Too emotional for the French
The battle between Classicism and Romanticism embodied the difference between the airs and graces of a wigged and powdered Parisian and the brash social freedom of the English. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, published in 1798, were heavily influenced by folk ballads, the kind of poems and songs recited by country folk, handed down since time immemorial. But to the French establishment, country folk were just ignorant bumpkins, great for mucking out horses and making cheese but incapable of anything artistic.
In his preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth wrote that the poems ‘were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purpose of poetic pleasure’. This would have had French poets chuckling into their perfumed hankies. What kind of ‘conversation’ did the lower classes have? Arguments about the price of bread? Or how to get cowpats off clogs? Not the stuff of poetry, that was for sure.
One of Wordsworth’s poems in the collection begins:
Strange fits of passion have I known:
And I will dare to tell,
But in the Lover’s ear alone,
What once to me befell.
Short lines, everyday vocabulary, illogical ‘fits of passion’, and not a single reference to a Greek god? In France, it would have been binned.
But the Brits loved everything about Nature, including the people who lived in it. Not surprising, really, because the Industrial Revolution was starting to carve up the British countryside and suck the rural population into the slums, making Nature a precious thing in need of protection. This was in part why painters like Constable, Turner and the lesser-known but just as important Richard Parkes Bonington were fascinated by foggy, overgrown natural scenery that was a million miles away from French artists’ statuesque Greek and Roman landscapes.
These Brits were respected artists at home, but when Eugène Delacroix adopted their Romantic style after a visit to England in 1825, all he earned in Paris was insults. His painting La Mort de Sardanapale depicts the murder of an Assyrian king’s concubines before he commits suicide, a theme taken from a play by Lord Byron. Classical in subject matter but violently Romantic in execution, it was described by Parisian newspapers as ‘a bizarre work’ and ‘a painter’s mistake’. In short, it was much too anglais.
Another Romantic influence that scared the French Classicists to death was women. Napoleon’s code civil had set their inferiority in stone and deprived them of an education. The most widely respected female French writer of the Revolutionary years, Olympe de Gouges, author of the Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne (Declaration of Women and Female Citizens’ Rights) and a play condemning slavery, was guillotined in 1793 for opposing the death penalty. In other words, if you can’t control your mouth, chérie, we’ll have to chop your whole head off.
In the early nineteenth century, Parisian males thought that ladies were perfect for evenings of witty conversation and adulterous sex, or for producing the right number of heirs, but little more. And then in 1821, across the Channel came Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Translated by a writer called Jules Saladin who preferred to remain anonymous, signing himself J. S***, and published with a mistake on the title page (the author was presented as ‘Madame Shelly’), the French translation was the first foreign edition of the novel, which had been a big hit in the UK in both book and stage form.
Shelley was the daughter of the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who had been in Paris during the Revolution, so perhaps it was not surprising that some French critics seized upon this to slam the book for its lack of ‘femininity’. The Revue encyclopédique for 1821 calls the novel ‘the bizarre product of a sick imagination’, and regrets that ‘the work of a woman’ does not ‘offer likeable and gracious images instead of revolting and hideous objects and stories’. The book ‘has no moral goal, does not enlighten the mind or uplift the soul’, and the reviewer concludes with the ultimate French Classicist putdown: ‘Let us hope that the author will apply the principles of the great masters – good sense and reason must be the primary guidelines for a writer.’ It wasn’t what he called littérature.
But this moralizing lesson meant nothing to the Brits, and Romantic novels like Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre kept up the cross-Channel storm of ‘irrational’ female emotion and unbridled passion. Even prim Jane Austen produced something of a Romantic bodice-ripper in Mr Darcy. Fair enough, women were by no means equal in Britain (Mary Shelley got some bad reviews there, too, and Mary Ann Evans called herself George Eliot so that she would be taken seriously), but such a concentrated outpouring of respected female fiction was unheard of in France. Only one Frenchwoman, Aurore Dupin, alias George Sand, came close, and she was (and is) known more for her scandalous love affairs than her writing. And it is a sign of how slowly France changes that since the creation of the Académie française in 1635, only four of its 710 members have been women.
