by Ruth Brandon
He did not stop at economics, however. Having lighted upon an idea that he felt would save the world, he felt impelled to design the world he would save. And that was altogether more problematic. For the second salary did not take the form of a simple monthly addition to the paycheck. Rather, it went to workers’ wives and children, to the retired, the ill and the unemployed, in the form of grants. Only after these grants had permitted the wives, children, and old to live “properly” were surpluses passed on to the workers themselves, as bonuses.32 But who was to define “properly”?
Not the workers, that was for sure. Schueller did not believe in consultation. To run an enterprise jointly was, he felt, “humanly impossible.”33 He saw egalitarianism, “the determination not to recognize any superiority, and never to admit the truth,” as a sort of social gangrene. Trade unions and work councils were destructive rather than constructive; the noisiest propagandists always got elected, and then had to justify their election by making unreasonable demands. Concerned only with their short-term interests, they were part of the company, but not for it.34 Everything about workers’ lives precluded the visionary detachment essential if those lives were to be improved.
Schueller, on the other hand, felt himself uniquely well placed in this respect. France in the first half of the twentieth century was a very static society, and his rise from poverty to wealth and power had given him an unusually broad view of it. His scientific training and industrial experience meant that he had a wide personal experience of design, production, and publicity. Through his factories, he remained intimately acquainted with how the poor lived, and he devoted much of his business life to teaching them better habits, in the form of cleanliness. For him, advertising was not just a way to raise sales but a tool for improving people’s living standards. “People are lazy,” he told business journalist Merry Bromberger. “You have to push them to spend, to consume—to move on. When I advertise . . . I feel I’m working in the public interest, not just for myself.”35
This evangelistic inclination was also evident in Votre Beauté, the magazine he published monthly. His original magazine, Coiffure de Paris, had become, by the 1920s, Le Coiffure et la mode. But despite carrying its articles in English, Spanish, and German, presumably to increase international sales, this was still of very limited interest compared to the general-interest women’s magazines he saw on visits to England. So in 1933 Le Coiffure et la mode became Votre Beauté, complete with readers’ letters seeking help for confidential problems (one of its most important sources of copy), as well as the latest from the couturiers, interviews with prominent society women and actresses, and assorted beauty hints. The result was a much wider readership and advertising base.
Although Schueller’s name did not appear above any of the articles, he wrote a great deal of Votre Beauté himself. And this gave it a particular flavor. In similar American and British magazines, beauty hints meant discussions of cosmetics, creams, and the best ways to apply them. But such things had little place in Schueller’s world: he neither made nor used them. Instead, French women were exhorted to make themselves beautiful through strict routines of diet and exercise. From thinness and fitness, all else followed. “Do marrons glacés put on weight?” enquired “Rose d’Orléans” in the first selection of readers’ letters. “Yes!” came the uncompromising answer—followed by a calorie breakdown showing that a single marron put you 100 calories to the bad (the recommended daily intake being no more than a meager 1,500 calories all told3).36 Many readers wanted to grow taller: they were advised to stand up straight—and, above all, to exercise. “It is a crime,” thundered an editorial in January 1934, “not to make the most of such an easy and pleasant way of improving your physique, keeping young, and prolonging your life!” Pages of detailed drawings and photographs introduced readers to winter sports (their skins protected, of course, by L’Oréal’s Ambre Solaire), and every issue contained a new, health-giving diet. When Colette, whose love of good food was legendary and who in later life had become very plump, wrote a piece in her journal saying fat women were happier than thin ones, Votre Beauté’s disapproval was almost hysterical. “Colette, dear, wonderful Colette, we all know you’re too fond of food. . . . But, for heaven’s sake, don’t try and make converts. . . . Go to all the banquets in the world, but don’t put your genius at the service of big bottoms and fat thighs!”37
In particular (a clue, here, as to the editor’s particular predilection?) women were exhorted to take care of their breasts. How to stop them sagging? (Exercises.) How to prevent them getting too large? (Stimulate ovarian activity as soon as puberty sets in, as sluggish ovaries lead to oversize breasts.) How to make them bigger? (Exercise.) Every issue contained a page of before and after photographs, in which nipples, following the recommended treatment, migrated upwards as if by magic; every month Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, a well-known pundit and “the uncontested master of sexology,” recommended his special hormone treatment (also with before and after photographs). A despairing reader, writing in to ask if she should undergo breast reduction surgery, was, however, recommended not to do so immediately. Big breasts weren’t necessarily a complete barrier to attraction; she shouldn’t give up hope, and she should remember that surgery left scars.
