards Denby, David, 161 Derème, Tristan, 34 La Derniere Mode, 14 Derrida, Jacques, 148 Désaugiers, Marc-Antoine, 63, 71n61

Desbaresdes, Anne, 176 Desforges, Régine, 182 desire: colonial, 83; cross-racial, 47–48, 59, 76n13; female, 139; and intentionality, 75; for novelty, 63; quantification of, 74 Dessaline, Jean-Jacques, 22 Les Deux Colons, 46 Les Deux lions, 51 Devillers, Jean-Pierre and Isabelle Cottenceau, A la vie, a la mort, 157 Dîner Molière, 109, 112, 118n26 dining, fine, the democratization of, 96 Donalson, Melvin, 158 Dorcel, 85, 90. See also Yasmine Dornac (Paul Cardon), 5, 6, 29; Nos Contemporains chez eux, 5, 6, 29 Doumer, Paul, 115 Drumont, Edouard, 11, 12, 15 Duhamel, Georges, 34 Dumas, Alexandre, 8–11, 14–15, 30 Duraille, Marguerite, 184 Durand, Marguerite, 207 Duras, Marguerite: Agatha, 183; L’Amant, 183, 187; “Cela me regarde” as art poetique of, 185; conflation of real and imaginary, 179; La Douleur, 176, 183; ethical commitment of, 175; and fait divers, xviii, 171, 182, 185–87, 188n5; L’Homme assis dans le couloir, 183; journalistic career of, 174; La Maladie de la mort, 183; La Musica deuxieme, 183; Outside, 174, 176, 183, 189n6; and public outrage, 172, 180–81, 183; Savannah Bay, 183; “Sublime, forcément sublime Christine V”, see “Sublime, forcément sublime Christine V” Les Editions de la Revue Mondiale, 30 ephemera, xviii, 121, 132, 146 Ernest-Charles, Jean, 198–99, 202, 208

216  •  Index

erotica, xiii,xiv, xviii; 75–77, 79–82, 84–85, 88, 106 Escoffier, Auguste, 112 Ethiopiques, 35 ethnographic realism, 74–75, 79 Ewers, Hanns Heinz, 32 exclusion, social, 158, 165–66 fashion, xvii, 151n29; industry, 121, 141, 144, 146; magazines, 14, 17n7; worker, 132, 144, 149, 150n26 Fassin, Eric, 89n16 Femina, 196, 199–208, 210n28 femininity: in fin-de-siècle France, xviii, 121; modern, xix, 198, 204, 208; submissive, 130, 177; of Tinayre, 199, 207; traditional standards of, 127, 201 feminism, 197, 200, 202, 205–07, 210n18 femme de lettres, 200–201, 203 femme nouvelle/New Woman, 127, 150, 201 Ferenczi, Thomas, 184 Fiallo, Fabio, 32 fiction: Duras’s “Sublime” as, 172–73, 180, 187, 191n33, 193n58; erotic, 77; serialized, 13; and the Tinayre Affair, 196; women’s, 210n29 Le Figaro, 181 film, xv, xvii; and ethnographic realism, 74; produced new ways of seeing, 127; representation of differences in, 166–67 Fin d’une République ou Haïti en 1849, 47 folklore, 35, 119, 121–22, 139, 144, 146 Foucault, Michel, 11, 16, 76–77 Fourny, Jean-François, xv French Cultural Studies: Criticism at the Crossroads, xxn10 French Legion of Honor, xix, 195–97, 207–208, 210

Galerie de la presse, 46 Le Gang, 73 Garcin, Jérôme, 182 gastronomy, 112–14 Gautier, Théophile, 44, 52, 64, 65n3 gay life, 87 Gazette politique et commercial d’Haïti, 23 Genet, Jean, 76 genres: conventions of, 190–91n29; creation of new, 14; film, 156; forgotten, 11; high and low literary, xvii; popular, xviii, 44, 157; privilege of single-author, 15; profusion of new journalistic, 17n14; theatrical, 65, 67n13 Gibran, Khalil, 32 Gide, Andre, 83–4 Le Gil Blas, 207 Gonaïves, 26 de Goncourt, Edmond and Jules, 68n25 Great War, 113, 126 Greenwich Meridian, 28 Les Griots, 28 Groult, Benoîte, 182 Guay, Gabriel, 109 Guénif-Souilamas, Nacira, 76 Gyp, 207 Haiti: brought into international postal service, 24; intellectual class, 32; national identity, xvii; population, 25; postcolonial intellectual and cultural production of, 21, 35; publishing market of, 22; Republican Constitution of, 24; in vaudeville, 47, 60, 63–64 Hall, Stuart, xiv, xxn4 Halpérine-Kaminsky, Ely, 8, 10–11 Hamdani, Hassan, 86–7, 90n27 Heurtelou, Daniel, 32, 34 Higbee, Will, 157 Hill, Leslie, 173, 185, 190n28 Hir, Marie-Pierre Le, xvi

