Introduction
1. On the perceived dangers of female intellect, see Rachel Mesch, The Hysteric’s Revenge: French Women Writers at the Fin de Siècle (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2006), 14–21.
2. For more on the Camille Sée laws implemented by Jules Ferry and their influence, see Françoise Mayeur, L’Éducation des filles en France au XIXe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1979); Rebecca Rogers, From the Salon to the Schoolroom: Educating Bourgeois Girls in Nineteenth-Century France (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2005).
3. On the question of whether the Belle Epoque was favorable to women, see Diana Holmes and Carrie Tarr, eds., A Belle Epoque? Women in French Society and Culture, 1890–1914 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006); Susan K. Foley, Women in France Since 1789: The Meanings of Difference (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); James F. McMillan, France and Women, 1789–1914: Gender, Society and Politics (New York: Rout-ledge, 2000); Christopher E. Forth and Elinor Accampo, eds., Confronting Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle France: Bodies, Minds and Gender (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
4. Clarétie, Hervieu, Prévost and Adam were critically acclaimed writers. Clarétie, Hervieu and Prévost were members of the Académie Française. Edmond Rostand, elected to the Académie Française in 1901, was a playwright and poet best known for Cyrano de Bergerac (1897) and Les Romanesques (1894), which was the basis for the Broadway hit The Fantasticks. His wife Rosemonde was an accomplished poet as well. Decadent writer Catulle Mendès was briefly married to Judith Gautier before marrying Jeanne Nette, who became known as Jane Catulle-Mendès and was a prolific poet. Writer Alphonse Daudet, father of Léon and Lucien, was married to Julia, also a writer. Jane and Marcel Dieulafoy traveled through the Middle East together, with Jane documenting their discoveries. When her husband was deployed to the front during the Franco-Prussian war, she followed, in a soldier’s uniform. With governmental permission, she continued to dress in men’s garb from then on.
5. On the social world of Belle Epoque literary Paris, see Anne Martin-Fugier, Salons de la IIIe République (Paris: Perrin, 2003); Géraldi Leroy and Julie Bertrand-Sabiani, La Vie littéraire à la Belle Epoque (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1998), 29–53. On the important role of the salon for women in earlier centuries, see Elizabeth C. Goldsmith and Dena Goodman, Going Public: Women and Publishing in Early Modern France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 1–9; Steven D. Kale, French Salons: High Society and Sociability from the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).
6. J.-H. Rosny, Mémoires de la vie littéraire (Paris: G. Crès et Cie, 1927).
7. “Les Fêtes du Prix Vie Heureuse,” La Vie Heureuse, April 1, 1907.
8. Many democratizing forces characterized the emergence of mass culture in France. See Lisa Tiersten, Marianne in the Market: Envisioning Consumer Society in Finde-Siècle France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 207–19; 126–28; 228; Rosalind Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 154–209.
9. On the department store, see Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreising, Gissing and Zola (New York: Methuen, 1985). On the relationship between magazines and department stores in British culture, see Ellen Gruber Garvey, The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s to 1910s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) 3–4.
10. Femina, February 1, 1901, 2. Most issues of Femina were approximately twenty to thirty pages; however, the pagination was continuous throughout a single year. Most pages of La Vie Heureuse do not include page numbers, so I have included them only when indicated.
11. Historian Karen Offen’s pioneering work on late nineteenth-century French feminism has been crucial to demonstrating the diverse nature of its causes and identifications, as well for situating it within cultural, literary and social trends. I am grateful to her for sharing part of her work in progress, Debating the Woman Question, which brilliantly lays out the multiple strands of early Third Republic feminist claims and their relationship to one another. Several articles opened up this field of study and examined the multiple expressions of late nineteenth-century French feminist activism, as well as its expression in literature. See Offen, “Depopulation, Nationalism and Feminism in Fin-de-siècle France,” American Historical Review 89, no. 3 (June 1984): 648–76; “Defining Feminism: A Comparative Historical Perspective,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14, no.1 (1988): 119–57; “On the French Origin of the Words Feminism and Feminist,” Feminist Issues 8, no. 2 (Fall 1988): 45–51.
12. I am continuing in this sense the work begun by Mary Louise Roberts in expanding our understanding of Belle Epoque feminism through her study of the New Woman, as well as Lenard Berlanstein’s important work situating Femina in Belle Epoque feminist history. Roberts, Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-Siècle France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Berlanstein, “Selling Modern Femininity: Femina, a Forgotten Feminist Publishing Success in Belle Epoque France,” French Historical Studies 30, no. 4 (Fall 2007): 623–49.
13. Habermas’s notion of the literary public sphere, often invoked in early modern scholarship on the salon, is another way of demarcating this space. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, translated by Thomas Burger, with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 29–30.
14. I am following in this sense Janet Wolff’s suggestion with respect to the well-studied question of female flânerie that we demote the public/private binarism, which tends to locate men and women in separate, gendered places. See her chapter “Gender and the Haunting of Cities: Or, the Retirement of the Flâneur,” in AngloModern: Painting and Modernity in Britain and the United States (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 68–85. Wolff’s essay is a coda to her original article, “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity,” in Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 34–50, and the many responses it inspired. On nineteenth-century women writers, journalists and flânerie, see Catherine Nesci’s fascinating study, Le flâneur et les flâneuses: Les femmes et la ville à l’époque romantique (Grenoble: ELLUG, 2007).
15. Berlanstein demonstrates the ways that female celebrities in the second half of the nineteenth century legitimized certain kinds of roles in “Historicizing and Gendering Celebrity Culture: Famous Women in Nineteenth-Century France,” Journal of Women’s History 16, no. 4 (2004): 65–91.
16. Berlanstein writes: “Femina participated in the same bold endeavor to which Durand had committed her newspaper, spreading a feminist message while changing the image of feminism, making it compatible with femininity. The difference was that for Durand, femininity was a tactic to strengthen the appeal of feminism, whereas femininity was at the core of Femina as a commercial enterprise” (“Selling Modern Femininity,” 625). For the debate between these two scholars, see Cosnier, Les Dames de Femina, 285–303, and Berlanstein’s review of Cosnier in H-France 9, no. 134 (November 2009): 566. Cosnier refuses to recognize Femina as feminist, in large part because of the overall conservatism of its message. However, she seems to be relying on a modern definition of feminism rather than considering the extent to which the magazine may have challenged Belle Epoque gender norms and attempted to expand women’s roles, even within certain circumscribed parameters. Colette Cosnier, Les Dames de Femina: Un féminisme mystifié (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009).
17. Parts of the feminist ideology expressed by La Fronde were quite resonant with the emphasis on conventional femininity found in Femina and La Vie Heureuse. In 1898, Daniel Lesueur wrote about the importance of “charm, seduction and beauty” (Karen Offen, “The Birth of Feminism,” Debating the Woman Question in Modern France, 16th–20th Centuries [in progress]) and in 1903 Marguerite Durand famously wrote that “feminism owes a great deal to my blonde hair” (Mary Louise Roberts, Disruptive Acts, 49).
18. There was very little overlap among the general staff writers for La Fronde and Femina and La Vie Heureuse. However, several high-profile women writers published in all of these publications: Gyp, Séverine, Marcelle Tinayre, Daniel Lesueur.
19. Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, Les bas-bleus (Paris: Société Générale de librairie catholique, 1878); Several fin-de-siècle plays portrayed thinking women in a negative light, including Paul Hervieu, Les Tenailles (Paris: Lemerre, 1896) and Maurice Donnay, L’Affranchie (Paris: Olendorff, 1898). Albert Cim dedicated his novel Bas-bleus (Paris: A. Savine, 1891) to Barbey and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, writing that both “so eloquently celebrated women who stay home and so vigorously lashed out at those women—of the pen, the club, or the street, who only aspire to become public.” For more on the iconography of the female intellectual in the nineteenth century, see Janis Bergman-Colter, The Woman of Ideas in French Art, 1830–1848 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).
20. Among the causes taken up in the 1890s were venereal disease, infant mortality, prostitution, and abject poverty.
21. Lafitte founded La Vie au grand air, which is widely considered the first photographic magazine, in 1898. He would go on to launch Musica in 1902 and Je sais tout in 1905. A vivid history of Femina in its earlier years can be found in Paul Pottier and Louis Vauxcelles, “La presse d’aujourd’hui: Femina,” Gil Blas, April 30, 1904; and Philippe Baudorre, Barbusse: Le pourfendeur de la Grande Guerre (Paris: Flammarion, 1995), 74–104.
22. L’Heureux was not the original editor-in-chief, but was brought in by July 1901. He promptly fired many of the female journalists who had worked for women’s fashion magazines, and relied instead on a close creative team of newspaper men (Pottier and Vauxcelles, “La presse d’aujourd’hui”). Barbusse was close with Lafitte during the early years of Femina and was a crucial member of his creative team, eventually helping to launch and direct Je sais tout. The two had a falling out in 1910, when Barbusse began working for rival publications. Barbusse then resigned from the Maison Lafitte and was hired by Hachette to edit La Vie Heureuse (Baudorre, Barbusse), 74–83.
23. According to Pottier and Vauxcelles, Lafitte was inspired by Ladies Magazine, Ladies’ Field, The Boudoir and Ladies Pictorial. The British women’s press was far more extensive and diverse, although not as visually innovative. For a history of British women’s magazines, see Margaret Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800–1914 (New York: Routledge, 1996). There is little written on French women’s magazines of the Third Republic, and no complete history of such. On French women’s magazines in the first half of the nineteenth century, see Evelyne Sullerot, Histoire de la presse féminine en France, des origines à 1848 (Paris: A. Colin, 1963) and Annemarie Kleinert’s informative and comprehensive Le journal des dames et des modes, ou la conquête de l’Europe féminine (1797–1839). (Stuttgart: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 2001). For a general overview of literary journals during the Belle Epoque, see Elisabeth Parinet, “L’édition littéraire: 1890–1914,” in Histoire de l’édition française, Roger Chartier and Henri-Jean Martin, eds., vol. 4, Le livre concurrencé, 1900–1940 (Paris: Promodis, 1986), 148–87. Both Femina and La Vie Heureuse are notably absent from Françoise Blum, “Revues féminines, revues féministes,” in Jacqueline Pluet-Despatin, Jean-Yves Mollier, and Michel Leymarie, eds., La belle époque des revues, 1880–1914 (Caen: Éditions de l’IMEC, 2002): 211–22; they are also absent from the more popular work by Vincent Soulier, Presse féminine: la puissance frivole (Paris: l’Archipel, 2008), which leaps from La Fronde to Marie Claire.
