If you’re born without wings, do nothing to preclude them from growing …
Get up early, work hard. It won’t hurt: your mind will be busy, your body active …
—COCO CHANEL
GABRIELLE CHANEL, who would grow up to be the essence of French chic, was born in a hospice for the poor at Saumur, in France’s Pays de la Loire, on a blistering hot August afternoon in 1883. She was descended from a tribe of peasants who lived on the edge of a chestnut forest in the Cévennes and were driven by the blight to become itinerant peddlers. Her name was registered at birth as “Chasnel.” Quite possibly, this was a slip of an official pen; or, more likely, it was the ancient spelling of the family name, softened later to please the ear. (The added “s” would cause some confusion in later police documents.)
Her mother, Jeanne Devolle, unwed at Chanel’s birth, and her street-hawker father, Albert Chanel, were finally married a few years later. For the twelve years before Jeanne died, the family, a brood of three sisters—Julia-Berthe, Gabrielle, and Antoinette—and two brothers, Alphonse and Lucien, lived here and there in shabby lodgings as Albert drove a horse-drawn goods-wagon from one market town to another. Upon Jeanne’s death at age thirty-three in 1895, Albert put his two sons out to hire on a farm and sent Gabrielle, age twelve, and her two sisters to the stark Corrèze region of central France. There, at the Aubazine convent-orphanage founded in the twelfth century by Étienne d’Aubazine, the Chanel sisters became wards of Catholic nuns.
Years later, when reflecting upon her humble beginnings at the convent, Chanel recalled: “From my earliest childhood I’ve been certain that they have taken everything away from me, that I’m dead. I knew that when I was twelve. You can die more than once in your life.”
None of her biographers have speculated about how twelve-year-old Chanel found life at the convent. She never talked about her years as a ward of the nuns or about the long years of Catholic discipline—the hard work, the frugal life. At the time, Catholic doctrine and theology stressed sin, penitence, and redemption. We also know that at the turn of the twentieth century, Catholic institutions such as Aubazine indoctrinated Catholic youth to loathe Jews. Chanel was no exception. She was often given to anti-Semitic outbursts. Well-known French author and editor in chief of the French fashion magazine Marie Claire, Marcel Haedrich, tells of a conversation he had with Chanel over his book And Moses Created God. Chanel asked Haedrich, “Why Moses? You can’t believe that ancient stories are still of interest? Or you hope Jews will like your story? They won’t buy your book!” When the conversation turned to how new fashion boutiques were springing up like mushrooms in Paris, Chanel declared, “I only fear Jews and Chinese; and the Jews more than the Chinese.” Haedrich observed, “Chanel’s anti-Semitism was not only verbal; but passionate, demoded, and often embarrassing. Like all the children of her age she had studied the catechism: hadn’t the Jews crucified Jesus?”
Christian religious beliefs for centuries held that Jews were the Christ killers. From the Middle Ages, Europeans preached that “Jews are bad luck” and excluded them from professions and corporations. Jews were banned in England in Shakespeare’s time and considered socially inferior and fit only for collecting taxes—not work that would endear them to peasant families such as the Chanels. Later, the Nazis and even many less fanatical Europeans fervently believed in a Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy, blaming the Jews for inventing Communism.
At eighteen, Chanel moved to a Catholic pension for girls at Moulins. It was at a time when the French were still debating the Dreyfus affair, a scandal that divided France for nearly a decade. The saga evolved from the 1894 arrest, trial, and conviction for high treason based on false evidence of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a young French artillery officer of Alsatian-Jewish descent. The condemned Dreyfus was banished to a penal colony at Devil’s Island in French Guiana; later he was retried and finally in 1906 exonerated. Restored to the French Army with the rank of major, Dreyfus served honorably in World War I, retiring as a lieutenant colonel in 1919.
The Dreyfus affair laid bare the anti-Semitic passions of the day and the decisive influence of the Catholic Church and their allies the monarchists and nationalists. During Chanel’s teens at the convent and later in the Catholic community at Moulins, “anti-Semitism was in full froth.” The widely read Catholic Assumptionist daily La Croix (The Cross) “raged against Jews.” A typical spokesman for the Church’s position was the Jesuit priest Father Du Lac, the spiritual guide to the anti-Semitic publicist Édouard Drumont, author of La France juive (Jewish France). Drumont coined the slogan “France for the French”—words that still echo today in French politics, particularly in the campaigns of Jean-Marie Le Pen and his daughter Marine, now head of the powerful and extreme-right Front National party.
Chanel could not have escaped the Catholic Church’s propaganda campaign against the Jewish officer Dreyfus. Later, her fear and hatred for Jews was noxious and notorious—even to those who themselves practiced a more genteel form of anti-Semitism.
