INTRODUCTION

Femina, La Vie Heureuse and the Invention of the Femme Moderne

In the inaugural issue of the wildly successful women’s photographic magazine La Vie Heureuse, the beloved countess and critically acclaimed poet Anna de Noailles is pictured in her beautifully appointed living room with her young son delicately set upon her lap (Fig. I.1). This image faces a slightly larger photograph of the countess in profile, her billowing skirt cradling not her baby this time, but her most recent book. Noailles’ graceful presence in this five-page photo spread diffused brewing tensions between feminism and femininity in the Belle Epoque through the precisely measured equilibrium of books and babies. Indeed, rather than books becoming substitutes for babies, and thus—as contemporary fears dictated—leading to infertility, depopulation and inevitably (or so the logic went) the collapse of French society, books and babies appeared side by side throughout, as the magazine consistently depicted women authors as devoted mothers.¹ Just like its rival publication Femina, La Vie Heureuse celebrated achieving women in dazzling feature stories sandwiched between elaborate fashion plates and advertisements for beauty creams, corsets and high-end furniture. Regardless of the nature of their achievements—not just as writers, but as lawyers, doctors, actresses, explorers or athletes—their femininity remained fully and vividly intact.

This book argues that Femina and La Vie Heureuse, launched within a year of each other in 1901 and 1902, introduced a significant and often overlooked image of modern French femininity, in deliberately stark contrast to stereotypes of the feminist activist and the New Woman—the two figures that have been most closely associated with Belle Epoque challenges to gender norms. Thanks to their savvy exploitation of photographic technologies, their embrace of new artistic currents and literary trends and their exquisite presentation of famous women, these magazines became the arena through which a powerful model of French femininity emerged—one that has exerted a lasting, if rarely recognized, influence on French expression.

Figure I.1 Feature story on Anna de Noailles in the first issue of La Vie Heureuse (October 1902).

Often referred to simply as the femme moderne, the feminine role model promoted in Femina and La Vie Heureuse was a bundle of decidedly new contradictions, as she embraced a newfound sense of equality without completely abandoning traditional gender roles. For many in this generation of newly educated women—the product of the reforms of the 1880s that guaranteed secondary schooling for girls—the most crucial challenge was that of reconciling traditional family structures with an independence of mind and spirit their mothers had never dreamed of.2 In the pages of Femina and La Vie Heureuse, this fantasy became a beautiful reality: the femme moderne offered an inspiring image of “having it all” in the Belle Epoque—devoted husband, fulfilling family, beautiful home, and, if not a satisfying vocation, at least some sort of outlet for self-expression, all while maintaining her impeccable appearance.

This new ideal embodied the hopes and dreams as well as the most pressing internal conflicts of large numbers of French women during what was a period of profound social and cultural change. Indeed, the contradictory stance of the femme moderne as both progressive in her pursuit of equality and conservative in her embrace of conventional gender differences reflected the essential ambivalence of the Belle Epoque itself, caught as it was between a postrevolutionary past in which gender roles were sharply divided and a rapidly modernizing future in which many of those long-held divisions were quickly falling away. This book proposes a new way, then, to consider the oft-posed question of whether there was a Belle Epoque for women.³ The richly coded pages of Femina and La Vie Heureuse offer an ideal vantage point from which to examine this moment of society in transition: poised to accept women in more powerful, visible roles than ever before, but not always certain as to how to imagine them inhabiting those roles.

The editors of both Femina and La Vie Heureuse—led by Pierre Lafitte and Caroline de Broutelles respectively—were firmly ensconced in what was known as the literary Tout Paris: a world of elite, highly intellectual, largely conservative-leaning writers, many of whom were published in a wide array of magazines and newspapers. This was the world of popular writers and journalists like Jules Clarétie, Paul Hervieu, Marcel Prévost and Paul Adam, and that of celebrity literary couples: the Rostands, the Catulle Mendèses, the Daudets, the Dieulafoys.4 Femina and La Vie Heureuse were, in a sense, offshoots of the vibrant literary salons that so many of these figures attended, often together.⁵ In his memoirs, writer J.-H. Rosny described the Maison Pierre Lafitte as “the most scintillating” publishing house, hosting dinners where one could see “the most brilliant literary stars” at the same table, from the poet Countess Anna de Noailles to the best-selling writer and media darling Marcelle Tinayre to the eccentric Lucie Delarue-Mardrus.⁶ Similarly, articles in La Vie Heureuse about the parties surrounding its annual literary prize proudly described the attendance of the “elite Tout Paris of arts, letters and the monde.”⁷

But these magazines were also products of the democratizing forces of fin-de-siècle mass culture: even as they often presented an aristocratic universe within their pages, they were, at least in theory, available to all.⁸ While readers were largely based in Paris, they extended to the provinces and represented a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds. We might describe the space created by Femina and La Vie Heureuse, then, as a fusion of the exclusiveness of the salon with the openness of the department store, displaying for an aspiring public the amenities of the upper classes.⁹ The luxuries associated with this milieu, however, were not limited to high-end goods. Quite remarkably, Femina and La Vie Heureuse made available and desirable for a broad female readership the creative, intellectual endeavors of the monde littéraire; they encouraged readers not only to dress and shop like the social elite, but to be reflective and literary themselves in myriad ways that we will explore in the pages that follow.

