Little by little, colonies are populated and North Africa is divided into departments. Snobbisms begin to play their part. In Paris, one witnesses the triumph of negro art, which would later come to influence cubism. A colonial administrator, Maurice Delafosse, writes:
One must readily admit that the inhabitants of the Sudan have their own civilisations that are worth studying and describing.
A new genre thus surfaces: colonial literature. In Sang des races692 , Louis Bertrand693 glorifies the work of the Algerian settlers. In the cinematic field, this would result in Pépé le Moko694 and La Bandera.695
‘The Genuine Grandeur of France’
This entire movement culminates during the bitter spring of 1931. At the edge of the woods of Vincennes, Paul Reynaud, the Minister of the Colonies, inaugurates the Colonial Exhibition. The Church is represented by the Pavilion of Missions. Monsignor Serrand, the bishop of Saint-Brieuc, declares that ‘the colonies are extensions of the mother country’. Paris is in line with exoticism. President Doumergue travels to North Africa, and picturesque images are published in L’Illustration: explorers are shown wearing caps, their cartridge belts strapped across their shoulders as they sit enthroned amidst the ‘natives’. The ‘greatest France’ comprises one hundred million inhabitants. The dream passes.696
On 4th January, 1939, while in Tunis, Daladier697 is heard to cry:
It is in North Africa that one can truly measure the genuine grandeur of France!
At that point, opinions had already evolved. Having failed to seize power in Paris, the ‘nationalists’ took to watching the proliferation of French flags across the globe, in a display of great emotion. Leftist ‘anticolonialism’ had taken over from the Rightist one. Following the example of Jules Guesde698 and Jean Jaurès,699 who had risen up against ‘colonial buccaneering’ at the start of the 20th century, Henri Barbusse700 and Félicien Challaye701 increase their sharp criticisms. Léon Bloy702 condemns the colonial principle in the name of the very same Christian tradition that had seemed to justify it a few decades earlier (other theologians, however, attempt to define the subtle concept of ‘just colonisation’, while Mr Joseph Folliet, the head of the Semaines Sociales de France,703 makes the following declaration: ‘The anticolonial argumentation is shattered in the face of the sheer size of one single fact: the very existence of colonisation’). In 1927, an Anti-Imperialist League is founded in Brussels; Albert Einstein is entrusted with its presidency.
Beginning in the 1920s, one witnesses the first rebellions of indigenous peoples. The Tunisian Destour704 party is established in 1920, and riots break out in Indochina in 1930 and 1931. In 1925–26, the Rif War705 offers the Communist Party the opportunity to strongly commit itself to supporting Abd el-Krim.
In February 1925, Jacques Doriot, the then Saint-Denis communist MP, scandalised his colleagues when uttering the following words in the gallery of the House of Commons:
It is for a task of expropriation and murder that our army is being used.
And this is what he added four years later in Les colonies et le communisme706 (Aubier-Montaigne):
The power of the Soviets has radically suppressed the colonial exploitation policy. There is thus no other solution to the national question but proletarian revolution.
Rare were the Leftist parties, however, which questioned the legitimacy of our conquest. During the Human Rights League congress of May 1931, two influential members of the Radical Party, Albert Bayet and Maurice Viollette, strived to justify the soundness of the colonial expansion. Albert Bayet declared:
Owing to its very past, the country that first proclaimed the existence of human rights has the duty to spread, wherever possible, the ideas responsible for its very grandeur.
His contention was approved by a large majority.
In 1939, the French journal Volontés published the first texts written by Aimé Césaire, a twenty-six-year-old Martinique national. He would soon become the talk of the country.
During World War II, the ‘close union between mainland France and overseas France’ is glorified simultaneously in London and Vichy. While General de Gaulle proceeds to establish his temporary government in Algiers, the members of the African Phalange volunteer to go and fight in Russia.
On 25th May, 1945, Mr Gaston Monnerville, a man of Guyanese origin, declares before the Consultative Assembly:
Without the Empire, France would only be a liberated country today. Thanks to its Empire, however, France is now a triumphant country.
