Modernity and Bourgeois Life

by Jerrold Seigel

  The new journalism’s mix of local and distant involvements extended much further. The papers relied on telegraphs for news and modern transport for distribution, and touted their pride at the speed with which they could get news to the public, often in “extra” editions, distributed with the aid of tramways (later trucks). These features of the papers reflected the deeper embeddedness of the cities they served in distant relations of all kinds, their economies tied up with national and world markets (“extroverted” rather than “introverted,” in the terms Jeanne Gaillard used about Paris), their politics shaped by national and (especially for socialists) international connections, their burgeoning size creating urban spaces too large to be grasped (or navigated) in an older, more immediate way, and inhabited by large numbers of first-generation immigrants whose unfamiliarity with the world around them both gave it the air of mystery that sensationalistic writing exploited, and created a need for the information about local goings-on the papers provided. An editorial in Le Petit Parisien in 1893 stressed the papers’ role in linking immediate and local experience to the distant places that increasingly impinged on it: “To read one’s newspaper is to live the universal life, the life of the whole capital, of the entire city, of all France, of all the nations … It is the newspaper that establishes this sublime communion of souls across distances.” Some of the Paris papers moved their offices to the new boulevards where traffic flowed between neighborhoods and sections of the city, and where much of the faster-paced life fostered by Haussmann’s rebuilding found its place, a development one observer regarded as “inevitable … Where better than the boulevard to feel the pulse of the city?”29 The new journalism drew on and gave expression to many of the same qualities of modern urban experience as did the impressionist painting we will consider in Chapter 14, notably the mix of physical closeness and psychic distance in personal relations Simmel described as typical of modern urban life, but in a style much more unbuttoned than in Manet’s “The Railway” or Caillebotte’s “Man at the Window.” The potential for fantasy projection such experiences and relations created was responsible for much of the excitement (as well as anxiety) that urban experience generated, the property Peter Fritzsche evokes when he observes that “turn-of-the-century Berliners … encountered the city as a place of previously unimagined possibility,” and that a (female) newspaper editor looked back on from the 1920s, recalling that “I felt that I was sitting right in the navel of the world, life streamed by in thousands of photos, hundreds of people, in the voices of the entire globe.”30

  Thus papers, like the novels and magazines with which they shared writers and readers, helped to form a new kind of popular culture, at once altered and invigorated by its participation in expanding and thickening communicative networks. What would later be called “mediatization,” encountering the world through vehicles set up to represent it, came to be part of cultural experience for individuals and groups whose relations with others and with ideas had hitherto taken place in more immediate and bounded ways. This gave a certain more commonly middle-class cast to popular experience, as socialist activists recognized when they expressed fears that workers in particular were being drawn away from their supposedly authentic existence and consciousness, made “bourgeois” through access not just to consumer goods but to the messages, entertainments, and leisure activities increasingly available to them.31 The kind of entry-point to the world provided by mass-circulation papers with their focus on faits divers differed from that of more literate and reflective organs much in the way the popular novels studied by Anne-Marie Thiesse contrasted with traditional literature; the books and papers spoke directly to people in accents they knew, in restricted codes rather than an elaborated one. They specifically renounced the effort to challenge people’s sense of what their experience and their relations with others might be. If some readers hungry for a diet of faits divers came close to the editor quoted above in feeling that they stood in “the navel of the world,” their relationship to the network from which the messages flowed was more passive, and the content they received palpably different. Popular culture was acquiring new heft and strength from its ties to the sort of distant connections that high culture had largely monopolized before, altering the relations between them; but the orientations toward experience each fostered remained largely distinct.

  Both movies and music provide illustrations of these processes and relationships. Moving pictures had their chief roots in popular cultural forms, some in the country and town fairs where entertainments included devices of various kinds able to pass a quickly shifting series of printed images before one or more viewers, creating the illusion of motion, and in dioramas or panoramas that (from the 1820s) produced comparable experiences for a larger audience by changing the light or angle in which spectators viewed a wall-size landscape or other scene inside an enclosure built for the purpose. Photography allowed similar effects to be produced by passing light through a series of plates or films, and in the 1890s both Louis Lumière and Thomas Edison contrived devices able to make and project images that conveyed the illusion of movement, opening the way to modern film-making (the near-simultaneity of their inventions illustrates the effects of what Joel Mokyr calls the “reduced access costs” for information brought about by thickened webs of communication). By 1900 large crowds were attending such showings, drawn in more by the pleasure of the illusion than for any particular content; before 1910 fairs and variety shows remained common venues, and the subjects were chiefly those of the popular entertainments just mentioned, often having to do with travel or everyday life (the arrival of a train, a bride at the end of her wedding day), and employing trick effects.