24. On Lafitte’s use of photography in La Vie au grand air, see Kevin Moore, Jacques Henri Lartigue: The Invention of an Artist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 72–82. No study of the specificity of Femina and La Vie Heureuse’s photographic innovations or their contextualization in the history of photography and the press has been undertaken to date. On the development of the genre of celebrity interview in the late nineteenth century, see Elizabeth Emery’s fascinating study, Photojurnalism and the Origins of the French Writer House Museum (1881–1914): Privacy, Publicity and Personality (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), 11–80. On the interrelated history of photography and the press, see Thierry Gervais and Gaelle Morel, La photographie: Histoire, techniques, art, presse (Paris: Larousse, 2008); Thierry Gervais, “L’Illustration photographique: Naissance du spectacle de l’information, 1843–1914” (PhD dissertation, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2007); Gilles Feyel, La presse en France des origines à 1944 (Paris: Ellipses, 1999).
25. In a 1907 speech for Lafitte, Daniel Lesueur applauded Femina for being dramatically different from preexisting women’s magazines, which she described as stale and boring, doomed from the start to “pitiful mediocrity.” Daniel Lesueur, “Toast à Femina,” Femina, February 15, 1907, 75.
26. These were Adolphe Brisson’s words in a speech celebrating Lafitte’s nomination to the Legion of Honor. “Le banquet Pierre Lafitte,” Femina, February 1, 1907, 55.
27. Femina, February 1, 1901, 2.
28. While substantially more expensive than a regular newspaper, whose illustrated supplements might be free, this price was in line with other illustrated magazines: La Mode Pratique cost 25 centimes, but there were higher prices, up to 75 centimes, if one purchased the illustrated supplement; Yvonne Sarcey’s Journal de l’Université des Annales, an illustrated magazine connected to Les annales politiques et littéraires, cost 60 centimes in 1908; in 1916, Le Monde Illustré cost 60 centimes.
29. Maurice de Thoren was a graphic artist best known for his painting Tea on the Seine, which appeared in L’Illustré soleil du Dimanche in August 1900.
30. Georges Prade, “Une femme peut-elle conduire une automobile?” Femina, February 1, 1901, 7.
31. On the bicycle and the New Woman, see Siân Reynolds, “Albertine’s Bicycle: or, Women and French Identity During the Belle Epoque,” Literature and History 10 (Spring 2001): 28–41; Christopher Thompson and Fiona Ratkoff, “Un troisième sexe? Les bourgeoises et la bicyclette dans la France fin de siècle,” Le Mouvement social 192 (July–September 2000): 9–39.
32. Berlanstein, “Selling Modern Femininity,” 626.
33. Pottier and Vauxcelles, “La presse d’aujourd’hui.”
34. According to Berlanstein, “The periodical’s sales were comparable to or larger than those of the newspapers that gave Lafitte his start as a journalist, La Presse (66,000) and L’Écho de Paris (134,000), and quite a bit larger than those of Le Temps (66,000), Le Gaulois (20,000), and Le Figaro (46,000), all thought to be influential in their day.” “Selling Modern Femininity,” 626.
35. Pottier and Vauxcelles, “La Presse d’aujourd’hui,” quoted in Cosnier, 21.
36. Baudorre, Barbusse, 95–96.
37. Max Rivière, “La Maison des magazines,” Femina, April 15, 1907, 172–76. As Cosnier notes, an earlier “garden party” in 1904 had attracted 10,000 visitors, including many famous artists, writers and celebrities. Cosnier, Les Dames de Femina, 21.
38. While Femina has been the object of two recent studies, La Vie Heureuse has received limited scholarly treatment. Notable exceptions are Margot Irvine, “The Role of Women’s Magazines in the Creation of the Prix Vie Heureuse,” in Francophone Women’s Magazines: Inside and Outside France, ed. Annabelle Cone and Dawn Marley (New Orleans: University Press of the South, 2010), 23–31; Sylvie Ducas, “Le Prix Femina: la consécration littéraire au féminin,” Recherches féministes 16, no. 1 (2009): 43–95; Guillaume Pinson, “La femme masculinisée dans la presse mondaine de la Belle Epoque,” CLIO: Histoire, femmes et societés 30 (2009): 211–29.
39. La Vie Heureuse was launched at the same moment as its sister publication, Le Conseil des Femmes. Both were advertised as companions to La Mode Pratique. Le Conseil des Femmes was entirely different in format, and contained no photographs or advertisements. It was a much denser journal, for a more targeted audience, and was billed as being for bourgeois women who were required to earn a living, without wanting to change their lifestyle or milieu. Unfortunately, we know little about La Vie Heureuse’s editorial staff. Most of the features did not include a byline, unless a famous writer had contributed. It is likely that many of the editors were men, but as with Femina, increasing numbers of women did contribute as time went on.
40. La Vie Heureuse, October 1, 1902, 2.
41. Femina, December 15, 1903.
42. Camille Pert, Leur Egale (Paris: H. Simonis Empis, 1899), 283.
43. See Roberts, Disruptive Acts; Diana Holmes and Carrie Tarr’s introductory essay, “New Woman, New Republic?” in Holmes and Tarr, A Belle Epoque? (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 11–22; Debora L. Silverman, “The ‘New Woman,’ Feminism, and the Decorative Arts in Fin-de-Siècle France,” in Eroticism and the Body Politic, ed. Lynn Hunt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 144–63; Jennifer Waelti-Walters, Feminist Novelists of the Belle Epoque: Love as a Lifestyle (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 174–81. Michelle Perrot, “The New Eve and the Old Adam: Changes in French Women’s Condition at the Turn of the Century,” trans. Helen Harden-Chenut, in Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, ed. Margaret R. Higonnet et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 51–60.
44. Roberts distinguishes between the stereotype of the New Woman and new women—real historical figures who engaged in behavior that challenged traditional gender norms (Disruptive Acts, 21).
45. For more on Belle Epoque feminism and its variants, see, in addition to the Offen articles cited above, Charles Sowerwine, “Revising the Sexual Contract: Women’s Citizenship and Republicanism in France, 1789–1944,” in Christopher E. Forth and Elinor Accampo, Confronting Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle France (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 19–42; Màire Cross, “1890–1914: A ‘Belle Epoque’ for Feminism?” in Holmes and Tarr, A Belle Epoque? (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 23–36; Florence Rochefort, “The French Feminist Movement and Republicanism, 1868–1914,” in Women’s Emancipation Movements in the Nineteenth Century: A European Perspective, ed. Sylvia Paletschek and Bianka Pietrow-Ennker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 77–101; Joan W. Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 90–124; Elinor Accampo, Rachel Fuchs, and Mary Lynn Stewart, eds., Gender and the Politics of Social Reform in France, 1870–1914 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).
46. Roberts argues that these two figures represent different kinds of resistance to gender norms (Disruptive Acts, 8). Holmes and Tarr, on the other hand, question the usefulness of separating two figures that overlap in so many important ways. Most Belle Epoque feminists, they argue, would also have been considered New Women (“New Republic, New Women?” A Belle Epoque?, 20–21).
47. This image, which brings together so many elements of the stereotype surrounding the New Woman, can be found in Debora Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology, Style (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 68, and Roberts, Disruptive Acts, 24.
48. Ruth E. Iskin’s study of women in Belle Epoque poster art offers numerous examples of independent women portrayed in a positive light, and thus contrary to other images of the New Woman. I would characterize the images she examines as examples not of the New Woman, but rather versions of the femme moderne—an alternative, positively coded figure of modern femininity. Her examples also point to the role consumer culture played in promoting modern women, who were more likely to respond to positive images of themselves. See her “Popularising New Women in Belle Epoque Advertising Posters,” in Holmes and Tarr, A Belle Epoque?, 95–112.
49. In her introduction to a volume on international manifestations of the New Woman, Linda Nochlin describes all images of the New Woman as expressing: “rebellion against oppressive notions of the ‘womanly,’ understood to be a life devoted to subordinating one’s own needs and desires to those of men, family and children.” This is precisely what distinguishes Femina’s and La Vie Heureuse’s rebellion, which does not recognize such devotion as oppressive. Linda Nochlin, “Foreword: Representing the New Woman—Complexity and Contradiction,” in The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s Through the 1960s, ed. Elizabeth Otto and Vanessa Rocco (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), vii–xi.
50. In their essay “New Republic, New Women?” Holmes and Tarr describe Marcelle Tinayre, who both wrote for and frequently appeared in Femina and La Vie Heureuse, as a “public New Woman,” and her novel La rebelle as a novel about a New Woman (20). However, as we shall see in Chapter 5, this description ignores the novel’s protagonist’s own rejection of that terminology.
51. In 1896, Georges Mouret’s Revue Encyclopédique published a long piece called “La Femme Moderne par elle-même,” in which they asked notable women writers and artists to give a sense of their “intellectual personality,” as part of their recognition that women were going through a period of transition towards new social functions. “La Femme Moderne par elle-même,” La Revue encyclopédique November 18, 1896, 842–85. This was preceded by an essay by Jules Bois, “La Femme Nouvelle,” which demonstrates the fluidity of the terms at the time. See Offen’s discussion of his essay in Debating the Woman Question.
52. Marie-Anne Bovet, “Femmes Editrices,” La Vie Heureuse, September 15, 1910, 229. This feminism is ideologically resonant with what was called familial or relational feminism at the turn of the century, similarly predicated upon equality in difference. The difference between relational feminism and Belle Epoque literary feminism is largely related to their form of expression and the apolitical nature of the latter. For more on relational feminism, see Offen, “Depopulation,” 656–58. Florence Rochefort’s understanding of fin-de-siècle feminism as an offshoot of republican utopianism is similarly relevant. Rochefort describes utopian republicans as challenging traditional republican ideology that viewed women exclusively as wives and mothers of future citizens (“The French Feminist Movement and Republicanism, 1868–1914,” 77–101). Both of these scholars are describing overtly political stances, in contradistinction to what I am identifying as feminist here.