Acceptance within the Belle Epoque literary world required a tacit disavowal of turn-of-the-century feminist movements, lumped together in the collective consciousness as a direct threat to “traditional” French values. Femina and La Vie Heureuse consistently rejected the feminist label for that reason. “This magazine is not about ‘feminism’ or ‘social emancipation,’” the editors of Femina insisted in their introductory mission statement. “We’ll leave to others the work of masculinizing women and robbing them of their delightful charm.”¹⁰ This harsh stereotyping, hardly reflective of turn-of-the-century feminism’s diverse causes and supporters, allowed the editors to invent a “straw feminist,” as it were, from which to draw a vivid distinction with their own work.11 And yet, I am arguing, it would be a mistake not to recognize the import of these magazines in the context of a more capacious feminist history.¹² In what follows, I use the term Belle Epoque literary feminism (whose precise contours I elaborate on below) to designate Femina and La Vie Heureuse’s stance as one occupied with expanding women’s roles even as they carefully avoided explicit political engagement. Despite their own initial resistance to the label, this book recognizes as feminist, then, the energetic efforts of these magazines and their surrounding web of fictional texts to help Belle Epoque women imagine themselves comfortably inhabiting modern roles.

Belle Epoque literary feminism was defined in large part by the unique discursive space that it fostered—the network of readers and writers that connected Femina and La Vie Heureuse and the novels associated with them, stemming from the enclosed world of the literary Tout Paris to a wide web of readers who would respond to their surveys and contests by the thousands.¹³ In presenting this new space, I would like to recognize its place as part of the new media of the twentieth century, through which lines between public and private were increasingly elided.¹⁴ As we shall see, the magazines were quite innovative for their time, with their reliance on photography, their cultivation of celebrity culture (often in the service of certain ideological positions), and their willingness to envision new modern heroines and ideals that might lead their readers to see themselves differently. While we may be familiar with the mimetic pressures of celebrity culture—which continue to function in much the same way to this day—we have not yet considered the particular way that early celebrity and mass culture in France shaped a new model of womanhood, one that not only soldered the association between consumerism and femininity, but also encouraged women to develop their own critical and creative voices.¹⁵

Recently Lenard Berlanstein and Colette Cosnier have debated the feminism of Femina, with Berlanstein linking its progressive strategies to that of Marguerite Durand’s La Fronde—the publication most visibly associated with Belle Epoque feminism—and Cosnier rejecting the feminist label for a magazine edited largely by men.¹⁶ It is certainly worth noting that Femina’s publisher and most of its editors were men; that many of the most frequent collaborators at both magazines were as well; and that so many women writers’ presence in their pages was secured by their link to an already famous husband.17 In these ways the magazines were fundamentally different from the all-woman run La Fronde.¹⁸ Notwithstanding Femina’s patriarchal structures, however, the most visible success of Belle Epoque literary feminism pertained to women writers—figures caricatured throughout the nineteenth century among the very same elite as haggard, man-hating bas bleus, or bluestockings. In the 1840s, cartoonist Honoré Daumier’s Les bas bleus series for Le Charivari had infamously ridiculed such women while betraying the profound anxiety they elicited as a potential threat to bourgeois domestic norms. Women who wrote were, in Daumier’s eyes, terrible wives and even worse mothers (Fig. I.2). In image after image, women writers were depicted as abandoning or sabotaging their traditional roles; worse yet, their husbands were left emasculated, forced into the roles their wives had evacuated. Long after Daumier, the bas bleu continued to be a reviled figure throughout the century, her threats vilified in writer Barbey d’Aurevilly’s treatise by the same name, not to mention countless other cartoons, satires and literary and journalistic asides.¹⁹

The Belle Epoque woman writer, on the other hand, emerges in Femina and La Vie Heureuse as the gorgeous conjugation of new equalities with traditional values, and thus a key example of the femme moderne. While largely absent from French literary histories, these magazines were credited during their time with facilitating an astonishing growth in the numbers of women writers, opening the way for women writers to be elected to the Société de gens de lettres and to regularly earn the Legion of Honor, facilitating women’s creation of their own literary prize (which would become the Prix Femina), and contributing to the overall sense that women were on the cusp of being admitted to the Académie française (even if this would not in fact happen for several more decades).