How do you say ‘damned spot’ in French?
The most frightening attack on French Classicism, though, came from a man, and a dead one at that – Shakespeare.
The Académie, whose mission has always been to protect the purity of France’s culture and language, despised him – even Voltaire, who recognized Shakespeare’s genius with words, had felt obliged to mount an anti-Shakespeare campaign before he died, calling the Bard a ‘drunken savage’. Everything about his plays was disorderly and unclassical. Servants talked to kings like equals, words were invented willy-nilly, emotions got out of control, and quite a few of the characters said nasty things about the French, especially in the history plays. Worse still, instead of declaiming their lines like statues in a Greek temple, the actors actually moved. They acted. Quelle horreur.
When an English theatre troupe performed a selection of Shakespeare’s plays in Paris in 1827 and 1828, the actors confirmed all the Académie’s prejudices. Hamlet and Romeo were played by a 52-year-old and Othello by a drunk. They ranted and raved their way through the monologues and – even more shocking for Parisian audiences – played other scenes like real human beings. Sometimes they actually sobbed or laughed.
All of which delighted France’s most famous pioneer of Romanticism, Victor Hugo (or to give him his full first name, Victor-Marie). Before finding worldwide fame in the 1980s as the author of a hit musical comedy, Les Misérables,* Hugo was a soldier’s son turned writer, and a pioneering French fan of Shakespeare. The best-known pictures of him show an old white-bearded man resting his head on one hand, but in his youth Hugo was a rabble-rousing literary hothead whose chat-up line ‘why don’t you come up to my apartment so I can explain all about Romanticism?’ he tried out on any society lady or housemaid who came his way.
Legend has it that Hugo fell under Shakespeare’s spell in 1825, flicking through a copy of the play King John while attending the long, boring coronation of France’s King Charles X. By 1827, the sheer freedom of Shakespeare’s writing had got under the 25-year-old Hugo’s skin and he poured out his newfound passion in the preface to a play about the English hero Oliver Cromwell. (The play itself, incidentally, was considered too long and boring to be performed.)
Hugo’s preface idolizes pre-classical man and his primitive emotions. ‘He lets himself go. His thoughts, like his life, resemble a cloud that changes shape and direction with the wind.’ (The exact opposite of French Classicism.) Hugo goes on:
Shakespeare is Drama. And Drama breathes the grotesque and the sublime, the terrible and the farcical, tragedy and comedy, in the same breath. [There were no comic scenes in Racine’s tragedies.] Let us take a hammer to theories, politics and systems! Let us tear down the plaster façade masking the face of art. There are no rules or models. Or rather, there are no rules except the laws of Nature.
All in all, it was like playing ‘Anarchy in the UK’ at an Académie française garden party.
When Hugo put his theories into practice in his play Hernani, it had a predictable effect. The play itself is a rather overblown story about a bandit who falls in love with a noblewoman, but the plot was the last thing that interested the crowds on its opening night in February 1830. The verse was choppy and Shakespearean, the emotions bordered on hysteria, the hero was a common thief. Hugo was so nervous about the play’s reception on its opening night that he marshalled his friends and supporters like a Napoleonic army. The teenaged poet Théophile Gautier wore a bright red waistcoat and lime-green trousers to shock the Classicists. Pro-Romantics were strategically seated beside well-known adversaries and placed near the expensive boxes to shout down hecklers.
The play’s opening scene contains a piece of dialogue that got the Classicists howling with outrage. The King of Spain, a rival for the heroine’s affections, wants to hide in her bedroom. The maid, though, tries to throw him out, producing the following exchange:
‘Hide me here.’
‘You?’
‘Me.’
‘Why?’
‘No reason.’
‘Me, hide you?’
‘Here.’
‘Never.’
