1913
Page 7
The idea of Parisian Bohemianism – passionate, flamboyant, unconventional – was already established in literary culture by the 1850s, though it had to wait another forty years to be immortalised in music by the Italian composer Giacomo Puccini.18 By the 1860s, in the midst of the Haussmann boom, the city acquired a reputation for moral licence and for excess, described as the new Babylon, or as ‘the entertainer of Europe’.19 This was the city of Manet’s Olympia, depicting a naked courtesan staring confidently out of the canvas at any one of her surrogate clients amongst the male crowds of the Paris Salon.20 It was the city described in Zola’s Nana, which tracks the career of a teenage star of the operetta stage who seduces men only to ultimately destroy both them and herself. In 1867 the city created a new aspect to its universalism, hosting the Exposition Universelle, and making itself the world’s shop window, with exhibits from as far away as Japan and Burma.
The Commune briefly revived the city’s reputation for political radicalism. But unlike the revolutions of 1789, 1830 or 1848 – which had become foundation myths for the following regime – the Commune was something rather to forget than to commemorate. There was no glory attached to it for most republicans – socialists excepted – only the reminder of disaster. Instead Paris regained her former insouciance, coupled with an expansion in outlets for the consumption of alcohol, sex and amusement. Populism transferred from politics to entertainment. Between 1870 and the mid 1880s the number of Parisian cafés rose from 22,000 to 42,000.21 Paris became the city of Seurat, who painted girls delicately lifting their skirts in dance halls for the inspection of orchestra and audience in Le Chahut or the Parisian bourgeoisie taking their ease on the island of La Grande Jatte, a top-hatted dandy promenading with his mistress. It was also the city of Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas, sculptor of tender ballerinas, painter of circuses, brothels and dance halls.
The fin de siècle saw Paris resplendent, at the height of its reputation – origin of all the latest fads, and capital of the arts. Only in Paris could one visit the Louvre in the afternoon, listen to an operetta in the evening and then, if feeling adventurous, listen to gypsy music until dawn at the Rat Mort in the still largely unmodernised Montmartre, or take in the plebeian scene at the Moulin de la Galette. Around the Grands Boulevards, Paris became the playground for Europe’s wealthy and dissolute, choosing each sunset between the Folies Bergère on rue Richer, the Moulin Rouge or the Étoile Palace, where each night a different cast of spectators was unburdened of their worries and of their money by the same cast of singers and dancers. In Paris one could eat well, the city having practically invented the modern restaurant, lunching at the Ritz and dining at Durand’s or at Paillard’s. And Paris remained, of course, the city of sex, whether purchased directly from one of the city’s many brothels or more indirectly and delicately acquired through the taking on of a mistress.
If London was where the world came to invest its money, Paris sold itself as the place where the world came to spend it. In London people did business; in Paris they came to international conferences: 426 were held in the French capital between 1900 and 1913, compared to 168 in Brussels, 141 in London and 96 in Berlin (New York, off the beaten track of such things, held just 14, fewer than the Norwegian capital Oslo).22 In the 1890s the German Kaiser disparagingly called Paris ‘the whorehouse of the world’ – but he knew that his own capital, however much it might have grown, could not yet compare with it for charisma or international pull.23 In 1900 Paris hosted the Exposition Universelle for the fourth time, each time more successful than the last. Some fifty million visitors saw the Exposition of 1900 – more than the entire population of France or Britain. Paris thus laid claim to the twentieth century.
Americans, in particular, had long been in love with Paris, the antidote to American puritanism and the narrowness of its commercial spirit.24 Increasing numbers of Americans took advantage of fast ships to Le Havre to consummate that love – and, in a novel twist, to find themselves in the process. In Henry James’ novel The Ambassadors, published in 1903, the fifty-five-year-old Lewis Lambert Strether is sent to Paris to rescue his fiancée’s son Chad from the city’s moral dangers – Chad has taken up with an elegant (and older) Parisian companion – and instead finds himself quite taken in by the city, leading him to re-examine his own life in its light.25 In the same year The Ambassadors was published, a well-off young American, Gertrude Stein, moved to Paris with her brother Leo, where she established an intellectual salon at their apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus, its walls dripping with contemporary art of the Paris scene.