53. André Chaignon, “Une Excursion à la Mer de Glace,” Femina, Sept. 1, 1903, 647–48.
54. A similar image appeared in the German magazine Illustrierte Frauenzeitung in 1910. The difference in message with Femina is worth noting. The caption for the latter, under the title “Feminism on a High Scale,” described the woman in the image as proof that women are not subject to vertigo—despite popular conceptions. The accompanying German text, on the other hand, emphasized the dangers of doing such a thing in women’s clothing and allowed that only “vertigo-free ladies” should consider such a task. The editors thus conveyed “a sense of danger pertaining to the female body and its clothing.” Despina Stratigakos, “Female Firsts: Media Representations of Pioneering and Adventurous Women in the Early Twentieth Century.” In The New Woman International, eds. Elizabeth Otto and Vanessa Rocco (2011), 64–65.
55. Mona Ozouf’s controversial Women’s Words: Essay on French Singularity, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997) described French feminism as having “a tranquility, a moderation, even a timidity about it” in opposition to American trends (xi). Without entering the debate on American versus French feminism or even validating that opposition (see Eric Fassin’s excellent deconstruction of the opposition in “The Purloined Gender: American Feminism in a French Mirror,” French Historical Studies 22, no. 1 [1999]: 113–38), my book historicizes some of Ozouf’s claims about the enduring role of femininity in the French feminist tradition. Responses to Ozouf’s book can be found in “Femmes: Une singularité française?” Le Débat, no. 87 (November-December 1995): 117–46. See also Offen’s review, “Weighing Women’s Words,” The European Legacy 5, no.5 (2000): 737–41. Ideas about the role of femininity in France have trickled down to more popular analyses. In a recent New York Times article about enduring gender inequalities in France, for example, Katrin Beinhold wrote that “French women appear to worry about being feminine, not feminist.” Beinhold, “Where Having It All Doesn’t Mean Equality,” The New York Times, October 11, 2010.
56. Joan Scott’s important book Only Paradoxes to Offer addresses precisely this tension, arguing that French feminism has struggled with the paradox of women needing to protest a lack of rights predicated on their difference by calling attention to that very difference: “To the extent that it acted for ‘women,’ feminism produced the ‘sexual difference’ it sought to eliminate” (3).
57. This is my objection to Cosnier’s conclusions regarding Femina: she dismisses these kinds of concerns as in tension with the magazine’s feminism, whereas in fact they are central to its feminism.
58. Jean Mistler, La Librairie Hachette de 1826 à nos jours (Paris: Hachette, 1964) 333; Claude Bellanger et al., eds., Histoire générale de la presse française, tome 3: De 1871 à 1940 (Paris: PUF, 1972) 382; Elisabeth Parinet, “L’edition litteraire, 1890–1914,” 206.
59. Rochefort, “The French Feminist Movement and Republicanism, 1868–1914,” 100.
60. On July 18, 2012, Housing Minister Céline Duflot was heckled on the floor of the Assemblé nationale because of the blue dress she was wearing. Daphnee Denis, “Sun Rises, Female French Minister Gets Heckled by Colleagues, Sun Sets,” Slate.com blog posted July 19, 2012, http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2012/07/19/cecile duflot and the floral dress just another day in the french parliment.html (accessed 1/7/13).
Chapter 1
1. In historicizing the advertising industry in France, Marjorie Beale argues that the early industry of publicité was defined by its efforts to establish itself within French high cultural traditions. Beale, The Modernist Enterprise: French Elites and the Threat of Modernity, 1900–1940 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 5. See also Marie-Emmanuelle Cheyssel, La publicité: Naissance d’une profession (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 1998); Marc Martin, Trois siècles de publicité en France (Paris: Éditions Odile Jacob, 1992); Michael B. Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1896–1920 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).
2. According to the advertisement, Cinderella “has come back to life in books read with interest, in the theater, and through the exquisite bounty that her fairy godmother’s goodwill granted her.” Femina, March 15, 1902. The ad may have been referencing the Cinderella ballet, numerous versions of which were produced and performed throughout the nineteenth century and the Belle Epoque; the early French film version of Cinderella in 1899; and Jules Massenet’s opéra-comique produced in 1899. The seventeenth-century Perrault tale also remained popular in illustrated editions throughout the nineteenth century.
3. Zola’s novel, Au Bonheur des dames, was published in the Gil Blas newspaper in 1882 and by Charpentier in 1883. It is usually translated in English as The Ladies’ Paradise.
4. This is to be compared to other thoroughly researched democratizing forces in the late nineteenth century: the democratization of luxury, of taste and of art; in the former two cases women have been particularly recognized as playing a crucial role. See Tiersten, Marianne in the Market, 207–19; 126–28; 228; on the relationship between consumption and femininity, see Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking, 18–34.
5. La Vie Heureuse, October 1, 1902.
6. See, for example, Leo Braudy’s The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), which considers the history of famous achievers, starting with Alexander the Great. Berlanstein synthesizes the extensive work on celebrity and its significance for French history in his “Historicizing and Gendering Celebrity Culture: Famous Women in Nineteenth-Century France,” Journal of Women’s History 16, no. 4 (2004): 65–91. See also Graeme Turner, Understanding Celebrity (London: Sage, 2004), 1–28, for an overview of recent criticism on celebrity.
7. Berlanstein, “Historicizing and Gendering Celebrity,” 82 and Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Schwartz’s important work demonstrates how early mass culture and the mass press created a newly democratized culture in which “individuals from different classes were expected to derive pleasure from the same sights and experiences” (16).
8. See Richard Dyer, Stars (London: British Film Institute, 1979; cf. 2nd ed., 1998).
9. Femina, February 1, 1901, 2.
10. As Marjorie Ferguson writes of twentieth-century women’s magazines: “the individual woman is a member not so much of society as a whole but of her society, the world of women.” Ferguson, Forever Feminine: Women’s Magazines and the Cult of Femininity (Aldershot, UK: Gower, 1985), 6.
11. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities, 202.
12. Prévost would be elected to the Académie française in 1909, and was a central figure in the Parisian monde littéraire so closely linked to the magazines. Femina had published his Lettres à Françoise mariée, fictional letters to his niece in which he offered counsel on life, love and marriage.
13. Prévost, “Lettres à la Lectrice,” Femina, April 15, 1908, 169.
14. Berlanstein, “Selling Modern Feminity,” 626 and “Ready for Progress? Opinion Surveys on Women’s Roles and Opportunities in Belle Epoque France,” French Politics, Culture & Society 27, no.1 (Spring 2009):1–22. The streets mentioned in the citation are suggestive of generic provincial thoroughfares: the place du Martroi is in Orléans and the cours Gambetta in Lyon; there is a rue des Ursulines in Paris but also Bordeaux.
15. Ferguson notes how part of the reinforcement of women’s magazines comes from their being a “source of positive evaluation,” and that they “consciously set out to foster a woman’s sense of her own worth,” in part through preaching “the ideal of a woman’s power of self-determination” (184–85).
16. Ferguson argues that “women’s magazines collectively comprise a social institution which serves to foster and maintain a cult of femininity” (184). See also Cynthia Carter and Linda Steiner, eds., Critical Readings: Media and Gender (Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press, 2004).
17. Tiersten describes how “commercial taste experts [distinguished] the frivolity and irrationality of the merely fashionable Parisienne from the rational and artistic qualities of the chic consumer of taste” (121–22).
18. La Vie Heureuse, October 1, 1902, ii.
19. Femina, February 1901.
20. Gruber Garvey, 4.
21. See Gruber Garvey’s discussion of the definition of “magazine” in The Adman in the Parlor, 3.
22. In his history of advertising in America, Roland Marchand argues that modern advertising was defined in the 1920s by the shift from depicting products themselves to showcasing their benefits. While in the beginning of the century advertisers focused on circulating brand names and images, later advertisers focused on the “reason-why” approach, appealing more directly to consumers as individuals. Marchand’s work, however, overlooks the symbiotic relationship between modern magazines and their advertisements. I would argue that magazines like Femina and La Vie Heureuse bring to light an intermediary step: while the advertisements mostly depicted the products themselves, those products were juxtaposed with the images figured in the pages within the magazine, which implicitly depicted the benefits of those same products. See Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 10.
23. The Liane corset was likely a reference to Liane de Pougy, the famous courtesan whose 1901 bestselling novel Idylle saphique detailed her relationship with Natalie Clifford Barney. Corsets from Claverie were often named for famous women. It is likely that the Myriem corset advertised in 1911 was named for the writer Myriam Harry.
24. Femina, April 15, 1902, 125.
25. As Gruber Garvey has shown, British magazines beginning in the 1890s regularly relied on advertising contests both to draw in readers and to secure advertising revenue. Through these contests, readers “were encouraged to transfer that sense of participating in the community of the magazine through their actions as consumers” (6).
26. On the development of the journalistic enquête in the nineteenth century, linked as it was to sociology and positivism, see Dominique Kalifa, “Enquête et culture de l’enquête au XIXe siècle,” Romantisme 149 (September 2010) 3–23. Berlanstein has studied Femina’s opinion surveys in order to “explore how readers were conceptualizing women’s place in society” (“Ready for Progress?” 2). His highly instructive essay is focused on Belle Epoque women’s self-assessment, rather than tracing the relationship between the magazine and its readers.
27. Berlanstein, “Ready for Progress?” 5.
28. Smilis, “Les femmes et les elections,” Femina, May 15, 1906, 214–15; “Non! La femme ne doit pas voter!” Femina, September 15, 1906, 405–6.
29. “Un Tournoi de poésie,” Femina, February 1, 1903, 423.
30. This is also another place to mark the difference from the female reader as consumer constructed by British women’s magazines. As Gruber Garvey has demonstrated, British women were frequently invited to participate in writing contests linked to advertisements, but these contests distinguished clearly between the kind of creative play they demanded and the “real” work of authorship and authority (166–83).
31. “Les Prix Femina,” Femina, (February 1, 1904, 470.
