The successful writer, artist or musician at the end of the nineteenth century had access to three indispensable resources. The first was connections and patronage, which could further a career, and might be provided by an influential salon in Paris or official recognition in the annual Salon sponsored by the Académie des Beaux Arts or by the prizes and membership of the Académie Française. The second was the dialogue, comradeship and support that could be offered by fellow writers and artists, who often met in favourite cafés and restaurants and reviewed each other’s work in journals and newspapers. Conflict between different approaches was common, a sense of betrayal was rife, and friendships often came to a bitter end, but all this was grist to the mill of literary, artistic and musical innovation. The third was public recognition and a market for their work in the growing consumer society. Not every writer or artist had access to all three resources. Official recognition in the Salon or Académie Française was generally confined to those who subscribed to the classical French canon as laid down by those institutions and did not seek radical or avant-garde approaches. Avant-garde writers and artists scorned official institutions and canons, or at least affected to do so. They also affected to scorn the demands of the mass market, which they denounced as ignorant and philistine, although they could not entirely eschew the oxygen of publicity and the income to live. For a mass culture was developing, which was something different from both elite culture and popular culture: a culture demanded by a largely urban society, shaped by mass education and craving instruction and entertainment more than cultivation, and supplied by a mass media of books, newspapers, universal exhibitions, music halls, cinemas, sports stadiums and race tracks. Classical and avant-garde or modern art and the mass consumer society were locked in a tension, but the art, literature and bohemian lifestyle of Paris were themselves becoming national assets, widely commented upon in Europe and America and drawing in foreign writers, artists and tourists.
Princesse Mathilde, Napoleon III’s cousin, returned to Paris from exile in Brussels a fortnight after the suppression of the Commune, assured by head of government Thiers that despite her ties with the fallen Empire she was not a political threat and would be left alone. She reconstituted the Wednesday salon which had been so influential under the Empire and continued to be so under the Third Republic. The older Romantic generation of her faithful, born around 1800 – Sainte-Beuve, Gautier, Mérimée – had died, as had Jules de Goncourt of syphilis at the age of forty in 1870, and the salon was dominated by the generation born around 1830 – Edmond de Goncourt, Taine and Renan, Flaubert, Alexandre Dumas fils, Alphonse Daudet, author of the Lettres de mon moulin, along with the painter Gérôme and the composer Gounod. Zola she could not abide and he was not a regular.1
Princesse Mathilde’s salon was home to the Realist school of writers, but these also had other venues for meeting. From 1874 Flaubert organized monthly dinners, suceeding those at Magny’s restaurant in the 1860s, for ‘the Five’ whose novels may have been successful but whose plays had been shouted down by theatre audiences. ‘We were all gourmands,’ recalled Alphonse Daudet, ‘with as many gourmandises as temperaments and provinces of origin. Flaubert wanted Normandy butter and Rouen ducks, Zola demanded seafood, Edmond de Goncourt ordered ginger delicacies while Turgenev tasted caviar. Ah! We were not easy to feed and the Paris restaurants remembered us. We often had to change the venue.’2 After Flaubert’s death in 1880 the group was kept together by Daudet who held his own salon on a Thursday in the avenue de l’Observatoire, presided over by his wife Julia, while in 1885 Edmond de Goncourt refurbished the loft at Auteuil where his brother Jules had died, done up with Japanese art, and visited with some trepidation by the Princesse Mathilde the following year. Zola bought a villa at Médan on the Seine in 1878 with the royalties from L’Assommoir and held meetings of his own young protégés such as Guy de Maupassant and Joris-Karl Huysmans, son of a Dutch father and French mother. In 1880 they published a collection of short stories, Les Soirées de Médan, which served as a manifesto for the Naturalist school and included Maupassant’s Boule de suif, a short story set during the war of 1870 about a prostitute who is persuaded by her bourgeois travelling companions to sleep with a Prussian officer so that the coach can move on, and described by Flaubert as a masterpiece.3 Naturalism, depicting humanity as determined by hereditary and environmental laws and reduced almost to bestiality, in fact drove a wedge between Zola and his circle on the one hand and Goncourt and Daudet on the other. In 1887, after the publication of Zola’s La Terre, an attack on his work’s ‘indecency and filthy terminology’ was published in Le Figaro, which Zola believed to have been inspired by Goncourt and Daudet.4
