FEMALE PUBLIC NUDITY in BELLE ÉPOQUE PARIS by LELA LOVETT FELTER-KERLEY a DISSERTATION PRESENTED to the GRADUATE SCHOOL OF

Home , After the Ball (play), Bataclan (theatre), Fantasio (opera), Head of a Young Woman, Heroic nudity, La Goulue

FEMALE PUBLIC NUDITY IN BELLE ÉPOQUE PARIS

LELA LOVETT FELTER-KERLEY

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2006

Lela Lovett Felter-Kerley

This life-long dream would not have been possible without the vision and encouragement of my parents and the numerous sacrifices of my husband John and daughter Adyla.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Let me begin by saying that nothing could be more foreign, more out-of-character, for me than to write a dissertation on nudity. Raised in a puritanical, middle-class military household during the conservative years of the Reagan administration (lest we forget Edwin Meese?), the closest I came to naked bodies was seeing my baby sister race around the house after having her nightly baths.

For years I have thought very little of those first visions and memories of my childhood until now. However the context for my thinking about nudity some twenty odd years later is radically different. Through a series of chance happenings and unforeseen events, I am now confronting my innermost feelings, frustrations, and fascinations with the naked body. It has been as much a taboo for me to think, speak, and write about as it has been for many of closest friends and family members to hear.

The University of Florida, its College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and its

Department of History granted me the academic freedom and financial wherewithal to explore this subject. The Council for European Studies’ generous pre-dissertation

fellowship afforded me the opportunity to conduct preliminary research abroad.

Furthermore, awards given by Linda Vance and the family of O. Ruth McQuown helped

to pay for my travel expenses when I presented individual chapters of this dissertation at conferences held by the French Historical Studies and the Western Society for French

History.

iv Finally, this dissertation would not have been possible without the support of a

small but influential group of strong-willed, ambitious, and accomplished professional women in my life. I would be remiss if I did not thank them for helping me to dream bigger, think harder, and see this project through to the end. Angel Kwolek-Folland provided me with the basic conceptual tools for exploring a topic in the history of sexuality. Her classes created a nurturing environment where my ideas could germinate and grow. A desire to study the history of female public nudity in relation to Belle

Époque visual culture was due in large part to Melissa Hyde and her infectious passion for art history. Mary Louise Roberts, who graciously agreed to read and critique the final draft, ultimately shaped the dissertation’s narrative structure by offering a bird’s eye view of what I could only see in miniscule detail. Yet the overall direction of this study has been steered by my fearless and faithful advisor, Sheryl Kroen, who prodded me every step along the way. Thanks to her visionary insight, I can look back and see the extraordinary progress that we made together. She has been a wonderful friend and mentor to me over these years. I am, and will be, eternally grateful for her shepherding.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... iv

LIST OF FIGURES ...... viii

ABSTRACT...... ix

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 1

2 FROM THE STUDIO TO THE STREETS: THE FEMALE NUDE ARTIST IN FIN-DE-SIÈCLE PARIS...... 20

History of Public Balls...... 23 The Press, Graphic Artists, and Public Balls...... 28 The Female Nude in Nineteenth-Century Art ...... 43 The Bal des Quat’z-Arts ...... 58

3 FROM THE STREET TO THE MUSIC HALL: THE FEMALE NUDE PERFORMER IN BELLE ÉPOQUE PARIS...... 87

Le Music Hall ...... 90 Photographic Representations of La Femme Nue ...... 117 Literary Representations of La Femme Nue...... 137

4 THE POLITICS OF MORALITY IN BELLE ÉPOQUE FRANCE...... 154

René Bérenger ...... 156 Moral Leagues ...... 165 The Trial of the Bal des Quat’z-Arts ...... 198

5 CENSORSHIP IN BELLE ÉPOQUE FRANCE...... 218

The Ministry of Public Instruction and Beaux-Arts ...... 222 The Politics of Le Déshabillage...... 242 Arguments For and Against Censorship...... 261

vi 6 PHYRNÉ BEFORE HER JUDGES ...... 278

Fears of Degeneration...... 281 Le Déshabillage Obligatoire!...... 289 Le nu au théâtre ...... 297 Folies Royales ...... 298 Folies Pigalle ...... 300 Little Palace...... 304 Folies-Pigall’ ...... 307 The “Obscene” Nude ...... 312

7 LA FEMME NUE: IN HER OWN WORDS ...... 321

Degeneration, La Culture Physique, and Sexual Dimorphism...... 324 La Femme Nue Speaks ...... 335