32. Irvine’s article, “Re-Reading Early Prize Winners: The 1904 Prix Goncourt and Prix Vie Heureuse,” in Re-Reading/La Relecture: Essays in Honour of Graham Falconer, ed. Rachel Falconer and Andrew Oliver (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2011), 153–66, offers a very helpful early history of the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Vie Heureuse, and their relationship to one another. On the history of women’s efforts to enter the Académie Française, see Christian Gury, Académiciennes (Paris: Éditions Kimé, 1996).
33. According to correspondence between Margot Irvine and independent scholar Philippe Rodriguez, Broutelles had ties to Goncourt jurists Gaston Chéreau, Justin Rosny (who was involved romantically with her sister) and Paul Margueritte.
34. Jacques de Nouvion, “Les Femmes et le Prix Goncourt,” Femina, Nov. 15, 1904, 410–11. Irvine, “Re-Reading Early Prize Winners,” 157–58.
35. An article in Le Gaulois noted that the Goncourt jury could never award a woman when four qualified men were also contenders (Dec. 4, 1904). An article in La Fronde quoted Joris-Karl Huysmans as saying that the jury could not set such a precedent as to award a woman their prize (Feb. 1, 1905). See Irvine, “Re-Reading Early Prize Winners,” 157.
36. Harry’s La Conquête de Jérusalem has a male protagonist and was compared to the colonial novels of her male peers, especially Pierre Lôti, while Frapié’s novel “takes the form of a journal intime, a genre more often associated with women’s writing than with men’s.” Irvine, “Re-Reading Early Prize Winners,” 5–13.
37. This conclusion can be found in a pamphlet published by Hachette in 1906 describing the Vie Heureuse prize. It also includes biographies and photos of the members of its jury and descriptions of the prize’s first meetings. This document can be consulted in the IMEC archives. A later, updated version of it can be found in the Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris.
38. Berlanstein attributes the prize’s origins to the Prix Vie Heureuse. Sylvie Ducas, on the other hand, acknowledges the synergy between the two magazines in her excellent and informative article, “Le Prix Femina: La consécration littéraire au féminin.”
39. Irvine discusses the history surrounding the establishment of a female academy in Une Académie de femmes? @nalyses 3, no. 2 (Spring–Summer 2008), http://www.revue-analyses.org/index.php?id=1134 (accessed November 29, 2012).
40. The article describing Femina’s original poetry tournament announced in the subtitle that the prizes would be judged exclusively by women.
41. Marcel L’Heureux, “Une Académie Féminine peut-elle passer du rêve à la réalité?” Femina, October 15, 1902, 316–17.
42. “Les Prix Femina,” Femina, November 1, 1905, 510.
43. “Les Prix Femina,” Femina, December 15, 1904, 470.
44. “Autour du ‘Prix Vie Heureuse’: Un nouveau concours offert à nos lectrices,” La Vie Heureuse, August 1, 1906.
45. André Gide was excluded from entry in 1909 because he was already an established author. See Ducas, “Le Prix Femina,” 62.
46. Hélène Avryl, “Notre concours des quarante: Une académie de femmes,” Femina, April 15, 1909, 206.
47. Jean Bertheroy, “Le Prix Vie Heureuse pour 1904,” La Vie Heureuse, March 1, 1905.
48. “Les Prix Femina,” Femina, December 15, 1904, 470.
49. Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, “L’âme des livres,” Femina, April 15, 1908, 172.
50. Maurice Laval, “Enquête sur la littérature féminine, Femina, May 15, 1906, 217.
51. La Vie Heureuse’s slightly different pitch may have been linked to its affiliation with another Hachette publication, Le Conseil des femmes, which they described on their cover as “the indispensable complement to La Vie Heureuse.” This other publication was far more austere (no photographs) and was aimed at professional women.
Chapter 2
1. Marie d’Ourlac, “George Sand,” Femina, October 15, 1901, 332–33.
2. This term was inherited from the English, who began using it to describe female intellectuals in the eighteenth century.
3. I am referring here to the visual stereotype of the New Woman in France and not the “new women,” actual women challenging Belle Epoque gender norms that Roberts discusses in Disruptive Acts.
4. D’Ourlac consciously set her biography in a separate space: “It’s a joy to talk about this woman of genius, as if in the margins of the encyclopedia entries devoted to her.” The notion of women’s history in the margins will of course become critical to feminist historiography later in the twentieth century. D’Ourlac’s description of Sand can also be understood as a kind of “resurrection biography,” which supplies a matriarchal prehistory along the lines of what Janet Beizer describes in Thinking Through the Mothers: Reimagining Women’s Biographies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009). In this case, what are resurrected are the feminine and especially maternal aspects of that history that Sand’s formidable intellect threatened to eclipse.
5. “It was in tandem with such visual technologies of mass reproduction as lithography, offset printing, photographs, stereographs, and the cinema that—costumed in bloomers, drop-waisted skirts, or trousers—New Womanhood went global.” Elizabeth Otto and Vanessa Rocco, “Introduction: Imagining and Embodying New Womanhood,” in The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s to the 1960s, ed. Elizabeth Otto and Vanessa Rocco (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 3.
6. On the role of photography in modern celebrity, see Peter Hamilton and Roger Hargreaves, The Beautiful and the Damned: The Creation of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Photography (Exhibition Catalog. London: Lund Humphries, 2001).
7. Alison and Helmut Gernsheim describe the At Home photography of the 1870s and 80s as a precursor to reportage portraiture. They note that Felix Tournachon and Paul Nadar introduced the first photo interview, of the chemist M. E. Chevreul in 1886 in Le Journal Illustré. With the exception of Sarah Bernhardt, the images they cite are of famous men, and they focused on the individual rather than the home. See their A Concise History of Photography (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1965), 129. On Dornac’s portraits see Emery, Photojournalism and the Origins of the French Writer House Museum, 67–76; Emery, “Dornac’s ‘At Home’ Photographs: Relics of History,” in Proceedings of the Western Society for French History, 36 (2008). http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0642292.0036.016. Last accessed 1/7/13. Dornac gained renewed attention in 2008 when nearly two hundred of his photographs were rediscovered and auctioned off, including images of Baudelaire, Zola and Mallarmé. See Souren Melikien, “Dornac: Unmasking a Photographer of Parisian Society,” The New York Times, May 2, 2008.
8. “Nearly all celebrity photographs until the late 1880s represented just the torso, the exterior trappings of celebrity.” Emery, Photojournalism, 67.
9. “Adolphe Brisson’s volume Portraits intimes (1894–1901), was comprised of portraits and interviews, thus providing a window into the home life of contemporaries as did works such as Pointes sèches: Physiognomies littéraires (1898), Paris intime (1899), or L’Envers de la gloire (c. 1904). Books like Charles Buet’s Médaillons et camees (1885), Maurice Guillmot’s Villégiatures d’artistes (1897), or Paul Acker’s Petites confessions: visites et portraits (1903) similarly conveyed the impression of visiting famous people at home. [. . .] Other series of French articles published in the periodical press [. . .] similarly played into the public’s hunger for first-hand information about the private lives of public figures. They included “Une heure chez . . .” in the Revue Illustrée and “Nos Contemporains chez eux” in Le Monde Illustré.” Emery, Photojournalism, 51.
10. By the 1890s, there were more than 1,400 professional photographers in Paris (Emery, Photojournalism, 63). See also Michel Frizot, ed., A New History of Photography (New York: Köneman, 1989), 123.
11. Roberts, Disruptive Acts, 106.
12. “Madame Séverine,” Femina, October 1, 1902, 295.
13. Jane Dieulafoy, “Comment j’ai écrit ‘Parysatis,’ par Madame Jane Dieulafoy.” Femina, August 15, 1902, 247.
14. This image can be contrasted with Dornac’s portrait of Dieulafoy, his only version of a woman writer at her desk. The purpose of Dornac’s image seems to be to show the extent of Dieulafoy’s masculinity—her dark man’s suit matches the weightiness of the desk at which she sits. Femina, on the other hand, chose to depict Dieulafoy not at her desk, recontextualizing her, perhaps, to offset her already strong associations with masculinity.
15. Maurice Level, “Enquête sur la littérature féminine,” Femina, May 15, 1906, 217.
16. The use of photography elaborates on the visite au grand écrivain genre earlier in the century. See Olivier Nora, “La Visite au grand écrivain,” in Les lieux de mémoire, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 2:131–56.
17. For more on what these images of men at their desks revealed and many wonderful examples of these images, see Emery, Photojournalism, 62–76.
18. “La Femme Moderne par elle-même,” La Revue Encyclopédique, 1896, 842–85.
19. Very little has been written about Lesueur. On reading her novels as feminist romances, see Diana Holmes, “Daniel Lesueur and the Feminist Romance,” in A Belle Epoque? eds. Holmes and Tarr, 197–210.
20. This photograph was actually not taken in Zola’s home but rather in a studio, against a fake backdrop whose edges can be discerned in the background.
21. Mary Léopold-Lacour, “Daniel Lesueur,” Femina, March 1, 1902, 74.
22. This pose is familiar from impressionist painting as well. See, for example, Degas’ 1879 portrait of Duranty.
23. “Madame Alphonse Daudet,” Femina, January 15, 1903, 415–16.
24. “Le Dialogue des Bêtes par Mme Gauthiers-Villars,” La Vie Heureuse, May 1904.
25. On clutter in High Victorian décor, see Alastair Duncan, Art Nouveau (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1994), 8.
26. Willa Silverman, The Notorious Life of Gyp: Right-Wing Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Roberts, Disruptive Acts, 152–64.
27. Maurice Guillemot, “Gyp,” Femina, November 15, 1902, 343–45.
28. Abbéma was a widely recognized and accomplished painter of the Belle Epoque, who would be named Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur in 1906. Femina often included her prints in the magazine as bonus excerpts.
29. The first art nouveau works were produced between 1893 and 1895 in London, Brussels and Paris. On the aesthetics and tradition of art nouveau, see Gabriel Weisberg, Art Nouveau Bing: Paris Style 1900 (New York: Harry Abrams, 1986); Victor Arwas, Art Nouveau: The French Aesthetic (London: Andreas Papadakus, 2002).
30. Debora Silverman, Art Nouveau, 158. In contrast to art nouveau movements of other European countries, France’s art nouveau movement did not pit itself against national tradition by trying to bring art to the people; rather than fully democratize art, it sought to extend art’s hierarchy while making available to the masses the refined taste of the elite. See Rosalind Williams’s discussion of this ambivalence in her chapter “Decorative Arts Reform and Democratic Consumption,” Dream Worlds, 154–209.
