"And here is now another example"
The Arcades Project
For Walter Benjamin, the philosopher, cultural critic and essayist (already mentioned re: aestheticisation of politics), the phenomenon of "Paris" had a particular importance in his thinking. In his major work, The Arcades Project, begun in 1927, but never completed (and in a way this was always to be so, given the use of his fragmentary style in presenting thoughts and questions), was about the rise of modern European urban culture, and Paris becomes important, not just as the capital city of France but, as evidenced in these two Exposés:
"Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century" (1935)
"Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century" (1939)
An exposé being something, whether a film, other various media or a piece of writing, which reveals the truth about a situation or person, especially something involving shocking facts. According to the Wikipedia article on the subject of Benjamin's project:
Parisian arcades began to be constructed around the beginning of the nineteenth century and were sometimes destroyed as a result of Baron Haussmann's renovation of Paris during the Second French Empire (ca. 1850–1870). Benjamin linked them to the city's distinctive street life and saw them as providing one of the habitats of the flâneur (i.e., a person strolling in a locale to experience it).
Benjamin first mentioned the Arcades Project in a 1927 letter to his friend Gershom Scholem, describing it as his attempt to use collage techniques in literature. Initially, Benjamin saw the Arcades as a small article he would finish within a few weeks.
However, Benjamin's vision of the Arcades Project grew increasingly ambitious in scope until he perceived it as representing his most important creative accomplishment. On several occasions Benjamin altered his overall scheme of the Arcades Project, due in part to the influence of Theodor Adorno, who gave Benjamin a stipend and who expected Benjamin to make the Arcades project more explicitly political and Marxist in its analysis.
It contains sections (what he terms convolutes) on Arcades, Fashion, Catacombs, iron constructions, exhibitions, advertising, Interior design, Baudelaire, The Streets of Paris, Panoramas and Dioramas, Mirrors, Painting, Modes of Lighting, Railroads, Charles Fourier, Marx, Photography, Mannequins, Social movements, Daumier's caricatures, Literary History, the Stock exchange, Lithography, and the Paris Commune.
In considering:
"French culture and the nation" . . .
. . . Re:LODE Radio sees this phenomenon as symmetrically mirrored in the type of narcissism of:
"American culture and the nation". . .
. . . And when it comes to the notion of;
"the nation",
. . . the follow up to the question that the French historian Ernest Renan (1823–1892) asked in his 1882 lecture:
Q. "What is a Nation?" ("Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?")
includes the idea that a nation is;
"a daily referendum",
and that nations are based as much on;
"what the people jointly forget, as what they remember,"
and this observation is frequently quoted in historical discussions concerning nationalism and national identity.
Revolution on the streets! The Paris Commune - what is remembered and what is NOT!
This painting by Manet of the aftermath of the Haussmannisation of Paris with the Road-menders in the Rue Mossnier (1878) belies the trauma of the barricades that took place seven years earlier during the Paris Commune of 1871.
The Bloody Week
In 1871 the enemy of the French state was not the Prussian military ensconced in the Palace of Versailles (where, and when, the nation of a unified German Empire was proclaimed), for the bourgeoisie, for the conservative political class, the enemy was the proletarian working class citizens of Paris who refused to surrender, were later summarily executed in the thousands (estimates of 20,000 fatalities have been revised down to half that number in recent calculations) by the French army in the streets of Paris and the executions that took place in the Père Lachaise Cemetery.
Map illustrating war between Paris Commune and National government
Benjamin's take on:
E. Haussmann, or the Barricades
II venerate the Beautiful, the Good, and all things great; Beautiful nature, on which great art rests -
How it enchants the ear and charms the eye!
I love spring in blossom: women and roses.Baron Haussmann, Confession d'un lion devenu vieux!Haussmann's activity is incorporated into Napoleonic imperialism, which favors investment capital. In Paris, speculation is at its height. Haussmann's expropriations give rise to speculation that borders on fraud. The rulings of the Court of Cassation, which are inspired by the bourgeois and Orleanist opposition, increase the financial risks of Haussmannization. Haussmann tries to shore up his dictatorship by placing Paris under an emergency regime. In 1864, in a speech before the National Assembly, he vents his hatred of the rootless urban population. This population grows ever larger as a result of his projects. Rising rents drive the proletariat into the suburbs. The quartiers of Paris in this way lose their distinctive physiognomy. The "red belt" forms. Haussmann gave himself the title of "demolition artist." He believed he had a vocation for his work, and emphasizes this in his memoirs. The central marketplace passes for Haussmann's most successful construction - and this is an interesting symptom. It has been said of the Île de la Cité, the cradle of the city, that in the wake of Haussmann only one church, one public building, and one barracks remained. Hugo and Merimee suggest how much the transformations made by Haussmann appear to Parisians as a monument of Napoleonic despotism. The inhabitants of the city no longer feel at home there; they start to become conscious of the inhuman character of the metropolis. Maxime Du Camp's monumental work Paris owes its existence to this dawning awareness. The etchings of Meryon (around 1850) constitute the death mask of old Paris.The true goal of Haussmann's projects was to secure the city against civil war. He wanted to make the erection of barricades in the streets of Paris impossible for all time. With the same end in mind, Louis Philippe had already introduced wooden paving. Nevertheless, barricades had played a considerable role in the February Revolution. Engels studied the tactics of barricade fighting. Haussmann seeks to forestall such combat in two ways. Widening the streets will make the erection of barricades impossible, and new streets will connect the barracks in straight lines with the workers' districts. Contemporaries christened the operation "strategic embellishment."
Civil War!
For Manet his 1878 picture of road menders may have contained echoes of his earlier prints titled Civil War (Guerre Civile) 1871–73, published 1874. After serving in the National Guard during the Siege of Paris, Manet remained outside the city for most of the Commune but returned to witness the atrocities of its violent suppression in late May 1871. According to his friend Théodore Duret, he based this lithograph on a sketch made from life near the Madeleine Church, the site of one of the first massacres of Communards by Versailles government troops. The dead National Guardsman lying beside the barricade stands for one of many, while the pinstriped pant legs in the right corner refer to additional civilian casualties. Manet’s animated use of the lithographic medium, which included employing the side of the crayon for broad strokes, as well as scratching into the greasy black marks, suggests that the dust has barely settled on this scene. The role of Manet, the "flâneur", as a witness to state led atrocities upon citizens, in revolt, and revolutionary, contrasts with the artist who possessed a lifelong interest in the subject of leisure, entertainment, and the distractions of modern life.
The flâneur is a French noun referring to a person, literally meaning "stroller", "lounger", "saunterer", or "loafer", but with some nuanced additional meanings and as a loanword in English. Flânerie is the act of strolling, with all of its accompanying associations. A near-synonym of the noun is boulevardier. Traditionally depicted as male, a flâneur is an ambivalent figure of urban affluence and modernity, representing the ability to wander detached from society with no other purpose than to be an acute observer of industrialized, contemporary life.
The flâneur was, first of all, a literary type from 19th-century France, essential to any picture of the streets of Paris. The word carried a set of rich associations: the man of leisure, the idler, the urban explorer, the connoisseur of the street. It was Walter Benjamin, drawing on the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, who made this figure the object of scholarly interest in the 20th century, as an emblematic archetype of urban, modern (even modernist) experience. Following Benjamin, the flâneur has become an important symbol for scholars, artists, and writers.
Manet's interest in all aspects of modern life, the various manifestations of cultural, economic and political exchanges, be they characterised by the exchange of bullets, or sex for money, along with champagne and red triangles on bottled beer, ends in this work.
A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (Un bar aux Folies Bergère) is Édouard Manet's last major work. It was painted in 1882 and exhibited at the Paris Salon of that year. It depicts a scene in the Folies Bergère nightclub in Paris.
No dust in this scene of new building developments in Paris!
This painting of 1877 by Gustave Caillebotte, best known for his paintings of urban Paris, is titled Paris Street; Rainy Day (Rue de Paris; temps de pluie, also known as La Place de l'Europe, temps de pluie) and shows new paving glistening in the rain. Any sense of a potential weaponising of the architecture, and the street itself, has been removed and replaced by the denizens of a bourgeoisie surveying entirely new and unthreatening prospects.
She wears a hat, veil, diamond earring, demure brown dress, and a fur lined coat, described in 1877 as "modern – or should I say, the latest fashion". The man wears a moustache, topcoat, frock coat, top hat, bow tie, starched white shirt, buttoned waistcoat and an open long coat with collar turned up. They are unambiguously middle class. Some working class figures may be seen in the background; a maid in a doorway, the decorator carrying a ladder, cut-off by the umbrella above him. Caillebotte juxtaposes the figures and the perspective in a playful manner, with one man appearing to jump from the wheel of a carriage; another pair of legs appear below the rim of an umbrella.This painting is almost unique among his works for its particularly flat colours and photo-realistic effect, which give the painting its distinctive and modern look.
The Paris Commune remembered and/or a memory erased and/or conveniently forgotten?
The echoes of this cultural and political trauma cut through those efforts of denial, or forgetting, for those on the "Left" the Commune is both a lesson and an emblem. Karine Varley, in her paper: Memories Not Yet Formed: Commemorating the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, explores this complex situation in the context of attempts to the memorialising the Franco Prussian War inevitably evoking memories of the Commune that required control management, and suppression. However, such control management of history and memory is made somewhat more difficult when an iconic Parisian landmark is the site of the burial of that history and the erasure of a collective memory.
Q. And what is this iconic landmark?
A. Montmartre, including the Basilica of the Sacré-CœurIn this video France 24 takes its audience on a tour of the history of Montmartre that includes the iconic structure that overlooks Paris, the Basilica of the Sacré-Cœur, that, in its purpose, and in its construction, was and is, sheer counter-revolutionary propaganda.
A tourist destination and . . .
The Paris Commune was the main insurrectionary commune of France in 1870-1871, based on direct democracy and established in Paris from 18 March to 28 May 1871.During the Franco-Prussian War, Paris had been defended by the National Guard, where working class radicalism grew among soldiers.Everyday life for Parisians became increasingly difficult during the siege. In December temperatures dropped to −15 °C (5 °F), and the Seine froze for three weeks. Parisians suffered shortages of food, firewood, coal and medicine. The city was almost completely dark at night. The only communication with the outside world was by balloon, carrier pigeon, or letters packed in iron balls floated down the Seine. Rumours and conspiracy theories abounded. Because supplies of ordinary food ran out, starving denizens ate most of the city zoo's animals, then resorted to feeding on rats.By early January 1871, Bismarck and the Germans themselves were tired of the prolonged siege. They installed seventy-two 120- and 150-mm artillery pieces in the forts around Paris and on 5 January began to bombard the city day and night. Between 300 and 600 shells hit the centre of the city every day.Between 11 and 19 January 1871, the French armies had been defeated on four fronts and Paris was facing a famine. General Trochu received reports from the prefect of Paris that agitation against the government and military leaders was increasing in the political clubs and in the National Guard of the working-class neighbourhoods of Belleville, La Chapelle, Montmartre, and Gros-Caillou.At midday on 22 January, three or four hundred National Guards and members of radical groups — mostly Blanquists — gathered outside the Hôtel de Ville. A battalion of Gardes Mobiles from Brittany was inside the building to defend it in case of an assault. The demonstrators presented their demands that the military be placed under civil control, and that there be an immediate election of a commune. The atmosphere was tense, and in the middle of the afternoon, gunfire broke out between the two sides; each side blamed the other for firing first. Six demonstrators were killed, and the army cleared the square. The government quickly banned two publications, Le Reveil of Delescluze and Le Combat of Pyat, and arrested 83 revolutionaries.At the same time as the demonstration in Paris, the leaders of the Government of National Defence in Bordeaux had concluded that the war could not continue. With Paris starving, and Gambetta's provincial armies reeling from one disaster after another, French foreign minister Favre went to Versailles on 24 January to discuss peace terms with Bismarck.
Bismarck agreed to end the siege and allow food convoys to immediately enter Paris (including trains carrying millions of German army rations), on condition that the Government of National Defence surrender several key fortresses outside Paris to the Prussians. Without the forts, the French Army would no longer be able to defend Paris.Although public opinion in Paris was strongly against any form of surrender or concession to the Prussians, the Government realised that it could not hold the city for much longer, and that Gambetta's provincial armies would probably never break through to relieve Paris. President Trochu resigned on 25 January and was replaced by Favre, who signed the surrender two days later at Versailles, with the armistice coming into effect at midnight.
Following the Siege of Paris and the military defeat of French forces by the Prussian war machine, on 26 January 1871 the Government of National Defence based in Paris negotiated an armistice with the Prussians with special conditions for Paris. The city would not be occupied by the Germans. Regular soldiers would give up their arms, but would not be taken into captivity. Paris would pay an indemnity of 200 million francs. At Jules Favre's request, Bismarck agreed not to disarm the National Guard, so that order could be maintained in the city.
The national government in Bordeaux held national elections on 8 February. Most electors in France were rural, Catholic and conservative, and this was reflected in the results; of the 645 deputies assembled in Bordeaux on February, about 400 favoured a constitutional monarchy under either Henri, Count of Chambord (grandson of Charles X) or Prince Philippe, Count of Paris (grandson of Louis Philippe).Of the 200 republicans in the new parliament, 80 were former Orléanists (Philippe's supporters) and moderately conservative. They were led by Adolphe Thiers, who was elected in 26 departments, the most of any candidate. There were an equal number of more radical republicans, including Jules Favre and Jules Ferry, who wanted a republic without a monarch, and who felt that signing the peace treaty was unavoidable. Finally, on the extreme left, there were the radical republicans and socialists, a group that included Louis Blanc, Léon Gambetta and Georges Clemenceau. This group was dominant in Paris, where they won 37 of the 42 seats.On 17 February the new Parliament elected the 74-year-old Thiers as chief executive of the Third Republic. He was considered to be the candidate most likely to bring peace and to restore order. Long an opponent of the Prussian war, Thiers persuaded Parliament that peace was necessary. He travelled to Versailles, where Bismarck and the German Emperor were waiting, and on 24 February the armistice was signed.
A Battery in the Montmartre Hills.