Moreover, this study adds to previous scholarship a full exploration of the medium itself, which, I am arguing, was crucial to the magazines’ feminist expression. If La Fronde was often referred to as Le Temps in skirts, this was in part because it had the same format as mainstream dailies, with headlined columns over several text-filled pages. The alternative model of femininity that Femina and La Vie Heureuse proposed, on the other hand, was profoundly visual, and the magazines’ wide variety of images and photographic innovations contributed to the sense of the dynamic possibilities they offered within, always, a hyper-feminized context. Thus, the story that I am presenting is as much about the history of French women as it is about the history of mass culture and the media in France; the femme moderne was as important for the freedoms that she openly embraced as for the kinds of journalistic innovations that allowed her to be celebrated. Belle Epoque literary feminism was primarily a work of imagination: of examining, exploring and most fundamentally, fantasizing about what the fully realized modern woman could be—and this, importantly, was done by both men and women. In its imaginative work, it was truly separate from the contemporary feminist movement, deliberately steering away from their serious political and social work, which was grounded in a searing and not entirely pleasant social reality.20 Often, as we shall see, the images depicted in Femina and La Vie Heureuse did not even reflect upper bourgeois or aristocratic reality—few women, comparatively, were doctors or lawyers, the balance of work and family was not effortless, equal partnership in marriage was not embraced in every household. Moreover, the ideals shared in these magazines were often misunderstood beyond the context of their devoted readerships. For legions of Belle Epoque women, on the other hand, the magazines represented a vibrant universe, an alternative reality in which certain kinds of feminist fantasies were normalized, made both accessible and desirable. Femina and La Vie Heureuse thus gently moved women forward by vividly displaying before them a compelling future in which their success was a given.

Figure I.2 Honoré Daumier, “Les bas bleus.” (Le Charivari, February 26, 1844). The caption reads: “The mother is in the heat of composition; the baby is in the bathwater.” Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Succès Oblige

The first issue of Femina in February of 1901 proudly described its mission in a full-page statement. This illustrated review would be for women, “in text and image,” what L’Illustration and La Vie au grand air, two of publisher Pierre Lafitte’s previously successful ventures, were for news and sports.21 The enterprising Lafitte, just under thirty years old, developed this venture with some of the most popular and talented journalists of the time: among others, Paul Adam and René Maizeroy; Marcel L’Heureux, who would be his editor-in-chief; Daniel Lesueur (pseudonym of Jeanne Lapauze), the first woman writer to receive the Legion of Honor; Maurice Leblanc, who would go on to write the Arsène Lupin series first published in Lafitte’s Je sais tout; and Henri Barbusse, who would win the Prix Goncourt for his harrowing tale of war, Le Feu, in 1916.²² The idea, inspired by publications from across the channel, was to launch a women’s magazine that would be both family-oriented and high-class, run by men “who love them and admire them.”²³ In the opening address, a friendly, welcoming editorial voice claimed that France had no real women’s magazine, and that Femina would fill that void, and not a moment to soon. Without mentioning his competitors by name, Lafitte decried the limited nature of existing fashion magazines, noting “there’s more to offer women than what is currently offered under the guise of ‘Fashion,’ ‘Society’ and ‘Family.’” In this, Lafitte was politely taking down Caroline de Broutelles’ La Mode Pratique (launched by Hachette in 1891), whose subtitle was “Journal de la famille.” This successful women’s magazine was filled with fashion plates, clothing patterns and tips on accessories and recipes. Femina shared La Mode Pratique’s large illustrated format (a little over thirteen inches in height) as well as its feminized fonts and gravures de mode. But to this homogenized and rather dreary mix Lafitte added the dynamic visual displays and chatty style of his sports magazine La Vie au grand air, which always featured dozens of photographs of the most successful and most unusual athletes (bodybuilders, runners, circus performers, race car drivers).24 He threw in the kinds of celebrity interviews and feature stories that dominated L’Illustration, while diverting the focus to famous women and couples.²⁵ He added to that mix the novels in feuilleton and poems by famous authors, extensive book reviews, and commentaries that were central to so many well-established publications. In other words, Lafitte borrowed all the most pleasing features of the burgeoning mass press around him, offering new and improved versions of elements most likely to interest women readers. He bound these disparate parts together with a gorgeous layout (“a dazzling orgy of colors, plates, pen and ink on glossy paper”)²⁶ and a clear, consistent editorial voice that spoke directly to Femina’s female reader, guiding her towards what she was meant to appreciate in its pages. Recognizing that “woman’s domain is vast and magnificent,”²⁷ this editorial voice promised its chères lectrices—dear (female) readers—everything from theatre to art, literature, cooking, music, hairstyles, fashion, jewelry, interior design, animals and flowers, and writings by the most famous women writers of the day. It was a kind of variety never previously seen under one French masthead.

