by Geert Mak
On class relations: ‘At a certain point we became completely enraptured by the new social order that was on its way. We wanted to talk to a worker, but we didn't know any. Through acquaintances of an acquaintance we finally met a worker's wife, who read something aloud to us from a newspaper. I still wonder why, if we wanted to meet one so badly, we didn't just go up to a worker on the street and talk to him!’
On technology:‘My friend and I were always fascinated by the phenomenon of electricity. We had read an adventure novel that talked about a machine you could use to talk to people without wires, no matter how far away they were. That seemed unbelievable to us. We installed lights, built telephones we could use to talk to each other two rooms away, we made sparks fly, we invented things, real inventions!’
My host took a book down from the shelf, its pages loose with age and use. Edward Bellamy, In het jaar 2000, Amsterdam 1890. ‘This is what we talked about, things like this.’ The story is a simple one: a nineteenth-century man falls into a deep sleep after being hypnotised and does not wake up until the year 2000. He finds himself in a city full of statues, fountains, covered walkways, gentlemen in top hats, ladies in evening dress. Thanks to electrical light, there is no more darkness. Night has been banished. Every home has a listening device, connected by an open telephone line to one of the municipal concert halls.
‘Here, read what one of those twentieth-century creatures says here: “At home we have comfort, but we seek the glory of life within society itself.” That was the kind of world we were looking for, in the year 2000. Money would no longer play any role. Every citizen would be safeguarded against “hunger, cold and nakedness”, products and services would be exchanged by means of an ingenious credit system, food prepared in huge, communal restaurants and delivered, if need be, by tube mail. The boys would be “sturdy”, the girls “fresh and strong”, the sexes would be free and informal in their dealings with each other, private shops would disappear, there would be no more advertising, publishing houses would be collectivised, newspaper editors would be elected by their readers, criminality and greed abolished, and – read for yourself – even the “crudest of individuals” would adopt “the comportment of the civilised classes”. Here, this passage: “Kneeling, my countenance bowed to the earth, I confessed in tears my unworthiness to breathe the air of this golden age. The long and sorrowful winter of mankind has come to an end. The heavens have opened to us.” What a book!’
The wintry light fell on the yellowed wallpaper of the study, the faded books on the shelf, the standing lamp with its cloth shade and tassels, my host's strong hands, slightly spotted skin, his clear eyes.
‘What do I think about this century, now that it's over? Ah, a century is only a mathematical construct, a human fantasy, isn't it? Back then I thought in terms of months, a year at the most. Now I think in twenty-year spans, that seems like nothing to me any more. Growing so immoderately old spoils one. Time no longer fazes you …’
Chapter Two
Paris
THE NEW CENTURY WAS A WOMAN, THEY WERE ALL IN AGREEMENT on that back in 1900. Take, for example, the drawing on the cover of the piano music for the English song ‘Dawn of the Century’, a ‘march & two step’ by one E. M. Paul. Amid golden clouds a woman balances on a winged wheel, around her float a tram, a typewriter, a telephone, a sewing machine, a camera, a harvester, a railway engine and, at the bottom of the picture, there is even a car turning the corner.
The European metropolises were feminine as well, if only in the lavish shapes of the thousands of little palaces of the bourgeoisie along the new boulevards and residential streets, with their curlicues and garlands in every ‘neo’ style imaginable, a ruttish profusion still found from Berlin to Barcelona.
So too the cover of the catalogue for the 1900 Paris World's Fair: a woman, of course, a rather hefty one this time, her hair blowing in the wind, a banner in her hand. Above the gate to the fairgrounds, a plaster woman six metres tall, in a wide cloak and evening dress by the couturier Paquin. At the official opening, Émile Loubet, the French president, spoke of the virtues of the new century: justice and human kindness. His minister of employment expected even more good things: gentleness and solidarity.