8 CONCLUSION...... 362

LIST OF REFERENCES...... 376

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 393

vii

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure page

2-1 An artist and his models at the ball ...... 64

3-2 The Folies-Bergère...... 94

3-3 “La Belle D’Herlys” in a 1912 Moulin Rouge tableau vivant...... 105

3-4 Jane de Lyane in La Belle de New York...... 120

3-5 Jane de Lyane in 1912 revue Eglé...... 121

3-6 Jane de Lyane posing for the Olympia music hall ...... 122

3-7 D'Herlys in 1914 revue Orgie à Babylone ...... 126

3-8 1912 Folies-Bergère program cover...... 127

3-9 Advertisements from La Cigale program, ca. 1900 ...... 128

3-10: Les femmes nues ...... 130

3-11 Mlle Rethore as “La Deese Raison” in La Cigale revue ...... 130

3-12 Blanche Dorfeuil in La Boite à Fursy's revue Une Femme Nue ...... 131

3-13 Jane de Lyane as “Le Modèle de Montmartre” in the Moulin Rouge's La Revue de la Femme ...... 133

4-14 René Bérenger (far right) ...... 157

6-15 Phryné devant ses juges...... 279

viii

Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

FEMALE PUBLIC NUDITY IN BELLE ÉPOQUE PARIS

Lela Lovett Felter-Kerley

December 2006

Chair: Sheryl T. Kroen Major Department: History

My dissertation focuses upon the emergence and controversy surrounding la femme nue, the performative female nude artist of the Parisian music hall and public ball between 1889 and 1914. I try to understand the cultural conditions that contributed to displays of female nudity in Parisian public life and how the actions of these performers played a major role in questions concerning censorship, separate spheres, the New

Woman, and in redefinitions of public morality. Using a variety of sources, ranging from the popular press, published memoirs, trial transcripts, fiction and photographic records, the dissertation focuses upon moments of crisis when the nude body challenged

conventional notions about femininity and social mores.

My investigation of la femme nue evolves from an already emerging line of inquiry

which problematizes actresses and dancers bodies within the larger social, political, and

moral milieu of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Europe. How, I ask, did the spectacularization of female nudity serve divergent social interests and groups? What were the perceptions, either real or imagined, of these performers and the various

ix reactions to their performances? More importantly, how did la femme nue view herself

and her actions in light of current debates over art and morality, the definition of public

and private spaces, and the individual’s access to or assertion of sexual pleasure? I argue that la femme nue’s self-actualization in the streets and theaters of Paris not only operated

as a catalyst for the formation and normalization of an alternative female identity, the

New Woman, but also reinforced traditional boundaries of sex and class on the eve of the

Great War.

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

All has been said, written on the bitter destiny of the Beauty Contest. But I have read nothing that treats the existence of women who are nude by profession. Maybe they do not have a history.1

Reflecting upon her experiences as a music hall performer, Colette chose the singular, all-encompassing, provocative concept of Nudité as the title for her autobiographical account. Perhaps one of her least known and read literary works,

Nudité speaks to the reality of sexual labor within Parisian entertainment by rendering a minor figure of the theater both visible and human. Having inherited her name from the pictorial female nude and the nude’s real-life counterpart, the artist’s model, la femme nue denoted a new type of female performer who practiced the art of undressing on the

Belle Époque music hall stage.

An unleashing of unrestrained pleasure and cultural experimentation in the last two decades before the Great War set the stage for various challenges to a bourgeois status quo. Behind the Belle Époque’s propagation of leisure sites, production of pornography, and creation of an artistic avant-garde lay a desire for greater individual freedom that, as this study shows, was expressed in the eroticized image of la femme nue. Thanks to new psycho-sexual theories put forth by Sigmund Freud and other sexologists of the time, the

“exposed” female body became redefined as a source of sexual pleasure and identity.2

1 Colette, Nudité (Paris, 2002), 19.

2 Alison Smith, Exposed: The Victorian Nude (New York, 2002).

1 2

The spirited performances of women baring their breasts, legs, even entire bodies, at festivals and theaters during the Belle Époque, as Charles Rearick has argued, represented a “conscious effort to break with traditional culture judged too austere or elitest.”3 Although Rearick privileges the roles played by artists, directors, and

entertainment entrepreneurs in critiquing contemporary moral and gender ideologies

through displays of female flesh, his sweeping coverage of Parisian leisure pursuits provides a backdrop for analyzing the candid treatment of sex within public spaces.