31. Situating the New Woman in the context of French anxiety about depopulation and changes in divorce law, Silverman has summarized: “The femme nouvelle, a middle-class woman seeking independence and education rather than marriage and life at home, thus made her claims in a context where maternity and family were issues fraught with special political and national significance” (67).
32. For more on Noailles’ biography, see Elisabeth Higonnet-Dugua, Anna de Noailles, coeur innombrable: Biographie, correspondence (Paris: Michel de Maule, 1989); François Broche, Anna de Noailles, un mystère en pleine lumière (Paris: Laffont, 1989); Patricia Ferlin, Femmes d’encrier (Paris: C. de Bartillat, 1995). On her poetry, see Catherine Perry, Persephone Unbound: Dionysian Aesthetics in the Work of Anna de Noailles (Lewis-burg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2003). A reading of her novel Le visage émerveillé can be found in Mesch, The Hysteric’s Revenge, 158–69.
33. It’s not clear whether Noailles rejected art nouveau furniture or the harsher lines of the movement’s initial products. According to Silverman, “By the 1900 exhibition, a significant shift had occurred: the terms art nouveau and modern style were used to identify architectural forms and meanings antithetical to those they had signified in 1899” (5).
34. The precise nature of the literary criticism offered in both La Vie Heureuse and Femina is beyond the purview of this book, but certainly merits further discussion. Generally speaking, Noailles is read in the context of late nineteenth-century “lyrisme féminin.”
35. See Debora Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France, 154–59.
36. Quoted in Silverman, 157.
37. La Vie Heureuse, October 1902.
38. See Vanessa Schwartz’s fascinating analysis of the Musée Grévin in Spectacular Realities, Chapter 3.
39. This title curiously references the satirical series Les Hommes d’Aujourd’hui that appeared in the French press beginning in the 1870s.
40. Art nouveau artisan René Lalique and others created “a new mythological creature, half-woman, half-dragonfly [. . .] Everywhere floated strange sea creatures [. . .] for designers seemed hypnotized by the mysteries of submarine life.” Williams, Dream Worlds, 174.
41. Silverman has recently demonstrated the link between the undulating lines of art nouveau and Congo motifs of the vine and the elephantine. See her “Art of Darkness: African Lineages of Belgian Modernism, Part I,” West 86th 18, no. 2 (Fall–Winter 2011): 139–81.
42. Art nouveau was suited perfectly to this task, as it offered gates or frameworks that could easily be added to existing structures, providing a simple way to update their look.
43. Baronne A. de Rothschild, “Une femme poète appréciée par une femme de lettres,” La Vie Heureuse, October 1, 1902, 10.
44. For example, a review of Tinayre’s La Maison du péché in Femina from January 1903 indicated that it was not “un livre pour les jeunes filles.”
45. Mary Léopold Lacour, “Madame Gabrielle Réval,” Femina, October 1, 1903, 685. On Réval’s writing, see Juliette Rogers’s chapter on women’s education novels in her Career Stories: Belle Époque Novels of Professional Development (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2007), 80–111.
46. “La plus jeune des femmes de lettres: Gérard d’Houville et L’inconstante,” La Vie Heureuse, May 1903.
47. Roland Barthes, “Novels and Children,” in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (1957; reprint, New York: Noonday Press, 1972), 50.
48. Robert Kemp, “Depuis Colette, plus de bas bleus,” Elle, November 22, 1954, 62–65.
49. “En Visite Chez Marcelle Tinayre,” La Vie Heureuse, June 1903.
50. Henri Duvernois, “Oeuvres de Femmes,” Femina, April 15, 1905.
51. Best known for her 1904 novel La Maison du péché, Tinayre was one of two women to sit for the baccalaureat in 1899; her novel Hellé received the Prix de l’Académie that same year. The most extensive biographical information about her can be found in Alain Quella-Villéger, Belles et rebelles: Le roman vrai des Chasteau-Tinayre (Bordeaux: Aubéron, 2000). See also Mélanie Collado, Colette, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, Marcelle Tinayre: Emancipation et Resignation (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003); Mesch, The Hysteric’s Revenge, 81–99.
52. “En Visite chez Marcelle Tinayre,” La Vie Heureuse, March 1903.
53. In fact, when I showed this image to a group of students in 2011, they immediately saw its resemblance to an American Express ad in which Tina Fey sits under her desk surrounded by a mess of papers while her baby daughter occupies her desk chair. While the AmEx ad called attention to the joyous chaos of having both career and family, La Vie Heureuse was determined to portray this dual role as entirely balanced and unchaotic.
1. In using the term Orient, I am referring to a constructed notion of the East rather than an actual geographical entity, with Edward Said’s groundbreaking critique of European orientalism in mind. See Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978). On the French fascination with the Orient during the late nineteenth century and Belle Epoque in particular, see Esin Atil, Charles Newton and Sarah Searight, Voyages and Visions: Nineteenth-Century European Images of the Middle East from the Victoria and Albert Museum (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service; Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1995); Jill Beaulieau and Mary Roberts, eds., Orientalism’s Interlocutors: Painting, Architecture, Photography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Ali Behdad, “Orientalist Desire: Desire of the Orient,” French Forum 15, no. 1 (January 1990): 37–51; Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity, and Representation (New York: Routledge, 1996); Linda Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient,” chap. 7 in The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society (New York: Harper and Row, 1989); Mahmut Mutman and Meyda Yegenoglu, eds., Orientalism and Cultural Differences (Santa Cruz: Center for Cultural Studies, University of California, 1992).
2. Harry was the daughter of William Shapira, an antiquities seller who was accused of selling fake biblical documents and later committed suicide. Those documents are now thought to have been authentic and possibly part of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Her family was one of the first residents of the house later inhabited by the artist Anna Ticho, which now houses a café and museum. See Roger Pierrot, “Myriam Harry et Jérusalem,” Hebrew University Studies in Literature and the Arts 18 (1990): 49–57; David Mendelson, “Les écrits Eretz-Israéliens de langue française de 1880 à 1948,” in Ecrits français d’Israël de 1880 à nos jours, ed. David Mendelson and Michael Elial (Paris: Lettres Modernes, 1989), 13–47.
3. La conquête de Jérusalem tells the story of Siona, loosely based on Harry’s life. It was followed by, among others, La petite fille de Jérusalem (1914); Siona à Berlin (1918); Siona à Paris (1919); La tendre cantique de Siona (1922). For more on Myriam Harry’s biography see Cécile Chombard Gaudin, Une Orientale à Paris: Voyages littéraires de Myriam Harry (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2005).
4. See Irvine, “Re-Reading Early Prize Winners,” 3–5.
5. More information on Lucie Delarue-Mardrus can be found in Hélène Plat, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus: Une femme de lettres des années folles (Paris: Grasset, 1994); Mélanie Collado, Colette, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, Marcelle Tinayre: emancipation et resignation (Paris: l’Harmattan, 2003); Myriam Harry, Mon Amie Lucie Delarue-Mardrus (Paris: Ariane, 1946). There is also a very informative website maintained by Patricia Izquiérdo, Anne-Marie van Bockstaele and the Association des Amis de Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, http://www.amisldm.org.
6. Writer André Billy famously used the expression “Sapho 1900” to describe the lesbian artistic community of Belle Epoque France in L’Epoque 1900 (Paris: Editions Jules Tallandier, 1951). Delarue-Mardrus had relationships with Natalie Clifford Barney and Renée Vivien, whose portrait of Petrus and his wife in her 1904 autobiographical novel Une femme m’apparut is said to be based on Delarue-Mardrus and her husband.
7. For an early but informative essay on the relationship between art nouveau and the Orient, see Clay Lancaster, “Oriental Contributions to Art Nouveau,” The Art Bulletin 34, no. 4 (December 1952): 297–310.
8. Both Bernhardt and Mérode have been recognized as early models of celebrity. Emily Apter has described Mérode’s legacy as a “stereotype compiled in large measure from the Orientalist performances of famous actresses: Sarah Bernhardt’s Cleopatra, Sibyl Sanderson’s Thaïs, Rose Caron’s Salammbô, Madame Héglon’s Delila, Loïe Fuller’s pseudo-Eastern veil dance, Sada Yacco’s Salome.” Apter, Continental Drift: From National Characters to Virtual Subjects (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 142. For the most complete collection of images of Mérode, see Michael Garval’s fascinating study, Cléo de Mérode and the Rise of Modern Celebrity Culture (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2012).
9. By feminist, Apter appears to mean challenging gender norms rather than affiliated with the feminist movement. Continental Drift, 131.
10. In her brilliant analysis of the veil in nineteenth-century Paris, Marni Kessler describes French women’s appropriation of the Muslim veil as “a visual symptom of a colonial convergence that took information about the East and displaced it, albeit in a limited way, onto the French woman.” Kessler, Sheer Presence: The Veil in Manet’s Paris (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 140.
11. “Madame Myriam Harry,” La Vie Heureuse, April 1904.
12. On the notion of strategic mimicry in a colonial context, see Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Culture,” in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 85–92.
13. Judith Gautier, “Une fête chinoise chez Pierre Lôti,” Femina, June 15, 1903, 567–69.
14. Femina cover, September 15, 1905.
15. These images are even more startling in our day given the controversies surrounding the wearing of Muslim headgear in French society.
16. “Princesses, Grandes Dames, Bourgeoises,” La Vie Heureuse, April 1, 1903.
17. On the equation of the Orient with femininity, see Kessler, Sheer Presence, 166n. Derek Gregory describes the colonizing nature of European photography of Egypt during the nineteenth century as part of a project of “unveiling” the Orient, through which the tourist is positioned in the masculine position as “spectator-voyeur, consumer-collector and sovereign-subject.” See his “Emperors of the Gaze: Photographic Practices and Productions of Space in Egypt, 1839–1914,” in Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination, ed. Joan Schwartz and James Ryan (London: I.B. Tauris, 2003), 195–225.
18. “Un Ménage d’artistes,” La Vie Heureuse, September 1907.