At the end of the war 400 obsolete muzzle-loading bronze cannons . . .. . . paid for by the Paris public via a subscription, remained in the city. The new Central Committee of the National Guard, now dominated by radicals, decided to put the cannons in parks in the working-class neighborhoods of Belleville, Buttes-Chaumont and Montmartre, to keep them away from the regular army and to defend the city against any attack by the national government. Thiers was equally determined to bring the cannons under national-government control.Clemenceau, a friend of several revolutionaries, tried to negotiate a compromise; some cannons would remain in Paris and the rest go to the army. However, neither Thiers nor the National Assembly accepted his proposals. The chief executive wanted to restore order and national authority in Paris as quickly as possible, and the cannons became a symbol of that authority. The Assembly also refused to prolong the moratorium on debt collections imposed during the war; and suspended two radical newspapers, Le Cri du Peuple of Jules Valles and Le Mot d'Ordre of Henri Rochefort, which further inflamed Parisian radical opinion. Thiers also decided to move the National Assembly and government from Bordeaux to Versailles, rather than to Paris, to be farther away from the pressure of demonstrations, which further enraged the National Guard and the radical political clubs.On 17 March 1871, there was a meeting of Thiers and his cabinet, who were joined by Paris mayor Jules Ferry, National Guard commander General D'Aurelle de Paladines and General Joseph Vinoy, commander of the regular army units in Paris. Thiers announced a plan to send the army the next day to take charge of the cannons. The plan was initially opposed by War Minister Adolphe Le Flô, D'Aurelle de Paladines, and Vinoy, who argued that the move was premature, because the army had too few soldiers, was undisciplined and demoralized, and that many units had become politicized and were unreliable. Vinoy urged that they wait until Germany had released the French prisoners of war, and the army returned to full strength. Thiers insisted that the planned operation must go ahead as quickly as possible, to have the element of surprise. If the seizure of the cannon was not successful, the government would withdraw from the centre of Paris, build up its forces, and then attack with overwhelming force, as they had done during the uprising of June 1848. The Council accepted his decision, and Vinoy gave orders for the operation to begin the next day.Early in the morning of 18 March, two brigades of soldiers climbed the butte of Montmartre, where the largest collection of cannons, 170 in number, were located. A small group of revolutionary national guardsmen were already there, and there was a brief confrontation between the brigade led by General Claude Lecomte, and the National Guard; one guardsman, named Turpin, was shot, later dying. Word of the shooting spread quickly, and members of the National Guard from all over the neighbourhood, along with others including Clemenceau, hurried to the site to confront the soldiers.While the Army had succeeded in securing the cannons at Belleville and Buttes-Chaumont and other strategic points, at Montmartre a crowd gathered and continued to grow, and the situation grew increasingly tense. The horses that were needed to take the cannon away did not arrive, and the army units were immobilized. As the soldiers were surrounded, they began to break ranks and join the crowd. General Lecomte tried to withdraw, and then ordered his soldiers to load their weapons and fix bayonets. He thrice ordered them to fire, but the soldiers refused. Some of the officers were disarmed and taken to the city hall of Montmartre, under the protection of Clemenceau. General Lecomte and his staff officers were seized by the guardsmen and his mutinous soldiers and taken to the local headquarters of the National Guard at the ballroom of the Chateau-Rouge. The officers were pelted with rocks, struck, threatened, and insulted by the crowd. In the middle of the afternoon, Lecomte and the other officers were taken to 6 Rue des Rosiers by members of a group calling themselves The Committee of Vigilance of the 18th arrondissement, who demanded that they be tried and executed.At 5:00 in the afternoon, the National Guard had captured another important prisoner: General Jacques Leon Clément-Thomas. An ardent republican and fierce disciplinarian, he had helped suppress the armed uprising of June 1848 against the Second Republic. Because of his republican beliefs, he had been arrested by Napoleon III and exiled, and had only returned to France after the downfall of the Empire. He was particularly hated by the national guardsmen of Montmartre and Belleville because of the severe discipline he imposed during the siege of Paris. Earlier that day, dressed in civilian clothes, he had been trying to find out what was going on, when he was recognized by a soldier and arrested, and brought to the building at Rue des Rosiers. At about 5:30 on 18 March, the angry crowd of national guardsmen and deserters from Lecomte's regiment at Rue des Rosiers seized Clément-Thomas, beat him with rifle butts, pushed him into the garden, and shot him repeatedly. A few minutes later, they did the same to General Lecomte. Doctor Guyon, who examined the bodies shortly afterwards, found forty bullets in Clément-Thomas's body and nine in Lecomte's back. By late morning, the operation to recapture the cannons had failed, and crowds and barricades were appearing in all the working-class neighborhoods of Paris. General Vinoy ordered the army to pull back to the Seine, and Thiers began to organise a withdrawal to Versailles, where he could gather enough troops to take back Paris.On the afternoon of 18 March, following the government's failed attempt to seize the cannons at Montmartre, the Central Committee of the National Guard ordered the three battalions to seize the Hôtel de Ville, where they believed the government was located. They were not aware that Thiers, the government, and the military commanders were at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where the gates were open and there were few guards. They were also unaware that Marshal Patrice MacMahon, the future commander of the forces against the Commune, had just arrived at his home in Paris, having just been released from imprisonment in Germany. As soon as he heard the news of the uprising, he made his way to the railway station, where national guardsmen were already stopping and checking the identity of departing passengers. A sympathetic station manager hid him in his office and helped him board a train, and he escaped the city. While he was at the railway station, national guardsmen sent by the Central Committee arrived at his house looking for him.On the advice of General Vinoy, Thiers ordered the evacuation to Versailles of all the regular forces in Paris, some 40,000 soldiers, including those in the fortresses around the city; the regrouping of all the army units in Versailles; and the departure of all government ministries from the city.Late on 18 March, when they learned that the regular army was leaving Paris, units of the National Guard moved quickly to take control of the city. The first to take action were the followers of Blanqui, who went quickly to the Latin Quarter and took charge of the gunpowder stored in the Pantheon, and to the Orleans railway station. Four battalions crossed the Seine and captured the prefecture of police, while other units occupied the former headquarters of the National Guard at the Place Vendôme, as well as the Ministry of Justice. That night, the National Guard occupied the offices vacated by the government; they quickly took over the Ministries of Finance, the Interior, and War. At eight in the morning the next day, the Central Committee was meeting in the Hôtel de Ville. By the end of the day, 20,000 national guardsmen camped in triumph in the square in front of the Hôtel de Ville, with several dozen cannons.
A red flag was hoisted over the building.The events that instigated the revolutionary process on the hills of Montmartre are dramatised in the Soviet Russian 1929 silent historical film The New Babylon, written and directed by Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg.
The film deals with the 1871 Paris Commune and the events leading to it, and follows the encounter and tragic fate of two lovers separated by the barricades of the Commune.Leonid Trauberg, later admitted, the film as it stands is a little difficult to follow. Its subtitle Assault on the Heavens: Episodes from the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, 1870-71 makes it fairly obvious that it is a principally a political film, and not a love story. Some background knowledge of the Paris Commune is needed to understand what's going on around the two lovers. As Fiona Ford remarks, "Both New Babylon and Eisenstein's October are episodic in structure and require an intimate knowledge of their relevant historical periods (the Paris Commune of 1871 in the case of New Babylon) to better appreciate the directors' intentions and often simply to follow the diegesis."
With Eccentrism there's . . .
The New Babylon was staged with members of the "Factory of the Eccentric Actor" (FEKS) - an avant-garde artists' association founded by Kozintsev and Trauberg in 1922 that sought to create new paths in the performing arts. FEKS first began as a theater group, but in the following years, many of its members shaped the Russian-Soviet film history when working as actors, outfitters, and cinematographers. They wanted to get away from the naturalism and empathy aesthetics of bourgeois art, and saw Eccentrism (as laid out in Trauberg's Eccentric Manifesto) as a new direction within the avant-garde that sought to find a place between Futurism, Surrealism and Dadaist Constructivism.
The Russian premiere of The New Babylon took place on 18 March 1929 in Leningrad, the anniversary of the events that instigated the beginning of the Paris Commune.
Re:LODE Radio considers the significance of the fact that The New Babylon was one amongst a number of films that were included in a "jumble of footage from feature films juxtaposed with still photographs, industrial films, early 1970s glossy 'lifestyle' TV ads, and news footage of unrest in the streets ", a montage that became a 1974 film La Société du Spectacle (Society of the Spectacle) by the Situationist Guy Debord, and based on his 1967 book of the same name. It was Debord's first feature-length film. It uses found footage and détournement in a radical Marxist critique of mass marketing and its role in the alienation of modern society. Other feature film footage included excerpts from The Battleship Potemkin, October, Chapaev, The Shanghai Gesture, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Rio Grande, They Died with Their Boots On, Johnny Guitar, and Mr. Arkadin.
The title The New Babylon refers to a fictional twin of the Parisian department store (magazin):
Le Bon Marché
See more: "clickbait" -On stage & on display in Bon Marché & the brothels of Paris
Women participants!
This visually striking poster for The New Babylon, foregrounds the image of a working class woman in the active role of one of the main protagonists in this revolution, meanwhile capitalist businessmen drink their wine and cavort with their female playthings. The central role of "Louise", a worker at the department store, the New Babylon, stresses the equal importance of women in this radical insurrection. The film directors, Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg include many scenes with women as workers, in both the industrial and domestic spheres, as active and activist, instigating a collective response to this moment of crisis. This is evident in the treatment of the events on the hills of Montmartre that sparked the insurgency and as depicted in the film, and contributes to the received idea in images of the Commune, of the role of the unruly women of Paris.
Les Pétroleuses
NOT this film The Legend of Frenchie King (French: Les Pétroleuses).
The 1971 French, Spanish, Italian and British international co-production western comedy film directed by Christian-Jaque and starring Claudia Cardinale and Brigitte Bardot.
These Pétroleuses . . .
. . . arrested in Versailles in the aftermath of the failed revolution!
A significant material consequence of the storming of the Commune by the Versaillais, as the French forces were called, included the destruction by fire of many buildings and neighbourhoods, including the Fields of Elysium (Champs-Élysées) . . .
. . . the Hôtel de Ville, Paris, and . . .
. . . most traumatically for the French Bourgeoisie, . . .
. . . the destruction by fire of the Tuileries Royal Palace.
Pétroleuses were, according to popular rumours at the time, female supporters of the Paris Commune, accused of burning down much of Paris during the last days of the Commune in May 1871. During May, when Paris was being recaptured by loyalist Versaillais troops, rumours circulated that working class women were committing arson against private property and public buildings, using bottles full of petroleum or paraffin (similar to modern-day Molotov cocktails) which they threw into cellar windows, in a deliberate act of spite against the government.
Many of the Parisian buildings, including the Hôtel de Ville, the Tuileries Palace, the Palais de Justice and many other government buildings were in fact set afire by the soldiers of the Commune during the last days of the Commune, prompting the press and Parisian public opinion to blame the pétroleuses.
However, of the thousands of suspected pro-Communard women tried in Versailles after the Commune ended, only a handful were convicted of any crimes, and their convictions were based on activity such as shooting at loyalist troops. Official trial records show that no women were ever convicted of arson, and that accusations of the crime were quickly shown to have no basis. Nevertheless, although few of the women brought to trial were executed, many working-class women were killed on site by Versaillais troops. Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray reported in his memoirs:
“Every woman who was badly dressed, or carrying a milk-can, a pail, an empty bottle, was pointed out as a petroleuse, her clothes torn to tatters, she was pushed against the nearest wall, and killed with revolver-shots"The history of the Paris Commune by Maxime Du Camp, written in the 1870s, and more recent research by historians of the Paris Commune, including Robert Tombs and Gay Gullickson, concluded that there were no incidents of deliberate arson by pétroleuses.
There is some debate on this, as the 150th anniversary of the Paris Commune approaches, and some now believe that the buildings destroyed at the end of the Commune were not burned down by pétroleuses but were largely caused by Versailles cannon fire. The Hôtel de Ville, the Palais de Justice, the Tuileries Palace and other government buildings and symbols of authority were burned by Commune forces as they retreated. Other fires were started by Communard forces, as a tactic to push back Versailles' troops if ground was lost. Some buildings along the Rue de Rivoli were burned down during street-fighting between Communards and Versaillais troops. Gullickson suggests that the myth of the pétroleuses was part of a propaganda campaign by Versaillais politicians, who portrayed Parisian women in the Commune as unnatural, destructive, and barbaric, giving loyalist forces a moral victory over the "unnatural" Communards.Kate Rees, writing in the TLS on Peter Brooks’s Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris, writes that:
Brooks analyses a comment reportedly made by Flaubert to his friend Maxime Du Camp as they surveyed the ruins of Paris in the wake of the turbulent year 1870–71. Flaubert maintained that the national shock and disgust which followed capitulation in the Franco–Prussian war, and the devastation of the French capital in the subsequent siege and Commune, might have been avoided had readers better understood Sentimental Education, which was published to general public and critical bafflement in 1869. Like many other fascinated tourists, Flaubert went to Paris immediately after the short-lived Commune was brutally suppressed by the French army, to gawp at the still smoking ruins of the city. Du Camp records Flaubert’s wry observation that a more nuanced reading of his novel could have enabled the course of French history to circumvent the debacle of this “terrible year”.Another race?
In the Introduction to his book Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris, an introduction subtitled: The Terrible Year, Two Writers, and a Novel, Brooks writes concerning the permitted level violence exercised during the bloody week that saw the abject crushing of the Communards:"French army troops, or the Versaillais, as they were known, their ranks bolstered by prisoners of war released by Bismarck to counter the proletarian insurgency, fought their way through Paris and levelled the Communard barricades with a vindictive force that is difficult to fathom. A number of the generals had experience of fighting in the French colonies of North Africa and treated the Communards as if they were "natives." Indeed they were made to seem like they were of another race, degenerate, alcohol fuelled, vicious."Classism, colonialism and racism provides an explosive combination of prejudice, projected and expressed in unaccountable and arbitrary acts of extreme violence. The proletarian hordes, and especially those women evidently demonstrating their agency and their activism, would be dismissed as less than human. The diarist Edmond de Goncourt, wrote, three days after La Semaine Sanglante;
". . . the bleeding has been done thoroughly, and a bleeding like that, by killing the rebellious part of a population, postpones the next revolution... The old society has twenty years of peace before it . . ."
Hundreds of prisoners who had been captured with weapons or gunpowder on their hands had been shot immediately.
Detail of Manet's Civil War - The Barricade
Others were taken to the main barracks of the army in Paris and executed there after summary trials. They were buried in mass graves in parks and squares.
Not all prisoners were shot immediately; the French Army officially recorded the capture of 43,522 prisoners during and immediately after Bloody Week. Of these, 1,054 were women, and 615 were under the age of 16. They were marched in groups of 150 or 200, escorted by cavalrymen, to Versailles or the Camp de Satory, where they were held in extremely crowded and unsanitary conditions until they could be tried. More than half of the prisoners, 22,727, were released before trial for extenuating circumstances or on humanitarian grounds. Since Paris had been officially under a state of siege during the Commune, the prisoners were tried by military tribunals. Trials were held for 15,895 prisoners, of whom 13,500 were found guilty. Ninety-five were sentenced to death; 251 to forced labour; 1,169 to deportation, usually to New Caledonia; 3,147 to simple deportation; 1,257 to solitary confinement; 1,305 to prison for more than a year; and 2,054 to prison for less than a year.
The photographs that document the aftermath of the La Semaine Sanglante were later supplemented by other photographic images. These images are significant because they were staged to produce a fake narrative, and one that helped pro-government forces to make a dramatic case of their crimes against humanity.
Massacre des dominicains d'Arcueil, route d'Italie no. 38, le 25 mai 1871, à 4 heures et demie
This phenomenon is discussed by Richard B. Woodward of The New York Times in article: The Uses of a Young Art at a Devastating Moment (May 7, 2000). In particular he draws attention to the work of Ernest Eugene Appert. He writes of Appert's work:
The key figure in this activity is Ernest Eugene Appert (1831-90?), a painter manque whose works dominate the last third of the exhibition. Fervently pro-Versaillais, he produced not only portraits of the Communards as they awaited trial in prison -- when arranged on a grid they read as wanted posters -- but also a series of small tableaus that may be the first political photomontages. His ''Crimes of the Commune,'' made between 1871 and 1873, illustrate in some 17 scenes the deaths by firing squad of priests, hostages, generals and other opponents brutally liquidated by the Commune. The realism of the photograph meets the fantasy of a zealot in these re-creations of history. Pasting the photographed heads and bodies of the victims onto photographs of the scenes of the crimes, Appert arranged events as he imagined they had happened.