  As makers began to offer longer sequences with more complicated subjects (marking the shift from what movie historians call the “cinema of attractions” to the modern narrative film) the popular origins of the genre remained an important element in the ways middle-class viewers reacted to it. Peter Jelavich has shown that educated Germans, especially Bildungsbürger formed on a diet of traditional culture, worried about whether they should allow themselves to be entertained by such fare as wild west films; in contrast, André Gide welcomed Charlie Chaplin with the journal entry that “it is so good to be able not to despise what the crowd admires.” Gide’s comment points to the important role that cinema would play in drawing French intellectuals into the romance with popular culture they have kept up ever since, a phenomenon less visible among their German counterparts, who (on the left as well as the right, a point to which I will come in a moment) displayed a greater fear that movies, like other forms of popular entertainment, would corrupt public and private taste. Even the French had to focus much of their enthusiasm for popular cinema on some supposedly more innocent past, however, partly in order to deal with longstanding alarms about immorality and the corrupting effect of “mechanical” procedures on culture of all kinds.32

  Despite these anxieties, the early history of cinema is in good part a story about the way a form rooted in popular entertainment came to occupy a large place in high culture and the lives of people devoted to it, illustrating the similarities the two levels were acquiring as popular forms came to be organized in ways previously more characteristic of elite ones. An important moment in this transformation came with the building of large and often luxurious movie houses beginning in the years just before World War I (the Gaumont Palace, opened in Paris in 1911, was the first and most illustrious French example), an innovation that relied on the improving technology of photography and projection (and after 1927 on the introduction of recorded and coordinated sound) and that was accompanied by the shift to a system of distributing films to houses by rental instead of purchase, encouraging more rapid and regular program changes. The new locales also introduced a sliding scale of ticket prices corresponding to different seating sections, at once preserving class distinctions and providing for the simultaneous participation of elite and popular strata in a single cultural activity, a phenomenon
that would mark such later instances as radio and television too. The striking expansion this produced led the Austrian novelist Robert Musil to observe after the War that the churches over the centuries “had not succeeded in creating as dense a network as cinema has done in thirty years,” an achievement that rested on the reconciliation of the elite public with what a French historian describes as “a spectacle hitherto too-much tied to the fried-potato-oil smell of outdoor fairs and the sweat and tobacco odors of the music-halls.” The two milieux never wholly fused, however, and by the 1920s people (at least in Paris) were speaking not about a single movie-going public but a number of different ones. These did not correspond neatly with social classes, but doubtless most of those who were drawn to the clubs and reviews making exalted claims for film as high culture that spread after the War (the first “Society of Art Cinema” had been founded in 1908) were mostly educated bourgeois, carrying on a discourse to which the majority of viewers remained indifferent. Thus there could arise the contrast between the cinéma du quartier and the quartier du cinéma that Anne-Marie Thiesse educes as symbolic of broader divisions within modern culture.33

  A comparable evolution can be discerned in music. In Paris the roots of what would be modern popular musical culture in the years between the wars lay in the expansion of musical cafés (café concerts) under the Second Empire and the music halls that began to supplant them under the Third Republic. Both owed their prominence to urban expansion and the less inhibited style of leisure for which the rebuilt city of light was becoming famous (encouraged by the new boulevards and by the Empire’s abolition of theater privileges in 1867). Tied up with earlier locales known chiefly for dancing, they bore names such as the Eldorado, the Folies Bergères, and the Reine Blanche, the last renamed the Moulin Rouge in 1888. The entertainment in the café concerts has been well described as a “mix of traditional song and fairground spectacle,” alternating music with short dramatic pieces or street-performer routines. Music halls extended the mix of genres to include circus acts, side-show staples (dwarfs, “ugliest,” fattest, or thinnest people, etc.) and troops of “girls” (in English), what one writer has called “a mosaic of borrowings from all the arts of showmanship.” But increasingly they featured reviews with orchestras, dancing, songs – racy, saucy, sometimes political or taking a satirical view of contemporary events and personalities – and headed by performers whose reputation was cultivated by advertising. The music halls and their performers inspired some of the great classics of poster art, and figures such as Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec included them in work intended as something more than publicity.

  Although each of the venues was an independent enterprise (there was some consolidation after the War), they quickly began to develop networks of outside connections that brought them wider attention and influence. One strand in this web was selling scores and texts for popular numbers from the reviews; the publisher François Salabert began to specialize in the genre during the 1880s, doing very well from a number of best-selling songs and collections and creating an audience for current Parisian music outside the city. This, in turn, helped give popular singers a wider exposure, allowing some of them to become the first real pop stars, beginning with the chanteuse Thérésa, already well known enough in the mid 1860s to command an income equal to the top dancers at the Paris Opera; in 1885 she made a highly successful European tour. By then Yvette Guibert (born in 1865) was launching a career that would make her still more famous, given extra cachet from the famous images of her by Toulouse-Lautrec and Cheret. In the same years imitators of the Parisian music halls sprung up in several provincial French cities; by 1900 there were “Eldorados” in Nice, Lyon, Poitiers and Albi, and Folies Bergères in Lyon, Le Havre, Rouen, and Brest, joined by still more before 1914; the same songs seem to have been part of the programs everywhere. As early as the 80s a maker of cough drops was using images of music-hall stars to advertise his product. The international prestige of the music-halls and their performers was at its height in the years between the wars, but firm foundations had been laid before 1914.34

