CHAPTER 1

CHÈRES LECTRICES

Cinderella Powder, Poet Queens and the Woman Reader

In the back pages of Femina’s first issues, full-page advertisements described the wonders of the beauty-enhancing Cinderella powder and soap (Fig. 1.1).¹ Drawing on the fairy tale heroine, one advertisement claimed that Cinderella’s dramatic transformation was not unfamiliar to many women: “All creatures of beauty and seduction have a double life.” Furthermore, the ad insisted that Cinderella was very much alive in Belle Epoque France—as witnessed by several recent performances and publications—and was poised to pass on her secrets to “all women, her sisters, so that they could be, like her, sure to please.”²

This advertisement performs, I would suggest, the work of Femina and La Vie Heureuse themselves: they both served as a kind of Cinderella powder, introducing women to new worlds that fascinated because of their exclusiveness and inaccessibility, while at the same time allowing women to identify with the realm of the elite and to view their own existences as refracted through its beautifying, edifying lens. Cinderella powder promised to transport women to a realm of fantasy in the context of their daily lives. At the same time, as the advertisement suggested, Cinderella was no longer an exclusive sort of figure. All readers were capable of—and entitled to—her upscale existence; it was simply a matter of learning her secrets. Cinderella thus symbolized at once an aristocratic elegance inscribed in a longstanding and revered courtly tradition, and the democratization of that elegance, available now to all, regardless of birth.

Both La Vie Heureuse and Femina were in this sense perfect vehicles for the democratization of luxury that Emile Zola had identified decades before in his novel about the department store, whose drama grew directly out of women’s newly available purchasing power.3 The magazines were filled with articles on real-life royals, alongside advertisements for fashion and furs; study these women’s lavish interiors and then run to the furniture shop advertised a few pages later and buy that same lamp. This was, at least, the initial way in which those whose privileged destinies were meant only to cast a little warm light on a mundane existence very quickly became models to emulate. Yet while the Cinderella advertisement focused on beauty and seduction, both magazines were soon coupling their affirmation of conventional feminine norms with an insistence on women’s capacity for other kinds of stunning transformations, as they featured them in an array of compelling new roles. Indeed, both publications energetically invited readers to not just admire these new models of female achievement but to imitate them; the democratization of luxury so clearly celebrated in these magazines at the outset became, over time, tightly linked to what I am calling a democratization of female intellect, as the magazines insistently encouraged their readers to become thinkers and writers themselves.⁴ This chapter explores the process through which Femina and La Vie Heureuse constructed a new kind of reflective woman reader, who was seen not just as a consumer of goods, but of culture and literature. Part of Belle Epoque literary feminism’s most important work—and its appeal—was to make its devoted lectrices into veritable collaboratrices, an outcome that, by both magazines’ own admission, was both welcome and unexpected.

Figure 1.1 Advertisement for Cinderella powder and soap, Femina (March 15, 1902).

Becoming a Princess

The first issue of La Vie Heureuse explicitly formulated a proposed relationship between its readers and the select, elite women who would be featured in its pages. In the mission statement included in their inaugural issue, the editors wrote:

There are female destinies so brilliant that the world seems to look at them with admiration. Their luminous reputations, their large estates and their radiant youth make these marvelous Women dazzle. But isn’t it good for other hardworking women to occasionally catch a glimpse, as if in a dream, of the lives of queens and princesses, of Women who are the most refined expression of the elite of all species? In this heaven filled with fortune and splendor shouldn’t the less fortunate get to see the care, worries and obligations that compensate for the privileges with which these ones had the fortune to be born?5

This justification for readers’ anticipated fascination with famous women conforms to certain traditional theories of fame through which celebrities were viewed as models of an ideal existence that offered a respite from the banality of the fan’s own necessarily more mundane reality.⁶ Inscribed explicitly in an aristocratic model, the elite women to be featured in the magazine were deemed worthy of attention simply because of their birth. The ideal of happiness embodied by these special “Women” would appear in La Vie Heureuse, “in its true state,” promised the editors, as they offered readers comfort from—while inevitably reminding them of—their lesser lot. Those lucky enough to catch a glimpse of these bright lights could thus “return more satisfied to the modest calm of their own condition.”

And yet, even with this insistence on traditional class structures, the editors clearly suggested a shift towards a more democratic paradigm: while these exceptional women were born into their superior role, realizing their grace required work. By opening a window onto the “care, worries and obligations” required of them, the magazine also ensured a lessening of the gulf between humble readers and destinées brillantes—between “women” and “Women,” as it were. In appealing to an aristocratic model, La Vie Heureuse addressed a conservative readership eager to hinge modern femininity to familiar French ideals. Yet the fact of putting these women, their homes, children and intimate thoughts on display through a captivating layout of images and text was actually a key step in making these famous women more accessible, collapsing the distance between admired and admirer.