Index  •  217

historians, cultural, 13–14 Hocquenghem, Guy, 76 Holmes, Diana, xvi, 210n29 home, 7–8, 10–11, 14, 25, 203 Houbre, Gabrielle, 198 Huffington Post, 156, 160, 163 Huret, Jules, 10 Huston, Nancy, 193n58 identity: authorial, 19n36; cultural, 16; female, 204; national, xvii, 26, 35, 95, 112, 116; social, 105 ideology, 22, 35, 141, 168 illustrated menus, Third Republic, xiii, xvii, 97, 104, 116; colonialism and, 114–15; depiction of reality on, 109, 112–13; distinction between special occasion and restaurant, 98; as ephemeral object, xiv; and “menu logic,” 103; political discourse embedded within, xviii; proliferation of, 95; and temporal divisions, 106; variety of, 99; as a visual medium, 101; vogue for, 100; working with, 96 Imagining the Popular in Contemporary French Culture, xvi Imprimerie du Gouvernement, 22 indigénisme, 27–28, 37n22 Ingold, Tim, 11, 13 Les Inrockuptibles, 85 integration, 164–65 intellectuals, 22, 25–28, 33, 35, 173, 188n1 interdisciplinary approach, xvi, 156, 206 interior decorating, 6, 10, 201 interviews, illustrated or photo-, xvii, 4–8, 10–11, 13–15, 19n36 Intouchables, xviii, 164; class distinction and ethnic difference in, 167; clichés in, 158; comparison to Abdel Sellou’s memoir, 165; criticism of,

160, 162–63; online reviews of, 161; success of, 155–56, 159, 166; public appeal of, 157. See also difference Jawel, 91 Jérémie, 26 Jocrisse maître et valet, 60, 70n56 Jouhaud, Auguste, 47, 69n37; Le Tremblement de terre de la artinique, 47, 49 journalism, 4, 14–15, 25, 172–75, 179, 181, 187, 188n5, 189n6, 195, 207 JTC Studio, 85 judicial system, 186–87, 189n13 July, Serge, 172, 176, 180, 184, 188n1, 191n33 Justice, 10, 85, 180, 186–87, 190n23 Kassovitz, Mathieu, La haine, 164 Klich, Lynda, 127 Kreyol, 35 Lacour, Laurence, 180 Lamy, Pierre (Franc–Lamy), 114, 115–16 Lanson, Gustave, 15, 19n41 Le Laquais d’un negre, 47 Larbaud, Valery, 34, 37n24 Latin America, 26–27, 36n9 Latour, Bruno, 11 Leclerc expedition, 23 Légitime defense, 35 Lemaître, Jules, 15 Lesage, Céline, 180 Libération, 155–56, 159, 162, 171–72, 175–76, 179, 180–83, 186, 188n1, 191n35 La Liberté, 197 Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, 11 Linotype machine, 26 literary magazines, Haitian: as alternative spaces, 27; conditions of production of, 22–23, 35;

218  •  Index

dépaysement in, 31; form and conventions of, 22–23, 30, 35, 36n1; price of, 24–25; readership of, 24, 31, 33; as source for understanding postcolonial literary production in Haiti, 22; specialized nature of, 25–26, 37n18; as untapped source in Francophone studies, xiii, 21, 35; lithography, 99, 126 Locke, Brian, 158, 169 Loir, Luigi, 101 Looseley, David, xvi Lyotard, Jean-François, 178, 190n26 M. Potard, ou le nègre blanc, 47 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 15 Magritte, René, La Trahison des images, 102 Maillard, Léon, 96 Mairet, Henri, 4, 6, 8, 9, 30; “Une Heure” series, 4, 6, 11–12 Malheureux comme un nègre, 47, 52, 67n13, 70n54 Mallard, Marie, 17 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 14, 17n15, 18n34 Mallet-Joris, Françoise, 182 Marbo, Camille, 204 Marcelin, Philippe-Thoby, 32, 37n24 market: erotica and pornography, 77, 81, 84, 87–87; Haitian publishing, 26, 28; marriage, 144; mass, 14; Parisian publishing, 22 Marotte, Léon, 104 marriage, xviii, 48, 59, 121–23, 125, 128, 134, 137, 141, 144, 146 Martial, Régine, 207–08 Maury, Louis, 79–80, 82 Maury, Serge, 183 McLuhan, Marshall, 11 Med in France, 77 media: Belle Epoque, 200; changing media landscape, 173; consumption, 185; debates, xviii; early, 202; gay,