Prison des Chantiers, le 15 août 1871, Versailles
One of these constructed images, in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum in New York, has a webpage with this accompanying explanatory text:
Following France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the fall of Napoleon III, thousands of Parisians revolted against the new royalist-leaning government and declared Paris an independent commune. Weeks of fighting ensued, during which Versailles troops attacked the city while the Communards threw up barricades, shot hostages, and burned government buildings. Soon afterward, Appert, a Parisian portrait photographer, issued “Crimes of the Commune,” a tendentious series of nine photographs of the insurrection that emphasized the criminal brutality of the rebels. Although based on real events, the photographs were utterly fabricated. Appert hired actors to restage each scene in his studio then cut and pasted the figures onto the appropriate backgrounds; atop the actors’ bodies he pasted headshots of the Commune’s key participants. The photographs were later banned by the French government for “disturbing the public peace” by sustaining anti-Communard sentiments — a testament to their effectiveness as political propaganda.
In the bottom left of this cut and paste assemblage the women of the Commune are depicted indulging in the despicable vice of consuming alcohol.
"Indeed they were made to seem like they were of another race, degenerate, alcohol fuelled, vicious."
A separate and more formal trial was held beginning 7 August for the Commune leaders who survived and had been captured, including Théophile Ferré, who had signed the death warrant for the hostages, and the painter Gustave Courbet, who had proposed the destruction of the column in Place Vendôme.
They were tried by a panel of seven senior army officers. Ferré was sentenced to death, and Courbet was sentenced to six months in prison, and later ordered to pay the cost of rebuilding the column. He went into exile in Switzerland and died before making a single payment. Five women were also put on trial for participation in the Commune, including the "Red Virgin" Louise Michel. She demanded the death penalty, but was instead deported to New Caledonia.
It is no coincidence that the character named "Louise" dominates the revolutionary narrative in the film The New Babylon, and that she proves to be an instigator of the resistance to remove the cannon from the hill battery of Montmartre.
Five years before the War of 1870 (as it is known in France) Louise Michel opened a school in Paris which became known for its modern and progressive methods. Michel corresponded with the prominent French romanticist Victor Hugo and began publishing poetry. It was at this time that she became involved in the radical politics of Paris and among her associates were Auguste Blanqui, Jules Vallès and Théophile Ferré. In 1869 the feminist group Société pour la Revendication des Droits Civils de la Femme (Society for the Demand of Civil Rights for Women) was announced by André Léo.
The group had close ties with the Société Coopérative des Ouvriers et Ouvrières (Cooperative Society of Men and Women Workers) leading to the July 1869 manifesto of the Revendication des Droits de la Femme being also signed by the wives of militant cooperative members. The manifesto was also supported by Sophie Doctrinal, signing with the name Citoyenne Poirier (citizen Poirier), a seamstress who later became a Republican activist during the Paris Commune in 1871. She became president of the Montmartre Vigilance Committee and a close associate of Michel in the Paris Commune. At the start of the Siege of Paris, in November 1870, Léo in a lecture declared "It is not a question of our practicing politics, we are human, that is all".
During the siege, Michel became part of the National Guard. When the Paris Commune was declared she was elected head of the Montmartre Women's Vigilance Committee. Michel thus occupied a leading role in the revolutionary government of the Paris Commune. In April 1871 she threw herself into the armed struggle against the French government. She closely aligned with Ferré and Raoul Rigault, two of the most violent members of the Paris Commune. However, Ferré and Rigault persuaded her to not carry out her plan to assassinate Adolphe Thiers, the chief executive of the French national government. Instead Michel fought with the 61st Battalion of Montmartre and organised ambulance stations. In her memoirs she later wrote "oh, I'm a savage all right, I like the smell of gunpowder, grapeshot flying through the air, but above all, I'm devoted to the Revolution."
Women played an important role in both the initiation and the governance of the Commune, though women could not vote in the Commune elections and there were no elected women members of the Commune itself. Joséphine Marchias, a washer woman, picked up a gun during the battles of May 22-23rd and said, "You cowardly crew! Go and Fight! If I'm killed it will be because I've done some killing first!" She was arrested as an incendiary, but there is no documentation that she was a pétroleuse. She worked as a vivandière with the Enfants perdus. While carrying back the laundry she was given by the guardsmen, she carried away the body of her lover, Jean Guy, who was a butcher's apprentice.
Women such as Joséphine Marchias and Louise Michel played a key role in the Paris Commune. They not only chaired committees, but they also built barricades and participated in the armed violence as well as caring for wounded fighters. Michel ideologically justified a militant revolution, proclaiming: "I descended the Butte, my rifle under my coat, shouting: Treason! . . . Our deaths would free Paris". Michel would be among the few militants who survived the Paris Commune and reflected: "It is true, perhaps, that women like rebellions. We are no better than men in respect to power, but power has not yet corrupted us." In her memoirs Michel confessed that the realities of the revolutionary government strengthened her resolve to end the discrimination against women. On the attitude of her male comrades, she wrote "How many times, during the Commune, did I go, with a national guardsman or a soldier, to some place where they hardly expected to have to contend with a woman?" She challenged her comrades to "play a part in the struggle for women's rights, after men and women have won the rights of all humanity?"
As in the 1789 French Revolution and in 1848 some women organised a feminist movement. Nathalie Lemel, a socialist bookbinder, and Élisabeth Dmitrieff, a young Russian exile and member of the Russian section of the First International, created the Women's Union for the Defence of Paris and Care of the Wounded on 11 April 1871. Together with the feminist writer André Léo, a friend of Paule Minck, who was also active in the Women's Union, and believing that their struggle against patriarchy could only be pursued through a global struggle against capitalism, the association made the following demands: Gender and wage equality; the right of divorce for women; the right to secular education; and professional education for girls. They also demanded suppression of the distinction between married women and concubines, and between legitimate and illegitimate children.
They advocated the abolition of prostitution and the closing of the maisons de tolérance, or legal brothels. The Women's Union also participated in several municipal commissions and organised cooperative workshops. Along with Eugène Varlin, Nathalie Lemel created the cooperative restaurant La Marmite, which served free food for people in need.
Nathalie Lemel went on to fight on the barricades as did the Russian Anne Jaclard, who founded the newspaper La Sociale with André Léo. She was also a member of the Comité de vigilance de Montmartre, along with Louise Michel and Paule Minck, as well as of the Russian section of the First International. Victorine Brocher, close to the IWA activists, and founder of a cooperative bakery in 1867, also fought during the Commune and the Bloody Week.
The arrest of Louise Michel in May 1871
In December 1871, Michel was brought before the 6th council of war, charged with offences including trying to overthrow the government, encouraging citizens to arm themselves, and herself using weapons and wearing a military uniform. Defiantly, she dared the judges to sentence her to death, saying "It seems that every heart that beats for freedom has no other right than a bit of lead, so I claim mine!" Further, she declared: "If you let me live, I shall never stop crying for vengeance, and I shall avenge my brothers by denouncing the murderers". The military court refused to make her a martyr. Michel was sentenced to penal transportation.
Michel was imprisoned for two years before she was deported. While in prison she demanded to be treated just like the other prisoners and rejected efforts by her friends Hugo and Georges Clemenceau to have her sentence commuted. She considered preferential treatment a dishonour. During the four-month journey to New Caledonia Michel re-examined her belief in revolutionary socialism. She embraced anarchism and for the rest of her life rejected all forms of government. In 1896 she wrote about her change of mind:
"I considered the things, events and people of the past. I thought about the behaviour of our friends of the Commune: they were scrupulous, so afraid of exceeding their authority, that they never threw their full energies into anything but the loss of their own lives. I quickly came to the conclusion that good men in power are incompetent, just as bad men are evil, and therefore it is impossible for liberty ever to be associated with any form of power whatsoever."Michel was introduced to the tenets of anarchism by a fellow prisoner Nathalie Lemel, with whom she was imprisoned in a large cage for several months. Michel became known for her selfless generosity and devotion to others. In the penal colony she lived in voluntary poverty, giving away her books, clothes and any money she acquired. Michel took up teaching again. She spent time with the indigenous Kanak people, teaching them French so that they could challenge the French authorities. Michel supported them in their revolt against the colonial power.Eventually an amnesty was granted and when Michel returned to Paris in November 1880 she was greeted by Henri Rochefort, Clemenceau, a crowd of 20,000 and the police.Michel soon began her career as a public speaker and found an audience all over Europe. In 1882 she staged her first anarchist play Nadine. As a public speaker Michel became skilled in advancing pragmatic arguments to attack capitalism and the authoritarian state, while holding open the possibility of a positive outcome. When she was put on trial in 1883 for leading a group of unemployed workers, she attacked shortcomings in the implementation of the French republican constitution, saying:"They keep talking to us about liberty: There is the liberty of speech with five years of prison at the end. In England, the meeting would have taken place; in France, they have not even made a legal admonition in order to let the crowd retreat, which would have left without resistance. People are dying from hunger, and they do not even have the right to say that they are dying from hunger."
One of the first known anarchist uses of the black flag was by Louise Michel, when she flew the black flag during a demonstration of the unemployed which took place in Paris on March 9, 1883. With Michel at the front carrying a black flag and shouting "Bread, work, or lead!," the crowd of 500 protesters soon marched off towards the boulevard Saint-Germain and pillaged three baker's shops before the police arrested them. Michel was arrested and sentenced to six years solitary confinement. Public pressure soon forced the granting of an amnesty. She wrote, "the black flag is the flag of strikes and the flag of those who are hungry".
Michel frequently spoke on women's rights from an anarchist perspective. She not only advocated education for women, but also that marriage should be free and that men should hold no property rights over women. In the late 1880s she authored several works in which she revisited the themes of her earlier works, but also portrayed the demise of the old order and its replacement with a society of equals. Michel embarked on a journey towards a new political philosophy. The revolutionary characters in The Strike expected to die, but instead they gave life to a new age and Michel discussed the rights and responsibilities of the people who lived in the aftermath of a revolution.She staged her plays in accordance with Jean Grave's theory on audience participation. The audience was integrated through a political and artistic program of lectures, poems and songs. The audience was encouraged to react and re-enact the conflicts of the plays. In her plays The Human Microbes (1886), Crimes of the Times (1888) and The Bordello (1890) an agricultural utopia emerges from a devastated Europe. Michel's political ideals owed much to the French romanticism of Hugo and are described at length in The New Era, Last Thought, Memories of Caledonia (1887):"It is indeed time that this old world die since no one is safe any longer . . . We can no longer live like our Stone Age ancestors, nor as in the past century, since the series of inventions, since the discoveries of science have brought the certainty that all production will increase a hundredfold when these innovations will be used for the general good, instead of letting just a handful of vultures help themselves in order to starve the rest."Michel lived at a time when hunger was widespread among the working poor of Europe. She believed that technological progress would replace physical labour with machines. In combination with anarchist politics, she argued, this could lead to equal distribution of wealth. In 1890 she reasoned that "the attractive power of progress will demonstrate itself all the more as daily bread will be assured, and a few hours of work which will have become attractive and voluntary will be enough to produce more than what is necessary for consumption." Like other anarchists of her time she did not believe that history was a record of constant improvement, but that it could become so. However, constant economic growth was not an improvement in itself. Michel argued instead, that progress came through intellectual development, social evolution and liberation. Her vision of the future was shaped by a supreme confidence."Science will bring forth harvests in the desert; the energy of the tempests and whirlpools will carve paths through the mountains. Undersea boats will discover lost continents. Electricity will carry ships of the air above the icy poles. The ideas of Liberty, Equality and Justice will finally burst into flame. Each individual will live his integral part within humankind as a whole. Progress being infinite, transformations will be perpetual."Michel did not only bemoan the poverty in which people across Europe lived, she also advanced a detailed critique of 19th century capitalism. She lamented the deficiencies of the capitalist banking system and predicted that the concentration of capital would result in the ruin of small enterprises and the middle class. In her memoirs Michel said that the Anarchist Manifesto of Lyon (1883) precisely expressed her views. The Manifesto had been signed by Peter Kropotkin, Émile Gautier, Joseph Bernard, Pierre Martin [fr] and Toussaint Bordat. Kropotkin, like Jules Guesde and Émile Pouget would become close friends and associates of her. Instead of focusing on violent revolution, as she had done in her earlier works, Michel in her later works emphasised the spontaneous uprising of the people. She came to reject terror as a means of bringing about a new era. She wrote "Tyrannicide is practical only when tyranny has a single head, or at most a small number of heads. When it is a hydra, only the Revolution can kill it". She took the view that it is best if the leaders of such a revolution would perish, so that the people would not be burdened with surviving general staff. Michel thought that "power is evil" and in her understanding history was the story of free people being enslaved. In an 1882 speech she said "All revolutions have been insufficient because they have been political". Organisation was, in her view, unnecessary because the poor and exploited would inevitably rise up and, through their sheer numbers, would force the old order to shrivel and expire.Michel's legacy
Michel was among the more influential French political figures in the second half of the 19th century. She was also one of the more powerful women political theorists of her day. Her publications on social justice for the poor and the cause of the working classes were read in France and all over Europe. When she died in 1905 she was mourned by thousands. Memorial services were held all over France and in London. Although her writings are today forgotten, her name is remembered in the names of French streets, schools and parks. Michel became a national heroine in France and was revered as the "great citizen". A cultish image of Michel emerged.
Shortly before her death, when returning from her exile in London, Michel had been dubbed "the angel of petrol", "the virago of the rabble" and "queen of the scum" by the conservative French press. In turn, Charles Ferdinand Gambon compared her to Jeanne d'Arc in reference to her role in the Paris Commune. This imagery was further propagandized by Edmond Lepelletier in 1911. The image of Michel as vierge rouge (red virgin) came to be used by conservative and liberal historians alike when recounting the story of the Paris Commune.
A graphic novel from writer Mary M. Talbot and graphic-novel pioneer Bryan Talbot comes The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia, a portrait of revolutionary feminist Louise Michel, Published June 01, 2016
Founder of anarcho-feminism
Michel is regarded as a founder of anarcho-feminism. Despite the anti-authoritarian rhetoric, early anarchist thinkers maintained cultural orthodoxy when it came to the division of domestic labour and their personal relationships with women. The founder of French anarchism, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was notorious for his sexist views.
This painting of 1865 by Courbet is a posthumously-produced image of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and His Children. Proudhon had died earlier in the same year the work was completed, and Courbet's picture wittingly, or unwittingly, presents the first person to refer to himself as an "anarchist", as a traditional French bourgeois "family man" and "patriarch".While his undoubted racism was not overtly part of his political philosophy, Proudhon did express sexist beliefs as he held patriarchal views on women's nature and their proper role in the family and society at large. In his Carnets , unpublished until the 1960s, Proudhon maintained that a woman's choice was to be "courtesan or housekeeper", alternatively translated as "a "harlot or a housewife". To a woman, a man is "a father, a chief, a master: above all, a master". His justification for patriarchy is men's greater physical strength and recommended that men use this greater strength to keep women in their place, saying that "a woman does not at all hate being used with violence, indeed even being violated".