In fact, the women of La Vie Heureuse were compelling at once because of their exceptionalness, and because of the ordinariness and familiarity of their domestic preoccupations. The magazine’s repeated depiction of female royals tending to their children provides a perfect example of this dynamic. The June 15, 1910 frontispiece featured a startling photograph of the queen of England giving her young son a piggyback ride (Fig. 1.2). Similarly, a September 1907 story, “Young Royal Mothers,” showed several queens and princesses holding their children. On the one hand, the text of this particular story details the somewhat exotic rituals that follow a royal birth, like the firing of one hundred canons. On the other hand, what the accompanying iconography demonstrates in a series of images of mothers cradling children, and what the article ultimately concludes, is that royal motherhood is no different from that of the rest of society: “Outside of political realms, queens are nothing more than young women watching tenderly over their precious, frail offspring [. . .] under their sparkling crowns, they laugh with their babies like the most modest of their subjects.” La Vie Heureuse’s success thus offers perfect evidence for Lenard Berlanstein’s and Vanessa Schwartz’s claims that celebrity “united rather than divided the upper classes and the masses” by the late nineteenth century in France, and that spectatorship—in this case, through an endless array of photographs—“had the power to convert potentially antagonistic classes into a culturally unified crowd.”⁷ Readers of this story, mothers everywhere, were asked to see the royals they admired as fundamentally no different from themselves.

Rather than “return more satisfied to the modest calm of their own condition,” then, everything about La Vie Heureuse seemed to encourage women to see a better version of themselves in the ever-expanding smorgasbord of models of modern femininity. Bit by bit, it seems, the stars whose privileged destinies were meant only to cast a little warm light on a mundane existence easily became paragons of achievement, if not models to emulate. The very women celebrated within the pages of both magazines immediately invited this slippage. La Vie Heureuse seemed at first to suggest that the women it would feature had gained their distinction by birth. The first issue contained an article, just a few pages after the mission statement cited above, on the acclaimed poet Countess Anna de Noailles, seemingly confirming this fact. And yet, her presence in the magazine was assured as much by her literary prowess as by her aristocratic lineage, which turned out to be the main focus of the article, in which her poetry was quoted and extensively commented upon. In fact, within the first months of the magazine’s existence, the distinction between women born into glory and those who had earned it by talent quickly dissolved: distinguished women writers and artists were regularly depicted as celebrities in the magazine, alongside queens and princesses. In feature after feature, these women’s children were pictured, their home decor and sartorial choices examined and glorified. They had become veritable celebrities, a status defined in part by the blurring of the line between their public accomplishments and private lives.8

Figure 1.2 The queen of England (left) giving a piggyback ride to her son, the duke of Cornwall; her mother-in-law, Queen Alexandra (right), holding her oldest daughter. Frontispiece to La Vie Heureuse (June 15, 1910).

“Chères lectrices”

Like La Vie Heureuse’s, Femina’s aristocratic valences were mitigated by its repeated efforts to draw the reader closer, collapsing social boundaries between reader and editor, between the aristocratic world that it glorified and the lives of the readers it sought to enhance. This is apparent from its very first issue of February 1901, even as it featured the Empress of Russia on its cover, Queen Wilhelmine in its first article, replete with images of her in royal garb and pictures of her estate, and lavish photographs of Prince Roland Bonaparte’s home (Fig. 1.3). To be a woman was, Femina explicitly argued, in itself a very special privilege, a kind of nobility really, and that is why the magazine would devote itself to offering “an exact idea of everything that takes place in her charming kingdom.”⁹

Femina cultivated its readers as a community, referring to them consistently and throughout each issue directly as “chères lectrices” (dear readers, in the feminine), if not “charmantes lectrices” (charming readers). The directness of this second person address encouraged readers to see themselves as fully part of, indeed implicated in, a conversation, rather than simply observers. It transformed the editorial voice into the semblance of an actual person on the other end. The repetition of the refrain also suggested a single person where there were many, bridging the gulf between reader and writer(s). In the regular column she began in 1908, writer Lucie Delarue-Mardrus encouraged readers to think of her as an “attentive and trustworthy friend,” and that was indeed the overall persona of Femina’s editorial voice. In addition, the repeated invocation of the magazine’s plurality of female readers served as a reminder to each individual that she was not alone, but rather part of a shared community of women that was separate, distinct and special.¹⁰ In her history of mass culture in fin-de-siècle France, Vanessa Schwartz argues that at the end of the nineteenth century “the apprehension of urban experience and modern life through visual re-presentation was a means of forming a new kind of crowd” and that these “re-presentations” had the effect of effacing class and gender “in their conceit that diverse consumers should, could and would have similar access to them.”11 The women’s press offered a similar experience in its effacement of class lines, while maintaining a deliberately gendered point of view that only further contributed to the illusion of exclusiveness, in the special kingdom of women.