Perhaps it reminded the men of Paris’s literary establishment too much of visits to their lovers’ apartments. In any case, it was not the classical verse they wanted to hear at the theatre, and a riot broke out between the pros and the antis. It was a battle between the young and the old, between adherence to rules and free expression, between Shakespeare and the French. And it spilled out of the theatre into fights and even duels all over France.
Hernani was pretty profitable for Hugo – the scandal kept the play running for several weeks. But it got him evicted from his apartment after noisy opponents exasperated his landlord, and it took a lot longer to win the battle to impose Shakespeare’s disorderly literary conduct on French culture. The main problem seems to have been that the French language just couldn’t cope with him. Translations weakened the Bard’s poetry, because Latin-based French is too rigid and refined. For example, you just cannot translate the witch’s line in Macbeth, ‘ditch-delivered by a drab’, without pulling it to pieces. Fair enough, a drab is an old word for prostitute, so modern English-speakers might not get the reference either, but an 1844 French translation by the poet Émile Deschamps renders these punchy seven syllables as ‘d’un enfant de fille de joie,/Sur la borne écrasé par sa mère en naissant’ or ‘the child of a lady of the night, smashed at birth by its mother on a milestone’. The result isn’t a hag’s spell, it’s a posh poet’s explanation.
Deschamps was a Romantic, and did his best, but some of the translators didn’t dare give a full French version of what they read. The most common translation of Romeo and Juliet performed in the early nineteenth century had no fight scenes and no balcony. In Shakespeare’s original Othello, Desdemona loses a handkerchief decorated with a strawberry motif, but in nineteenth-century France, a mouchoir was considered too humble an object to provoke a tragedy, and strawberries were too rustic, so in early French versions she lost either a embroidered piece of Oriental cloth or a diamond-studded headband.
On a more profound level, despite all their claims to be a passionate nation, the nineteenth-century French were overwhelmed by Shakespeare’s emotions. Teenagers committing suicide for love; a king’s blood dripping from an imaginary knife; witches warning that a forest will walk – France was too Catholic for such pagan Anglo-Saxon goings-on.
In the end, though, the French Romantics won their battle to impose a toned-down version of the new aesthetics that the Brits had shown them, and made it all their own.
The poet Charles Baudelaire, a big fan of Romantic art and gothic novels, began writing his Fleurs du Mal in the early 1840s, basically by taking British-style Romanticism and adding a dash of absinthe and a dose of syphilis. He was as uncontrolled and unclassical as you could get, as were his libertine successors Verlaine (who went to live in England for a while) and Rimbaud.
The Impressionist painters, meanwhile, took Bonington’s and Turner’s love of quickly executed paintings and turned them into a quintessentially French movement that still sells almost as many posters as the late Michael Jackson.
Even so, it wasn’t until the late 1850s that Victor Hugo’s son François-Victor published a translation of Shakespeare’s plays with Desdemona losing a strawberry-spotted mouchoir.
A mere 250-odd years after it was written, Othello finally stopped being too modern for the French.
* In fact, Les Misérables was first a highly successful five-volume novel published in 1862. When it first came out, Hugo enquired about its sales by telegraphing his publisher with the message ‘?’. The publisher, with a bestseller on his hands, replied ‘!’.
21
How Britain Killed Off the
Last French Royals
During the French Revolution, Britain had offered support, exile and no doubt endless cups of tea to the surviving members of France’s royal family. Ever since, the French ruling classes had felt quietly confident that, even if the two countries had been at war almost constantly since the Norman Conquest, they could always find a friend in Buckingham Palace (which first became the official royal residence in 1837 when Victoria moved in).
Thus it was that, in the mid-nineteenth century, every time France embarked on one of its frequent bouts of political self-flagellation, the deposed rulers dived across the Channel in search of refuge.