FEMINA, all caps and in quotes, in a savvy and persistent branding effort that prevailed in every issue, thus reclaimed the linguistic roots of femininity, promising something that was both all woman and thoroughly modern. This precise and original balance between tradition and modernity was both what defined Femina and what situated it in an ambivalent feminist space. Some of Femina’s internal tensions were apparent from the first issue. The cover of the magazine featured a model photographed by the Reutlingers, in an elegant gown, a bow wrapped under her chin, locking a heart-shaped flowered hat in place (Fig. I.3). The bouquet of peonies she holds in her arms obscures her actual hands, blurring the boundary between woman and flower. This lovely ultra-feminine figure would become Femina’s icon—her detached head would later find a place in the upper corner of the magazine’s bimonthly covers. An inner frontispiece featured a photograph of a demure Empress of Russia. Inside, one finds articles on Queen Wilhelmine (in a section on “The Royal Court”) and Prince Roland Bonaparte’s residence (“The Great Salons of Paris”), all matched with sumptuous photographs of lavish interiors. There were also articles: “The Century of Children,” “The Fashion of Tomorrow”; the opera star Mademoiselle Bréval; a song with music and lyrics written especially for the magazine; a section on jewelry and crafts, and beauty for self and home—all of which reflect an elegant, upper-bourgeois milieu, accessible to anyone for fifty centimes per issue.28 Amidst this list of traditional feminine features, one also finds a few elements that signal change and give a sense of the direction that Femina would take within months of its launch: the article on Queen Wilhelmine is signed by Madame Alphonse Daudet, wife of the famous decadent novelist and published author herself; the magazine included the first episode of a novella by Daniel Lesueur, who would become a key representative of the magazine and a member of its prize committees; the interior cover advertised an exercise contraption that promised to put an end to “anemic young women,” offering them “strength, appetite, color, agility, flexibility, grace and nimbleness” (Fig. I.4).

Figure I.3 Cover of the first issue of Femina (February 1, 1901).

Finally, and perhaps most significantly, the last article in the magazine, under the rubric “Sportswomen,” considered the question of women and driving. Illustrating the article’s title, a line drawing by Maurice de Thoren pictures Artemis, Greek goddess of the hunt. Bow and arrow poised, her hair flows behind her in the whiplash lines of art nouveau graphics, as hunting dogs and bunnies scurry past.29 In a large photograph in the middle of the page, an elegant woman, hat firmly in place, calmly drives a car, accompanied by what appear to be her smiling son and daughter (Fig. I.5). Can a woman drive, asks the title? She most certainly can, the article responds, but through its own particular idiom, which captures both the audacity and the conservatism of the publication: “the modern woman is no longer chained to the hearth, or rather, the hearth has widened.”³⁰ Reinforcing the iconography of the piece, the article declares woman’s freedom within the context of her traditional role, just as the woman in the photograph is accompanied by her children. This is hardly, then, the frightening independence of the femme nouvelle, or New Woman, so often pictured alone on her bicycle, a vehicle rumored to cause both self-pleasuring and infertility.³¹ Rather, the car is figured as a family-friendly expansion of the woman’s traditional private sphere, while at the same time announcing a new kind of mother: stronger, more visible and a challenge to the traditional circumscription of that separate sphere. The strength and power suggested by this alliance of woman and vehicle is alluded to in the graphics surrounding the title. Artemis, after all, is a highly aggressive figure whose connection to Greek mythology mitigates her threat; her graphic evocation here inscribes her perfectly within Belle Epoque aesthetics. But while the title seems to suggest that driving is considered a modern sport, the article ultimately reveals something far less audacious. The photograph pictured is that of the family of Georges Richard, an automobile engineer who had worked to design a family-friendly vehicle, so that “the safe and economical comfortable family car has replaced the dubious sports car.” Indeed, it would be only a slight exaggeration to say that this piece ostensibly devoted to the vehicles of “Sportswomen” turns out to be about an early model of the minivan.

Figure I.4 Advertisement for the Sandow exercise machine. Femina (February 1, 1901).

This one article captures much of the zeitgeist of the magazine, the spirit that would lead it to have 130,000 subscribers by its third year.32 The magazine’s zeitgeist was defined—at least on the surface—by a rather untortured ambivalence, one that masked its own contradictions at every turn. Explicitly eschewing the overtly political, Femina embraced a discourse of aspiration and achievement. Women, it seemed to announce on page after page, yes you can—but not only that—you already are! Women’s progress was not about making demands, but about performance and possibility, about the simple facts of modern femininity, evidenced by an array of photographs that repeatedly demonstrated the new things that women were, in fact, doing. While the first issues deliberately seemed to steer clear of controversial issues (this final article on driving comes the closest to pushing the envelope), or simply those of substance, by the end of 1902, one finds articles on women lawyers, doctors, athletes and explorers. Ironically, this may have been a result of a staff overhaul that replaced many of the original female staffers associated with preexisting women’s magazines with more daring young male journalists.33 By 1903 divorce and marriage reform were discussed regularly; by 1906, articles on suffrage begin to appear. If Femina’s formula was developed by market-savvy men, women quickly responded and became integral voices in that formula; soon after the early overhaul, the male-dominated editorial staff was joined by regular women contributors, from journalists to famous women writers, whose efforts helped shape the magazine’s message. Femina’s success, if measured by its own accounts, was stunning, comparable to those of the most influential mainstream periodicals of the day.³⁴ Within months, it seemed, one could find it everywhere: “on the guéridons of aristocrats, the dressing tables of actresses, the tablecloths of housewives, rolled up in the shopping baskets of midinettes, and hidden in the desktops of schoolgirls.”³⁵ By 1907, Lafitte’s success was such that he could move Femina’s offices to a hôtel particulier on the Champs Elysées. Every aspect of this new “maison des magazines” reflected Lafitte’s desire to be at the forefront of the modern. Equipped with telephones, elevator and modern heating, the building housed a photo studio (where for no small sum one could be photographed much like the celebrities within his magazine), a theater and a ballroom.³⁶ According to the magazine’s own reports, the opening reception for this new establishment was host to five thousand guests, a veritable who’s who of Tout Paris.³⁷

Figure I.5 “Can a Woman Drive an Automobile?” Femina (February 1, 1901).