Figure 1.3 Prince Roland Bonaparte’s salon, from the first issue of Femina (February 1, 1901).

The recurring second-person address also had the effect of fleshing out the alternative universe of the magazine. Not only were readers invited to see celebrated actresses and writers as alternate images of themselves, but they could also see better versions of themselves through their consoeurs, their fellow lectrices, who shared many qualities with their favorite celebrities. In April 1908, the novelist Marcel Prévost, a frequent contributor to Femina, accepted Pierre Lafitte’s invitation to offer a monthly chronique in which he would “converse with the Femina reader.”12 (This was, incidentally, described as Femina’s effort to associate itself more with literature and art.) Doing precisely what he promised, Prévost began his first chat with a meditation on the term “lectrice de Femina” in which he offered those readers myriad tantalizing images of modern femininity from which to self-identify:

[I thought of] the French society woman or wealthy foreigner who thumbs through the magazine while stretched out on a 10,000 Franc chaise longue, amid her priceless trinkets . . . the elegant Parisian woman, well-off, cultured, for whom the magazine is both a document and a distraction . . . the clever bourgeoise, who with her precise budget takes just what she needs for managing a lovely home, having some guests, dressing to the nines . . . the cheerful worker who looks for a dream-worthy supplement to her life of labor in the stories and images. And I thought of you also, the exquisite women of the provinces in this century when there are practically no more provinces, you, those inexhaustible reserves of the grace, wit and art of Paris: I saw you, oh pretty lady of the place du Martroi, of the cours Gambetta, of the rue des Ursulines, decked out, nimble, sporty, running to your bookstore or the train station library, the day Femina comes out!¹³

Prévost’s comments point to a wider and more diverse audience than the exclusively upper bourgeois readership that the magazine’s high-end advertisements seem to suggest.¹⁴ Lenard Berlanstein has argued that Femina’s readership was mostly upper bourgeois, based upon the high-end advertisements and those who responded to surveys. Colette Cosnier also notes that the absence of pointers on household tasks (as in Le Petit Echo de la Mode or La Mode Pratique) presumes a reader who would not engage in such tasks. However, there is also evidence of other kinds of readers, including women in the work force. In December 1902, for example, novelist Gabrielle Réval wrote a piece on female stenographers that was explicitly solicited by readers—presumably stenographers themselves—after an article appeared about female phone operators. While the magazine certainly modeled a highbrow milieu, this did not mean that all readers actually lived in one. Beyond signaling who some of the actual readers might have been, Prévost’s remarks underline the importance of the imaginary universe that Femina so actively created. Reading this piece assured the chère lectrice that she was in good company. Whether she was from Paris or the quickly receding provinces—or an exotic foreign land—mattered not. Of the highest echelons of society or laboring away but still finding time to admire, every woman had a reason to feel good about reading the magazine. Taking in Prévost’s words, the less than well-off, hardworking provincial could fancy herself a high-class Parisian, and that Parisian could, in turn, feel good about serving as a model for the hard-working provincial. And thus, the simulacrum was complete: the woman reader was free to imagine herself among this cohort of peers, reading about a world of exceptional women, equally constructed; the magazine offered subtle tools to enable women to emulate these role models, and, as we shall see in a moment, invitations to participate in the magazine itself. Hence the celebrated glory and achievement highlighted in its pages ultimately served to enhance the reader’s own sense of self-worth and possibility.15

This kind of self-enclosed and self-perpetuating female community constructed through women’s magazines has been justly criticized in contemporary feminist criticism for putting unproductive and deleterious pressures on women, by circumscribing their roles according to conventional and sometimes oppressive feminine norms.¹⁶ What interests me here, however, is the way similar pressures may have functioned in the 1900s as an expansion of women’s worlds. In particular, the promotion of the ideal magazine reader as a thinking woman rather than strictly a consumer offered women a new, positive role model who successfully bridged public and private spheres. To the extent that she served as a figure to emulate, the pressures toward self-improvement that she generated were mostly constructive, pushing women towards new realms of achievement.