Close links had been established before this break between the Realists and the Impressionists. Both challenged the literary and artistic establishment with their treatment of modern life, warts and all, and were often marginalized by it. Monet and Degas held court in the Café Guerbois in the Batignolles district, then in the more refined Café de la Nouvelle Athènes, which were also frequented by Zola. Nana, the prostitute who appears in L’Assommoir before having a novel to herself in 1880, was painted by Manet, a picture rejected for the Salon of 1877, while Zola tried to defend Impressionism through his treatment of the struggling artist in L’Oeuvre of 1886. Huysmans was launched as an art critic by Zola, attacking the academic art of the Salon and preaching the virtues of Manet and Degas. ‘A painter of modern life is born,’ said Huysmans of Degas in 1880, painting the flesh of ballet dancers lit by gaslight or the pale glow from courtyards, completely different from the classical school of Bouguereau’s Birth of Venus, a ‘badly pumped-up windbag, without muscles, nerves or blood. A single pinprick in the torso and it would collapse.’5 That said, Zola and Huysmans found other Impressionists such as Monet and Pissarro guilty of ‘indigomania’ and Gauguin argued that Huysmans liked Degas and Manet only because their work was figurative: ‘it is naturalism that gratifies him.’6
In the 1880s a breach opened up between Realists and Impressionists on the one hand, who were committed to the representation of modern life, and other artists whose ambition was to flee it, to search for meaning in some essence or ideal that lay behind the mask presented by reality, and were inspired by the primitive or the exotic, by myths and legends, by the spiritual and religious, symbols which seemed to permit access to an inner or unconscious world. Their art was modernist in form but was a critique of modernity – the mat erialistic world of urbanization, industrialization, science, secularization and mass education.7 It was avant-garde, grouping like-minded intellectuals seeking new literary forms and sometimes challenging bourgeois conventions by a bohemian lifestyle. One of their early haunts was the salon of Nina de Callais, who had been painted by Manet in 1874 as The Woman with the Fan. The poet Paul Verlaine, who had been a clerk in the Hôtel de Ville before the Paris Commune, met the sixteen-year-old Mathilde Mauté there in 1869 and married her in order to escape military service. She later admitted that she was ‘overcome by pity for a poor being with disgraceful appearance and who seemed sad’.8 In fact he was a spoiled child, alcoholic and violent. Obsessed by the brilliant young poet Arthur Rimbaud who arrived in Paris in the autumn of 1871, he tried to strangle his wife, threw his three-month-old baby against the wall and ran away to Brussels with Rimbaud. In 1873 he shot Rimbaud in the hand during another row and spent two years in a Belgian prison, after which his wife separated from him and Rimbaud went to Africa to trade in ivory or guns, according to the rumour. Briefly reforming himself, he published a collection of his own work and that of Rimbaud and Mallarmé, Les Poètes maudits, in 1883, which for the first time put this new generation of Symbolist poets on the map. He was then jailed again for an attack on his mother and spent much of the last years of his life in hospital.
For Symbolists the most important meeting-place was the salon of Stéphane Mallarmé. Mallarmé, who made a living teaching English in a succession of lycées in the provinces and Paris, organized his own literary salon on Tuesdays at his house in the rue de Rome. From 1885 it became the focal point for young writers of a new generation born around 1860 who experimented with elegant but opaque and suggestive forms of language. Where Verlaine destroyed bourgeois domesticity, Mallarmé incarnated it, although as poets they had the same ambitions. ‘The wife and daughter embroider under a dim lamp,’ wrote one of his disciples, Paul Valéry. ‘He smokes a pipe in a rocking-chair, eyes half closed, voice very low. Then suddenly his eyes are wide open and he raises his voice, panting. He becomes a savant in a moment, now epic, now tragic.’9 Other disciples of this rarefied salon were Jules Laforgue, who died of tuberculosis aged twenty-seven in 1887, Henri de Régnier, Félix Fénéon, Maurice Barrès, the musician Claude Debussy, the novelist André Gide, the German poet Stefan George and ‘the execrable Oscar Wilde who should have grasped from our mute reprobation’, said another disciple, ‘that one did not come to Mallarmé’s to make speeches’.10
One of the greatest advocates and interpreters of the Symbolist movement was Huysmans, whose novel of 1884, rebours or Against the Grain, documented the life and obsessions of a decadent, aristocratic artist, Des Esseintes. Withdrawing from the urban, industrial, materialistic and mechanistic contemporary world, seeking meaning in narcotically inspired dreams, erotic fantasies and memories of lost civilizations, he discovers Mallarmé, ‘that poet who in a century of universal suffrage and lucre lived apart from the world of letters, sheltered from surrounding stupidity by his disdain, dedicated to the surprises of the intellect and the visions of his mind, which he grafted with Byzantine finesse, fixing them with the lightest touches that an invisible thread scarcely linked’.11 The book was an attack on the Naturalism of his former master Zola, which he thought squeezed all psychological complexity out of his characters and made them mere puppets of instinct and environment. Huysmans was taken to task by Zola in a country lane near Médan in the summer of 1884, and the rupture was complete.