Based on recent studies of French, British, and American theaters at the turn of the century, the appearance of undressed women represented a menace to nations already weakened by social strife over the cultural accommodation of colonial “savages” and women’s changing role in society.4 By violating moral prescriptions governing self-

exposure and separate spheres, la femme nue fed a current phobia of hysterical, socially

transgressive, and sexually rapacious femmes fatales threatening to throw French society

into what Elaine Showalter aptly refers to as a state of “sexual anarchy.”5

This project contends that la femme nue is an important subject of historical

analysis precisely for the way in which she implicated the undressed body in turn of the

century crises concerning the individual, the social body, and the state. Because the

3 Charles Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Époque: Entertainment and Festivity at the Turn of the Century (New Haven, Conn., 1985), 24.

4 Rae Beth Gordon, “Fashion and the White Savage in the Parisian Music Hall,” Fashion Theory, Volume 8, 3, 267-300; Davinia Caddy, “Variations on a Dance of the Seven Veils: Paris, ca. 1910,” Cambridge Opera Journal, (March 2005): 37-58; Judith Walkowitz, “The ‘Vision of Salome:’ Cosmopolitanism and Erotic Dancing in Central London, 1908-1918” American Historical Review 108, no. 2 (April 2003): 337- 376; Amy Koritz, Gendering Bodies/Performing Art: Dance and Literature in Early Twentieth-Century British Culture (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1995); Susan Glenn, Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Votes for Women (Cambridge, Mass., 2000).

5 Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin-de-Siècle (New York, 1990).

undressed body operated as a powerful metaphor for human nature, symbolizing

concurrently innocence, openness, beauty, and simplicity as well as lust, sin, perversion,

and temptation, the domestic stability and international reputation of France swung

precariously in the balance depending upon how it addressed the relatively new phenomenon of female public nudity. A broad cross section of French society, from social reformers, theater critics, artists, and sexologists, to journalists, dancers, directors,

spectators, and censors debated the meaning and moral efficacy of women appearing in

public with little to no clothes on. Their reactions, responses, and proposed solutions

demonstrate that la femme nue played an integral role in reconfiguring two highly important means of national self-definition in pre-World War One France: moral values and gender relations.

Over the past fifteen years, scholars specializing in literature, dance, history, and theater have converged over the area of performance studies to analyze the subject of

entertainment. A focus on leisure sites, performance styles, audiences, and entertainers within a socio-political and economic context has shed light on the cultural dynamics of

New York, London, Berlin, and to some extent, Paris during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The history of music halls, drinking saloons, cabarets, and cafés-concerts as culturally-specific institutions of amusement has addressed topics ranging from the spatial orientation of urban nightlife, the content and costuming of shows, audience composition, architectural motifs, and the policing of prostitution, alcohol consumption, and nudity.6 One area of research within this field concentrates on the reconstruction of

6 For a discussion of urban nightlife in Victorian Britain, see Diana Howard, London Theaters and Music Halls, 1850-1950 (London, 1970); Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, 1978); Michael Booth, Victorian Spectacular Theater, 1850-1910 (London, 1981); Gavin Weightman, Big Lights, Big City: London Entertained, 1830-1950 (London, 1992); and Peter Bailey, Music Hall: The Business of Pleasure

certain kinds of performance and the personal and professional opportunities they

provided to women. Robert Allen, Deborah Jowitt, Anglea Latham, and Tracy Davis

have framed their discussions on burlesque, Oriental and nude dancing in terms of the

material conditions and cultural constraints under which actresses, singers, and dancers

worked.7 Susan Glenn, Judith Walkowitz, and Amy Koritz, on the other hand, have

emphasized the way in which these women’s performative choices functioned as vehicles

for the expression of alternative subjectivities and pretexts for moral panic.8 Although

their attention to internationally renowned stars of the British and American music hall

offers a distorted picture of the theatrical profession in relation to women’s experiences,

their collective work serves as a useful model for undertaking similar endeavors in the

context of Belle Époque France.