Thus visitors to Paris serviced the city’s mythology, and became part of it themselves. ‘Paris’, observed an American visitor from the Midwest in 1913, ‘is the magnet that attracts all the tribes of the earth; it is the dumping ground for the gold of the world’. The city left her breathless – something no one would ever say of London, except perhaps in reference to its smog:
Once you have lived in it [Paris], drunk in its beauties, absorbed its mysterious atmosphere, and become fascinated with its inscrutable personality and its sans-gêne joy of life, you are part of it forever. It is a city full of noble beauty and of fascination. You cannot define this fascination, but you feel it – it takes possession of you. You breathe it in, in long delicious drafts. You live tremendously and nerve-rackingly; you expect it, it is Paris.26
So much for the city of revolution. Paris was now the quintessential city of seduction, sensation and spectacle, to be consumed without moderation, to be experienced rather than to be comprehended: the city of pleasure and occasionally the city of risk. This was a mythology to which Parisians themselves could subscribe, flattering, as it did, both their sophistication and their worldliness.
By 1913 Paris had become the first global tourist brand: its allure to the world undiminished. Paris was a commodity, reproduced on postcards and posters, bottled and sold as perfume. A thousand Cafés de Paris opened their doors around the world, aspiring to recreate, even for one instant, the atmosphere of the street of the genuine French capital, with its boulevardiers, elegantly-dressed flâneurs, and its colourful criminal gangs of apaches. Visitors to the real thing could not leave it without having some tacky keepsake thrust upon them. An ‘Article de Paris’, as such souvenirs were known – ‘souvenir’ meaning memory in French – could be anything from artificial flowers to a leather bag.
In truth, such articles were more likely to have been mass produced in the city’s east end than hand-crafted in a studio within earshot of Nôtre Dame. But this did not matter. Like relics from the Holy Land a thousand years previously, the object’s significance lay partly in its provenance, but equally in the meaning with which the owner imbued it, and the worship to which it was subjected, displayed proudly on a mantelpiece or above a doorway. Souvenirs were, of course, ephemera – but ephemera touched by eternity. Sergey Prokofiev sent back twenty-nine identical postcards of the Eiffel Tower to friends in St Petersburg to prove that he had indeed made it to the city of light. He also ordered a black suit with black-and-white checked trousers, experimented with whisky and soda, and stayed in his first double bed. ‘Altogether Paris, as a city, is astonishingly beautiful, alive, gay and seductive’, he wrote in his diary, ‘I felt on top of the world there, surrounded on all sides by novelty and interest’.27
But was not Paris a little tawdry in 1913 compared to the magnificent city of 1900? Trainloads of tourists arrived each morning from Calais with a day’s hectic sight-seeing before them. Was the city’s romance not diminished by industrial-scale tourism, and by the cheap pedlars and swindlers who sought to profit from it? On stepping outside his hotel on the rue Helder, Prokofiev found himself immediately assailed by a Frenchman who sold him a map and a dozen postcards and who ‘offered me from under the counter a packet of indecent pictures’.28 Dreiser chased away a similar approach by asking the vendor if he had a mother, or a sister, and what they would think of such things.29 Baedeker presented card sharps as being a particular hazar
d on suburban trains and warned its female readers not to frequent cafés north of the Grands Boulevards, where they risked being misunderstood and possibly harassed. Tourists of both sexes were advised not to travel to less-frequented parts of the city after nightfall, and to be vigilant at all times against ‘the huge army of pickpockets and other rogues who are quick to recognize the stranger and skilful in taking advantage of his ignorance’.30 Prokofiev’s mother, perhaps a little less impressionable than her young son, was rather less bowled over by the city: ‘“Well, here it is, Paris”, said Mama as we came out through the gates of the Gare du Nord and she looked around her. “Nothing special though.”’31
Some Parisians worried: was not Paris losing some of its charm and originality? Parisia magazine fulminated in January 1913 against the commercialisation of the Champs-Elysées. ‘An illuminated sign over there, a pylon to be erected over here; further on, an advertising hoarding freshly mounted; emboldened building-owners agree to hire themselves out for business with ever more aggressive and provocative displays and advertisements’, wrote a journalist, criticising the trend to place advertisements across the front of buildings, breaking up the visual rhythm of the avenue and prostituting it to baser purposes. ‘See those enormous golden letters hanging from the balcony, look at the flamboyant sign which “makes eyes” at you in the same way a pickpocket “does” your pockets’, the tirade continued, ‘see if you can stand the glare of a tawdry electric advertisement which would burn the pupils of a blind man’.32