Disciples of the new school who followed Huysmans from decadence to religion attracted the name of Decadents, but they preferred to call themselves Symbolists and had a powerful publicity machine working for them. Jean Moréas, a writer of Greek origin, published a Symbolist manifesto in Le Figaro in 1886 which announced that ‘symbolist poetry seeks to clothe the Idea in sensible form.’ They regarded the external, material world as merely a veil over the ideal or spiritual world. They trusted in emotions rather than sensations, in what would soon be called the unconscious, and they sought to release deeper meanings by exploring myths and legends, primitive cultures and different manifestations of mysticism and religion. The review La Plume, which published much of their work, sponsored Symbolist evenings on a Saturday night at the Soleil d’Or café on the place Saint-Michel, at which Verlaine would arrive late, already the worse for wear. Maurice Barrès set the tone in the Latin Quarter by reinventing the decadent dandy that Baudelaire was supposed to have been, adopting ‘several souls’, well dressed and polite on the outside, sensuous and immoral in his inner life.12
Symbolism, or the search for a more spiritual art, shaped not only the poetry and literature of the fin de siècle but also painting, drama and music. As a reaction against the contemporary world, it could end up either in retreat from the world or in criticism of it. The death of Manet in 1883 dealt a blow to Impressionism, which embraced modern life and fixed the impressions it made, and artists took new directions. In 1886 Gauguin discovered Brittany, with its heaths and rocky coves, little chapels and traditional costumes. ‘There I find the savage and primitive,’ he wrote, and by 1888 he had gathered a group of artists of the 1860 generation at the fishing village of Pont-Aven. These included Émile Bernard, who perfected the cloisonné method of painting, with blocks of colour divided by black lines, as in stained glass, and Paul Sérusier, whose rendering of a landscape on the lid of Gauguin’s cigar box became the talisman of the group.13 Linked to them was Maurice Denis, who took an oath on All Saints’ Day 1884 to remain always a Christian and announced in 1886 that ‘even the purest realism and naturalism cannot satisfy… we must make an effort, a great effort, to bring Art back to its great master, who is God.’14 After Gauguin sailed to Tahiti in 1891 in search of more primitive societies, this group became the core of the Nabis, including Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard. For them Denis wrote a manifesto stating that ‘before it becomes a war-horse, a nude woman or some anecdote, a painting is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.’15 The Nabis were keen to apply their techniques to other decorative arts, such as tapestries and stage sets, and Denis had been at the Lycée Condorcet with avant-garde theatre director Aurélien Lugné-Poë. Lugné-Poë and the Nabis shared a studio in the rue Pigalle and after 1893 the Nabis designed sets and programmes for the north European idealist drama at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, notably Pelléas et Mélisande by the Belgian Symbolist Maeterlinck and a string of Ibsen plays from Rosmers-holm and An Enemy of the People to The Master Builder in 1893, with not a single French play until 1894.16
The search for a more spiritual art could lead squarely to religion. Huysmans only flirted with Decadence after his break with Naturalism. He was embraced by the Catholic writer Léon Bloy who argued that everyone had to decide ‘whether to guzzle like the beasts of the field or to look upon the face of God’, and dined frequently with the Abbé Mugnier, ‘confessor of duchesses’. Attracted by the aesthetic dimension of Catholicism he went on pilgrimages to La Salette and Lourdes, undertook a retreat with the Trappists and died in 1907 in the robes of a Benedictine oblate.17 Maurice Denis had always been devoted to the Italian Primitivist Fra Angelico, ‘the only really Catholic painter’, and in 1898 went on a pilgrimage to Rome with André Gide, where he discovered Raphael and ‘the theory of ideal, absolute beauty’. He broke with Nabis like Vuillard who espoused dreyfusism, reverted to painting the Virgin Mary and Joan of Arc and decorated the Chapel of the Holy Virgin at Le Vésinet. In his search for classicism and order he even joined Action Française.18
Modernist criticism of the modern world was, however, as likely to end up on the extreme left of the political spectrum as on the extreme right. Just as the Pont-Aven group gathered around Gauguin, so another cohort of the 1860 generation, the painters Georges Seurat and Paul Signac and the critic Félix Fénéon, gathered after 1886 around Pissarro. Seurat and Signac introduced Pissarro to the new technique of pointillisme, which involved dividing tones into dots from which new forms and colours were built. They painted scenes from modern life, such as circus artists and bathers, notably Seurat’s 1885 Sunday at La Grande Jatte, but also bleak industrial suburbs on the outskirts of Paris and peasants toiling in the fields. They considered the Pont-Aven school to be reactionary and Pissarro denounced Symbolism as part of a conspiracy to ‘restore to the people their superstitious beliefs’. ‘Impressionists have the true position,’ he said, ‘they stand for a robust art based on sensation, and that is an honest stand.’19 He attacked the Exhibition of 1889 as a capitalist extravaganza, produced a print of the sun of revolution rising behind the Eiffel Tower in his Turpitudes sociales series, and joined forces with Louise Michel, Benoît Malon and the antimilitarist Lucien Descaves in the Club of Social Art. In 1891 Seurat died aged thirty-one while Signac wrote an article on ‘impressionists and revolutionaries’ in La Révolte, published by the anarchist Jean Grave. Félix Fénéon, who defended their cause both artistically and politically, finished up in the dock alongside Jean Grave during the infamous trial of anarchists, the Procès des Trente, in 1894, while Pissarro fled to Brussels to avoid arrest.20