The fifty million visitors traipsed from one miracle to the next. There were X-ray machines with which you could look right through men and women, there was an automobile exhibition, there was equipment for wireless telegraphy, and from outside the gates one could catch the first underground line of Le Métro, built in less than eighteen months from Porte de Vincennes to Porte Maillot. Forty countries took part. California had dug an imitation gold mine, Egypt came with a temple and an antique tomb, Great Britain showed off all the colonies of its empire, Germany had a steam locomotive that could travel at 120 kph. France exhibited a model of Clément Ader's motorised flying machine, a gigantic bat with a thirty-metre wingspan; humans, after all, were destined to leave the earth one day.
There was a Dance Palace where a wide variety of ballets were performed, a Grand Palais full of French paintings and sculpture, and a building where the visitor could ‘travel’ around the entire world on a special ceiling for two francs, from the blossoming orchards of Japan by way of the Acropolis to the coasts of Spain, all depicted with extreme skill by the painter Dumoulin and his team. There was a cineorama, a variation on the panorama, where one could revel in the view from an airship or a compartment aboard the Trans-Siberian Express. The military section displayed the newest technologies in warfare: the machine gun, the torpedo, the gun turret, wireless telegraphy equipment, the personnel carrier. And completely new were the shows at the phono-cinema theatre, with newsreels accompanied by a phonograph recording. Among other things, the shaky images filmed by the Pathé Brothers showed – extra! – the Rostand family in their box at the premiere of L'Aiglon, and other sensations of the day: the test flight of Graf Zeppelin's first airship, the opening of a railway line through Africa, new cotton mills in Manchester, victorious Englishmen in the course of the Boer War, a speech by the kaiser, the launching of a battle cruiser.
The map in the catalogue provides a bird's-eye view of the impressive fair grounds: from the Grand Palais, along the lanes of pavilions on both banks of the Seine, to the Eiffel Tower and the great exhibition halls on the Champ de Mars. The World's Fair was a part of the city as a whole. Or, put differently, Paris with its boulevards laid out from 1853 under the prefecture of Georges Haussmann blended seamlessly with the fair, because Paris had become a permanent exhibition in itself, the grand display window of France, the city state of the new century. And both – as the photographs in the catalogue also show – were created for the new urbanite par excellence, the boulevardier, the actor/viewer of the theatre of the street, the young people on an allowance, the noble property owner, the wealthy officer, the youthful bourgeois relieved of all financial concerns.
‘The weather is so warm, so lovely, that I go outside again after dinner, even though I feel fatigue coming on,’ noted the young writer André Gide in the summer of 1905. ‘First along the Champs-Élysées, strutting past the cafés-concerts, I bustle through to the rotunda, then turn back along the Élysées again; the crowd is partying, in greater numbers and with greater cheer, all the way to the rue Royale.’
On other days he rides the roof rack of an omnibus, walks in the Bois de Boulogne, visits the opera, then heads back to a new exhibition featuring Gauguin, Van Gogh and Cézanne, ‘impossible not to visit the Louvre these days’.
The boulevardier's haven was the café, the marble table with kirsch and hot chocolate and friends all around, the democratic successor to the aristocratic salon. His prime trait was an infallible sense of timing: to be found in the best establishment at the best moment. The urban stroller moved between the old age and the new, plunging into the anonymity of the crowd, then falling back into the old security of one's own class. It was a way of life that showed up everywhere in the literature of the day, a modern courtliness that conquered e
very major European city.
André Gide, 1 September, 1905: ‘I am swept off my feet, I let myself be carried along by this monotone flow, dragged along by the course of the days. A great lethargy overtakes me, from the moment I arise to the evening hour; the game saves me at times, but gradually I lose my normal life.’
I stroll from the Champ de Mars along the Seine and the roaring traffic on both banks to the boarded-up entrance of the Grand Palais, which is now being restored. Big neon letters on the Eiffel Tower read ‘347 days till the year 2000’. Of the old World's Fair, the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais are still standing, and of course the Pont Alexandre III, with its four pillars at the corners, gigantic golden horses atop those, and along the edges a lacework of bronze lanterns with glass like cut diamonds.
In that same April in which the Pont Alexandre III and the 1900 World's Fair were opened, the anti-Semitic daily La Libre Parole took up a collection to present a pair of rapiers to the Jew-hater Raphaàl Viau, to commemorate his twelfth duel ‘for the good cause’. Viau expressed his hope that the blades ‘would not long remain unsullied’.