While Colette was certainly not the first (nor the last) to recognize the importance

of la femme nue’s emergence within Parisian entertainment, the historiography on these

unconventional performers suffers from conflicting dates, interpretations, a lack of

supporting evidence, and scholarly interest.9 This state of confusion prompted my search

(Milton Keyes, 1986); idem, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City (Cambridge, 1998). With regard to an American context, see Lewis Erenberg, Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1830-1930 (Chicago, 1981); Randy McBee, Dance Hall Days: Intimacy and Leisure among Working-Class Immigrants in the U.S. (New York, 2000); Andrea Friedman, Prurient Interests: Gender, Democracy, and Obscenity in New York City, 1909-1945 (New York, 2000).

7 Robert Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1991); Deborah Jowitt, Time and the Dancing Image (New York, 1988); Angela Latham; Tracy Davis, Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture (London, 1991); idem, The Economics of the British Stage, 1800-1914 (Cambridge, 2000).

8 Glenn, The Female Spectacle; Walkowitz, “The Vision of Salome”; Koritz, Gendering Bodies/Performing Art.

9 Emmanuel Bourcier, La Vie des Femmes de Music Hall: Chairs Nues, Ames Voilées (Paris, 1929); Paul Reboux, “Le Nu,” Eros, (April 1931); Colette Andris, Une Danseuse Nue (Paris, 1933); H.M. Alexander, Striptease: The Vanished Art of Burlesque (New York, 1938); Francois des Aulnoyes, Histoire et

5 to locate the historical actors and events that significantly shaped people’s perception and reception of la femme nue prior to World War One. Although a large body of secondary literature on gender, sexuality, and modern France exists, this corpus tends to overlook public nudity entirely in favor of treating social understandings of the body and desire through the lenses of illegitimacy, fertility, prostitution, abortion, divorce, feminism, and pederasty.10 Having developed along the lines of national case studies, a growing body of literature on pornography and nudism for nineteenth and twentieth-century Europe offers little choice by way of synthetic works.11

The problematization of meaning behind popular representations of “nude” and

“naked” bodies within cultural studies over the last ten years has contributed to new understandings of spectatorship and the body as a cultural text.12 Jann Matlock and

Philosophie du Striptease: Essai sur l’Eroticisme au Music Hall (Paris, 1958); Denys Chevalier, Metaphysique du Striptease (Paris, 1960); Lucien Rimel, De Mayol aux Femmes Nues (Paris, 1965); Jean Charvil, Strip-tease: Histoire et sociologie (Paris, 1969); Jean-Pierre Pastori, À Corps perdu: La Danse Nue au XX Siècle (Paris, 1983).

10 See James MacMillan, France and Women, 1789-1914: Gender, Society, and Politics (New York, 2000); Alain Corbin, Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850 (Cambridge, Mass., 1990); Karen Offen, European Feminisms, 1700-1950: A Political History (Stanford, Calif., 2000); Rachel Fuchs, Poor and Pregnant in Paris: Strategies for Survival in the Nineteenth-Century (New Brunswick, N.J., 1992); Thomas Laqueur and Catherine Gallagher, eds., Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth-Century (Berkeley, Calif., 1987); Carolyn Dean, The Frail Social Body: Pornography, Homosexuality and other Fantasies in Inter-War France (Berkeley, Calif., 2000).

11 There is an extensive body of literature on the photographic nude in relation to pornography, the study of human locomotion, and painting. However this scholarship is so vast that I will not list it here. An extensive amount of research has been done on German nudism. See Karl Toepfer, Empire and Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910-1935 (Berkeley, Calif., 1997); Michael Hau, The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany: A Social History, 1890-1930 (Chicago, 2003); Chad Ross, Naked Germany: Health, Race, and the Nation (Oxford, 2005). For France see Arnaud Bauberot’s Histoire du naturisme: Le mythe du retour à la nature (Rennes, 2004).

12 Hollis Clayson, Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era (New Haven, Conn., 1991); Heather Dawkins, The Nude in French Art and Culture, 1870-1910 (Cambridge, 2002); Tamar Garb, Bodies of Modernity: Figure and Flesh in Fin-de-Siècle France (Cambridge, 2001); Maria-Elena Buszek, “Representing ‘Awarishness:’ Burlesque, Feminist Transgression, and the 19th Century Pin-Up,” The Drama Review 43, 4 (Winter 1999): 141-162; Elizabeth Menon, “Images of Pleasure and Vice:

Heather McPherson have studied how photographic, literary, and artistic productions in

late nineteenth-century France raised concerns over the polluting effects that realistic

portraits of everyday life might have on unenlightened readers and viewers.13 New

optical devices, literary genres (realism and naturalism) and formats (feuilletons and

novels), as well as amusement attractions (the Morgue, Musées Grevin and Dupuytren), contributed to the de-containment and popularization of hyper-sexualized, hyper- racialized bodies. With regard to the world of modern entertainment, the physical site of the theater created erotic fantasies as much as they fed fears of a deadly female sexuality.