78, 81; literature, 191n33; mass, 13, 139; new, 127; and popular mythologies, xiv; process, 16; public space of, 175; scandals, xix, 76; visual, 3–4, 7, 99 Meizoz, Jérome, 11, 19n36 Mélesville, 52; Les Secondes noces, 52 melodrama, 44–45, 162. See also vaudeville memory, colonial, 75 Meurée, Christophe, 173 Michael, Charlie, 157 Milscent, Jules Solime, 23 de Miomandre, Francis, 32; Écrit sur d l’eau, 32 Mitterrand, François, 189 mixité, 78, 82 Mode Beurette, La, 85 modernity, 121, 159, 195, 208n2; sexual, 89n16 modistes, 119, 121–22, 137, 144–46, 148n5 Molière, 109, 112 Monde Féminine, 204 Monde Illustré, 6, 17n7 Le Monde, 184 Monjaret, Anne, 122, 144–45, 148n7, 149n8 Mordacq, Philippe, 97 MTV Cribs, 4, 11 Mucchielli, Laurent, 78 Le Naire, Olivier, 184 Nakache, Olivier, 155–57, 160, 163–64, 166–67, 169n12 Napoleon, 23 nationalism, 26–27, 32, 96 Négress ou le pouvoir de la reconnaissance, 47, 49 New Orleans, 47 newspaper, 15, 23–24, 26, 99 Ni Putes, ni Soumises, 81 Noury, Gaston, 101, 102, 104

Index  •  219

La Nouvelle revue française, 31 Nouvelliste, le, 26 O’Sullivan, Michael, 161 objects: aesthetic, 97; cultural, xiii, xvi, xvii, 21, 28, 32, 35, 173, 204; ephemeral, xiv, xviii; of fantasy, 88; material, 25, 31; Of study, xiv; visual, xx; written, 171 Occupation, 175 opera, 158; comic, 44; soap, 180, 191 Oréno, ou le bon nègre, 46, 55, 59 Orientalism, 13, 83 Orton, Joe, 83 Ory, Pascal, 97 Ourika, 52 Paraliterary texts, 172, 188n3 La Patrie, 197, 206 Paul et Virginie, 55 periodicals, xvii, 6, 14, 17n11, 24–26, 37n15 Perrein, Michèle, 182 Perrot, Luce, 185 Perrot, Michelle, 123, 149n14 Pétion, Alexandre, 36n9 phénomène de société, 156, 159 photo-interviews, xvii, 4, 6, 8, 10–11, 13–14, 31 photographs and photography: amateur, 30; captions, 7; digital, 4; flash, 6, 15; merged with lithography, 126; as a new technology, 14, 196; tradition of, 3; in women’s magazines, 195–6, 199–200; of writers, 3, 15 photojournalism. See journalism photoreportages, 4, 10–11, 13–14 Place Denfert-Rochereau, 109, 118n25 poems and poetry, 10, 14–15, 21, 27– 28, 30–35, 123, 128, 130, 150n27, 200 porn: ethics of, 82; ethnic, 74–78, 88; French gay, 73; food, 103;