From Chic Parisian to Modern Woman

Both Femina and La Vie Heureuse cultivated and updated the late nineteenth-century feminine figure that historian Lisa Tiersten has named the “chic Parisienne.” This profoundly modern figure, initially denigrated as a vulgar consumer prone to reckless behavior, was rehabilitated in the late nineteenth century, and came to be seen as embodying a positively coded association between femininity and consumption. The chic Parisian woman signaled the rational development of taste as a learned, refined skill, giving bourgeois women cultural legitimacy and aesthetic authority, as art and commerce were happily reconciled. By the 1880s, this figure was depicted in women’s magazines as “a devotee and practitioner of the arts whose avidity for high culture in no way precluded an ardent interest in fashion and decorating.” Indeed, this double interest in fashion and culture made the Parisian woman “an artistic creator in her own right.”17 The editors of La Vie Heureuse signaled this alliance explicitly, arguing that art was a natural part of women’s daily life: readers were thus invited to see their own flower arrangements and hair stylings as modest enactments of the works of famous painters or writers to be figured in the magazine’s pages. Women, declared the editors, naturally transport art into life. “They arrange flowers, they adjust the drapes, they imagine an outfit, they knot and tie the supple mass of their hair. Art is their most familiar companion.” In turn, reading the magazine promised to make their own lives more beautiful and more useful, as they learned ways to “embellish their lives” and “best occupy their time.”¹⁸

Both magazines, then, clearly embraced the model of the chic Parisian as a supreme arbiter of taste (and therefore respectable figure) and played on her power as a consumer: being a reader of both magazines was tightly linked to a whole line of commodities for self and home. Femina was keenly aware of the commercial potential connected to the cultivation of an identification between readers and subject matter. In their introductory statement in the February 1901 inaugural issue, the editors promised that for the first two thousand subscribers, the magazine would essentially pay for itself. Those readers would receive “must-have objects” including perfume, gloves and soaps from the most fashionable and trendy Parisian shops.¹⁹ For those first readers, then, buying Femina also constituted an instant makeover performed by the editors of the magazine themselves—one that ensured a shared level of aesthetic sophistication among its readership. The reader in this discourse was perfectly conflated with the consumer. That had been the model for British magazines, through which, as Ellen Gruber Garvey has compellingly demonstrated, the reader was gendered female primarily through her taste for consumption.²⁰ And so, like the grand magasin to which it was linguistically rooted, the magazine appeared at the outset to be a kind of department store, offering a panoply of tantalizing choices.21

Advertising was a key mechanism by which both magazines bridged the gap between reader and elite woman from the very beginning, as the Cinderella publicity attests.²² Indeed, within Femina’s first pages, advertisements, text and image were often fluid; the editors themselves might include a letter or brief note promoting a particular product, using the same typeset as the rest of the magazine. In December 1904, for example, the editors devoted a full page to inviting their “chères lectrices et amies” to take advantage of a special offer on the Liane corset, featured at a special price at the Claverie shop in Paris (Fig. 1.4).²³ The first issue of the magazine included pictures of all the prizes to be awarded to the first subscribers, as well as the names of the stores they were from; the January 1, 1902 interior cover pictured a strand of pearls to be awarded to one lucky reader, along with the name and address of the jeweler where the pearls were on display.

Figure 1.4 Femina offer for Liane corset (March 1, 1905).

Within a few months, however, Femina appeared to be catering to the fuller, far more multivalent femininity it had originally promised, in which the female reader’s purchasing power receded in large measure to the background (and the back pages). Those advertisements most certainly funded and ensured the magazine’s success, but the Femina reader was no longer simply figured as a consumer of high-culture goods; rather, she was depicted and valorized as a consumer of culture itself—and not just to the extent of her fashion choices. By 1902 the Femina editors had slightly reformulated their mission, announcing their obligation to “introduce their female readers to the curious and useful manifestations of the female mind, with absolute impartiality.”24 By 1904 the magazine featured articles on women artists, writers, doctors and lawyers; essays discussing possible changes to the Civil Code; reviews of theater, art and literature; and surveys inviting readers to weigh in on everything, from women’s education and their preferred career paths to the qualities of an ideal husband. Ultimately, Femina and La Vie Heureuse constructed a female reader who, while she was clearly recognized as a consumer, had many other facets to her identity.