Still in May 1945, the French Communist Party denounced the nationalist insurrection of Constantine as being an ‘act of provocation by Hitlerian agents’. As for Caballero, the Secretary of the Algerian Party, he wrote the following in L’Humanité:
Those who long to separate themselves from France are the conscious or unconscious agents of another imperialism.
The Right to Difference
Two years later, during the eleventh congress of the French Communist Party, Maurice Thorez would state:
Our party did not endorse the French Union’s disaggregation policy in Indochina.
Trotskyist Jacob Moneta specifies that ‘on 19th March, 1947, the central committee of the French Communist Party actually expressed its approval of the fact that communist ministers, including the then Defence Minister, Mr François Billoux, had voted in favour of the loans that were meant to finance the war in Vietnam’ (Le PCF et la question coloniale, 1920–1965707 . Maspéro, 1971).
Decolonisation thus began amidst the greatest possible confusion. A highly significant case is ‘that of Pierre Mendès France, who acted as the president of the Council of Ministers in 1954, negotiated the Geneva Agreements that put an end to the war in Indochina, and was also a proponent of the Carthage Agreements that granted Tunisia its internal autonomy. Faced with the onset of the Algerian insurrection a few weeks later, he unequivocally affirmed his government’s will to resist, as well as his own intention to keep intact the integrity of our national territory’.
In his speech to the Assembly on 12th November, 1954, Mr Mendès France would make the following declaration:
Several MPs have drawn parallels between the French policies in Algeria and Tunisia, but I say to you that no correlation could ever be more erroneous, and no comparison more mistaken. We are still in France here.
Strangely enough, this decolonisation was conducted in the name of a certain conception of ‘blood and soil’. Indeed, the ‘indigenous populations’ were eager to take charge not only of their own fate, but also of their own land, simply because it is theirs, because ‘they were there first’ and because they are home there. Today, we still watch as the universalist partisans of global civilisation are consumed by their passion for the ‘right to difference’ which colonised peoples are entitled to, with internationalists asserting that ‘settlers’ are to vacate the lands that ‘do not belong to them’ and the U.N. simultaneously proclaiming the ‘unity’ of the human species and the necessity for (different) peoples to be the masters of their own destiny.
Illusory Aspirations
Colonialism was ultimately a certain era’s response to both permanent data (the ‘biological’ propensity for expansion, people’s taste for discovery, and the Promethean West’s winning spirit) and a series of conjectural phenomena (the industrial boom, the increase of new technologies, and the birth of global commerce); in no way was it due to a specific political current. Despite displaying some ‘Rightist’ aspects, it remained fundamentally ‘Leftist’ in its illusory aspiration to create an ‘overseas France’ whose inhabitants, considered similar, would somehow chant ‘our Gallic ancestors’ in unison.
This era of ‘old-fashioned’ colonialism is now over. What is positive is that Europe has learnt to perceive the value and specificity of other cultures. It is henceforth aware of the fact that there are different ways of thinking that characterise humanity, which entitles it to hope for mutual decolonisation.
There is, however, another kind colon
ialism that subsists today — neo-colonialism. It is an insidious and subtle form of colonisation whose restrictive element is not necessarily visible and is accepted, and at times even desired, by the neo-colonised.
This colonisation is sometimes of an economic nature; among its causes, one can mention the need of developed societies for both raw materials and a cheap workforce. It can, however, also be spiritual, moral, ideological, cultural or religious. The persistence of the Soviet colonial empire in the East (accompanied by the forced Russification of the elites) and the degrading dissemination of the American way of life in the West (which goes hand in hand with perhaps even more intense deculturation) are two of its most striking examples.
Compared to these contemporary realities of ours, the ‘old’ type of colonisation seems very primitive indeed; but it did comprise a certain share of adventure, one that may yet fuel some bouts of nostalgia.