Worse, perhaps, was the demolition of parts of Montmartre, the former crucible of the Parisian art scene and of the city’s romantic appeal. On the very day that Raymond Poincaré was being feted in London, the London papers reported on the area’s gradual transformation. ‘Old Montmartre’, one noted, ‘is being pulled stone from stone, and soon will be nothing but a memory’:
The wide-trousered, floating-tied, long-haired Bohemians of all the Quat’z’Arts, who had found their last refuge in this forgotten village are in despair, and know not where to hide now to be at peace. Paris is invading the sacred Butte, and all that gave it character and charm is vanishing before it.33
The artists were now elsewhere. Matisse lived on the city’s south-western outskirts, in a bourgeois villa in Issy-les-Moulineaux. Pablo Picasso, the Spanish artist but long-time Paris resident, had his studio on rue Schoelcher, opposite the Montparnasse cemetery in southern Paris. Montmartre was now a tourist trap, a pale imitation of former glories.
Paris remained Europe’s capital of culture in 1913, though it wore the crown a little more uneasily than in 1900. Vienna and Munich, even London and Berlin, had made inroads into the French capital’s former unquestioned supremacy. Yet ‘France still sets the tone’, wrote Jacques-Emile Blanche, critic and artist, ‘from everywhere they come to Paris to see what we produce and to gain our sanction for their cosmopolitan baggage’.34 Paris remained a centre of artistic innovation, giving rise to the Cubism of Picasso and Braque. It remained the place where artists exhibited, and where they sold their work. Paris was still the place to launch a career or to launch a movement. When Italian Filippo Marinetti launched the Futurist manifesto in 1909, proclaiming the birth of a self-consciously incendiary artistic movement dedicated to speed, novelty and violence, he did so on the front page of the Parisian newspaper Le Figaro, in French, only two weeks after it had appeared, with much less fanfare, in an Italian newspaper:
8. We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! … What good is it to look behind us at the moment when we must smash in the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We live already in the absolute, because we have already created the eternal omnipresent speed.
9. We want to glorify war – the world’s only hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the destructive actions of anarchists, beautiful Ideas which kill, scorn for women.
10. We want to demolish the museums, libraries, combat moralism, feminism and the all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.35
The very notion of the avant-garde, the permanently shifting vanguard of modern art, emerged in Paris.
But while Paris remained the arbiter of cultural modernity, and a platform for artistic endeavours, its role now was as much a vitrine for European culture – a shop window – as an advertisement for that of France. Unlike Impressionism, which had been dominated by the tastes of Paris and by French artists, the newer movements within the visual arts were not identifiably French at all. Expressionism’s chief exponents were based in Germany. Futurism may have been launched in a Parisian newspaper but its leaders were Italian and, in a somewhat different form, Russian. The theatres of Paris, meanwhile, had held Viennese, Italian and even Belgian seasons in recent years.36 The artistic event of 1913, one which famously caused a riot amongst the audience for its daring, was almost entirely foreign: the staging of The Rite of Spring, with Russian ballet dancers dancing to music composed by a Russian composer, Igor Stravinsky, in a theatre criticised for its Germanic lines as ‘the Zeppelin of the Avenue Montaigne’.37
‘The French are barely tolerated on their home turf these days’, wrote Jacques-Émile Blanche. It was only by force of habit that Paris was still asked to pronounce its supreme verdict on the world’s art at all. And so rather than Paris conquering the world, it was the world which was conquering, colonising and internationalising it. Paris, Blanche concluded, was fast becoming the ‘central station of Europe’, its originality and impetus now imported.38
In 1913, despite all the accolades and superlatives heaped upon France by her sons and daughters, there was a lingering sense of apprehension behind French pride and posturing.