Amidst the tributes offered to women achievers in its pages—doctors, lawyers, athletes, writers—Femina was the first to offer all women a rapid path to glory—not just through their purchasing power, but through their talent and skill. At the outset, Femina’s multiple contests were clearly meant as a pure marketing ploy, an effort to draw readers in and ensure their continuing fidelity to the magazine.²⁵ If they entered a contest, after all, they would need to keep buying the magazine to see if they had won. Contests based on speed, rewarding the first respondents, were juxtaposed with contests based on talent and ingenuity. In Femina’s first issue, for example, the page describing the rewards for the first two thousand subscribers was immediately preceded by a page describing an ongoing series of concours, similar to those found in other women’s magazines. The first was simply a puzzle, or devinette: the magazine displayed several drawings of women in costumes from around the world, but the attire from each location was jumbled together on each figure. The winner would successfully assemble the various elements of these costumes (numbered in the images) in the correct order. The second contest was to create one’s own original child’s carnival costume. The winners of these efforts would receive gift certificates and have their names published in the magazine. They would also be eligible for the concours d’honneur, selected at random, whose prize consisted of the haute couture Ney Soeurs dress and hat featured on the magazine’s cover.

Rather quickly, these concours began to involve opinion surveys—although they would not be regularly labeled under the more serious (and masculine, scientific) term enquêtes until 1903.26 In 1902 Femina asked readers to name their favorite public figures; later that year they asked the ten qualities for female perfection; in 1903 they were asked to describe “the ideal life for a woman.” These surveys were still described as contests: winners would be drawn at random from the submitted entries and rewarded with money, gift certificates or goods, as well as publication in the magazine. At the outset, then, the rewards were entangled in the magazine’s spirit of conspicuous consumption. Eventually, however, these various ways of eliciting readers’ responses took their own unique shape. By 1903, the concours were limited to puzzles and arts and crafts contests, listed in small print in the back pages, while the magazine began to contextualize its enquêtes in feature articles or essays. These were often on rather heady topics involving contemporary publications. A December 1904 enquête, for example, asked readers to comment on novelist Michel Corday’s recent study of the relationship between playwrights and actors. “What is the role of the playwright versus that of the actor in the success of a play?” they asked, promising to publish their readers’ most interesting responses in an upcoming issue. These kinds of surveys, increasingly frequent, represented a significant shift from the earlier contests, one that substantially blurred the lines between the roles of editors and readers. The invitation to comment on the relationship between actors and playwrights appeared in the very same issue as the appeal to readers to purchase Liane corsets. And yet, the shift did not mean a negation of the lectrice as consumer of high-culture goods and arbiter of taste. Indeed, that is the surprising point of Femina’s modern woman: she was envisioned as both the potential purchaser of corsets and the intellectually engaged woman fully capable of sophisticated commentary. To be a true Femina heroine it was no longer simply enough to look good—to be exclusively the feminine artist of everyday life. The femme moderne celebrated in the magazine had successfully taken on new roles, all the while balancing the older aesthetic ones.

These surveys and contests invited women from all over to take part in the world that the magazine created, further democratizing its new model of femininity. The chic, sophisticated Parisian was a figure women could emulate from far and wide, and the evidence shows that they did: Lenard Berlanstein notes that of 292 readers who responded to a March 1904 survey about what constituted the “good life,” only 71 were from Paris; the others resided in the provinces, and not necessarily in major urban areas.27 While the first questions posed by Femina’s enquêtes remained carefully distanced from politics, by 1906, Femina was asking readers about such thorny topics as suffrage, displaying the development of its relationship with its readers and its increasing comfort in dealing with complex, controversial issues—not to mention feminism.²⁸

Literary Rewards

Beginning in 1903, Femina began to have literary contests as well. These contests were even more significant in shifting women’s notions of their own potential. They offered women the possibility of emulating one of the figures most often celebrated in the magazine’s pages: the woman writer—an ideal female professional for the magazine in that she could do her job without leaving her home, and without necessarily or overtly challenging traditional gender roles. Femina’s announcement for its first “Poetry Tournament” in February 1903 declared, “What woman today is not a poet, after all?” Here we have, then, the magazine’s ultimate elaboration on the democratized aesthetics of the chic Parisian: while in late nineteenth-century consumer culture every woman, by virtue of her femininity, was figured as a kind of artist of the self, in the thriving intellectual culture of Belle Epoque France, energized by an influx of newly educated women, every woman was figured as a writer, capable of rendering life as poetry. This is all the more intriguing when considered in light of the rather tortured history of the French woman writer, the bas bleu who in the nineteenth century had been associated with hysteria, prostitution and the rejection of traditional family structures. Femina proposed an altogether different image, elevating the woman writer to the status of queen and princess. Femina tied its contests to the rise of women poets, and saw its literary contests as a way to coronate the next great female talent. Commenting on the increasing numbers of women poets, Femina insisted that its very role was to “encourage as many female talents as possible, all of whom surely would like to get noticed.”29 Like the opinion surveys, then, these contests were part of Femina’s energetic efforts to articulate a new kind of female reader, as they coaxed women into modern roles while assuring them of the appropriateness of these changes.³⁰ Similarly, while encouraging women readers to participate in their own first writing contest, La Vie Heureuse assured them it would not be too much work—that they would simply have to put down the magazine for a few moments and reflect a bit. And the prizes they would receive—well, just think of them not so much as rewards but as compliments.