These Symbolist and modernist experiments were a reaction against the classical art of the bourgeois world, which was also that of the political mainstream. One of its platforms was the salon of Juliette Adam, which had been home to Gambetta and the republican opposition under the Empire, before she broke with the great man over his policy of rapprochement with Germany. From 1879 she published a Nouvelle Revue in which she promoted the work of aspiring writers, notably the Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard by Anatole France in 1881, the poetry of Jules Lemaître, and Pêcheur d’islande by the naval officer Pierre Loti in 1886, a poignant story of the impossible love between a Parisian girl and a Breton fisherman divided by class, culture and the long voyages of the seafarers to the Icelandic fishing banks. ‘I can still hear’, recalled Julie Daudet, ‘the old Count Beust [former Austrian chancellor] playing an outdated waltz, Gounod singing a dramatic Breton legend, the poetry readings of that ardent poet and admirable patriot Paul Déroulède. The salon was active and lively, the Nouvelle Revue was published not far away, Paul Bourget was brought in, Pierre Loti was discovered and Léon Daudet [Alphonse’s son] published his first timid volume there.’21
Juliette Adam secured the election of Pierre Loti to the Académie Française in 1891, while other protégés of hers moved on to even more influential salon hostesses, both artistically and amorously. When Madame Léontine Caillavet first invited Anatole France to her salon in 1883 she found him shy and stammering, but within five years they had become lovers. France divorced his wife and Madame Caillavet overcame his diffidence by shutting him up on her rural estate of the Gironde until he had finished Le Lys rouge, a study of contemporary jealousy, in 1894.22 France had attacked both Zola’s La Terre as ‘a scurrilous Georgics’ and the Symbolists for torturing the French language.23 Now Léon Blum declared that ‘M. Anatole France is the principal writer of our time. One rediscovers in him the classical beauties of the language; he united the richest currents of the French spirit: the fluidity of Renan, the sure and difficult taste of the Parnassians, the courageous freedom and natural sensibility of Diderot, the precise and delicate elegance of Fénelon or Racine, always the abundant and sustained irony of Montaigne or Rabelais.’24 Anatole France was duly elected in his turn to the Académie Française in 1896.
In 1885 Jules Lemaître went on to the salon of the Comtesse de Loynes, which included the aged Taine and Renan, Dumas fils, Maupassant and Georges Clemenceau. Lemaître and the countess soon became lovers, he thirty-two, she fifty. Both had risen from humble origins. Lemaître was the son of an instituteur from near Orléans, while the countess was an illegitimate textile worker from Reims who became a courtesan under the Empire and numbered Prince Jérôme-Napoléon or Plon-Plon among her clients. She was educated in the ways of society by Dumas fils and Sainte-Beuve and had an unsuccessful career as an actress, but inherited a fortune from the son of a minister of the Empire who was killed in 1870 and acquired a title from marrying the Comte de Loynes, who soon disappeared. The countess lunched theatre directors until she found one, that of the Odéon, to stage Lemaître’s first play, Révoltée, in 1889.25 With these connections Lemaître was elected to the Académie Française in 1895, and defended classical French art through his theatre criticism. He welcomed Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, which opened at the Porte Saint-Martin in 1897 and ran throughout the Dreyfus Affair, as ‘a recapitulation, or if you prefer it, a culminating efflorescence of a form of art which dates back three centuries’. Taking a sideswipe at the Symbolists he attributed the success of Cyrano to ‘the degree to which the public has been wearied and surfeited with so many studies of psychology, so many trifling tales of Parisian adultery, so many productions by feminists, socialists and Scandinavians… [It has] set on foot a revival of nationalism in France.’26 ‘The symbolist nightmare is fading,’ echoed another critic, ‘the northern fog has been holed and dissipated by this glorious flambée of Provençal sunshine which has restored France to herself, to her genius.’27
While this classical, mainstream art enjoyed success during the Dreyfus Affair, at a time when France felt uneasy about its standing as a nation, it did not manage to stifle new waves of avant-garde art in music and drama which made a huge impact in the so-called Belle Époque leading up to the First World War. Even at this late date and at the experimental end of art the patronage of the salon hostess could still be important. Winaretta Singer, who had inherited her father’s sewing-machine fortune, had her marriage with one French aristocrat annulled in 1891 because of her lesbianism and in 1893 married Prince Edmond de Polignac, son of Charles X’s last minister, a relationship which flourished on their joint homosexuality and love of music. The salon of the Princesse de Polignac, as she now became, had a music room designed by the poet, aesthete and patron Comte Robert de Montesquiou, who inspired Huysmans’ Des Esseintes and Proust’s Baron de Charlus. For the opening ceremony she dreamed of bringing together Gabriel Fauré, choirmaster of La Madeleine church whose Requiem had been performed there in 1888, and the now very sick Paul Verlaine. This ambition was not fulfilled, although Fauré, enjoying the hospitality of her palace on the Grand Canal in Venice, set a number of Verlaine poems to music as Five Melodies from Venice. Claude Debussy was another habitué of the princess’s salon. He also set Verlaine to music, and although his love of Wagner’s Parsifal was not shared by the Prince de Polignac, it was the inspiration for his only completed opera Pelléas et Mélisande, based on Maeterlinck’s play, which was performed in 1902. Most important, musically, however, was the princess’s promotion of the Russian ballet of Serge Diaghilev which took Paris by storm in successive seasons after 1909. With his choreographer Fokine, designer Benois and leading dancer Nijinsky, Diaghilev made a ballet of Debussy’s Après-midi d’un faune in 1912, in which Nijinsky simulated an orgasm, and also launched Stravinsky on to the Paris scene with the Firebird ballet in 1910 and Petrushka in 1911. The opening night of the Rite of Spring at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on 29 May 1913 was so revolutionary it nearly caused a riot and Debussy covered his ears, but by the end of the season Stravinsky had become a hero.28