19. Nochlin points out the crucial displacement of any Western presence in Orientalist art, arguing that Western elements are elided in order to reinforce the mystery of the Orient and the authenticity of the work. See “The Imaginary Orient,” in The Politics of Vision, 37–38. See also Kessler’s reading of this in relationship to the veil in Manet’s Paris, 132–38.
20. “Madame Myriam Harry,” La Vie Heureuse, April 1904.
21. Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, Mes mémoires (Paris: Gallimard, 1938), 151.
22. “Poésies de femmes,” Femina, March 1, 1905, 101.
23. “Poésies de Mme Lucie Delarue-Mardrus,” Femina, October 1, 1905, 446.
24. Cf. Cosnier, Les Dames de Femina. Un féminisme mystifié (Rennes: Université de Rennes, 2009), 76.
25. “Les Cowgirls,” Femina, October 1, 1906, 448.
26. Jean Lorrain cites this photo series at length in Maison pour dames, as we will see in Chapter 7.
27. On cross-dressing and orientalism, see Marjorie Garber, “The Chic of Araby: Transvestism and the Erotics of Cultural Appropriation,” in Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992), 304–52.
28. “Madame Delarue-Mardrus aux pays Arabes,” La Vie Heureuse, September 1905.
29. Delarue-Mardrus published eleven collections of poetry and at least forty-seven novels and novellas in her lifetime. There is very little criticism of her work in English, though a growing body in French. For analysis of Delarue-Mardrus’s bestselling novel, Marie, fille-mère, see Mesch, The Hysteric’s Revenge, 99–118. A special issue of the journal Inverses dedicated to Delarue-Mardrus was published in 2008. A more complete bibliography can be found on the website of the Association des Amis de Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, http://www.amisldm.org/bibliographie/critique/.
Chapter 4
1. Daniel Lesueur, “Toast à Femina,” February 15, 1907, 75.
2. On the question of female agency in turn-of-the-century photography, see Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “The Legs of the Countess,” October 39 (Winter 1986): 65–108.
3. Myriam Harry, Mon amie Lucie Delarue-Mardrus (Paris: Ariane, 1946); Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, Mes mémoires (Paris: Gallimard, 1938).
4. The fact that La Vie Heureuse rarely included bylines makes it difficult to attribute much of its commentary.
5. Jacques de Nouvion, “Madame Marcelle Tinayre,” Femina, October 1, 1904, 348.
6. Marcelle Tinayre, La rebelle (1905; repr., Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1906), 37.
7. This has led some to assume that Le Monde Féminin was meant to be La Fronde, but there are several markers that point more clearly to Femina and La Vie Heureuse, including the presence of men on the editorial staff, the emphasis on fashion and domestic concerns, and the description of their readers.
8. Camille Pert, Leur égale (Paris: Simonis Empis, 1899), 283.
9. Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, “L’âme des livres,” Femina, April 15, 1908, 172.
10. Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, “Les Adversaires,” Femina, November 1908, 498.
11. On the relationship between female intellect, reading and hysteria, see Rachel Mesch, The Hysteric’s Revenge, 14–21; Evelyne Ender, Sexing the Mind: Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Hysteria (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); Janet Beizer, Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).
12. Delarue-Mardrus, “Les Adversaires,” 498.
13. Cover of Femina, August 15, 1910.
14. Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, “En Normandie,” Femina, August 15, 1910, 444.
15. “According to the terms of the magazine, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus is not a ‘real woman’—her female lovers aren’t secret and she is not a mother, but what absolves her is her position-taking: as if from the moment that she said she wasn’t a feminist, you could forgive her for everything else, even for being a lesbian.” Cosnier, Les Dames de Femina, 76.
16. Most of the prominent Belle Epoque women writers who were not regular stars of the magazine—Colette, Natalie Barney, Liane de Pougy, Rachilde—also eschewed feminism.
17. Jean Lorrain seems closer to explaining Delarue-Mardrus’s success in his send-up of the magazines, to be explored in Chapter 7: “This young man with the cigarette hanging from his mouth, a fist at his waist, sporting musky leather and corduroy, is still Madame Lucie Mardrus. How could the public resist such a suggestive feat of drag?” Lorrain, Maison pour dames, 56.
18. Myriam Harry, Mon amie Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, 43–44.
19. Delarue-Mardrus, “En Normandie,” Femina, August 15, 1910, 444.
Chapter 5
This chapter is based on my article “A New Man for the New Woman? Men, Marriage and Feminism in the Belle Epoque,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 38, no. 3 (Winter 2012): 85–106.
1. Colette Yver, Princesses de science (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1907), 11.
2. Camille Marbo, “La femme intellectuelle au foyer,” La Vie Heureuse, August 1907.
3. More extensive analysis of Tinayre’s and Compain’s novels and the role of men in exploring marriage reform in Femina and La Vie Heureuse can be found in my article “A New Man for the New Woman?,” 85–106.
4. Georges Art, “La Crise du mariage,” La Revue bleue, Sept. 25, 1897. See Jean Elisabeth Pedersen, Legislating the French Family: Feminism, Theater, and Republican Politics, 1870–1920 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 42–74. By the end of the nineteenth-century, marriage was no longer simply a financial arrangement between fathers and husbands in France; as mariages d’inclination increased, marriage was conceived as a relationship based on love and ensuring the couple’s satisfaction. Michelle Plott, “The Rules of the Game: Respectability, Sexuality and the Femme Mondaine in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris,” French Historical Studies 25, no. 3 (2002): 531–36.
5. Pedersen, 13–41; Theresa McBride, “Divorce and the Republican Family,” in Gender and the Politics of Social Reform in France, 1870–1914, ed. Elinor Accampo, Rachel Fuchs and Mary Lynn Stewart (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).
6. The divorce debates were revived in the summer of 1900 following the Second International Congress of Feminine Work and Institutions. See Edward Berenson, The Trial of Madame Caillaux (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 153–54. Pedersen explores divorce plays in detail, including Emile Augier’s 1876 Madame Cavarlet; Paul Hervieu’s 1895 Les Tenailles; and Paul Bourget’s 1908 Un Divorce. See Pedersen, 13–102.
7. “L’Associée,” Femina, January 15, 1903, 408.
8. According to Màire Cross, the Civil Code was seen as “the greatest injustice to women in France in the nineteenth century.” Cross, “1890–1914,” 28.
9. “Faut-il rajeunir le code?” La Vie Heureuse, April 1, 1904, 65–66.
10. “In modifying it, one sometimes restores it to a state worse than its original construction.” Ibid., 66.
11. Article 213 reads: “The husband owes protection to his wife. The wife owes obedience to her husband.” On the familial laws of the civil code, see Berenson’s helpful summary, The Trial, 107–9.
12. Henri Duvernois, “Le Mot ‘amour’ et le code civil,” Femina, April 15, 1905, 181.
13. The May 1, 1905 edition of Femina contained two Henriot cartoons that referenced these proposed reforms. The first shows a woman reading what looks like a newspaper to her friend. The caption reads: “Very good, the new code . . . but it should have required the husband not only to love his wife, but to adore his mother-in-law.” The second cartoon features a dialogue between a middle-aged man and woman: “The new code requires the husband to love his wife.” “. . . If you don’t mind . . . does it say up to what age?”
14. This article begins with the admonition that “Eh bien, oui, on doit se marier!” (Well, yes, one must get married!) Jeanne Brémontier and Franc-Nohain, “A quel âge doit-on se marier?” Femina, December 15, 1905, 578.
15. See for example, the story on Myriam Harry and her husband Emile Perrault by Charles Genaux, “Ménages d’artistes,” La Vie Heureuse, September 1907; Jules Huret, “Ménages de savants,” Femina, March 1, 1904; “Un ménage d’artistes: M et Mme Paul Adam,” La Vie Heureuse, January 1905.
16. “Ménages de poètes,” Femina, June 15, 1904. This is an interesting expansion of the woman as “artist of the self.” In her key domestic role, she and her husband can now make art of themselves together.
17. The grammatical discrepancy of this last sentence calls attention to the particular linguistic idiom of the magazines, notable for a precious, affected style often difficult to translate. “Le coeur des femmes, connait-il des raisons nouvelles?” La Vie Heureuse, October, 1901.
18. See for example, M. de G., “Une Associée de demain,” Femina, June 1, 1907, 243, and M. D’Auray, “Les Associées,” Femina, January 15, 1903, 408.
19. Marcel Prévost, Lettres à Françoise mariée (Paris: Librairie Félix Juvan, 1908), 36.
20. Because of its heroine’s job as a schoolteacher, Compain’s novel has most often been treated in the context of girls’ education. Jennifer Waelti-Walters and Steven Hause, eds., Feminisms of the Belle: A Historical and Literary Anthology (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 92–93; Waelti-Walters, Feminist Novelists of the Belle Epoque, 126–37; Juliette Rogers, “Educating the Heroine: Turn-of-the-Century Feminism and the French Women’s Educational Novels,” Women’s Studies 23 (1994): 321–34. Rogers reads both La rebelle and L’un vers l’autre separately as “novels of female professional development,” focusing typologically on the ways that they differ from the male bildungsroman structure (Career Stories, 99–111; 163–73).
21. Emile Zola, “Le roman expérimental,” in Oeuvres complètes. On the influence of Zola and naturalism on turn-of-the-century women writers, see “Virility and the Intellectual Woman, or Can a Woman Be a Naturalist?” in Mesch, The Hysteric’s Revenge, 81–118.
22. Compain’s later involvement with the organized feminist movement should not prevent us from considering her work in the context of Belle Epoque literary feminism. Her later works continue to reflect a struggle to define modern femininity and the balance between love and career. For more on Compain, see Mesch, “Louise-Marie Com-pain,” Dictionnaire des femmes créatrices, ed. Antoinette Fouque, Mireille Calle-Gruber, and Béatrice Didier (Paris: Edition des Femmes, forthcoming).
23. Compain’s great-niece is the feminist sociologist Evelyne Sullerot. This biographical information comes from a telephone interview I conducted with Sullerot in October 2008.
24. Jacques de Nouvion, “Mme Marcelle Tinayre,” Femina, October 1, 1904, 348–49.
25. On the absence of a French marriage plot in nineteenth-century French fiction, see Masha Belenky and Rachel Mesch, “Introduction,” in “State of the Union: Marriage in Nineteenth-Century France,” ed. Belenky and Mesch, special issue, Dix-Neuf: The Journal of the Société de dix-neuviémistes 10, no. 1 (November 2008): 1–6.