Economics, health, beauty—who better than such a universally qualified man to propound the basic principles of utopia? The 1930s in France was a time of intense theorizing on both the left and the right, and everyone was eager to set out his own plan for national renewal. Schueller was no exception. In his book Le Deuxième salaire, published in 1939, he described his ideal world. To begin with, every family would have a house, ideally one designed by Schueller himself. In 1929 the American architect R. Buckminster Fuller had designed a house made of aluminum with premolded pipework, kitchen, and bathroom, and intended for low-cost mass production, that he called the Dymaxion House. Schueller made no mention of Fuller in his writings, but his own design incorporated many Dymaxion-type features—aluminum construction, industrial prefabrication, molded bathrooms. The Schueller house was prefabricated along the lines of an aircraft hangar, its triple-skinned aluminum frame providing heat and sound insulation, and its ogival shape giving a lofty sense of space. It was built from modules 85 centimeters long, 6 meters wide, and 5 meters high: house sizes would vary depending on the number of modules used. Large windows and skylights would make for light, airy spaces. Modern domestic necessities would be built in: piped water, washing machines, ironing machines, fridges, radios. The furniture would be of the latest wonder material, Bakelite, and designed by the best designers (Schueller was a connoisseur of fine furniture, commissioning his own from the great Art Deco designer Ruhlmann, whose clients also included Baron Henri de Rothschild, from whom he had bought Monsavon). Schueller’s suburbs would be spacious and green, with widely spaced dwellings set among intensively cultivated vegetable gardens, along the lines of William Morris’s 1890 utopian News from Nowhere, which advocated a bucolic lifestyle in harmony with the natural world.4 Transport would consist of small family cars with an average ten-year life span. People would wear modern fabrics, crease-resistant and stretchy. Only young, strong men would work in industry, traveling to work in car pools. Women would stay home, devoting their lives to their families. Every working man, in Schueller’s view, needed a wife waiting for him at home. Especially when work was scarce, he thought women had a duty not to compete with men: they should resign their jobs and look after their many child
ren. “A home, for a man, means a wife at home, and if every member of the family over fourteen has to work for a living, it isn’t a real home.”38 Older men would cultivate the gardens, and help the women with household tasks and crafts. Artists and craftsmen were also accommodated in this worldview, their artifacts adding to the pleasure of life.
Under Schueller’s system, poverty would be eliminated. So, too, would enormous wealth. Schueller admitted that getting rich was a not insignificant motivation in business, but in the end “we all have the same pen, the same telephone, the same radio, we’ll all have more or less the same fridge, the same car, the same mattress, the same sheets—and anyway,” he grumbled, like Helena Rubinstein indignant that such a large proportion of his rightful earnings should be confiscated by an ungrateful state, “there’s not much left once you’ve paid your taxes.”39 Running a business was, rather, about reinvestment and development, and he had definite ideas about that.
First, it was important that employers personally own their concerns. They must be allowed to take risks and go broke from time to time—for Schueller, risk-taking was what being a successful industrialist was all about—and shareholders would always vote for income over investment, rejecting risk on the pretext that “it all works fine as it is.” (L’Oréal remained a private company throughout its founder’s lifetime, going public only in 1963, six years after Schueller’s death.) Banks’ money was especially to be avoided, since banks were particularly risk-averse.5 So were those who owned a business through inheritance. Schueller thoroughly disapproved of businesses being inherited. The fact that so many of France’s businesses were dynastic was, he thought, a great weakness. Not only did it entrench social immobility, it had left the country economically underdeveloped—to the point, indeed, where even Schueller felt France’s most important resource was her land;6 her industries relied for survival on tariffs and cartels.
Above all, Schueller felt that being an employer was about social responsibility. He offered his own experience as an example of the kind of management vision needed. In 1936, he had mechanized one of his factories, and two years later production had risen 34 percent, using 11 percent less in the way of manpower. Each sacked worker represented 12 francs a day saved, but 15 percent of those let go were unable to find another job, and to those he continued to pay 10 francs a day out of this saving. He also paid monthly supplements to his workers’ families, 100 francs for the first child, 50 francs for the second, 200 francs to mothers who stayed home rather than going out to work. Motherhood was a social service: big families were essential if France was to be repopulated following the carnage of World War I.40 He hoped such practices would become widespread. All that was needed to achieve the revolution was a handful of strong-minded men like himself. If they persevered, they would prevail.
To connoisseurs of twentieth-century self-made men, all this will sound oddly familiar. A dynamic employer who rises from poverty to create a new industry through his own outstanding technical and commercial abilities, and who then uses part of his profits to create a kind of self-contained mini-state in which to impose his idea of how things should be—such a man already, and famously, existed. Schueller’s trajectory, so rare in France, would have raised no eyebrows in America. And his hero was indeed American—the automobile magnate Henry Ford. Ford, like Schueller, directed some of his profits into social services—housing, schooling, hospitals—for the families of his workers. Like Schueller, he was concerned that these subventions should be used properly—that is, used as Ford thought best. Like Schueller he was a political idealist, the idealism, in his case, taking the form of pacifism. (In 1915, his Peace Ship initiative tried vainly to bring World War I to an end.) And, like Schueller, he had an economic dada—in Ford’s case, the five-dollar day, his aim being to ensure that every one of his workers could afford to buy one of his cars.