Whereas Lenard Berlanstein and Rhonda Gharelick have addressed how literary representations of French actresses as respectable, middle-class women aimed to contain the image of the unruly female performer, Mary Louise Roberts and Rae Beth Gordon have highlighted a group of women who actively constructed public personalities and manipulated the dissemination of those personas through print and performance. Their analyses highlight the importance of the Belle Époque theater as a space where women could experiment with new attitudes towards sex and perform femininity within a broader culture of social prescriptions, stereotypes, material constraints.14

Women of the Fringe,” in Gabriel Weisberg, ed., Montmartre and the Making of Mass Culture (New Brunswick, N.J., 2001).

13 Jann Matlock, Scenes of Seduction: Prostitution, Hysteria, and Reading Difference in Nineteenth- Century France (New York, 1994); Heather McPherson, The Modern Portrait in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, 2001).

14 Rhonda Gharelick, Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender, and Performance in the Fin de Siècle (Princeton, N.J., 1998); Lenard Berlanstein, Daughters of Eve: A Cultural History of French Theater Women from the Old Regime to the Fin-de-Siècle (Cambridge, Mass., 2001); Mary Louise Roberts, Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-Siècle France (Chicago, 2002).

Based on these lines of inquiry, this dissertation focuses upon the emergence of and

controversy surrounding the lesser-known femme nue as she made her debut within

popular modes of entertainment and festivity, most notably public balls and music halls.

Methodologically, it investigates those moments of crisis or scandal where la femme nue

challenged social mores and conventional understandings of femininity, the female nude,

and art. A series of events, beginning with an institutionally-sanctioned social gathering

of artists and their models and culminating in street riots, skin shows, and highly

publicized trials, contributed to the creation of new standards of morality and

subjectivity. Theatrical critiques in major newspaper and literary publications, personal

memoirs from the performers themselves and those who knew them, police files on the

scandals involving nudity in the theater and on the streets, as well as the trial proceedings

and judgments of the courts and anti-vice leagues serve as primary sources of documentation. These data suggests that la femme nue functioned as a real and symbolic site for the articulation of social anxieties, the reconfiguration of gender relations, and the creation of modern subjectivities. As the object of a male gaze, la femme nue provided male professionals and spectators with the opportunity to articulate a masculine identity typified by self-discipline and sexual self-control, two characteristics that would dispel

concerns about an overly active male sexuality. Moments of slippage in la femme nue’s

performances, however, provided evidence otherwise, thus raising questions about men’s

ability to curb the rise of a modern female subjectivity grounded in corporeal pride and

sex. La femme nue manipulated a republican culture founded upon sexual difference by

capitalizing upon her womanliness in order to carve out a space from which she could redefine and critique moral and gender norms. Consequently, her destabilization of the

current social order contributed to a national “dis-ease” over the New Woman afflicting

France on the eve of the Great War.

Drawing from a range of theoretical frameworks connected with art history, the history of sexuality, and the study of gender and performance, this dissertation

understands the human body as a material artifact and a cultural signifier of sexual

difference. Based on Michel Foucault’s thesis that sex became the foundation of a new

social order driven by the interests of the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth-century, this

project casts the body as a site of social control, contestation, and negotiation.15

Specifically, it problematizes the relationship between the female body and the body

politic by questioning the historically-specific, value-laden attribution of ideal perfection

with nudity and of pornography with nakedness, two concepts which were of central

importance to matters of representation, spectatorship, sexuality, and cultural politics.

With the help of such theorists as Judith Butler and Elizabeth Grosz, it assesses the extent

to which women exercised control over the representation and dissemination of their

identities and bodies on and off stage and how representations and meanings of the

undressed female body changed over time and were subsequently placed at the center of

social, political, and cultural significance by the twentieth-century.

The underlying questions driving this dissertation are three-fold. Why did certain

women expose their bodies publicly at a time when a woman’s moral virtue was, among

other things, measured by the length of her hemline? In what ways did their actions

deviate from, conform to, or complicate a normative bourgeois femininity and aesthetic

15 Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité (Paris, 1976).

9 of the female body? And lastly, how should one interpret those performances in light of larger cultural shifts taking place?