In her study of Gustave Courbet, the prominent American feminist art historian Linda Nochlin points out that alongside his early articulations of anarchism Proudhon also wrote La Pornocratie ou les femmes dans les temps modernes, described as "the most consistent anti-feminist tract of its time, or perhaps, any other" and which "raises all the main issues about woman's position in society and her sexuality with a paranoid intensity unmatched in any other text". (Nochlin, Linda (2007). Courbet. Thames & Hudson. p. 220. n. 34)
The Origin of the World?
This "scandalous" painting by Courbet is part of the collection of art and design on display at the Musée d'Orsay. This museum is perhaps the ultimate validation of Walter Benjamin's assertion that Paris was the "Capital of the nineteenth century" and the realisation of a project to establish a museum of the nineteenth century in the defunct Parisian railway station the "Gare d'Orsay", situated on the banks of the River Seine.
An obvious link in the layering of art over railway tracks is the fact of the ramping up of various technological modes of communication, shaping "modernity" in the 19th and 20th centuries, and encapsulated in Rudyard Kipling's observation that "transportation is civilisation".
Another layer of consideration is immanent in the links embedded in many of the artworks on display in this museum, and situated in parallel to the paranoid style of Proudhon's notion of "La Pornocratie".
From Pornotropia back to La Pornocratie via Pornocrates!
Pornocrates, Pornokratès, La dame au cochon, or The Lady with the Pig is a work by the Belgian artist Félicien Rops, created in 1878.
The work depicts a woman, holding a swine on a leash, viewed from the left side. The woman, a courtesan, is almost naked, with the exception of long black silk gloves, a blindfold, a plumed hat, black shoes and stockings, and a band of gold and blue silk – accessories which only emphasize her nakedness. Above the pig with golden tail, three winged putti fly away in what looks like shock or horror. Rops refers to them as "Three loves – ancient loves – vanish in tears".
Various interpretations for the work exist. The woman as a powerful female, led by the hog, which can be seen as an image of a man in a bestial, submissive and ignorant state, kept in check by the woman. The pig with golden tail can also be seen as an allegory for luxury, or even as an animal of the devil, a symbol of fornication, steering the woman in blindness. In any case the work represents Rops' vision of the woman of his time: a "femme fatale", increasingly assertive, ruthless and seductive. According to Dijkstra, Bram in his Idols of perversity : fantasies of feminine evil in fin-de-siècle culture (1986):
"She was the human animal viciously depicted by Félicien Rops as "Pornokrates", ruler of Proudhon's "Pornocracy", a creature blindly guided by a hog, the symbol of Circe, the bestial representative of all sexual evil".
Circe as "clickbait"?
The best known of Circe's legends is told in Homer's Odyssey when Odysseus visits her island of Aeaea on the way back from the Trojan War and she changes most of his crew into swine. He manages to persuade her to return them to human shape, lives with her for a year and has sons by her, including Latinus and Telegonus.
Her ability to change others into animals is further highlighted by the story of Picus, an Italian king whom she turns into a woodpecker for resisting her advances. Another story tells of her falling in love with the sea-god Glaucus, who prefers the nymph Scylla to her. In revenge, Circe poisoned the water where her rival bathed and turned her into a dreadful monster.
Depictions, even in Classical times, wandered away from the detail in Homer's narrative, which was later to be reinterpreted morally as a cautionary story against drunkenness. Early philosophical questions were also raised whether the change from a reasoning being to a beast was not preferable after all, and this paradox was to have a powerful impact during the Renaissance.
Circe was also taken as the archetype of the predatory female. In the eyes of those from a later age, this behaviour made her notorious both as a magician and as a type of the sexually-free woman. As such she has been frequently depicted in all the arts from the Renaissance down to modern times.
With the Renaissance there began to be a reinterpretation of what it was that changed the men, if it was not simply magic. For Socrates, in Classical times, it had been gluttony overcoming their self-control. But for the influential emblematist Andrea Alciato, it was unchastity. In the second edition of his Emblemata (1546), therefore, Circe became the type of the prostitute.
His Emblem 76 is titled Cavendum a meretricibus; its accompanying Latin verses mention Picus, Scylla and the companions of Ulysses, and concludes that:
"Circe with her famous name indicates a whore and any who loves such a one loses his reason".
His English imitator Geoffrey Whitney used a variation of Alciato's illustration in his own Choice of Emblemes (1586) but gave it the new title of Homines voluptatibus transformantur, men are transformed by their passions.
This idea is reflected in the appearance of Circe in the Nighttown section named after her in James Joyce's novel Ulysses. Written in the form of a stage script, it makes of Circe the brothel madam, Bella Cohen. Bloom, the book's protagonist, fantasizes that she turns into a cruel man-tamer named Mr Bello who makes him get down on all fours and rides him like a horse.
The Pornocracy
Was The Lady with the Pig by Félicien Rops inspired by Proudhon's, La Pornocratie ou Les Femmes dans les Temps Moderne?
This infamous work, published posthumously, a diatribe against women and their increasingly active roles in 19th century society, which he viewed as having become a pornocracy, the rule by prostitutes and corrupt individuals.If the name of Circe was associated with prostitution the historical and societal facts of prostitution in the capital of the nineteenth century was to create a galaxy of different terms to name the different classes of prostitute in the city of Paris. For the economy of Paris in the hundred years from the fall of the Bastille to the construction of the Eiffel Tower, prostitution was at the epicentre of an entire era.
Pavement Nymphs and Roadside Flowers: Prostitutes in Paris After the Revolution (March 1, 2019) by Victoria Dailey, begins with a quote from the author of Sentimental Education, Gustave Flaubert:
"C’est peut-être un goût pervers, mais j’aime la prostitution et pour elle-même, indépendamment de ce qu’il y a en dessous."
(It might be a perverse taste, but I love prostitution and for itself, regardless of what's underneath.)
Pierre-Numa Bassaget, called Numa (1802-1872). Libre Exchange. J’ai Le Sac. (A Fair Exchange. I Have the Purse.) Colour lithograph, c. 1864.
Numa created many images of prostitution; in this one, a client bows down to a prostitute who holds the “power of the purse.”
Victoria Dailey begins her article with mention of the Dictionnaire Anecdotique des Nymphes du Palais-Royal et autres Quartiers de Paris par un homme de bien where in 124 pages, the anonymous author lists scores of Parisian prostitutes alphabetically by their first names, from Adelaide to Zoe, and gives the streets where they could be found along with descriptions of their physical appearance and personalities, including:
Olympe, rue du Richelieu, who is beautiful, tall like a man, and is said to flirt with the lovers of her friends — and that her desires are not always satisfied by just one.
Véronique (La Blonde), rue Traversière, is far from pretty, but her blond hair, falling with grace over her beautiful pale skin, sets her apart.
"Candy" is in today's internet version . . .
Victoria Dailey then looks at Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet’s De La Prostitution dans La Ville de Paris, 1836. She explains that this "is not a guide to pleasure but rather, an extensive textbook, the first attempt to investigate and analyse prostitution scientifically in order to create effective solutions to the problems it was creating".
The alluring sirens described in the dictionary, she says, and "the nymphs who had been sought by flâneurs, philanderers and married men, had become, within ten years, clinical objects of scientific inquiry". Dailey observes that prostitutes were to be studies as; "exotic specimens from the animal kingdom, they were probed, questioned and examined by doctors and experts in the newly emerging fields of hygiene, statistics, and sociology". And, she comments:
"In ten years, a portable, somewhat prurient “gentleman’s guide” had been displaced by a substantial, authoritative, government-sponsored work on prostitutes’ sexual habits, health, and attitudes, one filled with analytic texts and tables based on facts."
Dailey continues:
Parent created lists and tables showing the distribution of Parisian prostitutes by quartier, surveying areas throughout the city including the Île St. Louis, where, alone among neighborhoods, there were none; the Place Vendôme, where he found thirty-nine; and the Palais Royal, center of all things illicit, where he counted 346 prostitutes. They were also grouped by street, by suburb, and by which département in France they had come from, even by which floor of a building they most frequently occupied. (It was the French first floor, the floor above street level.) Parent took advantage of the information supplied to him by the police, who, in 1816, had begun to keep more accurate data on the prostitutes they arrested than they had previously. By 1832, he had access to just over 5,000 records which included information on each woman’s place of birth, the occupation of her father, the determining causes of her becoming a prostitute, her education level, the number of children she had, as well as the age at which she registered as a prostitute. (The ages ranged from ten to sixty-five.)
Yet within this methodical work, I found one bit of whimsy, certainly unintended, that called to mind my Dictionnaire: in a chapter on the pseudonyms prostitutes gave themselves, Parent included a double-columned table of these assumed names, arranged by social class. The first column contains the Classe Inférieure, including such ribald, lewd, and comical nicknames as Rousselette (Little Red Pear), Poil-Long (Long Hair), Belle-Cuisse (Nice Thighs), Faux-Cul (Fake-Ass), and Raton (Little Rat). In the second column, the Classe Elevée, are such names as Amanda, Calliope, Delphine, Paméla, Olympe, and Flore, names associated with Greek mythology, literature or the upper class. This classification by descriptive name was maintained throughout the century, helping men choose women based not only on her physical attributes, but also on what class she was likely to be from as revealed in her nickname. Later, the astute and often pontifical observer of women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Octave Uzanne, used the exact same method to describe Parisian prostitutes in 1910:
"At the very bottom of the ladder is the woman who haunts the fortifications… The soldiers do not even know her name; they call her la paillasse… A much more formidable species of prostitute is the gigolette [who] is almost always young, and often pretty… There are grades and degrees in all this peripatetic prostitution… In Paris, there are about 60,000 filles insoumises. They constitute the main part of what [is] called middle-class prostitution."As for upper-class prostitution, Uzanne refers to it as “clandestine prostitution” and the women who represent it are known as belles petites, tendresses, agenouillées, horizontales, and dégrafées. He also refers to Parent, complaining that of all the writers on prostitution who came after him “not one has sounded its deepest depths or probed its darkest mysteries.”Many tried. Parent’s formidable work became the cornerstone of a staggering amount of art and literature — he has been called “a veritable Linnaeus of prostitution.” Balzac, Flaubert, the Goncourts, Hugo, Huysmans, Sue, and Zola were all familiar with Parent and each created novels based on the lives of prostitutes that were based, in part, on data gathered by him. In art, the prostitute became a frequent figure in the caricatures and chromolithographs of the 1840s-1860s, as she did in the subsequent works of Manet, Degas, Lautrec, and Picasso, whose Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) refers not only to the name of a Barcelona brothel, but also — and originally — to one of the old slang words for prostitute, Pont-d’Avignon, so-called for the bridge under which many prostitutes met their customers during the Avignon Papacy in the 14th century.
"Sur le pont d’Avignon on y danse, on y danse."But perhaps Parent’s most devoted acolyte was Alexandre Dumas (père), who acknowledged him not only on the first page, but throughout Filles, lorettes et courtisanes (1843), his analysis and description of the Byzantine typology used to describe each of the three levels of Parisian prostitution, elaborating on Parent’s original list. From the lowest working-class filles de la Cité (known as numéros, chouettes, calorgnes and trimardes), to the middle-class filles du boulevard (grisettes, lorettes, ratons, louchons), and up to the highest level of filles en maison (courtisanes, femmes du monde), Dumas inventoried them all. Although such terms were included in other works, notably those on slang, no other book had been devoted exclusively to the subject, and in such a literary way. As Dumas observes in his introduction: “Here is a corner of the grand Parisian panorama which no one has dared to sketch, a page in the book of modern civilization whose base is a word no one has dared utter.”
Dumas had the audacity and honesty to assert that prostitution was at the base of Parisian society.
Yet Dumas, who understood so much about prostitution’s place in 19th century Paris, made no mention of the sexism that accompanied and regulated it. Others, steeped in misogyny, did not hesitate to express their sexist views, although not as metaphorically as Dumas.
Alphonse Liébert (1827-1914).
Adah Isaacs Menken and Alexandre Dumas.
Carte de visite photograph, 1867. This photograph was taken on March 28, 1867.
Misogyny
Dailey then mentions that:
"Noted historian and sociologist Jules Michelet held that the social order was in grave danger due to women’s “weak, atavistic and deranged sexuality” as evidenced by prostitution. Writing about women’s “natural inferiority,” he asserted that women were only fit to be wives and mothers".And so she comes to the brutal attitude found in Proudhon's La Pornocratie where as an extreme misogynist whose views, although widely shared, were rarely put into print with such viciousness. She writes:
He did not think twice in declaring in his most shocking work, La Pornocratie (1875), that a woman was capable of being only “a harlot or a housewife” and that “a woman does not at all hate being treated with violence, indeed even being violated.” (Little wonder that so many women, thwarted and abused mentally, emotionally and physically, were diagnosed with “hysteria.”) Many of these presumptuous attitudes about women may be traced back to Parent, whose classification and regulation of prostitutes heralded the 19th century’s determination to proscribe women’s opportunities, education, and sexuality. Yet Proudhon’s words seem more monstrous than most, and I wondered how deeply his views were embedded in French culture. With Dumas as a guide, I began to compile my own list of French synonyms for prostitute, reasoning that such words would reveal a great deal about how the French regarded women and sex. I didn’t realize just how long the list would become — it now has 400 entries.
Four hundred French words . . .
. . . for "prostitute"!
Why such a rich array of terms, an array that allows for differentiation, nuance and discrimination? All to the purpose of the naming and locating of a prostitute, in the multiple layers of social class? Alexandre Dumas' Filles, lorettes et courtisanes (1843), neither entirely scientific, nor entirely fictional, a curious hybrid of sociology and storytelling, echoes and continues Parent's project, exposing the threat of prostitution to health and the moral order by corrupting the wives and daughters of the bourgeoisie. The contradictions are obvious when it comes to who is buying and who is selling, and the complexity of this transactional economy and culture, and the attendant techniques of display and commodification, seemingly require the client to have recourse to a vast vocabulary to help navigate pathways through this territory.
Why so many different yet connected words?
The hypothesis of linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, is a principle suggesting that the structure of a language affects its speakers' worldview or cognition, and thus people's perceptions are relative to their spoken language.The claim that Eskimo languages (specifically, Yupik and Inuit) have an unusually large number of words for "snow", first loosely attributed to the work of anthropologist Franz Boas and particularly promoted by his disciple Benjamin Lee Whorf, has become a cliché often used to support the controversial linguistic-relativity hypothesis, which posits that a language's vocabulary reflects and shapes its speakers' view of the world. The "strong version" of this hypothesis is questioned, though the basic notion that Eskimo languages have many more root words for "snow" than the English language is itself supported by a 2010 study.
The first re-evaluation of the claim was by linguist Laura Martin in 1986, who traced the history of the claim and argued that its prevalence had diverted attention from serious research into linguistic relativity. A subsequent influential and humorous, and polemical, essay by Geoff Pullum repeated Martin's critique, calling the process by which the so-called "myth" was created the "Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax". Pullum argued that the fact that the number of word roots for snow is about equally large in Eskimoan languages and English indicates that there exists no difference in the size of their respective vocabularies to define snow.
The present use of the word "Eskimoan" is clearly anachronistic, an echo of the colonial mindset in relation to Indigenous Peoples.
Other specialists in the matter of Eskimoan languages and Eskimoan knowledge of snow and especially sea ice argue against this notion and defend Boas's original fieldwork amongst the Inuit of Baffin Island.