One early sign of Femina’s success was the launch of its rival, the monthly La Vie Heureuse, in October 1902, by the equally enterprising publisher Hachette under the direction of Caroline de Broutelles, the general editor of La Mode Pratique.38 In contrast to Femina, then, La Vie Heureuse was run by a woman. Both the similarity of La Vie Heureuse to Femina and the subtle distinctions with which it invented itself tell us a good deal about what Femina had already become.39 Above a neoclassic still life, the cover of this “Revue Féminine Universelle Illustrée” listed its topics as “The Home and the World”; “Sports and Games”; “Our Favorite Animals”; “Fields and Gardens”; “News”; and “Arts and Ideas” (Fig. I.6). Over the masthead reads the simple inscription: “Women represent half of humanity.” On the front page, the magazine addressed itself to “all women,” in recognition that women had recently acquired “a societal role and social influence never before seen.”⁴⁰ La Vie Heureuse reiterated Femina’s promise to deliver “through text and image” the infinite spectacle of modern femininity. Their aesthetics were so similar as to be interchangeable, the majority of famous contributors appeared in both magazines and their prices were identical; but La Vie Heureuse, at least at its outset, appealed directly to a more serious audience. (This might explain why the editors of Femina felt the need to fill a full page of their December 15, 1903 edition with headshots of their contributors, declaring in bold that “Femina is the most literary of all illustrated magazines.”)41 In their opening issue, the editors of La Vie Heureuse invoked women as members of a new generation, taking on new roles, increasingly outside of the home. The “infinite spectacle” of femininity in 1902 would include “supreme elegance,” first and foremost. But the list continued in some unconventional ways that seemed to allow for multiple incarnations of modern femininity: “exciting sports, endless amusements, lives of intelligence, courage, goodwill and devotion; productive careers, acts of generosity, women of beauty and talent, acts of heroism and strength, images and stories about women of exceptional lives.” Indeed, recognizing that women have different interests, La Vie Heureuse promised that their magazine would be devoted to “universal life [. . .] in a dynamic, attractive and varied manner,” and therefore “speak to all.” Like Femina, La Vie Heureuse appears to have taken off rapidly. Although its first three issues were approximately 8 x 11 inches, its first Christmas issue contained a flyer announcing a new larger format, under the title “succès oblige.” Beginning in January of 1903, it became the same 13 x 11 inch size as Femina.

Figure I.6 Cover of the first issue of La Vie Heureuse (October 1902).

La Femme Moderne

Two years before the first issue of Femina hit the stands, the protagonist of Camille Pert’s 1899 novel Leur égale (Their Equal) dreamt of developing her own photographic magazine devoted to a growing mass of women “who reflect, who think, who seek to teach others.” Of this future magazine, Pert wrote, “Women will only subscribe to it or buy it for the pictures on the cover, or the fashion inlays . . . the tips on shopping, the theater, exhibits and department stores . . .” Attracted and entertained by these features, “they’ll eat up all the articles on philosophy and social issues thrown into the mix!” (281).42 The name of this magazine: La Femme Moderne. For Pert’s heroine Thérèse, the existence of a new kind of woman was simply a fact, a product of the changing society in which she lived. This progress was described as an effect of women not actively resisting the currents pushing them forward, rather than a deliberate, combative effort to break down barriers. When one of Thérèse’s colleagues tries to categorize her reflections as feminist, she responds in frustration: “I don’t know exactly what you mean by this term . . . there are so many trends, so many different flags being waved! All of our efforts will aim to make women better able to wear the mantle that, by the force of events, has been slid upon her shoulders” (141). Thérèse rejects the feminist label because she does not see herself as an activist; she has no interest in being “the champion of ridiculous demands” (echoing, again, a caricatured sense of fin-de-siècle feminism). Rather, she simply is what she is: “man’s true equal,” in her ambition, in the pleasure she takes in her work, and in her thirst for knowledge. Her very existence is its own argument; her competence proof of what women can be, without, importantly and explicitly, being any less feminine because of it. “And why should she be less of a woman, for having a head full of serious ideas instead of troublesome nonsense?” (145) she asks herself.