Modern art as well as music enjoyed a heady phase in the years before 1914. After a few visits from Spain Pablo Picasso settled definitively in Paris in 1904, joining a colony of artists living on Montmartre. His key contacts were the poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire, who was born in Rome of a Polish mother and claimed to be an illegitimate son of the pope, the patrons Gertrude and Leo Stein, a German-American-Jewish couple, and the German-Jewish art dealer Kahnweiler. Picasso did not like to exhibit and sold directly to his dealer and patron. Gertrude Stein, whom he painted laboriously in the winter of 1905–6, claimed that ‘I was the only person to understand Picasso at the time.’29 After his pink period, painting circus folk and their families, he launched out in 1907 with he Demoiselles d’Avignon, five female nudes, possibly in a brothel, each seen from a different angle. Even his friends were confounded. Gertrude Stein saw it as ‘too awful’, Leo as ‘a horrible mess’, Kahnweiler as ‘mad or monstrous’. Matisse himself thought it ‘an audacious hoax’. It lay under wraps and was not sold until 1924.30 Picasso found a way out through his association with Braque. Together they launched Cubism, rendering first landscapes, then still lifes, in more and more abstract forms. They were assisted financially by Kahnweiler and promoted in the literary press by Apollinaire, who wrote experimental poetry for his own reputation and pornography in order to make a living. Still Picasso refused to exhibit, but Cubist followers such as Robert Delaunay and Fernand Léger did, at the salon of independent artists. At the salon of 1910 Apollinaire announced that the new school had completed the ‘rout of impressionism’, with Matisse in particular seeking ‘not to imitate nature but to express what he sees and feels through the very matter of the picture’.31 In 1911 Apollinaire was wrongly arrested for stealing the Mona Lisa from the Louvre, but hit back by gaining control of the Soirées de Paris review in 1913 in which he sang the praises of Picasso, Braque and Matisse, the writers Alfred Jarry, creator of Ubu Roi, and Max Jacob, and, from the world of popular literature, the Fantômas detective series.32
The pinnacle of modernism came with the publication in 1913 of the first volume of Proust’s la recherche du temps perdu. Its birth had not been easy and acclaim was not immediately forthcoming. Proust, the son of a successful doctor and Jewish mother, was received into the salon of Madame Caillavet in 1889 and called Anatole France ‘the first of my masters’, although France once quipped, ‘Life is too short and Proust is too long.’ He was invited to the salon of the ageing Princesse Mathilde and after 1894, through his friendship with Robert de Montesquiou, became a regular at the salon of Montesquiou’s cousin, Comtesse de Gref-fulhe, the leading society beauty of the Faubourg Saint-Germain.33 Living on family income and contributing occasional literary pieces to Le Figaro, he wrote and rewrote his great work in the Grand Hôtel of Cabourg and in the cork-lined bedroom of his Paris apartment. The novel was a social panorama on a scale not attempted since Balzac, but he was not content to observe characters from the outside. ‘Our social personality is a creation of others’ opinions,’ he wrote, of fantasies about their pasts and the worlds they live in.34 He examined the conversation and gestures of his characters in order to understand the rules governing the relationships between aristocrats and intellectuals, Jews and Gentiles, married partners, mistresses and their lovers, and homosexuals. These relationships changed over time, so that rich and cultivated Jews who were assimilated into high society were cast out of it as a result of the Dreyfus Affair, and passion and jealousy waxed and waned according to ‘the intermittence of love’. While most authors projected their heroes forward in time and followed their adventures, Proust wished to understand the secrets of life and love which were merely experienced the first time. Meaning was given to them only when memories surged up unexpectedly from the unconscious or when lost worlds were recaptured by the genius of the artist who could draw together sensations, associations and memories.
Proust found it almost impossible to publish his novel. He dedicated it to Gaston Calmette, editor of Le Figaro, but Calmette rejected it for serialization in his paper and failed to deliver a contact he promised with another publisher, Fasquelle. The Nouvelle Revue Française, founded in 1909 by André Gide and his friends and published by Gallimard, also rejected it, regarding Proust as ‘a snob, a literary amateur, the worst possible thing for our magazine’. Eventually Proust published it with Grasset at his own expense, and Calmette grudgingly published a review in Le Figaro, three months before he was shot. The book was not a commercial success, selling only 2,800 copies in the first year, but it was a literary event. Belatedly, Gide told Proust that ‘the refusal of this book will always be the gravest mistake the NRF ever made, and… one of the most stinging regrets, nay, remorses, of my whole life.’ Gallimard now recovered the rights from Grasset, publishing a full and revised version in 1922, and in 1919 the second volume of la recherche, l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, won the Goncourt Prize it had been denied in 1913. ‘And I thought I was unknown,’ Proust wrote to Grasset, as a hundred newspapers covered the event.35 He died recognized, but as the quintessential modernist artist who had no regard for mass culture and no resonance with it.