In the process of answering these three questions, this project’s narrative structure relies upon a collection of historical accounts provided by St. Albin, Georges Normandy,

Georges Montorgeuil, Louis Morin, and F.A. Ersky. As theater critics, journalists, and artists of the Belle Époque, they shared a particular reverence for la femme nue that colored and shaped their stories of this figure and the key moments in her history. In contrast to a more dominant discourse of sexual regulation associated with the state and anti-vice crusaders, these little-known chroniclers articulated a discourse of liberal individualism that supported the artist and the director, the consumer and the spectator as arbiters of taste when it came to art, the marketplace, and morality. In challenging the vestiges of an old order where the state and church dictated the parameters of a person’s life, they rallied around la femme nue as a symbol and literal embodiment of greater personal and social freedom.

Their writings, having come in two waves, reflected and confirmed the importance of the mid-1890s and the mid-to-late 1910s as significant points in the history of la femme nue. In both cases, these cultural observers were responding to trials where the exhibition of scantily dressed women disrupted traditional forms of spectating, presentational styles of the female body, and rules governing female behavior. With very few exceptions, almost all of them interpreted the 1893 Bal des Quat’z-Arts as a flashpoint when the exhibition of unclothed women became the source of aesthetic and moral debate between conservative and liberal forces, the focus of vice societies, and a

target of judicial pursuit.16 Like the annual Carnival festivals from which it was modeled,

the Bal des Quat’z-Arts satirized the conditions under which art idealized its subjects by exposing the romanticized female nude for who she really was, a living and breathing studio model of dubious origins. In the process of bringing their tableaux vivants to life, the students of the École des Beaux-Arts provided a forum where studio models could

construct their own representations of visibility thereby troubling and complicating

notions of liberal individualism, masculinity and femininity, separate spheres, and the

distinction between art and reality.

The legal battle that ensued between the state and students in the aftermath of the

Bal des Quat’z-Arts turned an act of female nudity into one of the decade’s most popular

causes célèbres. Whereas the Dreyfus Affair has often exemplified the political struggle that divided the French on issues of race, religion, and cultural accommodation, the Bal des Quat’z-Arts trial and the riots that followed in its wake illustrated the extreme polarization of and struggle to redefine French moral precepts at the end of the nineteenth-century. A court condemnation of the models and their sponsor for abusing the right of artistic freedom incited a week-long conflict of blood and violence amongst followers of an official bourgeois morality and those sympathetic to a modern, secular, and sexually liberal system of values. Together, the ball, the trial, and the riots

16 St. Albin, “Le nu au théâtre,” Mercure de France, vol. 1-4 (Paris, 1911); Georges Normandy, Le nu à l’église, au théâtre, et dans la rue (Paris, 1909); Georges Montorgeuil, Paris dansant (Paris, 1896); idem, L’année féminine, 1895: Les déshabillés au théâtre (Paris, 1896); Louis Morin, Les carnavals parisiens (Paris, 1898); idem, Revue de quat’ saisons: Revue trimestrielle illustrée (Paris, 1900); F.A. Ersky, Est-il le nu au théâtre impudique? (Paris, 1909).

11 represented the first major blow to an already eroding code of social norms that denied an acknowledgement of sex as part of one’s identity.

A cultural tension over the issue of female public nudity spilled over into the music hall where an increased outpouring in sexual expression on stage and within related paraphernalia served as a catalyst for moral conservatives to organize international conferences against pornography and to encourage governmental pursuit of nude spectacles. At a time when anxieties about the loosening of family, church, and community ties caused by industrialization were having their greatest impact, nude revues captured the attention of social purists who had recently formed moral leagues under the direction of Protestant pastor Louis Comte and Senator René Bérenger. The abolition of theatrical censorship in 1905 only exacerbated vice-crusaders’ fears of immorality in the theater, causing the number of performers and directors tried before a court of judges for outrages aux bonnes moeurs (insults to public decency) to climax in

1908. A dramatic reversal in the court’s judgment on the appropriateness of nudity within a five-month span evidenced a conservative backlash to shore up an eroding bourgeois sex/gender system. For the first time in French legal history, a precedent distinguishing between “artistic” and “pornographic” nudity was established. From that point on, governmental intolerance of performances featuring women in various states of undress increased until all forms of nude entertainment were completely outlawed with the outbreak of world war.