There is no doubt, Mr Girardet concludes, that ‘the colonial idea enjoys its own posthumous history within the French national consciousness. So many children have, over the past few French generations, indulged in daydreams as they flicked through the pages of Le Journal des voyages or La croisière noire.708 On the quays of Bordeaux and Marseille, so many young men have, likewise, experienced the emotions of their own departure, the waving handkerchiefs, the whirling of the seagulls and the sudden roar of the machines, before being surrounded by the sea as the waves broke over the stem’.
*
L’idée coloniale en France, 1871–1962,709 an essay by Raoul Girardet. Table ronde, 332 pages.
On the 20th Century
Bayreuth and Wagnerism
Men in dinner suits parade alongside women in evening dresses, flooding all of the city’s streets in mid-afternoon. In long and silent queues, they head for the Festspielhaus, the ‘theatre of celebrations’. A certain contemplation emanates from their procession.
‘Genuine pilgrims travel on foot’, one of them declares.
In Bayreuth, a small German city in Franconia, the Wagner festival has, since its very birth, taken on all the aspects of a cult.
For all three cycles of the performance, around 60,000 tickets are sold on an annual basis; with more than 30,000 ticket applications ending up rejected.
No other musical festival ever experiences such a turnout. Whereas Salzburg and Vienna, to use the words of orchestra conductor Karl Boehm, are ‘flooded with tourists’, the Bayreuth festival targets devotees driven by true passion.
There are some who book their seats years in advance, and others who, despite having spent five years unsuccessfully attempting to reserve theirs, still refuse to give in. One encounters them in Bayreuth, trudging about in front of the reservation office every morning in the hope of benefiting from some last-minute rescission. The Society of Friends of Bayreuth, to which a certain number of seats are assigned ex officio, informs its members that it cannot guarantee its ability to provide them with the desired number of tickets.
Every year, the audience comprises a large number of French people. The latter, incidentally, represent the second largest group among the Friends of Bayreuth, second only to the Germans: ‘French Wagnerism’ has a long-established tradition of its own.
It was during his stay in Paris from 1859 to 1962 that Richard Wagner first addressed an audience that was, at the time, more familiar with Meyerbeer710 or Rossini711 and that particularly revered the ‘Rossinian’ Chadeuil and Azevedo.
The first great ‘convert’ was none other than Charles Baudelaire, whose 1974 Bayreuth programme booklet was actually a reproduction of the beautiful letter he wrote Wagner on 17th February, 1860:
First of all, I would like to tell you that it is to you that I owe the greatest musical pleasure I have ever experienced. The characteristic that struck me most was your work’s grandeur. It represents the magnificent and drives one towards magnificence. Throughout your works, what I have encountered is the solemnity of great sounds, the great aspects of nature and man’s greatest passions. Since the very first day I heard your music, I have never ceased to make the following wish, especially at times of misfortune — “If only I could listen to some Wagner tonight!”
P.S: I shall not include my address, for fear of having you think that there might be something that I would ask of you.
One year later, Napoleon III would give the order to have Tannhäuser staged at the Opéra de Paris.
The premiere, held on 13th March, 1861, caused quite a row. On the eve of the performance, the ‘gentlemen’ of the Jockey-Club, who had purchased a supply of hunting whistles, organised a monstrous sort of commotion. Wagner himself attributed this hostility to the influence exerted by Meyerbeer (who he would end up portraying in The Mastersingers through the character of Beckmesser).
Soon, however, a Wagnerian school is founded in Paris. Symbolist poets are among its representatives, as well as Catulle Mendès, Judith Gautier, Léon Leroy, Edouard Schuré, Gérard de Nerval, Auguste de Gaspérini, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and Champfleury. From 1885 to 1888, they all gathered around the Revue wagnérienne,712 established by Edouard Dujardin (to whom we owe, among other things, an essay on H. S. Chamberlain713 ). In it, Verlaine714 sings the praise of ‘Valhalla’, while Mallarmé715 celebrates ‘the god Wagner radiating a consecration, hardly silenced by the very ink of cryptic weepings’ (January 1886).
In 1890, Péladan716 publishes Wagner’s Complete Theatre. One witnesses the emergence of an increasing number of ‘Wagnerian’ tragedies and novels. Marcel Proust717 and even Zola718 take part in the movement.