26. Louise-Marie Compain, L’un vers l’autre (Paris: P-V Stock, Editeurs, 1903), 28–29.
27. Marcelle Tinayre, La rebelle (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1905), 13.
28. At the outset of the novel, Josanne is still married to her sickly husband, whom she married young in a loveless union, but is raising a son conceived with her lover. Noël, however, does not seem to be bothered by Josanne’s previous marriage.
29. For Noel, this means accepting Josanne’s son, which happens after he is nearly lost to illness. For Henri, on the other hand, this means rejecting his parents’ patriarchal model of marriage, which left his mother powerless over her own property.
30. The recognition of men supporting this alternative feminist ideal supports Karen Offen’s recent argument that “male feminism was, in fact a ‘genre’ that developed substantially during the Third Republic.” See her “Is the ‘Woman Question’ Really the ‘Man Problem’?” in Confronting Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle France, ed. Christopher E. Forth and Elinor Accampo (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 40–62.
31. On the importance of Nietzsche’s thought to women novelists challenging Belle Epoque gender hierarchies, see Venita Datta, “Superwomen or Slaves? Women Writers, Male Critics and the Reception of Nietzsche in Belle-Epoque France,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 33, no. 3 (Fall 2007): 421–47.
32. M. D’Auray, “Les Associées,” Femina, January 15, 1903, 408.
33. See, for example, Henri Duvernois, “Une interview de Marcelle Tinayre,” Femina, April 15, 1906, 169. The subtitle reads: “Marcelle Tinayre, author of the sensational novel La rebelle, shares with Femina readers the ideas that motivated the book.”
34. “Les Associées,” Femina, 407.
35. Emile Berringer, “Les livres et les écrivains,” L’illustration, March 17, 1906, 170. An article in Femina asked Tinayre to justify some of those choices. Henri Duvernois, “Une interview de Marcelle Tinayre,” Femina, April 15, 1906, 169. In 1909, Femina editor Fernand Vandérem applauded Tinayre for not having any “suffragette” instincts in her fiction writing. See his “Réceptions: Marcelle Tinayre,” Femina, December 15, 1909, 675.
36. In her classic study, Nancy Armstrong argued for historicizing the British novel and demonstrated the ways in which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels “helped redefine what men were supposed to desire in women and what women, in turn, were supposed to desire to be.” Tinayre’s and Compain’s novels are similarly significant to both cultural and literary history. See her Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 251.
37. Janet Beizer describes the necessary expulsion of subversive female sexuality in nineteenth-century French literature as “the process whereby the disabling of the hystericized female body paradoxically becomes an enabling force for the discourse that produces it” (Ventriloquized Bodies, 249).
38. It is no coincidence that Thérèse’s ideal of marriage matches the one that would be described in Femina and La Vie Heureuse. She describes her alternative marriage as: “not the cowardly and traiterous servitude of slave to master . . . but a magnificent and admirable partnership between two hearts and desires . . . the indissoluble union of friends, lovers, siblings” (146).
39. Articles and essays on the topic were signed alternately by men and women and both famous men and women were quoted as voices of authority; the writers Paul Hervieu, Eugène Brieux and Marcel Prévost served on the extraparliamentary committee working towards reforming the Code in the interest of gender equality.
40. Camille Marbo, “La Femme intellectuelle au foyer,” La Vie Heureuse, August 1907.
41. Susan Suleiman defines the roman à these, or ideological novel, as seeking “through the vehicle of fiction, to persuade their readers of the ‘correctness’ of a particular way of interpreting the world.” Suleiman, Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 1.
42. Jules Huret, “Ménages de savants,” Femina, March 1, 1904, 77.
43. Colette Yver, “Réponse de Colette Yver à Mme Camille Marbo,” La Vie Heureuse, October 1907.
44. “Réponses à notre enquête, Epouseriez-vous une femme qui travaille,” La Vie Heureuse, November 1907.
45. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Writing Beyond the Ending (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985).
46. On rewritings of Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves, see Nicholas D. Paige, The Ancien Régime of the Novel (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 37–57; Julia Douthwaite, Exotic Women: Literary Heroines and Cultural Strategies in Ancien Régime France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 126.
47. The article “Les Associées,” for instance, explicitly offers examples of famous couples that counter widespread perception of “l’état actuel des moeurs.” Femina, January 1, 1903, 407.
48. Henri Duvernois, “La force du passé par Daniel Lesueur,” Femina, July 1, 1905, 316.
Chapter 6
1. Jean Lorrain, Maison pour dames (Paris: Ollendorff, 1908), 45.
2. Jean Lorrain, “Ellen,” Femina, October 1, 1905.
3. Cosnier begins her study of Femina with a summary of the novel: “It’s a precious document to the extent that it describes a very specific milieu,” 16; see also 15–20; Irvine notes “What his book chiefly points out is the lack of connection between the lives of the readers of Femina and La Vie Heureuse [. . .] and the exotic lives of the women they wanted to read about.” Irvine, “The Role of Women’s Magazines in the Creation of the Prix Vie Heureuse,” 28.
4. Annemarie Kleinert helpfully compares Flaubert’s La Corbeille to the actual magazine in “Le Journal des Dames et des Modes,” 118–22.
5. Paula Geyh, Cities, Citizens and Technologies: Urban Life and Postmodernity (New York: Routledge, 2009), 56.
6. Lisa Tiersten writes: “Emma Bovary’s predicament prefigures not only the convergence of middle-class femininity with consumerism, but also the widely felt anxiety about the relationships between individual will and social responsibility in modern market society that made the female consumer so controversial a figure during the early Third Republic.” Marianne in the Market, 11.
7. See Femina, October 1, 1905.
8. Hysteria was often known as la maladie du siècle, a twist on the mal du siècle that had plagued romantic writers earlier in the century.
9. See Margaret Cohen’s reading of this novel in The Sentimental Education of the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 165–85; Honoré de Balzac, La muse du département (1843) in L’illustre Gaudissart et la muse du département, ed. Bernard Guyon (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1970), 189.
10. Guy de Maupassant, “La parure,” Le Gaulois, February 17, 1884.
11. Colette appeared before her divorce from Willy. Jane de la Vaudère (author of numerous salacious medical novels) appears in La Vie Heureuse in November 1903 as the author of verse to accompany a musical interlude included in the magazine.
12. Charles Maurras, “Le romantisme féminin,” in L’avenir de l’intelligence (Paris: Albert Fontemoing, Editeur, 1905), 249.
13. In The Hysteric’s Revenge, I argued that the fear of female sexuality so often associated with nineteenth-century France actually masked a deeper anxiety surrounding female intellect. On reactions of male critics to the increased numbers of women writing, see 9–16.
14. Patricia Izquiérdo, “La réception des écrits de femme: les années décisives 1908–1909,” in Masculin/féminin et presse au XIXè siècle (Actes du colloque, Sainte Etienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint Etienne, 2013).
15. Jean Ernest-Charles, “Les ‘Bas-bleus’ et la littérature feminine,” in Les Same-dis littéraires, 5 vols. (Paris: Sansot, 1905), 2:231; Jean Bertaut, La littérature féminine d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Librairie des Annales Politiques et Littéraires, 1909); Jules Flat, Nos femmes de lettres (Paris: Perrin, 1909).
16. Camille Marbo, “La Femme Intellectuelle au foyer,” La Vie Heureuse, August 1907.
Chapter 7
This chapter is based on my article, “A Belle Epoque Media Storm: Gender, Celebrity and the Marcelle Tinayre Affair,” French Historical Studies 35, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 93–121.
1. Henriot, Le petit journal, Jan. 19, 1908. Gabrielle Houbre describes this image in “L’honneur perdu de Marcelle Tinayre: l’affaire de la Légion d’honneur ratée (1908),” in Les ratés de la littérature, ed. Jean-Jacques Lefrère, Michel Pierssens and Jean-Didier Wagneur (Tusson, Fr.: Du Lérot, 1999), 89–101. Houbre’s impeccably researched piece was the first scholarly article to reconstitute the details of the scandal following Tinayre’s nomination to the Legion of Honor.
2. The ranks for the Legion of Honor are knight (chevalier), officer, commander, grand officer and grand cross.
3. Although the first actress was awarded the Legion of Honor in 1904, Bernhardt did not become a chevalier until 1914, and was promoted to officer in 1921. Roberts, Disruptive Acts, 325n.35. For more on the controversies surrounding Bernhardt’s public image, see Berlanstein, Daughters of Eve, 209–36. On the first women to receive the honor, see Haryett Fontanges, La Légion d’honneur et les femmes décorées, étude d’histoire et de sociologie féminine (Paris: Alliance Cooperative du Livre, 1905).
4. Houbre provides a helpful breakdown of the range of political affiliations and scale in the publications that responded to the affair: “from the extreme-right to the nationalist right (La Libre Parole, L’Autorité, La Patrie, L’Écho de Paris, L’Éclair, La Presse, L’intransigeant, Le Gaulois) to the leftist-republican and extreme leftist (L’Aurore, Le Radical, La Petite République, L’Humanité, Le Rappel, L’Action, Messidor) by way of more moderate dailies without a clear political bent (La Liberté, Le Temps, Le Figaro, Le Matin, Le Journal, Le Petit Journal, Le Petit Parisien) without forgetting the Gil Blas, the Parisian gossip newspaper” (“L’honneur perdu,” 94).
5. Tinayre did not, then, refuse the Legion of Honor, although she was almost immediately remembered as having done so (Quella-Villéger, Belles et rebelles, 278). Numerous sources continue to describe her this way, largely because French Wikipedia contains this misinformation.
6. Controversy brewed about the context for Tinayre’s initial letter. In a letter published January 9, 1908 in L’Écho de Paris, Tinayre insisted that the editor Adrien Hébrard had invited her to write to Le Temps.
7. The January 11 edition of the Messidor charged that Tinayre had written a letter to Briand asking to be considered for the honor.