Chapter 2 discusses the genesis of la femme nue as a product of high and low cultural practices emanating from specific artistic milieus. The emergence of la femme nue did not adhere to one simple trajectory but was a multi-layered and complex merger

of performative practices that brought together artifice and naturalism, the abstract and

the real, the past and the present in an effort to redefine the terms by which female bodies

could be viewed, represented, and enjoyed. Throughout the 1880s, the avant-garde press

played a pivotal role in challenging bourgeois moral precepts by eroticizing the female

nude in its graphic illustrations. One saucy paper, the Courrier Français, revealed how diverse and nuanced this challenge really was by hosting its own Fête de Nu in 1889.

Providing the inspiration for what would take place just four years later at the 1893 Bal des Quat’z-Arts, the Courrier Français operated as a driving force in opposing bourgeois social hypocrisy. Its involvement in converting the female nude from a figure of flat print media to one of live performance at both of these balls suggests that the paper functioned as a major vehicle for disseminating spectacles of undressed women through a variety of mediums during the Belle Époque.

A desire to visualize the female nude-in-motion appealed to and served dual

purposes for a second group, the students of the École des Beaux-Arts. The official

reason cited for choosing the female nude model as the subject of a new social aesthetics

communicated a need to study the human body as a natural, unadulterated piece of

beauty. Their representation of art outside the studio in the form of live entertainment

was, as the students declared, an attempt to redefine one’s understanding of realism by

questioning what it meant to draw from life. And yet the presentation of the artist’s

model as a “living” nude in the space of a bal public raised a host of issues including, but

not limited to, the extent to which sexual expression and individual autonomy should be

permitted within France’s Third Republic. Knowing that what they proposed entailed a

redefinition of the nature of art and the artist-model relationship, artists affirmed their

right to freedom of expression at the same time that they veiled their challenge to

established artistic practices under the guise of a carnivalesque, gaulois gaiety.

In signifying a vision of society that was at once in keeping with tradition and

bordering on the irreverent, the ball opened up a space where the cultural myth of the

artist as a heroic and sexually innocent genius capable of transforming nature into culture

was thrown into doubt. Although artists enjoyed a degree of immunity from moral attacks regarding their contact with undressed women, their representation of the female nude-in-motion in the semi-public space of the bal public violated strict protocols regulating the production and display of her image and consequently undermined their claims to masculinity and professional propriety. In the process of putting forth a new vision of modern spectatorship and representation, the artists’ ball had the unintended

consequence of subverting an already unstable gender order by investing the female

model with a degree of agency. Having once stood atop platforms motionless,

speechless, and devoid of clothes, the model moved from the studio to the bal public and thus became a self-actualizing subject who could now construct her own representations of visibility.

A broadening in visual culture whereupon the art of gazing upon unclothed female bodies was transformed from a privilege into a public ritual was due in large measure to the music hall, a site that played host to and then later restaged these bals publics within its revues de fin d’années (end-of-the-year revues). Chapter 3 examines la femme nue as a complex and multi-faceted figure of the music hall whose ambiguous class origins played a key role in shaping audience reception. While the sight of women wearing revealing costumes in fixed poses already existed as a form of music hall entertainment,

14 the presentation of the performative female nude appears to have been a relatively new feat undertaken in or around the time of the Bal des Quat’z-Arts. The incorporation of the artist’s model in tableaux vivants as well as a stock character in revues centering on the atelier (artist’s studio) facilitated her jump from the studio and bal public to the theater. In addition to revealing a deeper desire across social groups and classes to contemplate the female form for reasons of artistic beauty and pleasure, the music hall posed and staged la femme nue through a variety of framing devices that helped to de- contain and project an image of la femme nue as an alternate model of Parisian femininity. Commercial advertisements, photographs, and literature associated with the world of entertainment conferred a level of respectability and a degree of cultural authority upon working-class femmes de revues (showgirls) that performed a multiplicity of roles from mythical goddesses, to ancient queens, and foreign deities.

A second critique of la femme nue originating from a more morally and socially conservative subset of the French population situates her within the context of social norms and the regulation of public morality. In their discussion of who could assert sexual desire and access sexual material in public places, politicians, bureaucrats, moral activists, and public prosecutors implicated la femme nue in a series of public debates on the role and utility of censorship in a republican society, the nature of public versus private spheres, and the appropriate roles for women. By portraying la femme nue as a desirable yet dangerous, transcendental yet transgressive, pretty yet perverse physiognomic type, these sources evoked fears of an unregulated female sexuality on public display at the same time that they expressed a faith in the public’s ability to morally govern itself. Their comments not only gave expression to the cultural tensions

underlying the Belle Époque as a period when conflicting traditions, values, and practices

merged, sometimes easily, and sometimes less so, but they also placed the issue of female

public nudity at the forefront of discussions about modernity.