Some anthropologists have argued that Boas, who lived among Baffin islanders and learnt their language, did in fact take account of the polysynthetic nature of Inuit language and included "only words representing meaningful distinctions" in his account.Studies of the Sami languages of Norway, Sweden and Finland, conclude that the languages have anywhere from 180 snow- and ice-related words and as many as 300 different words for types of snow, tracks in snow, and conditions of the use of snow.
Four hundred French words for prostitute points to the need for complex and nuanced ways to map this territory. If this is so, then the acceptance of this state of affairs by Alexandre Dumas that prostitution, the exchange of money for sex, was the basis of modern society, the lived life, of modernity, shaped by the capitalist system, would require this vocabulary to veil the reality as much as to reveal it.
Fanciful, imaginative, allusory, metaphorical, facetious and derogatory?
Dailey shares her conclusions with her readers:
I discovered that the majority of the words were fanciful, imaginative, allusory or metaphorical; many were facetious and derogatory; and some were outright expressions of disgust, à la Proudhon, including salope, latrine, and cul crotté (filthy woman, latrine, and shit ass.) The crudest words were, like anarchism’s father, in the minority, but they do exist.
Having collected so many words, I decided that a good place to study their evolution would be at the beginning, in the first French dictionary, Jean Nicot’s Thrésor de la langue françoyse, tant ancienne que moderne (1606), in which Nicot includes courtisane, cantonnière, fille de joye [sic], paillard, chienne, and putain. From this base, the vocabulary would multiply over the centuries, but Nicot’s six words would remain stalwarts, persisting along with the classification of prostitutes based on the rank of their clients. The courtisane would remain at the top — the lover of aristocrats and the rich — while the clients of the filles de joie and paillards were from lower ranks, but whatever their station, men had no trouble finding women to hire for sex: prostitution is as much a part of Parisian history as Notre Dame, and as important — the city, its streets and its prostitutes have had a long-term relationship. As my little dictionary indicated, women and streets were intimately linked: the pavement nymphs and roadside flowers — the fleurs du macadam — were categorized by the street names or area where they worked, and had been for centuries.
A study of some of Paris’ old street names reveals the longevity of the link. The tiny rue du Pélican might strike one as merely fanciful since pelicans don’t roost in Paris, but the name derives not from sea birds but from its bawdy 14th-century name: the rue Poil au Con (Puss Hair Street), so-named for the many prostitutes who worked there; with a nod to propriety, the street later assumed its less vulgar homophone. Similarly, the medieval rue Pute-y-Muce (Hidden Whore Street) would later become the rue du Petit Musc (Little Musk Street).
The lure of the streets was so potent that each image in Les Lionnes de Paris, a set of chromolithographs depicting individual prostitutes published circa 1855, shows each one identified only by the dress and décor of the street or neighborhood where she could be found: each title is the name of a street.
The cocotte from the Boulevard St. Denis (currently and historically known for prostitution) reclines seductively on her lush bed, her left breast exposed as she fondles a gold necklace — prostitutes were typically portrayed as rapacious deceivers. As the Goncourts declared, “Women only consider their sex as a livelihood!… their sex is a career.”
Back to the origin of the world . . .
Halil Şerif Pasha (Khalil Bey), an Ottoman diplomat, is believed to have commissioned the work shortly after he moved to Paris. Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve introduced him to Courbet and he ordered a painting to add to his personal collection of erotic pictures, which already included Le Bain turc (The Turkish Bath) from Ingres and another painting by Courbet, Le Sommeil (The Sleepers), for which it is supposed that one of the models was Joanna Hiffernan, and who may have also been the model for The Origin of the World.
Art historians have speculated for years that Courbet's model for L'Origine du monde because Hiffernan was his favourite model. Hiffernan was the subject of a series of four portraits by Courbet titled Jo, la belle Irlandaise (Jo, the beautiful Irishwoman) painted in 1865–66. In spite of Hiffernan's red hair contrasting with the darker pubic hair of L'Origine du monde, the hypothesis that Hiffernan was the model continues.
Jacky Colliss Harvey puts forward the idea that the woman's body-hair suggests a more obvious candidate might be the brunette painted with Hiffernan in Courbet's Le Sommeil; and that the identification with Hiffernan has been greatly influenced by the eroticised and sexualised image of the female redhead.
(Colliss Harvey, Jacky (2015). RED: A History of the Redhead. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal. pp. 119–120)
In February 2013, Paris Match reported that Courbet expert Jean-Jacques Fernier had authenticated a painting of a young woman's head and shoulders as the upper section of L'Origine du monde which according to some was severed from the original work. Fernier has stated that because of the conclusions reached after two years of analysis, the head will be added to the next edition of the Courbet catalogue raisonné. The Musée d'Orsay has indicated that L'Origine du monde was not part of a larger work.
The Daily Telegraph reported that "experts at the [French] art research centre CARAA (Centre d'Analyses et de Recherche en Art et Archéologie) were able to align the two paintings via grooves made by the original wooden frame and lines in the canvas itself, whose grain matched." According to CARAA, it performed pigment analyses which were identified as classical pigments of the 2nd half of the 19th century. No other conclusions were reported by the CARAA. The claim reported by Paris Match was characterized as dubious by Le Monde art critic Philippe Dagen, indicating differences in style, and that canvas similarities could be caused by buying from the same shop.
Documentary evidence however links the painting with Constance Quéniaux, a former dancer at the Paris Opera and a mistress of the Ottoman diplomat Halil Şerif Pasha (Khalil Bey) who commissioned the painting. The Guardian covered this story in a report from Agence France-Presse in Paris (Tue 25 Sep 2018) with the headline and subheading:Mystery solved? Identity of Courbet's 19th-century nude revealedExperts say they are 99% sure model who posed for L’Origine du monde was ballet dancer Constance Queniaux
One of the greatest mysteries in art history appears to have been solved. The identity of the model who posed for the most scandalous painting of the 19th century, Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du monde (The Origin of the World), has finally been revealed.Experts say they are “99% sure” the painting depicts the Parisian ballet dancer Constance Queniaux. The canvas has never lost its power to shock – bringing out the prude in Facebook, which censored profiles using it as late as 2011.For decades art historians have been convinced that the naked torso and genitalia it depicts belonged to Courbet’s lover, the Irish model Joanna Hiffernan, who was also romantically linked with his friend, the American artist James Whistler. But doubts persisted – mainly because the dark pubic hair in the painting did not correspond with Hiffernan’s mane of flaming red curls.Now documentary evidence found in the correspondence between the French writers Alexandre Dumas fils – the son of The Three Musketeers author – and George Sand points directly to a former dancer at the Paris Opera.Queniaux was a mistress of the Ottoman diplomat Halil Şerif Pasha – aka Khalil Bey – when the picture was painted in the summer of 1866. And it was Halil who commissioned the painting from Courbet for his personal collection of erotica.The French historian Claude Schopp discovered the Queniaux connection when he was going through copies of Dumas’s letters for a book. One particular passage perplexed him: “One does not paint the most delicate and the most sonorous interview of Miss Queniault (sic) of the Opera.”It was only when he consulted the handwritten original that he realised there had been a mistake in its transcription. “Interview” was in fact “interior”.“Usually I make discoveries after working away for ages,” said the writer, whose new book on the find will be published this week. Here I made it straight away. It almost feels unjust,” Schopp joked.Schopp shared his discovery with the head of the French National Library’s prints department, Sylvie Aubenas, who is also convinced that Queniaux was the model.“This testimony from the time leads me to believe with 99% certainty that Courbet’s model was Constance Queniaux,” she told Agence France-Presse.Queniaux was 34 at the time and, having retired from the Opera, was competing with the famed courtesan Marie-Anne Detourbay for Halil Pasha’s affections.Detourbay, sometimes known as Jeanne de Tourbey, held a famous salon and would later become the Comtesse de Loyne. She was also thought by some to be the model for L’Origine du monde.But Aubenas said contemporary descriptions of Queniaux’s “beautiful black eyebrows” corresponded better with the model’s pubic hair.The library has several photographs of her including one by the famed photographic pioneer, Nadar.Aubenas believes the secret of the model’s identity was known by the cognoscenti but was lost over time as Queniaux became a highly respectable lady of leisure known for her philanthropy.Another discovery by Schopp helped to clinch the argument, she said. When she died in 1908, Queniaux left a Courbet painting of camellias in her will at whose centre is a lusciously open red blossom. Camellias were strongly associated with courtesans at the time thanks to Dumas’s novel The Lady of the Camellias, which was adapted into Verdi’s opera La Traviata.“What better tribute from the artist and his patron to Constance?” Aubenas said. She also believes it may have been a gift from Halil.
Constance Quéniaux was born to Marie Catherine Quéniaux in Saint-Quentin on 9 July 1832. Her mother was unmarried and she grew up in poverty. She joined the ballet corps of the Paris Opera in 1847, performing minor roles in its repertoire. She rose to secondary soloist position along with Claudina Couqui, receiving acclaim.Like many ballet dancers at the Paris Opera Ballet she combined her dance career with prostitution. However in her case she was able to secure a wealthy lifestyle as a courtesan. This was not unusual in this glamorous and not-so-glamorous backstage world of the Paris Opera.
Ballet - l'étoile (Rosita Mauri)
Edgar Degas' painting Ballet - l'étoile (Rosita Mauri) circa 1878, forms the starting point in an article on how wealthy men turned the famous Paris Opera Ballet into a brothel posted on the History website (Updated: AUG 22, 2018 Original: JAN 5, 2018) by Erin Blakemore with the headline:
Sexual Exploitation Was the Norm for 19th Century Ballerinas
The star’s moment should be triumphant. She’s brilliantly lit, her leg lifted in a graceful ballet pose, and she’s clearly the star of the show. But in the wings lurks a black-clad figure—a symbol for the sordid backstage reality of the ballerina.
It’s not clear who Edgar Degas used as the model for the 1879 painting, L’Etoile, that depicts that tense moment. But it’s likely that she was a prostitute. Sex work was part of ballerinas’ realities during the 19th century, an era in which money, power and prostitution mingled in the glamorous and not-so-glamorous backstage world of the Paris Opera.
The Paris Opera Ballet, founded in the 17th century, was the world’s first professional ballet company, and continues as one of the preeminent outfits today. Throughout the 19th century, it raised the bar for dance — but on the backs of many exploited young women.
Women entered the ballet as young children, training at the opera’s dance school until they could snag a coveted position in the corps de ballet. Girls who studied at the school became apprentices to the Opera; only after years of militaristic training and a series of brutal exams could they get guaranteed, long-term contracts.
In the meantime, they attended classes and auditioned for small, walk-on roles. Often malnourished and dressed in hand-me-downs, the “petits rats” of the ballet were vulnerable to social and sexual exploitation. And the wealthy male subscribers of the Paris Opera — nicknamed abbonés — were often on hand to exploit them.
“The ballet is…what the bar-room is to many a large hotel,” wrote Scribner’s Magazine in 1892, “the chief paying factor, the one from which the surplus profits come.” Men subscribed to the opera not for the music, but for the beautiful ballerinas who danced twice per show—and, behind the scenes, they bought sexual favors from the women they ogled on stage.
Rehearsal on the Stage’ by Edgar Degas, 1874.
The abonnés were so powerful, they were part of the Opera’s very architecture: When Charles Garnier designed his iconic opera house in the 1860s, he included a special separate entrance for season ticket holders. The building also included a lavish room called the foyer de la danse. Located directly behind the stage, it was a place where ballet dancers could warm up and practice their moves before and during performances. But it was designed with male patrons, not dancers, in mind. The foyer was a place for them to socialize with—and proposition—ballet dancers.
At the time, women’s bodies were typically covered by lots of clothing. In contrast, ballet dancers wore skimpy and revealing outfits (though ballet costumes of the time, which included skirts, were much less form-fitting than today’s leotards and tights). Subscribers could, and did, go backstage to ogle women. Due to their social status, they were free to socialize with them, too.“Epic scenes took place backstage,” wrote the Comte de Maugny, who described the foyer de la danse as a kind of meat market. For subscribers, backstage was a kind of men’s club where they could meet and greet other power brokers, make business deals and bask in a highly sexualised atmosphere.
A painting by Jean Beraud of ballet dancers in the wings of the opera house, 1889.
For dancers, though, it was a place where they were subject to scrutiny and harassment. Dancers were expected to submit to the attentions and affections of subscribers,most of whom were nobleman and important financiers and whose money underwrote the majority of the opera’s operations.
Since subscribers were so powerful, they could influence who made it into coveted roles and who was fired from the ballet. They could lift a girl out of poverty by becoming her “patron,” or client, setting her up in comfortable quarters and paying for private lessons that could increase her cachet in the ballet. Often, girls’ own mothers—who acted not unlike entertainment agents today—helped set up and maintain these relationships. For many Paris Opera ballerinas from poor backgrounds, a relationship with a rich man was their only chance at stability.Some dancers managed to advance without a rich patron, becoming celebrities on the merits of their own abilities, notes historian Lorraine Coons. But even those dancers who did succeed independently were looked down on as suspected prostitutes.
Little Dancer of Fourteen Years by Degas, 1881
One influential Parisian couldn’t afford the expensive subscription that allowed special access to ballerinas: Impressionist painter Edgar Degas. During the 1870s and 1880s, he produced hundreds of drawings and paintings of Paris Opera dancers, relying on his friends tosecure backstage passes so he could sketch the dancers in their habitat. There, he recorded behind-the-scenes views of dancers practicing—and captured glimpses of the world of the lecherous male subscribers, too.One of Degas’ best-known works is his Little Dancer of Fourteen Years, a life-sized statue of a teenage “petit rat,” or ballet dancer in training. To modern eyes, it’s the portrait of a child who eagerly awaits her next dance step. But when Degas exhibited it in 1881, it was panned by the critics, who called the dancer “frightfully ugly,” monkey-like, and “marked by the hateful promise of every vice.”Degas’ subject may have been vulnerable, but for 19th-century observers, she was marked by the sordidness of the sexual harassment that was baked into ballet. Teenager Marie van Goethem, a Paris Opera petit rat who modelled for the sculpture, likely traded sex for money in order to survive — but even if she hadn’t, it’s almost certain Degas’ audience would have assumed she did.Constance Quéniaux retires from the Opera to become a "kept" mistress!
By the age of 34 Constance Quéniaux had retired from the Opera and was eyeing the favour of the aforementioned Ottoman diplomat, Halil Şerif Pasha.
Quéniaux in later life was well-off, owning a villa in Cabourg. She became a philanthropist, actively supporting, for instance, the Orphelinat des Arts, an institution for orphaned or abandoned children of artists.
She died in Paris on 7 April 1908. As mentioned in Guardian story, in her will Quéniaux left a Courbet painting of camellias. This flower, since the publication of Alexandre Dumas fils' La Dame aux Camélias had been associated with courtesans. This common euphemism for a "kept" mistress or prostitute, particularly one with wealthy, powerful, or influential clients, remains a popular subject today in a literature that celebrates the women who created and owned resources garnered from a corrupt social and economic system, founded on inequality. The term courtesan historically referred to a courtier, a person who attended the court of a monarch or other powerful person.