In Bayreuth, the alphabetical list of Frenchmen who attended the festival between 1876 and 1896 includes no fewer than 3,000 names. Among those who had come from Paris for the first ever performance of the Tetralogy, the names of Vincent d’Indy, Catulle Mendès, Judith Gautier, Gabriel Monod and Edouard Schuré are the most striking.
Wagner paid homage to them when writing:
What my French friends had already understood but my German brethren and critics labelled a ridiculous delusion dreamt up by my own pride was, in fact, a work of art which, clearly separate from opera and modern drama, rose above both, while borrowing from them their most outstandingly special tendencies so as to lead them towards the right goal, moulded into an ideally free sort of unity.
Subsequently, one reproached Wagner for having written a ‘comedy in antique style’ entitled The Capitulation, in which he allegedly ‘ironised’ the ordeal of the Parisians that found themselves besieged in 1870. In a letter dated 25th October, 1876 and addressed to Gabriel Monod, Wagner offered an explanation, declaring:
All that I wrote with regard to the French spirit was written in German and solely for Germans to see. It is thus clear that I never intended to offend or provoke French people; my intention was, instead, to simply divert my compatriots from imitating France and to encourage them to remain faithful to their own genius, if any good was to come out of their actions.
Later on, he would state:
It was in Paris that I became fully conscious of this thirst for ideals which had already manifested its presence in me and was, at a later stage, to lead me back to my homeland and my homeland back into me.
Strangely enough, it was Houston Stewart Chamberlain who, in a letter to Antoine Lascoux,719 formulated a genuine apology of Francophile Wagner, an unexpected attitude penned by this fierce defender of the Germanic. He writes:
This incredible mental mobility, the staggering speed at which his ideas followed each other in quick succession and formed a sequence, all of it came from a Parisian rather than from someone Germanic! It is just as Goethe tells each of us: “What you are, you must desire! And do not desire anything but that!” As for Wagner, it is nations that he addressed in such a manner.
The criticisms targeting Wagner would resume at the time of World War I, reaching extremes that bordered on the absurd. One would witness authors denouncing ‘the music of our fatherland’s enemies’. And in a book stating that ‘e
ver since Schumann, German musicians have remained premeditatively German’, Camille Saint-Saëns720 would not hesitate to describe Wagner’s music as ‘an incredibly well-equipped machine for gnawing upon patriotism in France’ (Germanophilie,721 Dorbon-Ainé, 1916).
In the 1920s, anti-Wagnerism would be represented on a musical level by Darius Milhaud (France), Emmanuel de Falla (Spain), George Gershwin (USA), Bela Bartok (Hungary), Paul Hindemith and Igor Stravinsky.
Nothing would, however, ever manage to curb the success of Wagner’s music, as testified to by the existence of today’s National Richard Wagner Circle, headed by Ms Catherine Devraigne, the daughter of Doctor Pierre Devraigne, the former president of the Municipal Council of Paris.
‘Artistic Voyage’
The artists who, a good month in advance, flock to Bayreuth from all corners of Germany, and even from abroad, so as to cooperate in the great work begin to animate the usually silent streets with their presence. Hotels are cleaned, and all private residences intended to serve as accommodation for foreigners organise themselves as best as they can. Soon, the chosen date for the first performance is upon us at last: everyone is at their post, armed and ready. This is because one does not visit this place the way one would the Opéra de Paris or a similar location in some other city, bringing yesterday’s concerns or their mundane indifference with them; or, at least, one should not go there in such a state of mind, for to enter the Bayreuth celebration hall without being in a mental state becoming of what one has come to listen to is to voluntarily deprive oneself of one of the most intense artistic emotions anyone could ever have the opportunity to experience.
These lines date back to 1896 and are comprised in Albert Lavignac’s Le voyage artistique à Bayreuth.722 Not a single word can be removed from them. During the entire summer, the city of Bayreuth, which is located in one of Germany’s most beautiful regions, organises its life in harmony with a henceforth immutable rhythm.
Controversies and Viewpoints Page 28