Avant-garde culture was in tension with classical bourgeois culture, as epitomized by the likes of Anatole France, Jules Lemaître and Edmond de Rostand, but as a rule both were defined against mass culture. This was the culture generated by a mass market of a largely urban but also rural population that was literate but not bookish, and wanted to be informed and entertained rather than educated. It was fed by the mass production and distribution of media, a mass scale that was also sensitive to different markets, such as the female market, which had long existed, and new markets, such as that of adolescents. Just as avant-garde and bourgeois culture cross-fertilized literature, art and music, so mass culture also produced crossovers between books, the theatre and new media such as the cinema, as well as between the press and sport. Despite their fundamental opposition, however, there could nevertheless be interaction between mass culture and more elitist forms of art. Thus some writers and artists found a wider audience through media such as the café artistique, while some popular literary forms, such as the comic cartoon, were beloved of students.
Books and bookshops catered essentially for a bourgeois audience, although reading matter was produced in new and more accessible forms for the mass market. A book in this period cost 3 francs 50, a good day’s wage for most workers, and the production of titles reached a high point of 15,000 in 1889, then fell to 11,500 in 1912. The novels of Zola were bestsellers, with L’Assommoir selling 40,000 copies in 1878 and Nana 80,000 in 1880. In 1892 Le Figaro calculated that the 120,000 copies of La Débâcle sold to date, if piled on top of one another, would rise eleven times as high as the Eiffel Tower.36 Zola’s readership in 1887, however, as gauged by those who wrote to him, was almost entirely middle class, with hardly any artisans, shopkeepers, peasants or servants, although perhaps these may have been readers but not letter-writers.37 Much more popular were authors not now part of the classical canon. Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days was serialized in Le Temps in 1872, published by Hetzel in 1873, and also adapted as a play for the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin in 1874. Complete with special effects and a live elephant, it was as much circus as fiction and enjoyed huge success, with a run of 1,550 performances down to 1898, while the book itself sold 108,000 copies before 1904. By then, taken together, Jules Verne’s works had sold a million copies.38
It was not that the mass public did not read, just that they did not go into bookshops. Plenty of other media existed for reading material to reach a mass public, some developments of traditional colportage or hawking, others using and at the same time promoting the popular press. Romans-feuilletons or novels serialized in the press, at the bottom of the first page and sometimes page three as well, appealed in particular to a female readership. Many women cut out the serials and sewed them into little books, or used special binders provided by the newspaper, and swapped them with friends. Stories with pacey plots, heroes and villains, about wronged innocence finally redeemed, were republished in popular editions or adapted for the stage, as was the immensely popular Porteuse de pain of Xavier de Montépin in 1884, the story of a widow wrongly accused of arson and gaoled, staged at the Théâtre de l’Ambigu in 1889.39 Alongside female audiences a new public was emerging among adolescents. These generated a new genre of adventure stories featuring American heroes such as Nick Carter or Buffalo Bill but also homegrown masked lords of crime with their own gangs of ‘apaches’ who flouted work, and were addicted to drink and violence, pursued but never caught by their police inspector nemeses. From 1909 to 1913 Le Matin serialized the adventures of Zigomar, written by a failed dramatist Léon Sazie. These were later sold as ‘little novels’, in instalments, once or twice a week, for between 1 and 2 sous (5 and 10 centimes), the price of a newspaper, and sold not by bookshops but by grocers, stationers and street criers.40 The Zigomar stories sold a million copies a time and were imitated by other dubious heroes, notably the masked bandit Fantômas invented by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre and launched in 1911. Meanwhile the gentleman thief and detective Arsène Lupin, with his plebeian father and aristocratic mother, a redresser of wrongs echoing some of the characters of Eugène Sue, was created in 1905 by Maurice Leblanc. After their original incarnations as serials Fantômas and Arsène Lupin were published as ‘popular books’ by Joseph Arthème Fayard, who was repackaging old favourites such as the Porteuse de pain but also the new detective and thriller genres for adolescents.41
The popular newspapers that carried serialized novels entered an era of mass circulation at the end of the nineteenth century, fuelled by a growing urban population, universal suffrage and the liberal press law of 29 July 1881. Le Petit Parisien, founded in 1876, was taken over in 1888 by Jean Dupuy, senator of the Hautes-Pyrénées, and its circulation rose from 100,000 in 1884 to 555,000 in 1894 and 1,453,000 in 1914. It overtook Le Petit Journal at the turn of the century, but these two Paris dailies together with Le Matin and Le Journal had a combined circulation in 1914 of 4.5 million copies, controlling 75 per cent of the Paris daily market and 40 per cent of the provincial market. Powerful regional dailies such as La Dépêche de Toulouse and L’Écho du Nord also had wide circulations, selling 180,000 copies a day in 1914, while Le Progrès de Lyon topped 200,000. This circulation went far beyond the middle classes to the petite bourgeoisie, working class