8. Marcelle Tinayre, “La croix de Madame Tinayre,” Le Temps, January 9, 1908.
9. Houbre describes Jean Ernest-Charles as “a lawyer who was a specialist in literary trials, and who had published political works before turning to literary criticism” (Houbre, “L’honneur perdu,” 94). See Ernest-Charles, La littérature française d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Perrin et Cie, 1902); Also see “Livre de femmes,” Les Samedis littéraires (Paris: Sansot, 1905) 1:85–93.
10. Jean Ernest-Charles, ed., Le Censeur, January 18, 1908, 65–94. Houbre notes that he excluded some of the articles most favorable to Tinayre, including Paul Lagardère’s piece in the January 10 Le Petit Parisien.
11. Jean Ernest-Charles, “Femmes de lettres,” Gil Blas, January 12, 1908.
12. “They always want to attract attention for themselves. All they know how to do is make up stories so that people will admire them more.” Ernest-Charles, “Femmes de Lettres.”
13. Clément Vautel, “Note parisienne,” La Liberté, January 10, 1908.
14. Franc-Nohain, “La mode nouvelle,” La Liberté, January 8, 1908; “Madame Tinayre et ses amis,” La Presse, January 9, 1908; Guy de Cassagnac, “Causons chiffons!” L’Autorité, January 11, 1908.
15. Emile Faguet, “Vous le porterez!” Le Gaulois, January 9, 1908.
16. “Pour Sarah Bernhardt,” Gil Blas, January 9, 1908; “La Croix de Mme Tinayre,” Gil Blas, January 8, 1908; “Pour Georges de Peyrebrune,” Gil Blas, January 10, 1908.
17. “L’opinion des femmes décorées,” L’Éclair, January 9, 1908.
18. Houbre reads the affair as an example of media producing an event (“journalistic strategies produced, indeed created, ‘the event’ of the missed Legion of Honor”) but also as expressing “the tenacious misogyny and antifeminism of the Belle Epoque” (“L’honneur perdu,” 101).
19. Tinayre initially told La Liberté: “You know, I won’t wear the decoration. I don’t really want to be noticed by the [. . .] corner grocer.” René de Valfori, “Conversation avec Mme Tinayre,” La Liberté, January 7, 1908.
20. Gil Blas, January 10, 1908.
21. Emmanuel Arène, “La croix du jour,” Le Figaro, January 11, 1908.
22. Tinayre, “Les Explications de Mme Tinayre,” L’Écho de Paris, January 9, 1908; Tinayre, “Je ne l’ai pas refusée, nous dit Marcelle Tinayre,” L’Intransigeant, January 10, 1908.
23. “La modestie, vertu féminine,” L’Aurore, January 9, 1908.
24. The regular features on visits to celebrity homes that had become popular in the periodical press by the 1890s certainly collapsed some of these boundaries. But in these stories, part of the thrill was the sort of detective work required of the journalist. The famous person might answer questions in an interview, but the tone was still one of distance and hierarchy. See Emery’s Photojournalism, 47–80.
25. The features of Myriam Harry and Lucie Delarue-Mardrus on their travels are of another variety, of course. They showed the woman writer as a kind of performer, like the actress, outside of the bounds of bourgeois existence.
26. Tinayre actually had three children, but she only mentions one in the letter. A fourth died in childhood in 1896.
27. Marcelle Tinayre, Le Temps, January 8, 1908.
28. Berlanstein describes this formulation as a paraphrasing of Daniel Boorstin’s famous description of a celebrity as someone who is “well-known for his well-knownness.” See Berlanstein, “Historicizing and Gendering Celebrity Culture,” 66, and Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America (New York: Vintage, 1961), 57.
29. The paradoxical nature of Tinayre’s predicament merits comparison with Joan Scott’s description of the contradictions inherent to French feminism, whereby women had to argue at once that sexual difference was irrelevant to citizenship, but in order to act on behalf of women had to insist on their sexual difference. In addition to being caught in a similar feminist double-bind, Tinayre’s story highlights the “internal tensions and incompatibilities” of Belle Epoque feminism to which Scott encourages attentiveness. Only Paradoxes to Offer, 16.
30. Emile Faguet, “La rebelle,” Revue Latine, 1905, quoted in Eugène Martin-Mamy, Marcelle Tinayre (Paris: E. Sansot, 1909), 39.
31. Régine Martial, Gil Blas, January 18, 1908.
Conclusion
1. In 1908 Jean Richepin, Henri Poincaré and Francis Charmes were elected; they were joined in 1909 by Marcel Prévost, Jean Aicard, Eugène Brieux, René Doumic and Raymond Poincaré. This was not the first time the question of electing women had been raised. For a complete history, see Christian Gury’s excellent study, Les Académiciennes (Paris: Éditions Kimé, 1996).
2. Paul Flat refers to the “crowded battalions” of women writers in Nos femmes de lettres (Paris: Perrin, 1909), ii; Jules Bertaut describes the “battalion” of women writers as “a sort of mass marching in one unified spirit toward victory!” in La littérature féminine d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Librairie des annales politiques et littéraires, 1909), 11.
3. Simone d’Ax, “Sur le pont des arts,” Femina, January 1, 1909, 16–17.
4. As Sylvie Ducas notes, the prize committee was rarely referred to as an Academy, but rather as a company, assembly or committee (“Le Prix Femina,” 63).
5. Irvine describes the prize as a joint product of Femina and La Vie Heureuse that “helped to consecrate and legitimize writing by women at the turn of the century,” in “The Role of Women’s Magazines in the Creation of the Prix Vie Heureuse,” 21.
6. The original jury was composed of Juliette Adam, Arvède Barine, Thérèse Bentzon, Jean Bertheroy, Pierre de Coulevain, Julia Daudet, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, Jane Dieulafoy, Claude Ferval, Judith Gautier, Lucie Félix-Faure-Goyau, Daniel Lesueur, Jeanne Marni, Anna de Noailles, Jane Catulle Mendès, Georges de Peyrebrune, Poradowska, Gabrielle Réval, Séverine, Marcelle Tinayre and Caroline de Broutelles as permanent secretary. See “Le Prix Vie Heureuse,” La Vie Heureuse, February 1905.
7. On the initial disregard for the prize, see Irvine, “Une Académie de femmes?”
8. Hélène Avryl, “Les femmes et l’Académie,” Femina, February 15, 1909, 95; Avryl, “Une Académie de femmes,” Femina, April 15, 1909, 206.
9. Franc-Nohain, “Choses et autres,” L’Écho de Paris, January 15, 1909, 1; “L’Académie et les femmes,” Le Temps, January 20, 1909, 1.
10. A final full-page image features an enormous open book, which a crowd of male and female hands appear to be clamoring for. While the caption attributes these hands to readers, in context they are suggestive of a struggle between authors themselves, men and women battling over their right to the book at the center.
11. François de Tessan, “Académiciennes?” La Liberté, January 10, 1909, 1. In this piece he announced a forthcoming series of letters from women on the topic. See also January 15 and February 1, 1909.
12. Avryl, “Les femmes et l’Académie,” Femina, February 15, 1909.
13. George Sand had famously refused election to the Academy, a fact often noted. But, as François de Tessan had noted in La Liberté, “times have changed.” De Tessan, “Académiciennes?” La Liberté, January 10, 1909, 1.
14. Gury, Les Académiciennes, 110–11.
15. Fernand Vandérem, “Réceptions: La comtesse M. de Noailles,” Femina, October 15, 1909, 561.
16. Hélène Avryl, “Les Femmes et l’Académie,” Femina, February 15, 1909.
17. Fernand Vandérem, “Réceptions: Madame Marcelle Tinayre,” Femina, December 15, 1909, 645.
18. Article 213 of the Civil Code, which described husbands giving protection in exchange for wives’ obedience, was changed in 1938, but until 1970 still referred to the husband as “head of the family” and stipulated the circumstances under which the wife could make familial decisions. In 1972, it was revised so that “the spouses together control the material and moral direction of the family.”
19. See Karen Offen, “Women, Citizenship and Suffrage with a French Twist, 1789–1993,” in Suffrage and Beyond: International Feminist Perspectives, ed. Melanie Nolan and Catherine Daley (Auckland, NZ: Auckland University Press, 1994), 151.
20. Compain, L’un vers l’autre, 250.
21. Janine, “Remarques d’une débutante: Chevalières?” Femina, April 15, 1910.
22. Gury, Les Académiciennes, 90.
23. Lafitte had overextended himself with the high production cost of the photographic news daily Excelsior that he had launched in 1910.
24. See Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–27 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 17–45.
25. In her study of mid-century femininity in the French mass press, Susan Weiner describes Elle as the first French magazine to portray a fantasy of work-life balance: “for the first time, a women’s magazine displayed the fantasy of having both a fulfilling career and a traditional home life.” Weiner, Enfants Terribles: Youth and Femininity in the Mass Media in France, 1945–1968 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 21.
26. Kemp stops in the early 1900s only to note Colette and Anna de Noailles, with an allusion to Gabrielle Réval and Marcelle “Tinagre” (sic) as minor characters along the way.
27. Lafitte’s La Vie au Grand Air has been studied for its contribution to the history of photography and the invention of the modern magazine, while Femina’s particular innovations have been largely ignored, despite their crucial role in Lafitte’s own history and his development of Je sais tout and Excelsior. See for example, “L’invention du magazine,” in Thierry Gervais and Gaëlle Morel’s excellent history, La photographie: Histoire, techniques, art, presse (Paris: Larousse, 2008), 113–16. The more recent La Civilisation du journal addresses Femina in the essay on “La presse féminine,” which is followed by an essay on “La presse féministe,” which makes no mention of it; Gervais’ essay on photography for that collection, which discusses the development of photographic interviews, makes no mention of either magazine, nor does his essay on the illustrated magazine, despite its emphasis on Pierre Lafitte. See Rosemonde Sanson, “La presse féminine,” Michèle Riot-Sarcey, “La presse féministe: la politique des femmes ou la plume exclusive,” Thierry Gervais, “Les premiers magazines illustrés” and “Poétique de l’image 2: La photographie au service de l’information visuelle (1843–1914),” in La Civilisation du journal: Histoire culturelle et littéraire de la presse française au XIXe siècle, ed. Dominique Kalifa et al. (Paris: Nouveau Monde éditions, 2011), 523–42; 543–55; 851–64; 453–63.