Femina explicitly inscribed its “tournament” in a feminine courtly tradition dating back to the fifteenth century, when queens and princesses judged poetic jousts. In recognition of this, the magazine’s cover featured a photograph of the “Poet Queen” Her Majesty Elisabeth, Queen of Romania, at her desk; she had recently published a poetry collection under the pseudonym Carmen Sylva (Fig. 2.13). (This image will be discussed in further detail in the chapter that follows, as an example of the new iconography of the woman writer.) Femina’s labeling of Queen Elisabeth in this way again literalized the metaphor for women’s accomplishment: to write was to attain royal status—witness the woman writer as celebrity—a possibility open to all women. The paradoxical democratization of this elevated status is made vivid in the ways that her majesty the queen is brought down to earth: both through her taking of a pseudonym, and the image of her sitting at a modest desk, the folds of her thick silk skirt forming an unwieldy curtain around her as she toils like a lowly commoner. This only underscores the point: if all women are royalty, and all women are poets, then all women can be reines poètes. Writing becomes at once a great equalizer (like motherhood) and a lofty aspiration—eliciting the labor of the queen herself.

Femina’s first poetry prize would be judged by an impressive all-woman jury including Countess Anna de Noailles (another sort of Poet Queen) and Madame Alphonse Daudet, depicted in a photograph in her elegant home, next to her son Léon. The rewards, then, were no longer linked to high-end goods, but rather to the approbation of respected literary women, in addition to publication in the magazine. These first poetry tournaments led to “Les Prix Femina,” a series of literary contests for published authors launched in December 1904. The original Prix Femina included six awards: Female Merit (awarded to an exceptional act of social justice or generosity); Teaching; Literature and Poetry; Fine Arts and Poetry. In their denomination these prizes built upon while slightly expanding conventional feminine realms. The prizes were presented as an explicit rearticulation of the magazine’s mission, one that we can see as an elaboration of their 1902 promise to introduce readers to the “diverse uses of the female mind.” Remarking once again on the ever-increasing accomplishments of women in all areas, not just art and literature but society at large, the editors took the opportunity of the prize’s launch to carefully describe their own vision of the modern woman: “Certainly no one values domestic virtues more than us,” they wrote, reminding readers that in this magazine devoted to “Women,” any “feminism” (in quotes) “is strictly repudiated.” However, they went on to explain, these domestic virtues were in no way incompatible with the development of a woman’s “mind and personality.” Thus, “the expansion of women’s activities that characterizes the dawn of the twentieth century” should be not only celebrated but facilitated, and it would be Femina’s self-declared job to encourage women in this direction.31 In selecting future winners, Femina immediately called upon “the collaboration of our countless readers,” who would be asked to nominate candidates for these honors, after which juries of eminent women would make the final selections.

Two months later, in February 1905, Caroline de Broutelles announced that La Vie Heureuse would offer an annual prize for the best literary work of the year, to be awarded to a new author by a jury of his or her female peers. This prize was a response to the disappointments of the brand-new Prix Goncourt, which was established in 1902 and gave its first prize in 1903.³² Despite the dramatic rise in popularity of women writers during the years of its establishment, and Broutelles’ own ties to many of the writers involved, the Goncourt convened a jury of ten men, repeating the patriarchal structure of the Académie Française from which it was meant to be set apart.³³ Nonetheless, there was still hope that, given the increased visibility of women writers, a woman might soon receive its prize. In November of 1904, Femina published an article by editor Jacques de Nouvion entitled “Women and the Prix Goncourt,” which discussed several female contenders; precisely because of the prize’s newness and detachment from tradition (and thus its distinction from the comparatively archaic Académie française, which had repeatedly refused to elect women to its ranks), De Nouvion concluded that women had a good chance.34 Based on interviews with several members of the actual jury, a determination was made that novelist Myriam Harry was the most likely candidate for her critically acclaimed La conquête de Jérusalem. It was soon revealed, however, that Harry would be excluded because of her sex.³⁵ Shortly thereafter, Léon Frapié was named the Goncourt winner for his novel La maternelle, which, as Margot Irvine has brilliantly demonstrated, was a more conventionally feminine text (told through a young woman’s voice) than Harry’s orientalist novel based on her father’s life in Jerusalem.³⁶ It quickly became clear that the Goncourt would, vraisemblablement, not be recognizing women’s writing.³⁷