Around the turn of the century, three major scandals rocked Europe's capitals. They were cracks in the façade, the first fissures in that steadfast world of rank and class. In London, in 1895, there was the conviction of the brilliant writer Oscar Wilde for perversity. In Berlin, a similar scandal took place in the period 1907–9 concerning Prince Philipp zu Eulenburg, former ambassador to Vienna and one of the German emperor's intimate friends. But the scandal with the greatest impact was the Dreyfus affair.
No other issue occupied the French more intensely between 1897–9 than the possible rehabilitation of the unjustly accused Alfred Dreyfus. This Jewish army captain had been banished to Devil's Island for allegedly having spied for the Germans. Gradually, however, it became increasingly clear that officers of the war council had tampered with his dossier and then, to refute the rising groundswell of suspicion, had continued to pile forgery upon forgery. The nation's military command knew about it, but refused to budge. To admit to such fraud would be tantamount to blasphemy, and would cast a taint on the gloire militaire.
Before long the affair was being monitored breathlessly all over Europe. After Émile Zola forced a reopening of the case on 13 January, 1898 – his fiery ‘J'Accuse!’ in L'Aurore was intended primarily to provoke charges of libel – scores of other European writers and intellectuals became involved. What was more important? The rights of the individual, or the prestige of the army and the nation? The progressive principles of the Enlightenment, or the old values of the counter-revolution, of the days of glory from before 1789?
The Dreyfus affair, as historian Barbara Tuchman put it, was ‘the death-struggle of the old world’. ‘In those years, life seemed to have been temporarily suspended,’ wrote the future prime minister, Léon Blum. It was ‘a human crisis, not as far-reaching or long-lasting as the French Revolution, but no less violent for that … It was as though the whole world revolved around one affair, and in the most intimate feelings and personal relationships all was interrupted, all was disrupted, all was seen through different eyes.’
Friends stopped seeing each other: Dreyfus lay between them like a live grenade. Family members avoided each other. Famous salons fell asunder. A certain M. Pistoul, manufacturer of wooden crates, was taken to court by his mother-in-law after a family row over Dreyfus. He had called her an ‘intellectuelle’; she had accused him of being a ‘monster’ and a ‘traitor’; he had struck her; her daughter had filed for divorce. During Dreyfus’ retrial, Marcel Proust sat in the public gallery each day with coffee and sandwiches, so as not to miss a moment. He and his brother Robert helped to circulate a petition,‘The Intellectuals’ Protest’, and collected 3,000 signatures, including those of that notable arbiter of good taste Anatole France, and of André Gide and Claude Monet. For Monet, the petition meant the end of his friendship with his colleague Edgar Degas, and an enraged M. Proust Sr refused to speak to either of his sons for a week.
The Dreyfus scandal, like those surrounding Oscar Wilde and Philipp zu Eulenburg, had been drawn to the public's attention by a newspaper. And it was, above all, a clash of the papers. The affair's unprecedented vitality was due to the phenomenon of the ‘high-circulation daily’ appearing all over Europe, sensation-hungry papers with hundreds of thousands of readers and a distribution network that stretched to the remotest corners of the country. Around the turn of the century, Paris alone had between twenty-five and thirty-five dailies reporting and creating a wide variety of news. Berlin had sixty papers, twelve of which appeared twice a day. In London, the Daily Mail cost twopence, and had a circulation of 500,000: eleven times that of the staid and respectable Times. There arose in this way a new force, the force of ‘public opinion’, and it did not take the newspaper magnates long to learn to play on popular sentiment like a church organ. They inflated rumours and glossed over facts, everything was allowable for the purposes of higher sales, political gain or the pure adrenaline of making the news.