heterosexual, 85–6, 88; plots, 77; postimmigration, 87; production, 76, 78, 83–84; studios, 79, 81; viewing public of, 82 pornography. See porn Port-au-Prince, 22–28, 30–31, 33–34, 59, 63 postcards, xiii, xiv, xviii, 123, 141, 148n4; craze for, 119, 121; and feminine roles, 128; forerunners of, 148n5; golden age of, 126; and invention of tradition, 125, 139; legibility of, 126; and marriage, 121; past and future in, 146; and printing technology, 99, 121, 126–27 Postcolonial Studies, xv Poulain, Caroline, Potage tortue, buisson d’ecrivisses et bombe glacée... Histoire(s) de menus, 97 Pound, Ezra, 36n1 Pozzo di Borgo, Philippe, 157–58, 169n12 practices: cultural, 125, 195; journalistic, 198; labor, 23; literary, 199; methodological, xiii; reading, 25; religious, xv; representational, 200; signifying, 196; theatrical, 44; writing, 173, 182 press: of the 1890s, 13; alternative, 75; American, 160, 162–63; Duras in, see Duras, Marguerite; French, 160, 192n37; gay, 78; Haitian, xvii, 22–24, 26, 36n8; mass, 195–96, 198–99, 208; on menus, 109; popular, xix, 172, 174; women’s, 201, 203, 207; writer’s relationship to, 14–15 privacy, 7, 14, 157 private: life, 10, 17n14, 184; man, 10; and public, 126–27; sphere, 116 Prix Goncourt, 182–83 public: space, 6, 81, 175; sphere, xix, 172, 182, 187, 188n5

220  •  Index

publishers, 18n32, 23–24, 31. See also press Puerto Plata, 24 le Quesne, Fernand, 108 Racaille, 77, 83, 85–86. See also porn race: performative dimension of, 48; questions of, xix; relations, xviii, 75, 88; representations of, xvii, 45, 58, 65; resentment, 82. See also difference Rachida et ses soeurs, 85 racism, 86, 88, 160, 163–65, 189n13 Radet, Honorine ou la femme difficile a vivre, 48–49, 50, 55 Radiguet, Raymond, 31–32, 34 Rahim, Tahar, 167 Rambaud, Patrick, 184 Rambourg, Patrick, 97 Ramsey, Kate, 26–27 reporters, 6, 8, 11, 13–15 Restaurant Chartier, 106 Restaurant Drouant, 103, 104 Restaurant Maire, 103 restaurants, rise of, 98–99 Reverdy, Pierre, 33–34 La Revue illustrée, xvii, 4–8, 10–11, 12, 14, 17n7 Revue indigene, 22, 27–28, 30–34 La Revue mondiale, 30 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 34 Rinaldi, Angelo, 182 ritual, 106, 122, 125, 132, 134, 137, 139, 144, 149n8, 152n41 Robert, Denis, 180 Roberts, Mary Louise, 206–07, 210n25 Robida, Albert, 113 Rochefort, Claude-Louis-Marie, Les Boucles d’oreille, 56, 58 la Ronde, 25–26 Ronsard, 128, 150n27, 151n28 Roumain, Jacques, 31–34 Roumer, Emile, 31–34, 37n24

Saemmer, Alexandra, 173, 179, 190n20 Saigon, 115 Saint Catherine, 119, 122–23, 124, 125, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 139, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 148n4. See also catherinette Saint-Domingue, 23, 63, 71n61 Salomon, Lysius, 24 Santo Domingo, 24 Sardou, Victorien, 3, 4, 5–8, 10–11, 14, 29 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 188n1 Schauer, Erica, 149–50n18 Schehr, Lawrence, xv Scholes, Robert, 31 Schor, Naomi, 125–26 Scott, A.O., 160–61 Scott, Joan, 151n34, 206 Second Empire, 98 Sellou, Abdel, 157–58, 165 Senegal, 46, 59–60, 63, 70n57 service à la française, 98 Sewrin, Charles-Augustin, 41, 70n56; Les Habitans des Landes, 41, 42, 43, 46, 54, 69n46, 70n56 Signoret, Simone, 182 Silverman, Debora, 201 Skyrock radio station, 91n35 Speirs, Dorothy, 8 Staff, Frank, 126 stereotypes, 73–74, 79–80, 84, 86, 90n29, 160, 164, 166–67 Stilwell, Jama, 55 Story of Yasmine, 85 Strand, Dana, xvi Strauss-Kahn, Dominique, 181, 192n37 studies, celebrity, 19n36 Studio Press, 77. See also Barde, Antoine. study, academic xiv “Sublime, forcément sublime Christine V”, xvii; complicates distinctions between different writing practices,