LES GRANDES HORIZONTALES: The Lives and Legends of Marie Duplessis, Cora Pearl, La Pava, and La Présidente (2003) by Virginia Rounding,The Publishers Weekly Review says: The horizontal women of the title were four of Paris's most renowned, or notorious, courtesans immediately before and during the glittering Second Empire. But anyone looking for lubricious reading will be disappointed. British translator Rounding is more interested in how these four lives reflect the place of women in 19th-century France than in the details of their erotic adventures,
though we are informed of who their various protectors were, and they included some of Paris's most prominent and powerful men. Rounding's aim is to separate the real lives from the myths surrounding the women, which, she asserts, reflect stereotypes of prostitutes as depraved, even denatured, women. Yet strangely, she ends up partially confirming them, there is something almost vampiric in how the wildly ostentatious Cora Pearl and Thérèse Lachmann (known as La Païva) bled men of their money to satisfy their taste for luxury. Marie Duplessis, Alexandre Dumas fils's model for La Dame aux camélias, died too young to do much harm (or to be of much interest), and La Présidente, Baudelaire's muse Apollonie Sabatier, retains an affecting dignity through her ups and downs. But Rounding's points are well taken: the men were willing dupes, proud to parade these high-priced lovelies on their arm; these men ultimately retained the power of the purse; and her four subjects were spirited, independent-minded women who rose from poverty to great heights (and, in the case of Cora Pearl, ended with a corresponding descent). Still, primarily avid students of women's studies and French cultural history will be gratified by this judicious account.
Clickbait? Yes, clickbait!
The image that is used for the cover of the GRANDES HORIZONTALES is a painting by the French artist Henri Gervex titled "Rolla" (1878). the model for this picture was Ellen Andrée. The use of this image, is an example of a style, a "clickbait" style, that Re:LODE Radio considers relates to the digressions and détournements of the pornotropic aesthetic, discussed in a previous PART of this work, and reflecting the spirit and method of Walter Benjamin's . . .
. . . Convolutes!
Modernity, mythology, the birth of Venus . . .
Henri Gervex's early work belonged almost exclusively to the mythological genre, which served as a good excuse for the painting of the nude. The lineage for this "taste" for the nude in art jumps effortlessly into a world of images destined for their reproducibility, continued and continues . . .
. . . to the Playboy centrefold!
Henri Gervex's Rolla of 1878, based on a poem by Alfred de Musset, was rejected by the jury of the Salon de Paris for immorality, since it depicted a scene from the poem of a naked prostitute after having sex with her client. However, the censorship only made Gervex's painting even more famous, and launched the career of Gervex, then age 26. Although banned from the Salon, Rolla was exhibited in a nearby private gallery and became, according to the book Famous Pictures Reproduced from Renowned Paintings By the World's Greatest Artists, "probably the most successful private exhibition made in Paris." The book also called Rolla "a masterpiece, one of the few real great works on modern art."
Counter-subversive aesthetics?
Display is everything when it comes to the power of pornotropic, counter-subversive aesthetics to bring pleasure, to move people, and to order the world, and look no further than the exhibition Splendeurs et misères that was "staged" at the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, in 2015.
Staging the . . .
As Kim Wilsher says in the Guardian article:
Cocottes, courtesans and sex in the city: Paris celebrates art of the demi-monde (Sat 19 Sept 2015):
The event’s title Splendours and Miseries: Images of Prostitution 1850-1910, is borrowed from Honoré de Balzac’s Comédie Humaine novel A Harlot High and Low (Splendeurs and Misères des Courtisanes). It focuses on the work of the painters, artists and photographers who, with a blend of fascination and growing disgust, captured this shadier, decadent side of the City of Light during the period between the Second Empire and the Belle Epoque.The images they left romanticise the depravity of the age.
“Every major artist at the time tackled the subject of prostitution in one way or another,”
Richard Thomson, Watson Gordon professor of fine art at the Edinburgh College of Art (ECA) and a curator of the exhibition, told the Observer.
“It was a subject that interested them. Why? The obvious answer is that they were men, but another reason was that prostitution was linked to the idea of modernity. People had moved to the city, which was in itself a new concept, where the moral strictures of the village had disappeared. The city was fluid and this excited the artists.”
Easy virtue, splendours . . .
Later, in 2016, a spin off was staged at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam under the title: Easy Virtue: Prostitution in French Art 1850 -1910. This video montage shows some of the publicity (or clickbait) for the Amsterdam exhibition, followed by the inaugural conference in Paris, held on the opening of the exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay, in 2015.
Migration, prostitution and economic necessity
From the 1830s onwards, the number of prostitutes working in Paris increased dramatically as a result of political and demographic changes. First, the transformation of Paris into a modern industrial city encouraged the migration of women from the countryside towards the urban centre. According to a study of Paris-based registered prostitutes, conducted in 1889, 75 percent were not born in Paris. Secondly, widespread migration to industrial centres coincided with a low point in demand for women in the labour force. What work there was for women, mostly in the garment industry or domestic service, was often terribly underpaid and unstable. One contemporary writer, Maxime De Camp, estimated that Paris had 155,000 prostitutes between 1870 and 1900.
In almost every line of work, the salary for women fell below what was needed to cover basic living expenses. Milliners earned a salary between 2 and 4 francs per day. Taking into consideration the average food costs from this period, women would be left with approximately 40 cents per day for all other living expenses. By this estimate, women in these circumstances would be at least 200 francs short at the end of the year. Faced with unemployment or underemployment, prostitution became a necessary choice for many women. Indeed, the only options open to a working-class woman at this time - in order to make up the difference between income and living expenses - was through cohabitation with a man or prostitution.
Robert L. Herbert writing on the subject of Degas & Women for the April 18, 1996 issue of The New York Review, says:
The most extensive study of Degas’s representations of prostitutes is Hollis Clayson’s Painted Love (1991), an investigation of prostitution in the art of Degas and Manet, with some attention also to Cézanne, Renoir, and illustrators for the popular press. Clayson stresses that clandestine prostitution was perceived as a new social scourge when it became, during the Seventies, more common than “tolerated” prostitution in registered brothels. Clandestine prostitution was seen by many as especially troublesome because these freelance prostitutes looked like many other women, and therefore could not be readily categorized. Clayson writes mostly about restaurant servers, café-concert entertainers, milliners, and laundresses, all of whom were widely perceived as including clandestine prostitutes, but she has an important chapter on Degas’s monotypes of brothel workers.
She reminds us that Degas’s idiosyncratic shorthand has been seen as modern because its spontaneous realism seems free of the usual artistic formulas, lacking the finished surface and treatment of details that were required by convention. Clayson does not accept this definition of “modern” because it is limited to issues of style. She acknowledges that the monotypes have a radically new pictorial form; but she argues that instead of dealing with the clandestine prostitution that was current in the Seventies and Eighties, they conform to the old-fashioned image of the police-regulated brothel staffed by a single brutalized and criminal type. From the perspective of sexual politics of the Impressionist era, Degas, she concludes, cannot be judged as progressive or modern.
Signs of confusion! Back to Venice and the origins of capitalism . . .
This troubling phenomenon of clandestine prostitution, because these freelance prostitutes looked like many other women, and therefore could not be readily categorised, takes this convolute back to Venice and the inception of this problem, and how it is immanent in the emergence of capitalism. Venetian authorities became concerned that it was impossible to distinguish between courtesans and respectable women. Rules drawn up in 1543 determined what the courtesans could wear. In Venice there were educated prostitutes who were refined and well dressed in expensive textiles, often rented rather than owned, enabling them to service the social elite, and with the look of wealth and social standing. Such an "appearance" led the Venetian authorities to become concerned.
It was impossible to distinguish between courtesans and respectable women.
This situation repeats itself in nineteenth century Paris but with the added dimension of a working class condemned to supplement meagre earnings with sex work.
Edgar Degas, The Milliners, about 1882 - before 1905. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Edgar Degas, The Laundresses, c. 1880-1882 Minneapolis Institute of Art
In this increasingly industrialised capitalist economy, where the mass production of clothing fabrics resulted in class distinctions in the context of "public appearance" becoming equally problematic. The appearance of the middle-class bourgeois mistress of the domestic sphere began to blur, exactly where the boundaries of difference between the couture fashions of the upper class merged with a mass produced fashion phenomenon. At the same time, the bourgeois mistress of the respectable home, required her servants to replace their equally presentable "respectable" clothing with a uniform that would more clearly, and publicly, communicate the actual difference in social status.
Personality in public?
Chapter 8 of Richard Sennett's The Fall of Public Man begins with this short paragraph:
"In asking what effect new material conditions had on public life, in particular the effects of industrial capitalism upon it, we find ourselves having to ask a second question, how personality entered the public realm. The system of profits couldn't succeed without this intrusion of personality, and the system of profits won't explain why it arose." (page 150)
Re:LODE Radio considers that this chapter offers an indispensable method and approach to addressing this crucial question. Sennett says:
"As the gods are demystified, man mystifies his own condition, his own life is fraught with meaning, yet it remains to be played out. Meaning is immanent in it, yet the person is unlike a stone or fossil which is fixed and so can be studied as a form."
"As the gods fled, immediacy of sensation and perception grew more important: phenomena came to seem real in and of themselves as immediate experience. People in turn were disposed to make more and more of differences in the immediate impressions they made upon each other, to see these differences, indeed, as the very basis of social existence. These immediate impressions different people produced were taken to be their "personalities"." (page 151)
"One is what one appears, therefore people with different appearances are different persons. When one's own appearance changes, there is a change in the self. As the Enlightenment belief in a common humanity is eclipsed, the variation in personal appearance becomes tied to the instability of personality itself." (page 152)
"The two phenomena which bourgeois people personalised in public appearance were class and sex. Through reading details of appearance strangers tried to determine whether someone had metamorphosed economic position into the more personal one of being a "gentleman". sexual status became personalised in public as strangers tried to determine whether someone, for all her seeming propriety, gave out little clues in her appearance which marked her as a "loose" woman." (page 164-165)
This new "economy" of appearances, specific to the Parisian scene, is picked up in the Guardian article on the exhibition Splendours and Miseries. Kim Wilsher writes:
As Gustave Flaubert wrote to his politician friend Ernest Chevalier in June 1842: “What seems to be most beautiful in Paris is the boulevard … at the hour when the gas lamps shine in the mirrors, when the knives ring against the marble tables, I’m going to walk there, peacefully, enveloped in the smoke of my cigar while looking at the women who pass. This is where prostitution is on display, this is where eyes shine!”“What is art? Prostitution,” Charles Baudelaire declared in his Journaux Intimes. The exhibition attempts to put 19th and early 20th-century prostitution in France within the moral and social framework of an era when a demographic shift brought many country dwellers to the city and when the authorities regarded prostitution as a necessary evil to blunt the rampant nature of the male libido. For centuries, French kings and aristocrats had kept courtesans and mistresses; but in Paris in the second half of the 19th century, the sex-for-sale business democratised, invaded the public space and boomed.The exhibition begins on the streets, the rues and boulevards where during the day the scenes are ambiguous and visitors are encouraged to spot the telltale signs that distinguished a prostitute from an “honest woman”: a bold stare, a lifted hem, a female drinking alone in a bar. “There are codes that give us clues,” Thomson said. “But during the day, it was slippery trying to identify who was or who wasn’t. This ‘was-she-wasn’t-she’ was the great question of the age.”The exhibition moves into the Maison Clos (closed house). In the second half of the 19th century, prostitutes – who registered with the local police and were obliged to have regular medical checks – worked in around 200 legalised brothels and maisons closes.Many thousands more worked on the streets illegally. Their activity centred around cafes and bars, depicted so colourfully by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, where no “decent” woman would enter without a male escort. Cafe terraces, visible from the street and from inside, were the domain of those who were soliciting.In a red velvet curtained side room at the exhibition, some early photographs capture the debauchery: there are women in suggestive poses and pornographic scenes of heterosexual and homosexual relations inside the closed houses.Next, the exhibition moves into the boudoir. If the clandestine streetwalkers, who were often forced to supplement their incomes by charging for sex, were at the bottom of the pile, the young female “courtesans” often actors or singers, were at the top. Kept by powerful, aristocratic or high-ranking “protectors” as a sign of wealth and virility, these demi-mondaines were a subject of fascination for the upper class who looked down on them but also observed them as a reference for fashion and taste. Emile Zola’s character Nana is a streetwalker who makes a meteoric rise to become a high-class cocotte, wrecking the lives of all who fall for her and dying eventually of smallpox.The exhibition also features Edouard Manet’s Olympia, the nude that shocked and outraged the Paris Salon in 1865, not because she was unclothed but because her gaze was defiant and a number of not-so-subtle details – including the orchid in her hair – identified her as a prostitute. (In fact, the model was Manet’s friend, the painter Victorine Meurent). The work, condemned as immoral and vulgar, became a landmark work in art history.It ends with the harsh and often cruel portrayal of prostitutes by early 20th-century artists, including Picasso. “By the time you get to the last room of the exhibition and the beginning of the 20th century, the artists’ attitude has changed. The pictures are more caricatural, nasty even, reflecting a misogynist society,” said Thomson.“We don’t exactly know why, but at the time France had some serious problems, like a low birth rate, and questions over whether the country was degenerating. There were high levels of alcoholism and syphilis, and people were scared.”He said the courtesans were a world away from the misery on the streets. “The high-class prostitutes had a very, very substantial time. They weren’t paid in anything so vulgar as money, but in diamond bracelets and racehorses.”For the majority of the prostitutes portrayed, however, the paintings romanticised the wretchedness of the circumstances that drove poorly paid women to sell their bodies, turning their misery into a celebration of art and personal talent.“The social history was horrible,” said Thomson. “But the paintings are fantastic.”
L'Absinthe (The Absinthe Drinker or Glass of Absinthe) is a painting by Edgar Degas, painted between 1875 and 1876. Its original title was Dans un Café, a name often used today.
A bourgeois ideological projection?
While the trend in interest, as shown in the exhibition of nineteenth and early twentieth century art, and in recent literature and the exhibition itself, prurient or otherwise, surrounds the demimonde of the courtesan, the sordid reality for the many working class women who prostituted themselves to survive, is not so easily romanticised. For the bourgeois, the class that was driving the system of profit and exploitation, the fear and panic provoked by the social epidemic of prostitution, could be easily managed. Ideologically, in discourses that claimed the scourge of vice was the result of the unstable, and unbridled sexuality of the lower class woman, the victims of the system would carry the blame and the responsibility. While the bourgeois woman, as mistress of her household's servants might fret at those details of appearance that would mark her as a "loose" woman, the epidemic of prostitution would be down to the base sexuality of the women of a downtrodden poor.
When it comes to a mythological Circe turning Odysseus' men into swine, in Paris the modern associates of a modern Ulysses were more than capable of undertaking the transformation themselves.
The class and gender oriented psychological and ideological "projection", emanating from the patriarchal condition of this industrial and capitalist system, is by any standard - grotesque.
La Commune
Addressing the reality and its alternative? The Paris Commune and the Union des femmes pour la défense de Paris et les soins aux blessés . . .
. . . (Women's Union to Defend Paris and Care for the Wounded) was a women's group during the 1871 Paris Commune.Founded by Nathalie Le Mel and Elisabeth Dmitrieff on April 11 1871, the group set about fundamental changes to the conditions of working class women.In Genderquake: socialist women and the Paris Commune by Judy Cox, posted on the International Socialism's quarterly review of socialist theory (5th January 2021). She writes:
On 11 April 1871, three weeks into the life of the Paris Commune, a poster appeared on the walls of France’s capital:Citizenesses, we know that the present social order bears within itself the seeds of poverty and of the death of all liberty and justice… At this hour, when danger is imminent and the enemy is at the gates of Paris, the entire population must unite to defend the Commune, which stands for the annihilation of all privilege and all inequality.All women who were prepared to die for the Commune were urged to attend a meeting at 8pm at the Salle Larched, Grand Café des Nations, 74 Rue de Temple. Laundresses, seamstresses, bookbinders and milliners attended and there they established a new organisation, the Union of Women. This Union was a part of the socialist First International, which had been established by Karl Marx and other socialists and trade unionists in London in 1864 with the aim of uniting workers across national borders. Within a few days, the Union became one of the most important organisations of the Paris Commune. Socialist women played an indispensable role in organising the working women of Paris to become Communards.