Within weeks of this announcement, De Broutelles had assembled a jury for her new prize, made up of twenty-two female stars of the women’s press and presided over by Anna de Noailles, who presented the first award to Harry herself. The Prix Vie Heureuse has traditionally been recognized as the origin of the current Prix Femina, which remains a highly coveted honor to this day: the magazine’s prizes (and juries) later merged, along with the magazines, for the Prix Femina–Vie Heureuse, only to become the Femina in 1919. The Prix Vie Heureuse’s original structure, modeled on the Goncourt and much leaner than Femina’s complex process, would be the archetype for the eventual prix Femina.³⁸

It would be a mistake, however, to discount Femina’s parallel, if not equally substantial, role in shaping the roots of the Prix Femina, as well as the democratic forces at its origins. The determining role of Femina’s readers reaches back to their participation in one of Femina’s very first opinion surveys in July 1902. Femina had asked its readers to nominate talented French women (living or deceased) who they felt would make “An Ideal Female Academy.”³⁹ The editors received 8,277 postcards with suggestions. Of the top forty nominees, seven would become part of the eight-woman jury that judged Femina’s first poetry tournament; twelve would later be invited to the jury of the Prix Vie Heureuse. Many of the same women writers, including Anna de Noailles and Daniel Lesueur, served on the juries of both prizes; the female jury that remains the enduring legacy of the prize was a key element of Femina’s original prize series.40 Perhaps more crucially, Femina’s prizes helped both to generate and solidify the female literary community and reader support that would be crucial to the success of the Prix Vie Heureuse and eventual Prix Femina. As it turns out, many of the famous women selected by these readers were not entirely in favor of the notion of a female academy, per se. In October, Femina’s editor-in-chief Marcel L’Heureux noted in an article that fifteen of them, when queried, offered deafening silence on the topic, while several, including Lesueur and Bertheroy, were notably hostile (Fig. 1.5). The opinion of readers, on the other hand, was overwhelmingly enthusiastic, and L’Heureux therefore preferred to end his article on a positive note, citing Madame Alphonse Daudet’s encouraging remarks as a measure of hope and comfort for Femina’s lectrices, who themselves “were passionate about a female Academy.”⁴¹ Despite their hostility to the notion in 1902, just three years later Lesueur and Bertheroy went on to become members of the first Prix Vie Heureuse and eventual Prix Femina—as did Georges de Peyrebrune and Jeanne Marni, also less than favorable in L’Heureux’s article. The strong response of the readership that Femina had worked so hard to cultivate thus appears to have been an influential factor in the creation of this enduring prize.

Figure 1.5 “A Female Academy: Could It Go from Dream to Reality?” Femina (October 15, 1902).

For Femina, success was always predicated upon readers’ direct implication in their endeavors. “We are counting on you,” wrote the editors in their description of the new prizes—simultaneously announcing their new offices on the highly chic avenue de l’Opéra, a sign both of their financial success and social standing. In a follow-up article responding to readers’ questions about their awards in November 1905, Femina insisted it had no preferred candidates and reiterated the fact that the readers would play a direct role in selection: “Our readers will be effectively collaborating with members of the jury.”42 They had been even more explicit in declaring the readers’ role as they announced the first literary contest: “Naturally, the names of subscribers will be published and will remain attached to the prizes, which they will have founded.”⁴³ Despite their different model, La Vie Heureuse also ended up opening their contest to their readers. In August 1906, they invited readers to guess who the winner of the Prix Vie Heureuse would be from the list of nominees. The submission showing the greatest “literary finesse” would be awarded 500 francs.44 Theirs, in general, was a less democratic model, and tended to emphasize editorial sophistication while similarly appealing to a reader who could mirror that sophistication. But like the Femina awards, the prix Vie Heureuse privileged the discovery of new talent over the coronation of well-established writers.⁴⁵

“A Femino-literary Victory”