Yet the question remains: why was French public opinion so susceptible to this particular affair? Anti-Semitism definitely played a part. The anti-Dreyfus papers ran columns every day about the perfidious role of the ‘syndicate’, a burgeoning conspiracy of Jews, Freemasons, socialists and foreigners who were out to tear France apart with their deception, lies, bribery and forgeries. When Dreyfus was first court-martialled, the crowd at the courthouse gates shouted ‘À mort! À mort les juifs!'The Viennese Neue Freie Presse's Jewish correspondent in Paris was so shocked that he went home and penned the first sentences of his tract Der Judenstaat: the Jews had to be given a country of their own. The correspondent's name was Theodor Herzl. And so the first seed of what was to become the state of Israel sprouted here, at the Dreyfus trial.
But that was not all. What was really taking place, in fact, was a collision between two Frances: the old, static France of the status quo, and the modern, dynamic France of the press, public debate, justice and truth. Between the France of the palaces, in other words, and the France of the boulevards.
Strangely enough, the affair also blew over almost as quickly as it had arisen. On 9 September, 1899 Dreyfus was convicted once more, despite obvious tampering with the evidence. Europe was stunned to discover that such things were possible in an enlightened France. ‘Scandalous, cynical, disgusting and barbaric,’ the correspondent for The Times wrote. The French began to realise that the affair was damaging their country in the eyes of international opinion – and on the eve of a world's fair that was to be the biggest ever held. Dreyfus was offered a pardon and accepted it, too tired to fight on.
In 1906 the army rehabilitated him. He was promoted to the rank of major and received the Légion d'honneur. Zola died in 1902; in 1908 his ashes were interred at the Panthéon. Once free, Dreyfus himself proved less idealistic than those who had fought for him. ‘We were prepared to die for Dreyfus,’ one of his most avid supporters later said. ‘But Dreyfus himself was not.’ Years later, when a group of intellectuals asked him to sign a petition to save the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti – two American victims of a political process – he flew into a rage: he wanted nothing more to do with such affairs.
During my first few days in Paris, I take as my guide a copy of the 1896 Baedeker. In it, the avenue Jean-Jaurès is still the rue d'Allemagne, the SacréCoeur is still under construction, the most important painter of the day is Louis Meissonier, and the vanes of the Moulin de Galette have only recently stopped turning. I hail one of the 13,000 fiacres, or hop aboard one of the forty omnibus lines crossing the city. Everything works and moves by horsepower, tens of thousands of horses for the cabs, omnibuses, carts and coaches, my entire city guide smells of horse. And all those horses must be stabled and fed – hence the hay and oats markets – and watered – there are 2,000 city fountains – to say nothing of disposing of all that manure.
The days have been sunny and mild. From my hotel window I look out o
ver the roofs of Montmartre, the ruins of an old windmill, the misty hills in the distance. Beneath my window are a few old gardens with tall trees, a house with a sun porch, the early spring sounds of the blackbirds, sparrows and starlings. Darkness falls gradually. Between the roofs and the grey of the evening sky, more and more yellow lights appear. The city hums quietly.
The waters are blue and the plants are pink; the evening is sweet to behold;
People go walking.
The big ladies go walking; behind them, the little ladies.
It was with this ode to Paris, written by the Vietnamese Nguyen Trong Hiep in 1897, that the wandering European writer Walter Benjamin begins his essay ‘The Capital of the Nineteenth Century’. Why did he – and so many with him – choose to grant the title to Paris? Why was the name Paris still on everyone's lips around 1900, when global power had long been focused in London, industry in Berlin, the future of good and evil in Vienna? Why was nineteenth-century Paris seen so widely as the springboard to the modern age?
That overwhelming unanimity had to do, first of all, with the new building materials and construction techniques, the iron and glass used here so much more freely and artfully than anywhere else. Take, for example, the palaces, the Eiffel Tower, the metro tunnels under the Seine with their immense iron stairways and lifts half the size of a railway car. And everywhere the famous galleries, the ‘indoor boulevards’ that formed the motif for Benjamin's most important work.
The lush interiors of the bourgeoisie – ‘the purses of the private man’, as Benjamin called them – became safe havens for the arts. The rise of photography – Paris led the way in that as well – forced painters to find totally new forms. It was now the splendour of a movement that made its way onto canvas, or the impression of a late afternoon. In this way the Impressionists blazed trails for painters like Pablo Picasso, who later pulled scenes and objects apart in search of structure.