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173; criticism of, 186–7; as example of the universal condition feminine, 178, 185; implications for Christine Villemin, 172; as rewriting of crime, 171; real-world impact of, 187. See also Duras, Marguerite Sy, Omar, 157, 159–60, 162–63, 166–68 Sylvain, Georges, 25 Symbolist writers, 14–15, 34 Tardieu, Eugène, 5–8, 11 Tarr, Carrie, 164, 210n29 Tel Quel, 85–86 television, xv, 11, 99, 178, 180, 183, 188 Le Temps, 197, 206 Testevuide, Jehan, 105 Têtu, 78, 81–82 theater, 44, 58–59, 67n13. See also vaudeville Théâtre des Varietés, 52 Thérenty, Marie-Eve, 14 Third Republic, xiii, xviii, 95, 99, 112 Tiananmen Square, 189 Tinayre Affair, xix, 195–96, 198–200, 206–07 Tinayre, Marcelle, 202: as feminist, 210n29; illegibility of, 206, 210n25; performance of, 206; nomination for French Legion of Honor, xix, 195, 208; and the public, 199; resistance to gender norms, 207; La Rebelle, 204; response to remarks of, 197–98; and women’s magazines, 196, 200–01, 203–04, 210n28. See also femininity. Toledano, Éric, 155–57, 160, 163–64, 166–67, 169n12; Tellement proches, 166 Torre, Leopoldina Palotta della, 186 Toulet, Paul-Jean, 34 Tournantes, 78, 88, 89n9

Trading Places, 161 tradition, 3, 116, 121, 125, 127, 139, 141, 144, 146, 178, 189n8, 197, 199, 204, 207. See also catherinettes Tropiques, 35 Vadepied, Mathieu, 157 Vaillant, Alain, 14 Vastey, Jean Louis, 36 vaudeville plays, xiv, xviii, 60; audiences for, 45, 55, 65; characters of color in, 41, 44–49, 52–56, 59, 63–65, 66n11, 67n13, 67n18, 70n56; endings, normative, of, 44; genre of, xvii, 44; music in, 45, 54; plots of, 44, 63, 65, 67n18 Verdier, Yvonne, 122, 137 La Vie Heureuse, 196, 200–202, 202, 203–08 La Vie Matérielle, 174 Vieux, Antonio, 32–34 Vilain, Philippe, 190n28 Vilaire, Etzer, 25 Villemin, Christine, 171–72, 177, 179– 80, 182–85, 187, 190n20, 193n58 Villemin, Grégory, 171 Vodou, 35 Weiss, Benjamin, 126 Weissberg, Jay, 160–61 Wesh Cousin, 78, 80, 82 Wheaton, Barbara K., 97 Williams, Raymond, xiv, xxn2 Women’s Studies, xv work: intellectual, 3; women entering, 121, 128, 151; writer at, 5–6, 172 World War II, 98 Yasmine, 85–87, 90 Yver, Colette, 204 Zem, Roschdy, Chocolat, 167–68 Zola, Emile, 8, 10–11, 13–15

About the Editors and Contributors

Masha Belenky is associate professor of French at The George Washington University. Her articles have appeared in journals such as NCFS, Dix-Neuf, Romance Studies, and Dalhousie French Studies. She is the author of The Anxiety of Dispossession: Jealousy in Nineteenth-Century French Culture (Bucknell, 2008). She is currently completing her second book, Engine of Modernity: The Omnibus and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris, which focuses on the relationship between early mass transit and popular culture and ways in which they shaped the concept of modernity in France. Anne Brancky is assistant professor in the Department of French and Francophone Studies at Vassar College. She is the author of several articles on literature and the media and is currently working on a book project on Marguerite Duras and the fait divers. Her research and teaching focus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century French literatures, film, and media; representations of women; crime writing; and the relationship between mass culture and literature. Elizabeth Emery is professor of French at Montclair State University. She is the author of several books, articles, and essay anthologies related to the reception of medieval art and architecture in nineteenth-century France and America, and has recently published books exploring the early twentiethcentury phenomenon of writers’ private homes turned into public museums:

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Photojournalism and the Origins of the French Writer House Museum (1881– 1914) (Ashgate, 2012) and En toute intimité . . . Quand la presse people de la Belle Époque s’invitait chez les célébrités (Parigramme, 2015). She serves as book review co-editor for Nineteenth-Century French Studies. Michael Garval is professor of French and director of the master of arts in liberal studies program at North Carolina State University, as well as Associate Editor of Contemporary French Civilization. The author of “A Dream of Stone”: Fame, Vision, and Monumentality in Nineteenth-Century French Literary Culture (Delaware University Press, 2004) and Cléo de Mérode and the Rise of Modern Celebrity Culture (Ashgate, 2012), he is currently developing a new project titled Imagining the Celebrity Chef in Post-Revolutionary France. Throughout his career he has worked with a variety of popular culture materials, including literary memorabilia, caricatures, cartes de visite, postcards, cookbooks, and illustrated menus. Susan Hiner is the John Guy Vassar Chair in Modern Languages Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Vassar College. Her first book, Accessories to Modernity: Fashion and the Feminine in Nineteenth-Century France (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), won the Millia Davenport Publication Award of the Costume Society of America in June 2011. She is currently at work on a new book entitled Behind the Seams: Women, Fashion, and Work in Nineteenth-Century France, for which she was awarded an NEH fellowship. She is the author of numerous articles and book chapters pertaining to her research in women and material culture in nineteenth-century France, fashion studies, and the intersection of literature, visual culture, and social history. Leslie Kealhofer-Kemp is assistant professor of French and Film at the University of Rhode Island. Her current research focuses on representations of minorities (and particularly minority-ethnic women) in France in cinema and on television, as well as on the films and careers of actors and actresses of North and West African origin in France. She is the author of Muslim Women in French Cinema: Voices of Maghrebi Migrants in France (Liverpool University Press, 2015) as well as several articles in journals such as the French Review, Modern and Contemporary France, Studies in French Cinema, and Contemporary French Civilization. Kathryn Kleppinger is assistant professor of French and Francophone studies at The George Washington University. She has published journal articles

About the Editors and Contributors   •  225

on Francophone literature, the Littérature-Monde manifesto, and the terrorist attacks on Charlie Hebdo. Her work has appeared in journals such as Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: Sites and Contemporary French Civilization. She is also the author of Branding the Beur Author: Minority Authors and the Media, 1983–2013 (Liverpool University Press, 2015). Mehammed Mack is assistant professor of French studies and the study of women and gender at Smith College. His research focuses on contemporary immigration to France, gender and sexuality, diversity in the banlieues, and the relation between culture and politics. His larger teaching and research interests include Franco-Arab cultures, the development of Islam in France, travel literature, as well as media studies.  He has published articles in the Journal of Arabic Literature, Comparative Literature Studies, Hétérographes, Jadaliyya, Newseek, Al Jazeera English, and SITES. He is the author of Sexagon: Muslims, France, and the Sexualization of National Culture (Fordham University Press, 2017). Rachel Mesch is associate professor of French and English at Yeshiva University, where she teaches courses in French literature, history, and culture. She is the author of Having It All in the Belle Epoque: How French Women’s Magazines Invented the Modern Woman (Stanford University Press, 2013) and The Hysteric’s Revenge: French Women Writers at the Fin de Siècle (Vanderbilt University Press, 2006). Her current book project considers transgender identity in the nineteenth century.  She serves as associate editor of Nineteenth-Century French Studies and edits a column on nineteenth-century material culture for the Wonders & Marvels history website. Anne O’Neil-Henry is assistant professor of French at Georgetown University. Her research centers around nineteenth-century popular literature and culture in France, with a focus on the literary marketplace of the July Monarchy and on Parisian World’s Fairs. Recent articles of hers have appeared in Nineteenth-Century Contexts, French Forum, and Dix-Neuf. She recently completed her first book, Mastering the Marketplace: Popular Literature in Nineteenth-Century France, forthcoming with University of Nebraska Press. Lise Schreier is  associate professor of French at Fordham University and associate editor of Nineteenth-Century French Studies. Her studies of race and colonialism have explored material as diverse as travelogues,  fashion plates,  children’s literature, vaudeville theater, and early comics. Her research has appeared in Dix-Neuf, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Romance

226  •   About the Editors and Contributors

Studies, Romantisme, Children’s Literature, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, French Cultural Studies and Transition Magazine. She published Seul dans l’Orient lointain: Les Voyages de Nerval et Du Camp (CIEREC/Université de Saint-Etienne 2006) and Gens de couleur dans trois vaudevilles du dix-neuvième siècle (L’Harmattan 2017). She was awarded a Children’s Literature Association Diversity Grant, an American Philosophical Society Grant and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for 2016–17 to complete her next book, “Playthings of Empire: Child-Gifting and the Politics of French Femininity.”  Chelsea Stieber is assistant professor of French and Francophone studies at Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. She  received her PhD jointly from the Department of French and Institute of French Studies at New York University in 2013. She is currently working on a book that proposes a new, decentralized paradigm to Haitian literary history, for which she was awarded a Kluge Fellowship from the Library of Congress. Her work has appeared in journals such as French Studies and Francosphères.