When Ford instituted the five-dollar day in 1914, it seemed like an act of reckless generosity. In fact it paid for itself handsomely as higher wages led to better health and morale, and hence increased production. But it was not, in practice, as straightforward as it sounded. You could earn five dollars a day, if you worked uncomplainingly on the production lines Ford had built and led the kind of life he thought you should lead: not smoking or drinking (Ford did neither), and putting some of your money into savings. Ford created a Sociological Department to educate and inspect his workers, and decide how much each man should be awarded. You didn’t have to be a respectably married nonsmoking teetotaller to work at Ford’s. But you wouldn’t earn five dollars a day unless you were, any more than Schueller’s workers would see their share of profits until their families were certified as living “properly.”
Schueller was a great admirer of Ford, and his economic and social theories were heavily influenced by Fordism.41 And Fordism led to a particular kind of politics. Unlike most businessmen, whose interest in their workers ceased once they had left the plant, Ford and Schueller’s form of extended paternalism effectively turned their businesses into mini–welfare states. And in the chaotic world of the 1920s and thirties, it seemed logical that what worked for their businesses might also work in the wider political arena.
Ford first dipped his toes into political waters in 1918. He ran for the United States Senate, as a Democrat, but was defeated in a viciously corrupt campaign. In 1923 there was talk of drafting him to run for president. But he hated public speaking so much, and was so bad at it, that after his one and only failed attempt at a political rally, he determined never again to risk a comparable humiliation. “I can hire someone to talk for me that knows how,” he said. “That talking thing is a gift. I’m glad I never acquired it, and I’ll never try again.”42 Nor did he need to. Why humiliate himself at the hustings when he could practice his theories upon a captive audience and a captive population?
Untrammeled by the need to accommodate public opinion, what had begun as a benign dictatorship soon changed into something altogether unpleasant. Ford’s Sociological Department, begun in a genuine spirit of philanthropy, was after a few years replaced by a Service Department, which sounded equally altruistic but whose function was very different. Set up to coordinate the protection of the plant, the Service Department soon transmuted into a network of spies, informers, and enforcers who terrorized the Ford factories and suppressed all dissent. Labor organizers were beaten, strikes were broken brutally, protesters were sacked: one ex-member of the Service Department referred to it as “our Gestapo.”743 Indeed, Hitler was a fervent admirer of Ford. Mein Kampf was written with Ford’s autobiography, My Life and Times, and philosophy—“an absence of fear of the future and of veneration of the past”—much in mind.8
Schueller, too, was an unashamed authoritarian: as he put it, “An elected leader is already less of a leader.” 44 He thought democracy should mean government for all, but not by all. Running a modern state was too difficult to be left to anyone the masses might choose.45 However, when it came down to picking actual men, he showed himself to be somewhat uncertain. The list of leaders he admired included Stalin, Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, Horthy, Atatürk, Pilsudski, Roosevelt, Chamberlain, and Daladier—that is, pretty much every available one, elected or otherwise. From which we can only conclude that the mere fact of making it to the top was evidence, as far as he was concerned, of the right stuff. Similarly, although he did not at this stage think France should ally herself with Germany—on the contrary, his great concern was the unpreparedness of the French a
rmy—as a committed authoritarian he could not help admiring Hitler’s style. Hitler hadn’t pandered to the trade unions with a New Deal like Roosevelt in the United States, or with a forty-hour week and unemployment pay like Léon Blum in France. Instead, he had taken all the men he could get hold of and put them to work, creating a formidable military power. France, Schueller felt, should do likewise. Nevertheless, despite his dislike and distrust of the unions (a dislike wholeheartedly reciprocated), he continued to employ union men, and did not persecute them as Ford did.
Of course Schueller and Ford were not alone in being attracted by the idea of dictatorship. They were probably unique, outside the ranks of politicians, in actually running, to a greater or lesser extent, their own state; but as the broke and dithering thirties limped on, many idealists with no personal experience of power were attracted by the capacity for unimpeded action that dictatorship seemed to offer. “I am asking for a Liberal Fascisti, for enlightened Nazis,” declared H. G. Wells, addressing the Oxford Union in 1932, still, despite all the evidence, apparently believing that a benign dictatorship was not an oxymoron. “The world is sick of parliamentary democracy. The fascist party is Italy. The Communist is Russia. The Fascists of liberation must carry out a parallel ambition on a far grander scale.”
With hindsight, Wells’s call seems extraordinarily naive. But it was a true expression of his personal creed, which managed to combine socialism with unambiguous elitism. Many of his novels—The Time Machine, A Modern Utopia, The New Machiavelli, Anticipations—envisaged worlds ruled by a special governing order of the best and the brightest. And Wells was not alone in this seemingly incompatible combination of beliefs: this was the generation of socialists who embraced the new “science” of eugenics—but who were appalled when those theories were actually translated into action.