In April 1909, Femina posed the question of a female academy again, this time receiving 6,700 responses. By this time, the question (to which we will return at the end of this book) had become particularly charged, due in part to the success of the magazines themselves. While the magazine was always loathe to make political demands, preferring to applaud women’s accomplishments, writer Hélène Avryl waxed somewhat rhapsodic in pondering the beauty of this academy. Perhaps such campaigns would one day lead to—not a feminist victory, “heaven forbid!” but rather une victoire fémino-littéraire—a femino-literary victory.⁴⁶ Of course, this term never took hold, but it is worth pausing upon for a moment as we consider the feminist implications of these magazines even in their efforts to remain apolitical, and their espousal of a feminism that could not be named as such. Following the first award made by the Vie Heureuse prize committee to Myriam Harry, Jean Bertheroy did remark in that magazine: “Now that’s the right kind of feminism.”⁴⁷ Indeed, the literary realm turned out to be the domain in which the editors of both magazines felt most comfortable directly exhorting women towards change, the kind that would be “favorable to women’s interests,” offering benefits “on a grand scale that would include other realms.”⁴⁸ Both Femina’s and La Vie Heureuse’s feminist leanings found their most natural outlet in this “femino-literary” realm—poised between public and private roles. My own terminology, Belle Epoque literary feminism, thus designates not just a mode and an ideology, but also the nature of female achievement for which the magazines most vividly and successfully advocated.

In her inaugural literary column in Femina in April 1908, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus (a member of the Prix Vie Heureuse jury from inception and throughout her life) marveled at the enduring power of the book amidst the ruins of modern society. She wrote that not only are books still of lasting value, their importance “increases every day. They are more than ever a social necessity.” And while this in itself was surprising given the changes of modern society, perhaps even more unexpected was the role of Femina in ensuring this “supremacy.” Indeed, the beautiful images dominating the magazine, wrote Delarue-Mardrus, “have not managed to change the fact that literature is being talked about here in a more regular and extensive fashion than would have been anticipated.”49 Similarly, in his May 15, 1906 “Survey on Women’s Writing,” journalist Maurice Laval interviewed several critics for their opinion on the current “expansion of women’s writing,” referring to the increasing numbers of women publishing in the early 1900s. Summarizing the diverse remarks of these critics, who included Catulle Mendès, Edmond Haraucourt and François Coppée, Laval noted that they were in agreement on one major point: “that the current success of women’s writing is due in large part to the efforts and success of Femina.”⁵⁰ Both Delarue-Mardrus’s and Laval’s comments call attention once again to a significant and too-often-overlooked aspect of the magazine: its strong link to the unprecedented success of Belle Epoque women’s fiction. Moreover, I would suggest that not only was the success of women’s writing linked to Femina and La Vie Heureuse, but the success of both magazines was due to their promotion of women’s literature and its production. The editors of Femina must have realized the market appeal of this literary emphasis when they devoted a full page in their December 1903 issue to announcing that the magazine was “the most literary of all the illustrated magazines” and featured thumbnail images of upcoming contributors—a campaign perhaps elicited by La Vie Heureuse’s recent arrival on the scene and its promotion of a more overtly intellectual image.⁵¹ Literary appeal was clearly selling magazines and keeping readers. This appeal was linked not only to these authors’ writing but also very much to their celebrated and newly accessible public images, equally promoted through feature stories about their lives and lifestyles. As we will see in greater detail in the next two chapters, one real and fully document-able triumph of Belle Epoque literary feminism was its coronation of the woman writer as the ultimate femme moderne.

Femina and La Vie Heureuse’s literary appeal worked to the extent that it did because the publications invested in what was ultimately the most essential element to their success: the cherished lectrice, whom they never forgot to acknowledge. From the very beginning, this reader was given a fundamental role in participating in the intellectual parameters of both publications. Femina’s first poetry tournament was followed by dozens more, with nearly every issue of the magazine containing an announcement of a new contest or featuring winners of previous ones, their epic verse taking up page after page. “Mesdames and Mesdemoiselles who read us, delicious readership, the most desired in the world, we salute you” wrote Delarue-Mardrus, announcing her own literary column, “L’âme des livres,” as a just reward for their efforts. Laval too, in applauding Femina’s success, recognized his audience, describing editor and reader as equals sharing the pride. This news, he wrote, “will, I hope, be as agreeable to you our readers as it was to myself.” Recognizing their chères lectrices at every turn, inviting them into the exclusive world of the anointed literati, the magazine allowed each reader the possibility of feeling as special as real queens, princesses . . . and women writers. Femina and La Vie Heureuse did their best to convince readers that such a fantasy was indeed achievable and that a reflective, independent mind was an essential part of the new female ideal.

Cinderella had traded in her glass slipper for a golden pen.