However, exile chez l’ennemi wasn’t always a good idea, as the families of both Louis XVI and Napoleon Bonaparte were about to discover …
Louis-Philippe lives the dream
King Louis-Philippe was descended from the brother of Louis XIV, and belonged to a secondary branch of the Bourbon dynasty that had always been just out of range of the French throne. When the Revolution came, Louis-Philippe’s side of the family had even supported it, hoping that the upheavals might send the crown their way.
However, their wish didn’t come true until 1830, when King Charles X, who had succeeded his brother Louis XVIII, was ousted from power for the usual reason – trying to control Parliament instead of doing it the British way and adopting more of a figure-head role. Charles was forced to flee to England, where he was taunted by tricolour-waving crowds and hounded by creditors from his first exile during the Revolution.
Meanwhile, instead of calling for another Republic, the Paris mob and the politicians offered the throne to the moderate Louis-Philippe. They remembered his father, who had renamed himself ‘Philippe-Égalité’ and served the Revolution faithfully until he was guillotined for treason in 1793. Perhaps, the people thought, King Louis-Philippe would usher in a more democratic monarchy.
And at first, Louis-Philippe didn’t disappoint them – he went all out to try and change the royal image. ‘I don’t like gambling or hunting,’ he proclaimed, ‘and I don’t have a single mistress.’ Victor Hugo admired him for this simplicity and congratulated the King for ‘sleeping with his wife and having servants in his palace whose duty it is to show the conjugal bed to the bourgeois’.
Louis-Philippe went even further – he used to sing the ‘Marseillaise’ and walk the streets shaking hands with passers-by (though when doing this he would always wear a specially kept old glove). There is a photo of him, one of the first daguerreotypes, looking like a bourgeois gentleman, stuffed into a tight waistcoat, a top hat on the table beside him. His characteristic piled-up hair, side parting and bushy sideburns make him look modern for the times rather than an eighteenth-century throwback. His expression is rather snooty, but this might well have been because in those days you had to pose without moving a muscle for several seconds so as not to blur the photo.
The King tried to immobilize his critics in much the same way. The caricaturist Charles Philipon was put in jail for a drawing that showed Louis-Philippe’s chubby, wide-jawed head mutating into a pear – a piece of repression that backfired when Honoré Daumier produced a version of the cari
cature that was a hit all over Europe.
It took an assassination attempt to give the King some breathing space. In 1835, Giuseppe Fieschi, a Corsican ex-convict who had previously benefited from an amnesty of political prisoners by Louis-Philippe, fired a machine infernale made out of twenty-five rifle barrels at the King’s carriage as it was trotting along the boulevard du Temple in Paris. The home-made gun killed seventeen people and injured Fieschi but only managed to graze the King’s forehead. Although wounded, Louis-Philippe went on to review an army parade, and was hailed as a fearless hero when he made a joke during the ceremony. One of his generals had been killed, and other members of his entourage mown down, which was why, the King quipped, ‘I’m the one driving the coach.’ Not exactly a side-splitter, but standards were different in Paris in 1835.
In the subsequent trial, it turned out that Fieschi was a paid assassin, hired by anarchists who wanted the machine infernale to blow up and kill him, thus covering their traces. The State finished the job for them, guillotining Fieschi and two accomplices. Even here, Louis-Philippe showed his popular touch by ordering that the condemned men should be the first royal attackers in French history not to be tortured in public before their execution. All in all, every inch (or centimetre) the nice guy.
His popularity didn’t last long, however, because soon Radicals were accusing Louis-Philippe of being too friendly with the Brits. When Queen Victoria came on a state visit to Normandy in 1843, Louis-Philippe responded to her gesture of support with a speech that used the term entente cordiale for the first time (albeit the wrong way round – he used the English-sounding cordiale entente). The young Queen got on well with the cordial King, who spoke good English, and she invited him to pay a return visit. This he did in 1844, in full knowledge of the dangers it involved – if he got too warm a welcome in Britain he would become unpopular at home; if he was coldly received by the London crowds, he would be laughed at on both sides of the Channel.
1000 Years of Annoying the French Page 41