The struggles of Pert’s compelling heroine challenge prevailing narratives of resistance to gender norms in the Belle Epoque. Both contemporary scholars and writers of the time have written extensively about the New Woman, or femme nouvelle, an Anglo-Saxon import who burst on the scene in the 1890s.43 Based on an accumulation of stereotypes circulated through the mass press, the femme nouvelle was “reified in the French imagination” as mannish and severe, sporting pants and spectacles, smoking cigarettes, riding bicycles, and unabashedly entering male-dominated professional realms.⁴⁴ During the same time period, French feminism was forcefully emerging while still struggling to define itself. As historian Karen Offen has demonstrated, in the 1890s and early 1900s, feminists took up a wide variety of causes in France, including the rights of women workers, poor women and prostitutes; infant mortality; changes to the French civil code; and, eventually, suffrage. The far-reaching concerns of the movement and its multiple incarnations are reflected in the multiple ways in which feminists self-identified: as “familial feminists,” “Christian feminists,” “socialist feminists” and “radical feminists,” to name a few. Six feminist congresses took place between 1892 and 1913; numerous feminist periodicals appeared, and discussion of “the woman question” proliferated in wide-ranging publications.⁴⁵

While recent scholarship has worked to distinguish between New Women and feminists, these figures were often conflated in the Belle Epoque imagination.46 If they were to be differentiated, it was as two sides of the same coin. The fact that many feminists hinged their demands for equal rights to their dutiful fulfillment of domestic roles was lost on much of the public. Caricatures of these modern women in the popular press often portrayed both figures as mannish, aggressive creatures refusing traditional feminine roles, suggesting that women must choose between the conventional, domestic feminine self and the feminist overhaul of traditional gender roles. This choice was most often depicted as a violent rupture to the social order, an undermining of social structures and a refusal of conventional feminine norms. An 1896 cartoon from the satirical Republican newspaper Le Grelot entitled “Revendications féminines” (Women’s Demands) demonstrated the shared tropes of this threat as well as its debt to Daumier: the woman pictured, in pantaloons, smoking a cigarette and holding her bicycle—all forms of visual shorthand for the New Woman—is off to a feminist congress, while her incredulous yet wasted husband is left inhabiting the traditional role of wife, to tend to feeding children and washing dishes (Fig. I.7).⁴⁷ Just as in many of Daumier’s own caricatures, the threat of women’s public roles was visited directly upon the hapless male partner, and, by implication, on marriage (read: French society) itself.

In reality, however, there was no single way for Belle Epoque women to enter the public domains that were rapidly opening up for them, and these two labels masked a far more complex picture of the evolving women of this generation.⁴⁸ Femina and La Vie Heureuse were both quick to distance themselves from any association with the organized feminist movement, and the term femme nouvelle is rarely found in their pages.⁴⁹ There are numerous examples both in the magazines and in novels like Pert’s in which women explicitly reject these identifications while expressing their desire to embrace modern roles.⁵⁰ In light of this, one of the aims of this book is to flesh out the figure promoted by Femina and La Vie Heureuse as an alternate means of expressing resistance to gender norms during the Belle Epoque. For Thérèse, the femme moderne was explicitly articulated as a work in progress, an evolving news story that the magazine’s task was to pursue. The precise contours of that figure were conventionally feminine, yet strategically ill-defined (“very eclectic, very omnibus”), her ideas nonthreatening, open to conversation. Pert’s novel, as well as a series on “la femme moderne” that appeared in the Revue Encyclopédique in 1896, suggest that this more nuanced terminology predated the magazines.51 The femme moderne offered a flexible mode of identification that unsettled the categories of feminist and New Woman, while pointing to a resistance to these politicizing labels shared by many women of this generation, even as they sought to update their roles. In September 1910, Marie-Anne Bovet offered a definition in La Vie Heureuse that comes close to summarizing the competing energies of this figure, who sought to balance conventional feminine roles with new kinds of power: “Good feminism is one that doesn’t destroy the make up of the family, one that, in making professionals out of those who have the need or desire, allows the wife, the mother, the housewife, the mondaine even, to continue to exist; it’s a feminism that virilizes—which is a strength—without masculinizing, which would be disgraceful.”52

Figure I.7 “Women’s Demands.” Le Grelot (April 19, 1896). The caption reads: “I am going to the feminist congress! Make dinner for 8:00 sharp, do you hear me? And nothing gets messed up!” Courtesy of Universitätbiblothek Heidelberg.

Pert’s literary fantasy is of course just that, but as such it takes us into what both Femina and La Vie Heureuse might have symbolized for so many, while shining light on the symbiotic, mutually sustaining relationship between these magazines and women’s fiction. The publication Thérèse could only dream about in 1899 was a thriving reality within a few years, and her own heroine’s sober, solitary ending stands in stark contrast to the happy endings of the novels we will explore in Chapter 5. These happy endings and brighter outlook, I will suggest, were very much enabled by the edifying vision of modern femininity and the community of female readers and writers fostered by Femina and La Vie Heureuse. Even as she distanced herself from feminist activism, then, the femme moderne nonetheless delineated an important new space for feminist discussion.