and some elements of the peasantry. News information was provided for these newspapers by agencies such as Havas, which also managed their advertising, and also became involved after 1889 in the sale of Russian bonds through the press. New technology and marketing gimmicks constantly expanded the readership. From 1903 Le Petit Parisien published photographs and also ran competitions with large prizes. Alongside the news, information was provided about stock exchange prices, food market prices, racing prices, trial proceedings and crime. Faits divers or human-interest stories including crime, accidents, suicides, fires and rescues took up between 10 and 20 per cent of Le Petit Parisien in 1894–1914, with a whole proletariat of reporters hanging around police stations and even conducting parallel investigations in order to provide mat erial, the reportage drawing on and in turn fertilizing the contemporary taste for crime and detective fiction.42
The press and popular novels were not the only ways of reaching a mass public. Popular hunger for up-to-the-minute news and comment was fed by fast-selling pamphlets, songs and cartoons, supplied by a multitude of printers – perhaps 1,500 in Paris – and sold by camelots, the heirs of the colporteurs, particularly during dramatic events such as the Dreyfus Affair. Answering Zola’s Letter to France of 7 January 1898, which had sold 47,000 copies, Léon Hayward, otherwise known as Napoléon, printed a Reply of All French People to Émile Zola, which sold 200,000 copies. This was a continuation of the Grub Street literature of the Revolution which involved the labouring classes, unemployed and immigrants in political debate.43 Of the more substantial illustrated magazines, Excelsior had a circulation of 100,000 in 1910, while one of the successes of the Offenstadt brothers was the youth press, comics with titles like L’Épatant thriving after 1908 on the back of Louis Foulon’s cartoon strip, the Pieds-Nickelés, featuring the subversive and inventive heroes Croquignol, Filochard and Ribouldingue, and using speech bubbles for the first time. Jean-Paul Sartre, born in 1905, recalled not only ‘reading the concluding pages of Madame Bovary twenty times’ but dragging his mother to the kiosk at the corner of the boulevard Saint-Michel and the rue Soufflot to buy the weekly copy of L’Épatant.44
Mass culture was generally blended in with entertainment and thus drew on other resources such as drink, music and sex. A law of July 1880 removed the Empire’s police control over cafés, requiring owners simply to register them rather than seek permission. The number of cafés in Paris ballooned from 22,000 in 1870 to 42,000 in the mid-1880s, falling back to 30,000 in the Belle Époque, and were the social space of a broad mixture of classes. In 1867 the theatres’ monopoly of putting on shows had ended, leading to a great expansion of café-concerts such as the Alcazar and Eldorado which had developed under the Empire, a ‘democratized theatre’ or ‘theatre of the poor’ which generally charged only for food and drink, not for the show. In the working-class districts the tradition of communal, participatory singing carried over from the goguettes was common, but in central Paris the tendency was to greater refinement and sophistication. The cabaret artistique or literary café was aimed at a bohemian, intellectual clientele and launched the careers of poets and singers. Émile Goudeau, a low-level functionary in the Finance Ministry, founded the Hydropathes in the Latin Quarter in 1878, which boasted the humorist Alphonse Allais on the bill. Later Allais moved to Le Chat Noir, a cabaret on Montmartre decked out in mock Louis XIII style, where writers such as Maupassant and Huysmans, who generally moved in literary circles, could find a wider audience. Le Chat Noir was bought in 1885 and renamed Le Mirliton by Aristide Bruant, a bourgeois whose education had been cut short by his father’s death. He was apprenticed to a jeweller, fought in the Franco-Prussian war and was a clerk in a railway office before going into show business. An excellent publicist and self-publicist, Bruant commissioned posters from Toulouse-Lautrec, was deliberately rude to his clients, and celebrated the criminals and pimps of Paris in songs the vulgarity of which for Edmond de Goncourt provided ‘warning signs of the approaching end of the bourgeois age’.45
Another upgraded version of the café-concert was the music hall, which developed after 1890. These were sumptuous variety theatres like the Moulin Rouge, which opened for the Exposition of 1889, and the Folies Bergère, draped in red and gold, lit by gas or electricity. These charged at least 2 francs entrance, 3 francs standing and 4 or 6 francs for a seat after 1900 when the Comédie Française cost 2½ francs, which put them beyond reach of the petit peuple. These had to be content with downmarket guingettes such as the Moulin de la Galette, which charged 50 centimes for men and 20 for women and combined entertainment with clandestine prostitution. Music halls put on circus acts such as trapeze artists, fairground spectacles such as the Pétomane whose act was a symphony of farts, and dancing girls such as the Barriston sisters from America. Music and comedy were central to the routine and stars of the music hall emerged such as Yvette Guibert, whose father died when she was nineteen and who worked as a sales girl in Printemps before being spotted and launched as an actress. She made her career as a singer and comedienne, starting at Eldorado in 1889, moving to the Moulin Rouge, but was also popular in the open-air cafés chantants such as the Ambassadeurs, unmistakable in her long black gloves and iconized by Toulouse-Lautrec. The buttoned-up American writer Rupert Harding Davis found her songs and sketches ‘neither funny, witty, nor quaint, but simply nasty and offensive. The French audiences of the open-air concerts, however, enjoy these, and encore her six times nightly.’ Other audiences also appreciated the star, who made successful tours of Europe and America.46