There was perhaps more menace to the future now than ten years ago, in the bright sunshine of the Exposition Universelle. In 1913 the film Fantômas occupied the capital’s cinema screens; the elaborate crimes of its eponymous anti-hero were committed against the everyday backdrop of the modern world. The poster for the film showed Fantômas top-hatted and masked, a spectre dominating a blood-red sky, leering over Paris, the Eiffel Tower barely reaching above his knees. Fantômas suggested the almost occult power of modernity, a dark and mysterious side to quotidian experience, a world from which spectres of evil had not been exiled, but rather one to which they had returned in new and more dangerous forms.
The spectre of fictional master criminal Fantômas occupied French cinema screens in 1913, symbol of the occult power of modernity.
Perhaps these apprehensions of modernity, balanced though they were by the positive cult of speed, aeroplanes and automobiles, were tied up with a broader set of questions about France’s relationship to the changing world around it. Was France past its prime? Was French greatness a reality – or was it a sense memory, like the texture of a madeleine dissolving on the palate, as in Marcel Proust’s elegiac novel À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), the first instalment of which was published in 1913? Above all, was France slipping quietly behind its rivals – Germany, in particular?
To even ask such questions was considered by some to be too fatalistic, if not defeatist. Poincaré himself had on occasion declared discussions of French decadence to be unpatriotic. For every ten books proclaiming the causes of decadence – German-Jewish conspiracy being a staple of far-right writers such as Léon Daudet, and the internationalist socialism of Jean Jaurès offering another target – there were a couple proclaiming the glorious renewal of France around the ideas of patriotic union and sacrifice for the nation. French nationalism was shrill because it was born of weakness, intended as an exhortation to renewal, as if greatness depended only on self-belief, and not on material facts.
For some, France’s population statistics showed all that one needed to know about the country’s historical decline, and provided all that one needed to worry about for France’s future. ‘One single agonising problem should occupy all the thoughts of France’, wrote Jacques Bertillon starkly in a surprise best-selling treatise on the issue: ‘“How to pre
vent France from disappearing? How to maintain the French race on earth?”’39 How was it, Bertillon asked, that France, with some of the best agricultural land in Europe, supported less than half the number of citizens per square mile than did Britain? How was it that France’s population had increased by only two million over the previous thirty years, while Britain’s had grown by ten million and that of Germany by eighteen million? Even Italy was now almost as populous as France.
The reasons for France’s relative depopulation were various: low levels of childbirth amongst France’s leading classes, laws of succession that tended to discourage large families (as this would lead to ever-greater fragmentation of estates), and French couples’ sexual habits, in particular the ‘crime of Onan’ (coitus interruptus or masturbation). Bertillon cited additionally the popularity of Parisian music halls – dens of ‘light music [and] inept and immoral refrains’ – plays which implied that smaller families were better, the availability of contraceptive prophylactics, and campaigns against childbirth which he associated with socialists and anarchists. He applauded the actions of a police chief across the border in Belgium, who had closed down an educational display of contraceptive methods on the basis that this fell under the category of an immoral publication. In order to try and reverse the depopulation trend, Bertillon formed the Alliance nationale pour l’accroissement de la population with Charles Richet, a physiologist who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1913, tirelessly lobbying the French parliament to act (though without great success).
The fact of France’s relative depopulation entailed a string of dangers, as Bertillon saw it. Already, a higher proportion of the country’s male population was required to serve in the military in order to achieve parity of numbers between the French and German armies. Indeed, this was one of the reasons Poincaré campaigned in 1913 for an extension of military service from two to three years in the wake of a German expansion.