The human-interest stories that filled both magazines’ pages can be read as sustained metaphors for the positive images of modern femininity that the magazines aimed to promote, and thus a kind of extended advertisement for this Belle Epoque modern woman. A September 1, 1903 article in Femina entitled “An Excursion to the Mer de Glace” offers but one example. The first of several articles about female explorers and mountain climbers, this article takes up the hyper-feminized epistolary form, addressed to “My dear Simonne,” and signed “Yvonne.” The challenging excursion described in this letter is one where a towering mountain is compared to a gigantic sugar loaf and later Santa Claus. Yvonne’s trek involves an adorable “conversation with a goat” and a brief encounter with danger followed by arrival at “a cute little chalet.” In the photographs, “real alpinistes” (in the feminine) are pictured contemplating their next move, while Femina’s own alpinistes “powder their noses before entering the chalet.” The true danger, the author assures, will be left to some “intrepid English women,” thus marking a cultural distinction between French women’s new roles and those hailing from the land of the New Woman.⁵³ The article, then, sets out rather explicitly many of the contradictions and jumbled messaging of the women’s press as it imagined women reaching, as it were, new heights. Written explicitly by a man under a female pseudonym (the editorial practice was to reveal the true author—in this case André Chaignon, one of Lafitte’s close associates—under the heading “pour copie conforme”—for a certified copy), the article brings into relief the gendered role-playing involved in this messaging, as a male editor took on a female voice in order to perform this updated femininity. While Femina was a magazine for women, it was not always written by women (although as time went on, this increasingly became the case). Troubling as it might now seem, this role-playing was part of a wider strategy of encouraging women’s achievement by modeling for them roles they might not yet comfortably assume on their own.

Perhaps most importantly, the article on women climbers brings out the particular idiom of the women’s press, in its savvy exploitation of the synergistic effects of text and image. In the language of Femina, the relationship between the literal and the metaphoric was always suggestively and powerfully intertwined. French women, suggested the article above, you can climb mountains, as long as you recognize your feminine limits. Nearly every page of Femina and La Vie Heureuse helped flesh out this thoroughly modern figure, and the message of success was insistently disseminated through image after image, article after article. To be a modern woman, these articles declared, as much through the writing itself as through the accompanying photographs, was to climb mountains and explore new realms, all the while looking beautiful and carefree. Over a very short period of time, these images gained in audacity, with Femina edging out La Vie Heureuse in terms of visual potency and photographic innovation. Each new example literalized the possibility for readers: the fact that there were female mountain climbers made the fantasy of climbing mountains—real and metaphorical—all the more compelling. Indeed, the literal realities conveyed through the magazines steadily insinuated metaphorical possibilities of future, or more personalized, feminine success. In this sense any symbolic difference was effaced between the woman worker repairing a skyscraper (Fig. I.8),⁵⁴ the courageous rock climber (in a clearly doctored image, Fig. I.9), the tennis star (Fig. I.10), the bowler (Fig. I.11), the young lawyer (Fig. I.12), the impossibly elegant woman writer (Fig. I.13), the lovely mother (Fig. I.14), the legions of princess brides, the dozens of devoted associées—the term used to describe wives who helped their husbands professionally—or the simple lectrice entering poetry contests while tending to her family; they were all metonyms of Femina and La Vie Heureuse’s modern femininity, mirror images of a feminine achievement that had once seemed nearly impossible but was now placed, at least figuratively, within reach.

Figure I.8 “Feminism on a High Scale.” Cover of Femina (September 15, 1910).

Figure I.9 “An Intrepid Alpinist,” on the cover of Femina (August 15, 1908).

Figure I.10 Tennis player Madame Fenwick on the cover of Femina (July 15, 1908).

Figure I.11 “Un sport à la mode: Le bowling.” Cover of Femina (April 1, 1911).

Figure I.12 “The Débuts of Women Lawyers.” La Vie Heureuse (September 1905).

Figure I.13 Poet and novelist Countess Anna de Noailles, frontispiece to La Vie Heureuse (February 1905).

Figure I.14 Cover of La Vie Heureuse by art nouveau illustrator A. E. Marty (June 15, 1913).

Having It All in the Belle Epoque

I have divided the book into two parts: “Readers and Writers” and “Texts and Contexts.” The first half examines the ways that Belle Epoque literary feminism constructed, in text and image, a shared fantasy of modern femininity. This fantasy was promoted in large part through an intimate relationship with the magazines’ readers (explored in Chapter 1), who were encouraged to identify with what they found displayed before them. The next two chapters situate Femina and La Vie Heureuse in the context of Belle Epoque visual and mass culture and the history of photography. These chapters explore the dazzling iconography of the woman writer within the pages of both magazines, where she is figured in ways that seek to wholly expurgate the legacy of the dowdy bas bleu of the previous century, while tacitly promoting the ideals of the femme moderne. Finally, Chapter 4 explores women writers’ own relationship to their public image as a way to gain insight into their own relationship to the feminist strategies deployed by the magazines.