Judy Cox continues her article, covering some familiar ground, articulating the significance of the historical context. She writes:Two opposing traditions relating to women co-existed uneasily inside the French socialist movement. One went back to the utopian socialism of the 1830s, when Flora Tristan became the first reformer to argue that women could only win equality through the emancipation of the working class. This tradition was developed in the 1848 Revolution by the great socialist leaders Jeanne Deroin and Pauline Roland, who organised women to fight for their rights to work and to vote.A very different tradition was represented by the misogynistic anarchist-socialist writer Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Proudhon argued that women were physically weak, incapable of abstract thought and naturally immoral, fit only for marriage or prostitution. In his last work, Pornocracy: Women in Modern Times, Proudhon argued that husbands had the right to kill wives who were adulterous, immoral, drunk, thieving, wasteful or obstinately insubordinate. Jules Michelet further popularised these misogynistic views in his accessible novels Love (1858) and Women (1859). Michelet blamed women for the failure of the revolutions of 1789 and 1848 and considered them to be prisoners of their biology, which left them unreliable, capricious and unsuited to work outside the home. Proudhon and Michelet were very influential in the French section of the International. At the French section’s inaugural meeting in 1866, delegates passed a motion that stated: “From a physical, moral and social viewpoint, women’s work outside the home should be energetically condemned as a cause of the degeneration of the race and as one of the agents of demoralisation used by the capitalist class”. There were opposing voices, including those of future Communards Varlin and Benoît Malon, but the French section of the International remained deeply Proudhonist.Female campaigners fought back against the sexist ideas of Proudhon and Michelet. One combatant was André Léo. Léo had lived in Switzerland with her husband, a utopian socialist who had been inspired by the ideas of Henri de Saint-Simon and was forced into exile after 1848. Léo was widowed and to survive she published several novels exploring the oppression of women and affirming women’s abilities. In 1866 she hosted the inaugural meeting of a new feminist group at her house. The group included Paule Mink, Louise Michel, Eliska Vincent, Noémi Reclus and her husband Élie Reclus, all future Communards. The group established improving girls’ education as their campaigning priority.Mink and Michel were two of the leading women of the Commune. They both stood in the revolutionary socialist tradition of Deroin and Roland. Mink was the daughter of an exiled Polish nobleman. When her marriage broke down, she worked as a seamstress and language teacher. She also edited a radical newspaper and built a reputation as an orator in Paris’s radical circles. At a public meeting in 1868, Mink challenged Proudhon: “By ceasing to make woman a worker, you deprive her of her liberty and, thereby, of her responsibility so that she no longer will be a free and intelligent creature but will merely be a reflection, a small part of her husband”. Michel was the daughter of an unmarried servant. She trained as a teacher but refused to teach in state schools because it would have meant swearing an oath of loyalty to the French Empire. Michel came to Paris to further both her education and the revolution. She was one of the most courageous, determined and audacious women in the revolutionary tradition.Some male members of the International supported the women against Proudhonism. In 1866, Malon wrote to Léo as a member of the International, assuring her that he was not, “forgetting about the emancipation of women and we receive new support each day. We have convinced almost the entire association of the idea; only the pontiffs of Proudhon remain unconvinced”. The first edition of the paper issued by the Batignolles-Ternes section of the Parisian International included a programme, signed by Léo and 16 others, which declared: “It is time to have women participate in democracy instead of making them its enemy by senseless exclusion”. The following year Varlin argued:Those who wish to refuse women the right to work want to keep them permanently dependent on men. No-one has the right to refuse them the only means of being truly free. Whether done by man or women, there should be equal pay for equal work.Léo, Mink and Varlin consistently agitated for the International to support both civil rights for women and women’s right to work.Throughout the 1860s women joined the political clubs that attracted large audiences in Paris’s poorer districts, at least some of which discussed how to campaign against women’s low wages. The political clubs also incubated the desire, “to establish a commune based on cooperation of all energies and intelligences instead of government composed of traitors and incompetents”. Early in 1869 demands for a commune could be heard in many clubs, and proceedings often closed with the cry, “Viva la Commune”. When the Commune became a reality two years later, the clubs continued to provide a space for debate and organisation and became a living link between the Central Committee and the people. The clubs debated what actions the Commune should take and made their views and priorities known to the Central Committee. Through the clubs, women could organise direct action against profiteers and urge support for reforms they wanted. Many Parisian women were in relationships with members of the National Guard, but few went through a marriage ceremony. Only married women could claim a wives’ allowance from the Commune, a discriminatory policy that caused much anger. The demand for allowances for the unmarried partners of national guardsmen originated in the clubs and was later granted by the Commune.Some clubs were mixed, some were segregated and both provided a platform for female leaders to emerge. An English reporter from the Daily News described one club where “respectably dressed women with their grown up daughters, little shopkeepers’ wives with their young families” mixed with “those repulsive females of almost all degrees of age who form the typical furies of excited Paris mobs”. Reporters were horrified to hear women advocating not only an end to marriage but also for equality between the sexes. Michel presided over the Club of the Revolution, which voted to arrest any priests who were in league with the “monarchist dogs” and to set up corporations of women and men to undertake necessary public works. At the Club of the Free Thinkers, Nathalie Lemel and Lodoyska Kawecka, who dressed in trousers and wore two revolvers hanging from her sash, argued for divorce and the liberation of women. At the Club of the Proletarians a laundress, known only as Madame Andre, was the secretary. One regular speaker was a Citizeness Thiourt, who demanded that cannons be placed in the well-to-do squares of Paris and that women be given the right to bear arms. Léo, Michel and Lemel toured the clubs arguing that capitalist exploitation must be abolished.
The revolutionary fact, rather than the theoretical abstract, was that, as Judy Cox sets out in her article:
The Commune demonstrated that working class people were capable of organising society more efficiently and fairly than the privileged politicians and bureaucrats that they had replaced. However, many of the Commune’s supporters had a wider ambition: to lay the basis of a socialist society. Elise Reclus, who had been a member of André Léo’s feminist circle, wrote:The Commune set up for the future a new society in which there are no masters by birth title or wealth, and no slaves by origin, caste or salary. Everywhere the word “Commune” was understood in its largest sense as referring to a new humanity, made up of free and equal companions, oblivious to the existence of old boundaries, helping each other in peace from one end of the world to the other.They believed that the Commune could inspire an international movement towards egalitarianism and freedom.Further, as Judy Cox writes later in her article:
The Union aimed to organise the defence of Paris’s revolution and to instigate long-term changes in women’s labour to eradicate the masters and exploiters. It issued an address calling on the Commune to abolish all forms of gender inequality and describing sex discrimination as a means employed by the ruling class to maintain their power. This was the first time a significant French women’s organisation explained their inferior status in terms of class.The achievements of the Union were huge. It provided staff for orphanages and care for old people, recruited nurses and canteen workers, provided speakers for public meetings. The Union asked for space in local halls so it could meet and staff a desk providing information, aid and expenses for printing leaflets and posters—all of which the Commune provided. Nightly meetings of the Union were attended by between 3,000 and 4,000 women.60The driving force behind the Union was an outstanding revolutionary socialist leader, Elisabeth Dimitrieff. Dimitrieff had escaped from her native Russia for less repressive Geneva, where she was one of the signatories of the founding document of the Russian section of the International. The document sought to synthesise Marx’s economic theories with the beliefs of the influential writer Nikolai Chernyshevsky in the emancipatory potential of the traditional peasant commune. In Geneva, Dimitrieff met future Communards and supporters of women’s rights, Eugène Varlin and Benoît Malon. Dimitrieff also edited a journal, The People’s Cause. Its founding statement declared:As the foundation of economic justice, we advance two fundamental theses:The land belongs to those who work it with their own hands: to the agricultural communes.Capital and all the tools of labour belong to the workers: to the workers’ associations.These ideas resurfaced in the Commune. Dimitrieff spent three months in London, discussing her journal with the Marx family. She requested to be sent to Paris and there she established the Union of Women. Dimitrieff ’s politics shaped everything she did. She sought out working-class women, recruiting laundresses and seamstresses to the Union.
In Judy Cox's: Conclusion: agitating and squawking, she writes:One historian of the Commune (Eichner, Caroline J, 2004, Surmounting the Barricades: Women in the Paris Commune p18), describes it as an “incubator for embryonic feminist socialisms”. It would be more accurate to say that women’s role in the Commune encouraged experienced socialist women to reach out to other working women. Mink wrote in the Geneva-based newspaper of the International, Equality, addressing women:It is in the name of women that I speak, in the name of women to whom the International has given the rights and duties equal to those of men… Only socialism will be able to emancipate women materially and morally, as it will be able to emancipate all those who suffer!Socialist men who supported women’s emancipation were also keen to draw the lessons of the Commune. In 1871, just weeks after the defeat, Malon argued that “one important fact demonstrated by the revolution in Paris is the entry of women into political life… Women and the proletariat can only hope to achieve their respective liberation by uniting”. At the same time, Leó Frankel wrote:All the objections produced against equality of men and women are the same sort as those which are produced against the emancipation of the Negro race. Firstly, people are blindfolded and they are told that they have been blind since birth. By claiming that half of the human race is incompetent, man prides himself on appearing to be the protector of women. Revolting hypocrisy! Just let the barriers of privilege be lowered and we shall see.In 1879, the national workers’ congress in Marseille marked a decisive shift in attitude of organised French workers and a “majority rallied behind the notion of complete civil and political equality”. The motion was ardently defended at the congress by Hubertine Auclert, a working-class socialist. She was acclaimed by the Congress, elected as chair of both the session and the commission, and the Congress adopted a resolution proclaiming the “absolute equality of the sexes”.
Judy Cox ends her article with her contention that:The Commune was a working-class revolution that was necessarily also a “great gender event” because it depended on women’s active involvement, creativity and courage. It was the visible involvement of women that made the Commune so appalling to its opponents. One wrote:Those females who dedicated themselves to the Commune—and there were many—had but a single ambition: to raise themselves above the level of man. They were all there, agitating and squawking, the gentleman’s seamstresses, the gentleman’s shirt makers, the teachers of boys, the maids of all work. During the final days all these bellicose viragos held out longer than the men did behind the barricades.Across the English Channel, a Times reporter joined in the abuse, sneering: “If the French nation were composed only of the French women, what a terrible nation it would be”. If the unruly women of Paris had been in charge of the whole country, it is conceivable that the revolution could have spread across Europe. Perhaps then, this brief but inspiring example of workers’ power could have won more time and so provided us with many more examples of how working-class people can organise together to create a socialist society.
Pan-European and American anarchism
Along with Louise Michel, Teresa Claramunt, Lucy Parsons, Voltairine de Cleyre and Emma Goldman became prominent figures in the late 19th century pan-European and American anarchist movement. With the formation of the First International anarchist sections in various European countries under the leadership of Mikhail Bakunin, anarchism became noted for not only encouraging female participation in the political movement, but also for espousing the ideal of female emancipation.
Forgetting and/or remembering?
Michel was rediscovered by French feminists in the 1970s through the works of Xavière Gauthier, and academic interest in Michel's life and political writings was prompted in the 1970s by Édith Thomas's comprehensively researched biography.
Louise Michel station on the Paris Metro, located in Levallois-Perret, is named after her.
In 2020, street artist Banksy was credited for sending a rescue ship in the Mediterranean Sea and naming it after Michel.
M.V. LOUISE MICHEL
While Louise Michel is remembered by the M.V. Louise Michel project in its humanitarian effort, in her own time the French government sought to erase the significance of La Commune, especially the site of resistance on the hills of Montmartre, with the construction of an architectural and topographical spectacle, the Basilica of Sacré-Cœur.
Construction of the Sacré-Cœur, 10 March 1882
The National Assembly decreed a law on 24 July 1873 for the construction of the Basilica of Sacré-Cœur on Montmartre, near the location of the cannon park and where General Clément-Thomas and General Lecomte were killed, specifying that it be erected to:
"expiate the crimes of the Commune".
Against this attempt at expiation there runs another tradition, the political requirement, individual and collective need to remember.
This painting by Maximilien Luce, A Street in Paris in May 1871, 1903–1906 is an early twentieth century artwork to excavate history, in a reprise of the work of Manet, in the avant-garde style of an impressionism informed by pointillism. Luce aligned with the Neo-impressionists not only in their artistic techniques, but also in their political philosophy of anarchism. Many of his illustrations were featured in socialist periodicals, notably La Révolte, Jean Grave's magazine which was later called Les Temps nouveaux. Other socialist/anarchist publications which he contributed to include Le Père Peinard, Le Chambard,[11] and La Guerre sociale.
On 8 July 1894, Luce, suspected of involvement in the 24 June assassination of President of France Marie François Sadi Carnot, was arrested and was confined to Mazas Prison. He was released forty two days later, on 17 August, following his acquittal at the Procès des trente. He published Mazas, an album consisting of ten lithographs documenting the experiences of himself and other political prisoners incarcerated in Mazas; accompanying the lithographs was text by Jules Vallès.
"Reprise", meaning "verb: repeat (a piece of music or a performance)", is a word that Re:LODE Radio chooses, with a deliberate nod to the word "reprisal", meaning "noun: an act of retaliation". Manet was in a "reprise" mode when depicting the scene of French soldiers firing on Parisians on the barricades.
The image "repeats", or "echoes", Manet's own performance in his painting of The Execution of Emperor Maximilian (1868–69), Kunsthalle Mannheim.
And, this painting was itself a reprise of Goya's Third of May 1808, completed in 1814, now in the Museo del Prado, Madrid. In the work, Goya sought to commemorate Spanish resistance to Napoleon's armies during the occupation of 1808 in the Peninsular War.
The Wikipedia article on this painting quotes the art historian Kenneth Clark, who considered that The Third of May 1808 was "the first great picture which can be called revolutionary in every sense of the word, in style, in subject, and in intention".
Like other Spanish liberals, Goya was personally placed in a difficult position by the French invasion. He had supported the initial aims of the French Revolution, and hoped for a similar development in Spain. Several of his friends, like the poets Juan Meléndez Valdés and Leandro Fernández de Moratín, were overt Afrancesados, the term for the supporters — collaborators in the view of many — of Joseph Bonaparte. Goya's 1798 portrait of the French ambassador-turned-commandant Ferdinand Guillemardet betrays a personal admiration. Although he maintained his position as court painter, for which an oath of loyalty to Joseph was necessary, Goya had by nature an instinctive dislike of authority. He witnessed the subjugation of his countrymen by the French troops. During these years he painted little, although the experiences of the occupation provided inspiration for drawings that would form the basis for his prints The Disasters of War (Los desastres de la guerra).In February 1814, after the final expulsion of the French, Goya approached the provisional government with a request to "perpetuate by means of his brush the most notable and heroic actions of our glorious insurrection against the Tyrant of Europe". His proposal accepted, Goya began work on The Third of May. It is not known whether he had personally witnessed either the rebellion or the reprisals, despite many later attempts to place him at the events of either day.