At the turn of the century the new medium of cinema began to emerge. It separated itself from the fairground and theatre only with difficulty. The Lumière brothers from Lyon who manufactured photographic products demonstrated the first film in Paris in 1895 and for the Exposition of 1900 they projected a twenty-five-minute show on to a giant screen 21 by 18 metres. For the 5,000 viewers at a time who saw it the effect of the film was not unlike the panoramas they were already used to, created by a large drum of painted scenes revolving round the audience, showing Madagascar or the trans-Siberian railway. After Georges Méliès bought the theatre of the conjuror Robert Houdin in 1888 and developed special effects such as the guillotined man reluctant to lose his head, it was a short step to the fantastic films he made at his Montreuil studio after 1897, such as Cinderella, Bluebeard or Jules Verne’s Round the Moon, which also used special effects. Charles Pathé, who sold Edison phonographs and cylinders of popular songs in fairgrounds, built his own studio at Vincennes in 1905 and made melodramatic films for a fairground audience such as The Story of a Crime in 1901. More revolutionary were the comic films he made after 1905 with actor Max Linder, a precursor of Charlie Chaplin, such as Max’s Holidays and Max’s Wedding, which created the first film star, fêted from Barcelona to St Petersburg in the years before 1914. Meanwhile film-maker Victorin Jasset engineered the crossover between adolescent fiction and film with his Nick Carter, King of Detectives in 1908, Zigomar, King of Bandits in 1911, and, inevitably, Zigomar against Nick Carter in 1912.47
Alongside cinema, a new dimension to mass culture at the turn of the century was sport. Until then, sport had meant essentially horse-racing, with the track of Longchamp in the 1870s attracting 200,000 visitors a year (generally punters), 500,000–600,000 in the 1890s. It also meant gymnastics in the German or Swedish style that took off in the wake of the defeat of 1870, with a Union of French Gymnastic Clubs set up in 1873, in an attempt to make the young male population fitter for war. Parallel to this developed athletics clubs, such as the Racing Club de France, which after 1892 organized Sunday races in the Bois de Boulogne, with runners wearing jockey colours and caps, sometimes carrying whips, and bet upon as though they were themselves horses in a flat race. Rugby and football penetrated from England, the first extended along the wine-trade route into south-west France, the second into Channel ports such as Le Havre, into Paris and the northern industrial towns following other business connections. When the Le Havre Athletic Club won the French championship in 1899, six of its players were English. Football and rugby clubs were generally set up by alumni of elite secondary schools, and provided winter activity for those doing athletics in the summer. The development of athletics was furthered by Pierre de Coubertin, a Jesuit-educated noble who studied at the Paris Law Faculty and the École Libre des Sciences Politiques, was worried by the neglect of physical education and character-building in French lycées and believed that England’s enthusiasm for team games helped to fortify its ruling class against revolution and underpinned its empire-building. In 1889 he founded the Union of French Athletic Societies and on 20 March 1892 refereed a football match in the Bois de Boulogne between Stade Français and Racing Club de France in front of a crowd of 2,000. In this period athletics, along with the football and rugby that grew out of it, retained a somewhat bourgeois and English profile. As one sports paper noted in 1891, ‘The Grand Prix de Longchamp attracts over fifty thousand, a football match hardly five hundred.’48
Much more French and much more popular was cycling. It was the product of a technological revolution that brought down the price of cycles from 500 to 100 francs in the 1890s, so that there were 3.5 million of them in France in 1914. The French Cycling Union set up in 1881 had 44,000 members by 1893, and acted as a formidable lobby, persuading the Paris municipal council and other town councils to fund cycle stadiums as popular race-courses in the 1890s to match those of the rich at Auteuil and Longchamp. In time road-racing became even more popular, with big prizes and accolades for rival manufacturers to be made in the Bordeaux-to-Paris and Paris-to-Brussels races. These gave opportunities to young men of working-class origin, such as Charles Terront, the son of a railway mechanic of Saint-Ouen and a former errand-boy for Havas, to win fame and money. It was however the intervention of the press that made cycling into a sport of mass appeal. This was the work of one man, Henri Desgranges, who gave up a career in the law to become manager of the Parc des Princes cycle stadium in 1897 and three years later took control of a new sports daily financed by the Comte de Dion, L’Auto. In 1903 he boosted the fortunes of both cycling and L’Auto by launching the Tour de France, with prize money of 20,000 francs. L’Auto pumped up the Tour, inventing heroic stories such as that of ‘the Old Gaulois’ Christophe, who in 1911 carried his machine with a snapped fork down the Pyrenees to have it repaired by a blacksmith before he continued his route. Circulation of L’Auto, which had a monopoly of the coverage of the Tour, went from 20,000 to 120,000 in 1913, with 332,000 during the Tour in July 1914.49 This supreme amalgam of racing, journalism and advertising epitomized the versatility and success of mass culture.