The second half of the book moves beyond the borders of the magazines themselves in order to explore their reception and influence. In Chapter 5, I explore the interactive, almost symbiotic relationship between Femina and La Vie Heureuse and popular women’s fiction. The novels that were reviewed and discussed in the magazines functioned as a kind of laboratory for the femme moderne, grappling rather explicitly with the complexities of issues that the glossies introduced but could not engage in the same way. The final two chapters then test the impact of the magazines beyond their exclusive female readership, where much of the work of the magazines was largely misunderstood. I explore this disconnect through both fiction and history: through Jean Lorrain’s parodic send-up of the women’s press, and then through a real-life media scandal surrounding beloved author Marcelle Tinayre. Finally, by way of conclusion, I examine the renewed discussions surrounding the possibility of letting women into the Académie française that took place in 1909 and 1910. These discussions, as well as Femina’s elegant way of sidestepping them, illustrate the surprisingly imaginative mechanisms of the magazine’s own alternative reality.

The difference in emphasis between French and American feminism is often noted, in particular with respect to the privileging of traditional forms of femininity within the French tradition.⁵⁵ The chapters that follow offer important historical context for this emphasis, as they provide evidence of early efforts to strike a balance between preserving conventionally feminine roles and achieving feminist goals. Recognizing the nature of these efforts, I contend, forces us to reevaluate traditional narratives of Belle Epoque gender history in a variety of disciplines—visual, literary and historical—leading ultimately to a sharper understanding of this period and the profound changes it ushered in. At the same time, addressing the overlooked significance of the Belle Epoque modern woman is crucial to understanding the path that French feminism took in the twentieth century and beyond. The questions raised in this book are thus both historical and timely, as they offer a new context through which to consider continuing debates about whether women can be both “feminine” and “feminist.” Indeed, the women figured in the Belle Epoque women’s press sought a balance that remains the holy grail of achieving women to this day, on both sides of the Atlantic.

Ultimately, as I will demonstrate in the pages that follow, Femina and La Vie Heureuse worked to prove again and again that traditional femininity and new, public female roles were not an either- or choice but rather, identities that needed to be integrated, family and femininity intact.56 The possibility of such integration was something that the prevailing categories of New Woman and feminist seemed to flatly deny: to embrace modern female roles was associated necessarily with the rejection of conventional ones. In the magazines, on the other hand, the issue was not whether to be feminist or not, but rather an unexplored struggle surrounding how to be feminist without using that term, that is, how to embrace women’s equality, and how to be modern and a woman. As reticent as these magazines were to be political, then, they do also need to be recognized as an effort to expand Belle Epoque feminism’s parameters so that it did not force women to choose between femininity and equality. To the extent that she rejected the image of the shabby suffragette or audacious femme à bicyclette, what, precisely, should the modern woman look like, these magazines asked, in all earnestness? How should the working woman decorate her home? Where should she buy her clothes? It would be a mistake not to recognize the serious import of these questions.⁵⁷ In the context of the magazines’ struggle to reconcile competing values, they were part of a concerted effort to carve out an alternative female identity, both modern and traditional. More crucially, they helped women to imagine themselves living a reality that was not yet fully in place.

The story that I present in the pages that follow covers a narrow yet rich and significant slice of history. For the most part, it is limited to the first ten years of these magazines’ existence, from 1901 to 1911, a period characterized by Femina and La Vie Heureuse’s energetic efforts to define a new feminine ideal. Lafitte’s bold entrepreneurial spirit, which pushed him towards risk-taking new projects, finally caught up with him after his 1910 launch of Excelsior. The first photographic daily newspaper, and thus a major event in the history of the press, Excelsior was not financially successful. Femina and La Vie Heureuse merged in late 1916 after Hachette rescued Lafitte from bankruptcy; the reimagined magazine struggled to find its voice anew following the war.58 In her important article on fin-de-siècle French feminist movements, historian Florence Rochefort has asked: “Did the inventiveness of French feminism during the Belle Epoque bear fruit?” Her answer to the question was decidedly measured, noting that “from a purely legislative point of view, the progress achieved did not measure up to feminist hopes.”⁵⁹ I am not sure, however, that this is the best question to ask of Belle Epoque feminism. This book will be concerned, instead, with something much more difficult to gauge: a shift in the way of thinking about feminine possibilities, and in the way French women were encouraged to imagine themselves and their potential. This book is about the significance of that imaginative work, which moved women forward by offering them an airbrushed view of their present, thus raising the bar in terms of what they expected of themselves.

Flipping through the pages of contemporary women’s magazines in nearly any Western country, it is hard not to recognize, for better and for worse, the influence of the idealized femme moderne celebrated by Femina and La Vie Heureuse as a model of female achievement. We continue to be fascinated by many of the things that secured the attention of so many Belle Epoque readers, and women’s professional success is still often circumscribed by their willingness to occupy roles in ways that are sensitive to gender norms and social constraints. How can a woman be both an actress/writer/journalist/athlete and a mother? we still want to know. What should a female politician wear to a debate, or on the floor of the Assemblée nationale?⁶⁰ Is it possible to have a satisfying marriage and achieve success in a demanding career? By offering important historical context for these contemporary conversations, this book reminds us that the challenges of educated women are hardly new, and reveals that choices that might appear retrograde or antifeminist with the hindsight of a century were once lived as important steps towards change.