Goya's picture of the execution of resistance fighters echoes one of his prints from his "The Disasters of War" (Los desastres de la guerra), Y no hay remedio (And it can't be helped) from his own private and personal album of intaglio prints.
His handwritten title on an album of proofs given to a friend reads: Fatal consequences of Spain's bloody war with Bonaparte, and other emphatic caprices (Spanish: Fatales consequencias de la sangrienta guerra en España con Buonaparte, Y otros caprichos enfáticos). Aside from the titles or captions given to each print, these are Goya's only known words on the series.
For Manet, the picture of Parisians on the barricades being fired upon by French soldiers echoes a feature of both the National Gallery, London, version, an assembly of fragments, and his final version in Mannheim of the execution of Emperor Maximilian, in both pictures the military firing squad are dressed in 19th-century field dress, common to many armies at that time, and Manet would have recognised the irony that they could be easily mistaken for French soldiers rather than Mexican troops. Also, the sergeant in both versions wearing a red cap clearly resembles Napoleon III.
Elected to the presidency of the Second Republic in 1848, he had seized power by force in 1851, when he could not constitutionally be reelected; he later proclaimed himself Emperor of the French. He founded the Second Empire, reigning until the defeat of the French Army and his capture by Prussia and its allies at the Battle of Sedan in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. The bungling of Napoleon III in this affair is implicit in Manet's work as someone profoundly critical of the "pornocracy" of Empire, but from an entirely different critical place from Proudhon. In Mexico too, the execution of Maximilian was bungled, and a coup de grâce was required. For Flaubert this era informed the entire world of fact and fiction in his novel Sentimental Education.
France versus Paris? Paris versus France? The bourgeois "nation" at war with the "people"?
Besides the likes of Benjamin, trying to make sense of modernity in the twentieth century, the cultural role of Paris in the nineteenth century, and that had stalked the parlours of the bourgeoisie in the United States, like a spectre (but it wasn't communism), through a civil war, the manifest destiny of continental expansion, the genocide of Indigenous Peoples, and that took on a new form in the period that was once termed the American Century.
This photo by Edwin Levick of Fifth Avenue at 43rd Street, New York, was chosen as the banner image for the article:
New York: Capital of the Twentieth Century
by Nancy Levinson
This quotation from Mark Kingwell's, “New York, Capital of the 20th Century,” from Concrete Reveries: Consciousness and the City, 2008 introduces the article:
Walter Benjamin labeled Paris the “capital of the nineteenth century” in his monumental work of cultural excavation, The Arcades Project, that dense, unparalleled, unfinished flotsam-and-jetsam chronicle of revolutionary history, literary struggle and sexual ambition in the West’s most beautiful and sedimentary city, the birthplace of modernity. New York’s essence will not surrender the same kind of archaeological depth…because it tends to erase and rebuild rather than layer; it has always been more tabula rasa than palimpsest.…New York, like Paris, occupies the world-historic position relative to its century, maybe an even greater one than the French capital, and it demands an equally nuanced connoisseur’s gaze. All the more so because New York’s reign, like Paris’s when Benjamin came to construct his elaborate intellectual billet-doux during the 1930s, is now over.
Nancy Levinson begins the article:
It’s an easy riff, and the Canadian philosophy professor Mark Kingwell got there already: New York was the capital of the twentieth century. Or at least for part of it. Just as Paris was capital of the nineteenth century for several decades from the end of the Second Empire to the fin-de-siècle, so too New York didn’t become a world city until the middle decades of the twentieth century. You could date its ascent to the postwar years of the pax Americana, of Henry Luce’s American Century; but you could also date it back a decade or so, to the mid-1930s, when the modern skyline was being contoured by the now celebrated buildings — Chrysler, Empire State, Rockefeller Center, et al. — and when the city rehabilitated twelve hundred acres of an old ash dump in Queens to create the spectacular 1939 World’s Fair, even as the world war was already consuming Europe and Asia.
Margaret Bourke-White's photograph of a DC 4 flying over mid-town New York circa 1939.
In December 2015 the Guardian ran an article (The 10 Dec 2015) in its Book of the day, History books sections, on the publication of:
Kenneth Goldsmith - Capital: New York, Capital of the 20th Century review – a monumental hymn to the city
Under the subheading paragraph:
From sex and the subway to loneliness and gentrification, Goldsmith’s collage of many voices captures the complexity of New York life
Brian Dillon writes:
In November 1938, exiled in New York, Theodor Adorno wrote to his friend Walter Benjamin concerning some pages the latter had sent from The Arcades Project, his vast prismatic study of 19th-century Paris. The text, Adorno complained, was ruinously addicted to the “wide-eyed presentation of mere facts”. Benjamin had been at work on the book – it’s not clear he intended a “book” as such – since the late 1920s, trawling the city itself and the Bibliothèque Nationale for images and anecdotes, setting thousands of quotations in devious array with his own reflections. These fragments orbited a central motif: the network of phantasmagoric shopping arcades that had flourished in Paris at mid-century. The only way to write about such things was in the collage style of a shop window. Benjamin tartly replied that, in accusing him of a stupefied empiricism, Adorno had simply identified “the true philological attitude”.
“Wide-eyed presentation of mere facts”: the phrase appears to suit the work, if that’s the word for so insouciant an oeuvre, of poet and theorist Kenneth Goldsmith. With Capital – both a challenge and a homage to The Arcades Project – Goldsmith extends (or does he extinguish?) a practice of borrowing and citation to which, since the mid-1990s, he has given various names, notably “conceptual poetry” and “uncreative writing”. Originality and expression are over, he contends: we’re in the era of literary sampling. Earlier projects involved verbatim transcripts of a New York radio station’s weather reports and of traffic bulletins; one volume recorded the author’s every spoken utterance during one week. Now, with the scholarly endorsement of the critic Marjorie Perloff – she was among the first to note an affinity between Goldsmith’s appropriations and Benjamin’s quotation hoard – he has composed a 1,008-page hymn to New York, created almost entirely from other people’s words.Capital is a monumental, admirable undertaking: a richer, more surprising, frankly more readable book than Goldsmith’s blank conceptual gambit seems to promise. Here is “the capital of the 20th century” anatomised according to 52 diverse themes. Goldsmith begins with the familiar image of New York as dream city, a glittering vision that turns out to be real. (Surely, Joan Didion wrote of her own youthful arrival there, “one does not live in Xanadu”.) Among the teeming quotations on advertising and empire, sex and the subway, loneliness and gentrification, we get many passages on the visual blare of the city. Thomas Wolfe remarked the “great slant beacons of moted light” at Grand Central Station; Truman Capote wrote that being in New York was “like living inside an electric lightbulb”; F Scott Fitzgerald called the sight of Manhattan “a miracle of foamy light suspended by the stars”.At its best, Capital scintillates, with celebrated and obscure writers. But Goldsmith’s method is also frustratingly slapdash. He fails to note when he is quoting one writer quoting another; when he hits on an eloquent source such as Peter Conrad’s The Art of the City, he relies on it for page after page: you may as well go and read the original book. Perhaps, as with his occasional recourse to Wikipedia, he is making a point: his democratic levelling mirrors street-level New York itself. The lapses hardly matter, in a way, when the book gives us such curiosities as wine cellars beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, or the public electrocution of the troublesome Coney Island elephant, Topsy, in 1903. Along the way, there are vivid descriptions from voices as diverse as American historian Lewis Mumford, Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and music journalist Legs McNeil.The book stalls to a predictable gridlock – predictable chiefly because it seems to lead straight to the arrival of one K Goldsmith. I love Andy Warhol’s moaning, gossipy, phoned-in diaries as much as the next masochist, but you have to wonder why appropriating Andy looms so large here. There’s an absurdly inflated section on Robert Mapplethorpe – no other artist gets the full chapter treatment – that leads one to suspect he functions as a personal talisman (or warning) for Goldsmith when it comes to uptown avant gardism. And in that chapter there is not one quotation from Patti Smith, who is reduced instead to Mapplethorpe’s muse – a reminder of the general scarcity of female writers and artists in Goldsmith’s collage.Goldsmith probably doesn’t care if you notice such things; he famously considers his books unreadable. But anybody taking Perloff’s advice and reading Capital against the grain of its conceptual intentions would do well to have a small stack of other NYC books to hand: it might include Smith’s memoir Just Kids, Elizabeth Hardwick’s novel Sleepless Nights, Maeve Brennan’s essays in The Long-Winded Lady. Not only because Goldsmith has scanted or – as in the case of Jane Jacobs’s Death and Life of Great American Cities – simply ignored certain essential voices. But because, as Benjamin the rigorously seductive essayist well knew, assemblage is just half the work when it comes to capturing the modern city; the other half is style. Despite himself, Goldsmith has produced a book that reminds us how close we can still get, via the labour of sound and thought and syntax, to the rhythms of a real city.
Manhattan - Hot jazz in stone and steel . . .
. . . according to Le Corbusier. In 1935, Le Corbusier made his first visit to the United States. He was asked by American journalists what he thought about New York City skyscrapers; he responded, characteristically, that he found them "much too small". He wrote a book describing his experiences in the States, Quand les cathédrales étaient blanches, Voyage au pays des timides (When Cathedrals were White; voyage to the land of the timid) whose title expressed his view of the lack of boldness in American architecture.
Manhattan, the film (1979), directed by Woody Allen with a screenplay written by Allen and Marshall Brickman, begins with a montage of images of Manhattan and other parts of New York City accompanied by George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, with Isaac Davis (Woody Allen) narrating drafts of an introduction to a book about a man who loves the city. Isaac is a twice-divorced, 42-year-old television comedy writer who quits his boring job. He is dating Tracy (Mariel Hemingway), a 17-year-old girl attending the Dalton School. His best friend, college professor Yale Pollack (Michael Murphy), married to Emily (Anne Byrne), is having an affair with Mary Wilkie (Diane Keaton). Mary's ex-husband and former teacher, Jeremiah (Wallace Shawn in his film debut), also appears, and Isaac's ex-wife Jill Davis (Meryl Streep) is writing a confessional book about their marriage. Jill has also since come out as a lesbian and lives with her partner, Connie (Karen Ludwig).
When Isaac meets Mary, her cultural snobbery offends him. Isaac runs into her again at an Equal Rights Amendment fund-raising event at the Museum of Modern Art hosted by Bella Abzug (playing herself) and accompanies her on a cab ride home. They chat until sunrise in a sequence that culminates in a shot of the Queensboro Bridge. In spite of a growing attraction to Mary, Isaac continues his relationship with Tracy but emphasizes that theirs cannot be a serious relationship and encourages her to go to London to study acting.In the dénouement, Isaac lies on his sofa, musing into a tape recorder about the things that make "life worth living". When he finds himself saying "Tracy's face", he sets down the microphone. Unable to reach her by phone, he sets out for Tracy's on foot. He arrives at her family's apartment building just as she is leaving for London. He asks her not to go and says he does not want "that thing about [her] that [he] like[s]" to change. She replies that the plans have already been made and reassures him that "not everybody gets corrupted" before saying "you have to have a little faith in people". He gives her a slight smile, with a final look to the camera then segueing into final shots of the skyline with some bars of Rhapsody in Blue playing again.
From Sentimental Education . . .
When it comes to "corruption" and the city . . .
. . . a Playboy cartoon on the subject of New York's street plan and the modernist art of Mondrian, echoes Le Corbusier's views. On the opposite page to this image in a Playboy Cartoon Album another cartoon encapsulates the twentieth century New York version of Flaubert's Sentimental Education.
Woody Allen's reference to Sentimental Education in his film Manhattan captures Flaubert's feeling and relationship to Paris, and translates this condition to a typical situation in the lives of a privileged and highly educated class of "liberal" New York bourgeoisie. Flaubert's novel describes the life of a young man (Frédéric Moreau) living through the revolution of 1848 and the founding of the Second French Empire, and his love for an older woman (based on the wife of the music publisher Maurice Schlesinger, who is portrayed in the book as Jacques Arnoux). Flaubert based many of the protagonist's experiences (including the romantic passion) on his own life. He wrote of the work in 1864:
"I want to write the moral history of the men of my generation—or, more accurately, the history of their feelings. It's a book about love, about passion; but passion such as can exist nowadays—that is to say, inactive."
The novel's tone is by turns ironic and pessimistic; it occasionally lampoons French society, as does Woody Allen. Isaac, the main character in Manhattan corresponds loosely to the main character in Sentimental Education, Frédéric, who regularly gives himself over to romantic flights of fancy.
Coda
The final pages of Flaubert's Sentimental Education are, as Simon says, genuinely emotional:
Burnt out, abandoned, Frédéric leaves France and goes travelling to lose himself and when he returns, is a broken man.
He travelled.He knew the melancholy associated with packet-boats, the chill one feels on waking up under tents, the dizzy effect of landscapes and ruins, and the bitterness of ruptured sympathies.He returned home.He mingled in society, and he conceived attachments to other women. But the constant recollection of his first love made these appear insipid; and besides the vehemence of desire, the bloom of the sensation had vanished. In like manner, his intellectual ambitions had grown weaker. Years passed; and he was forced to support the burden of a life in which his mind was unoccupied and his heart devoid of energy.‘Towards the end of March, 1867, just as it was getting dark, one evening, he was sitting all alone in his study, when a woman suddenly came in.’It is Madame Arnoux. She and her husband are living in obscurity in rural Brittany. She and Frédéric swear their undying love to each other. Maybe their love has survived and meant so much because they were never together. She takes her cap off to cut a lock of her hair for him, and he is stricken to see that her hair has gone completely white. She is an old lady. She leaves. It is the last time they will meet.In the final final scene, years later, Frédéric encounters Deslauriers again and the novel ends the way it began, with the pair swapping stories of the past. On the final page they decide that their best memory is of being about 16 and trying to sneak into the town brothel in Nogent. Like simpletones they picked nosegays for the girls but, once inside, all the girls laughed at their sweet innocence and, overcome by embarrassment, first Frédéric and then Deslauriers had fled.Now they sit by the fire, too old men reminiscing and agreeing that, yes, that was probably the happiest moment in their lives.The bourgeois personality?
This ending, was to be followed in 1870-71 by the end of the Second French Empire in France, the birth of a united Germany (the German Empire), and the savage suppression of an uprising, La Commune. What was left was the burnt out ruins of Paris and a ruthlessly selective, and bourgeois, version of false memory syndrome.
Richard Sennett's chapter eight of The Fall of Public Man, "Personality in Public", begins with a short introductory paragraph that ends with this line:
"The system of profits couldn't succeed without the intrusion of personality, and the system of profits won't explain why it arose." (page 150)
A couple of pages further on he writes:
"The 19th century bourgeois is always remembering what it was like when in youth he was really alive. His personal self-consciousness is not so much an attempt to contrast his feelings with those of others as to take known and finished feelings, whatever they once were, as a definition of who he is."
The reference to Sentimental Education in Manhattan is pivotal in considering the idea mooted at the top of this page, that leads inexorably to a bourgeois and capitalist ideology and the Culture of Terrorism:
"French culture and the nation" . . .
. . . Re:LODE Radio sees this phenomenon as symmetrically mirrored in the type of narcissism of:
"American culture and the nation". . .
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