  Despite their connections with popular forms of entertainment, however, the music halls were far from being strictly lower-class locales. The well-known ones listed above often set admission prices at levels that excluded most workers and their families, who sought recreation instead in neighborhood hangouts or in the suburbs. This does not mean that working-class leisure went untouched by the changes occurring in other social milieux. At least in some places workers able to afford the admissions prices (in the Paris suburbs new industries such as machine building and automobiles paid relatively well) quickly became enthusiasts for movies, music halls, and even theaters; traditional genres such as gymnastics, singing, and animal training remained popular, but even for them “marketplaces and fairs were replaced by glamorous showcases; crowds became audiences.”35 The same can be said with even more emphasis about places like the Moulin Rouge and the Folies Bergères whose clientèle, as we know from the famous images by Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Picasso, was in good part bourgeois; even before 1900 the patrons included many foreign and provincial tourists.

  That both broadly middle-class audiences and serious artists were drawn to such places calls for several observations. The first is the obvious point that not all bourgeois were drawn to high culture; many were happy to seek communion through music and public performances that did not require the kind of attention associated with listening to Beethoven or Wagner. More than one observer thought the rapidly shifting components of music hall entertainment were necessary in order to hold the interest of a diverse audience. In addition, however, the features of such performances that drew Degas, Manet, or Toulouse-Lautrec to such locales were ones that had long attracted their fellows to non-elite locales and practices: Baudelaire’s exemplary “Painter of Modern Life” had been a popular illustrator, Constantin Guys; Courbet found inspiration for the direct and unidealized style he called realism in popular prints and drawings; many composers incorporated elements of folk music into their works; and numerous literary figures from Balzac to Alexander Döblin and after were fascinated by the color and vitality of popular argot. To modernists in search of paths of escape from traditional limits and new sources of cultural energy, these alternative forms offered resources of much importance; in taking them up, artists of all kinds undermined from within the very separation between high and popular forms of representation and expression that other features of cultural evolution were rendering more rigid.

  The complex mix that could result from such configurations of cultural elements by late in the century is well illustrated by the artistic cabarets that sprang up in Montmartre from the 1880s, the Chat Noir and its imitators. The Chat Noir’s founders Émile Goudeau and Rodolphe Salis had been inspired to establish their venue by earlier Latin Quarter cafés intended to provide exposure and publicity for young poets, writers, and illustrators. Like these earlier ventures, the Chat Noir published a paper dedicated in part to calling attention to the artists and performers who appeared there, seeking to make a direct appeal to the public in a manner that had much in common with the strategies by which picture dealers such as Durand-Ruel were attempting to give a new kind of organization to the relations between visual artists and their audience. Some of the figures who appeared at the Chat Noir had or gained considerable stature (Maurice Rollinat, who had close ties to Rodin, presented Baudelaire’s poetry and Erik Satie played piano there for a time), but others belonged more to the world of mostly forgotten popular writers we described above, and the general atmosphere was one that blurred the lines between high culture and things often thought to be incompatible with it. The mix of genres, recalling that of the music halls, and the fact that books and prints were for sale alongside drink (in a neighborhood where other pleasures, some suspect or illicit, were available too), helped encourage the comparison sometimes made between the cabarets and the increasingly prominent department stores. Like these, the Chat Noir and i
ts imitators advertised throughout France, seeking to add tourists (even some who came to Paris in part for religious reasons) to their clientèle.36

  The popular and commercial side of what made the cabarets so successful at the end of the century is well illustrated by the career of Aristide Bruant, the celebrated chansonnier, today known mostly through the striking lithograph Toulouse-Lautrec did as an advertising poster for him. Bruant got his start at the Chat Noir before setting up his own establishment, Le Mirliton, in 1885 (the name means a toy pipe) in the premises vacated by the first one’s move to a larger space. His enormously successful appearances, along with published editions of his songs (sold throughout the country and advertised in his newspaper, also called Le Mirliton), took popular and working-class life as their subject, evoking the districts where workers lived, the poverty and suffering they endured, the experience of being out of work and “in the street” (Dans la rue was the title of his most famous collection). Bruant’s forceful, colorful, often slangy language (he published a dictionary of argot), along with his sympathy for his subjects, gave a seemingly radical edge to his work; the songs were sometimes sung in anarchist meetings, and he greeted patrons in his café with ritualized insults and hard stares. But even more than Courbet, he came to value such a style as a way of gaining notoriety, and thus a following. By the end he was defending property, patriotism, and right-wing causes. As a friend who was a former police officer wrote in a pamphlet about him, “The characteristic of Bruant’s particular success is that he has known how to make himself the idol of the poor and at the same time gain the acceptance of the others, the highly placed people and those he calls les fins-de-siècle. He has on his side both the oppressors and the oppressed.” His connection to the Chat Noir and his broad-based following show how the larger audience available by the end of the century, and the new techniques being developed to appeal to it, created a potential to redraw the boundaries between levels of culture.37