AT TWENTY, Chanel was put to work as a seamstress and, in her spare time, sang at a cafe patronized mostly by cavalry officers. There she became “Coco,” a name taken from a ditty she sang, or perhaps drawn from the shorthand version of the French word for a kept woman: cocotte.
It was her burning black eyes, striking silhouette, and slim good looks bordering on the juvenile that eventually captured the heart of a rich ex–cavalry officer, Étienne Balsan. Chanel put needle, thread, cafe coquetry, and a life destined for drudgery aside. At twenty-three, she became Balsan’s paramour, living for the next three years at his château and racing stable near Compiègne—seventy-five kilometers from Paris. In the dense forest of Compiègne, among heath and moor, pond and bog, Chanel, her lover, and his friends rode Balsan’s stable horses on hunting paths used by the kings of France.
A faked scene of jealousy: left to right, Boy Capel in a satin kimono threatens Léon de Laborde, who shields a sleepy Chanel in bathrobe, ca. 1908. (illustration credit 1.1)
Balsan, the son of a wealthy industrialist family of fabric makers who had supplied uniforms to the French army, saw to it that Chanel developed solid equestrian skills—riding astride and sidesaddle—and taught her how to manage the stables. Pictures of Chanel on horseback show her proud carriage; one in particular shows her mounted on a fine great bay hunter, a bowler hat settled on braided hair—her torso proud and confident. Her love of horses and skills at riding would serve her well when, years later, she hunted with Hugh Grosvenor, the Duke of Westminster, known as Bendor, and his friends, among them Winston Churchill and his son, Randolph.
Chanel’s life had changed in the space of a few months. One has only to scan pictures taken of her at the time: Chanel on horseback; in the arms of the elegant Léon de Laborde as Étienne Balsan looks on; with Arthur Capel (her future lover) dressed in a satin kimono and wielding a large stick as a pajama-clad Laborde playfully shields Chanel from a mock attack by Capel. In one picture, Chanel wears the look of a little girl who just got out of bed—with coal-black hair tumbling down her shoulders and flowing over her white bathrobe. One, taken later that summer of 1912, shows the Balsan set clad in flimsy pajamas and robes at breakfast: Capel, Laborde, Gabrielle Dorziat, Balsan, Chanel, Lucien Henraux, and Jeanne Léry.
Arthur “Boy” Capel with Chanel on horseback at Balsan’s Château Royallieu, set in the forest of Compiègne. In 1908, they would begin an eleven-year romance. (illustration credit 1.2)
In 1908, Chanel fell in love with Arthur Capel, Balsan’s riding partner and friend. Nicknamed “Boy,” Capel was from the English upper class—handsome, rich, and mercurial. In 1908, Boy installed Chanel in a Paris apartment and helped her to launch a business making ladies’ hats. Balsan may have lost a mistress—he had many—but he would remain friends with Chanel for a lifetime.
Boy Capel and Chanel were now soul mates. A generous Capel arranged for his mistress’s nephew, André Palasse, to attend a fine English boarding school after his mother, Chanel’s older sister, Julia-Berthe, committed suicide. Later, when Chanel moved into ladies’ fashion wear, Capel would finance boutiques for her in Paris, Deauville, and Biarritz.
SEM’s illustration of Chanel at Boy Capel’s mercy, ca. 1910. (illustration credit 1.3)
Between 1914 and 1918, the years of the Great War, Chanel took an apartment overlooking the Seine and the Trocadéro; she was on her way to acquiring enormous wealth. Soon she would employ up to three hundred workers making a line of dress wear in jersey fabric. Later, she opened her landmark Paris boutique-residence behind the elegant Place Vendôme at 31, rue Cambon. There she began building the House of Chanel into a hallmark of French style, refinement, and craftsmanship. As business prospered Chanel would later create “les Tissus Chanel” to reproduce high-quality fabrics.
For eleven years Chanel enjoyed being Boy Capel’s lover and pal—but given her lowly origins she could hardly become the wife of a socially connected upper-class Englishman. In 1918, Boy married the daughter of an English lord. Still, he and Chanel remained lovers. Then, at Christmas, returning home to be with his wife and newborn child, Boy died in a road accident. Chanel was devastated at Boy’s death—and all the more so when she discovered she was not his only mistress. The Times of London revealed in February 1920 how Capel had left Chanel and another—an Italian countess—handsome bequests. Overwhelmed by feelings of betrayal and grief Chanel sank into an agonizing period of mourning. Twenty-five years later, exiled in Switzerland, she confided to her friend and biographer Paul Morand, “His death was a terrible blow to me. In losing Capel, I lost everything. What followed was not a life of happiness I have to say.”