La femme nue acted as a lightening rod for those who had the most to lose, namely

the men and women most closely associated with institutions of social control. Chapter 4

addresses those individuals and groups who tried to contain the performative female nude

to a limited number of spaces and persons. Charges brought against artists, theater directors, models, working class spectators, and female performers who demanded the right of expression and choice on the basis of their participation in mass culture and a market economy revealed that not everyone embraced the notion of liberal individualism as it applied to mass consumer culture and that many blamed it for a host of social problems, from a weakening of familial ties, to depopulation and degeneracy.

We would know very little about these individuals if it were not for René Bérenger who represented in the public’s mind the antithesis of liberal individualism. He articulated a particular perspective held within French society that equated a growing acceptance of women appearing in public, acting on their own, speaking for themselves, and daring to bare more with a decline in morality commonly attributed to the larger process of degeneration. A brief autobiographical account of his life in public service serves as an introduction to Chapter 4, which discusses the formation of moral leagues and assesses their ability to shape public opinion through anti-pornography propaganda, legislate a moral social agenda for the cultural arts, and instigate judicial pursuits against

violators.

In addition to petitions and pamphlets penned by anti-vice crusaders, ministerial circulars, governmental decrees, laws, and censor reports indicate the degree to which public spaces were to be policed for the display of nude figures and expressed opinions about what was considered appropriate or inappropriate womanly conduct and dress.

Although censorship of the press had been lifted since 1881, the government continued its campaign against what it deemed immoral theatrical productions. Chapter 5 looks at the ways in which la femme nue was central to definitional understandings of separate spheres, “obscenity,” and “art” and to debates regarding the abolition and maintenance of dramatic censorship. The range of venues, types of performances, and variety of costumes in which she appeared complicated the government’s response to nude spectacles. How should the Third Republic, a government brought into existence on the belief of the individual as a rational, self-disciplined, and autonomous being, limit the freedoms already granted to its citizenry since 1881 or refuse their expansion to certain groups or areas of public life without appearing morally hypocritical, inconsistent, or contradictory?

The pursuit and prosecution of female actresses, dancers, and models who chose or chose not to wear bodysuits, cache-sexes (chastity belts), or veils, and the theater directors responsible for them show the extent to which presentations of la femme nue had become not only a popular attraction of Belle Époque entertainment, but also a gauge of changing moral values. Chapter 6 isolates the year 1908 as a moment when a series of legal conflicts involving female nudity in music halls and restaurants placed la femme nue’s body as a site of contestation for the deep struggles of the subject as citizen. Who or what institutions had the moral authority to dictate what the paying public could or

could not see? How was artistic freedom to be construed and practiced after the abolition

of dramatic censorship? Under what conditions and to what degree could female entertainers undress themselves and still appear chaste and civilized? In the course of

these select trials, such questions reflected a struggle within French society to come to

terms with a more modern, secular, and liberal outlook.

A large part of this transition had to do with la femme nue embodying the New

Woman and marginalized Other in pre-World War One France. Not long after the

infamous balls of 1893, la femme nue had moved sequentially from her officially

sanctioned home at the École des Beaux-Arts, to the semi-public space of the bal public,

to her final residence in the theater, all the while eluding moral activists and

governmental authorities. Her enhanced visibility suggested a rising impulse among a

cadre of women to step beyond traditional gender roles and reinvent themselves outside

the parameters of contemporary social norms. A lack of published memoirs and

interviews, as well as a vast discrepancy among the actresses and dancers who performed

nude and their reasons for doing so, has made the task of recovering this historical subject and speaking of a representative femme nue extremely difficult. In many cases, these women were anonymous actresses on the historical scene who did not feel it necessary to record their experiences. Those that did did so because they had achieved a level of stardom rare for performers of this type and were abnormally conscious of that fame and the place it held in the annals of history.

Despite the incongruity of their voices Chapter 7 attempts to discern who these women were, what nudity meant to them, and how they understood their actions and defined their audiences. Whereas Colette, Isadora Duncan, and other famous celebrities

translated their performances in terms of current understandings of the body as an

instrument of health or a work of art, the more typical Parisian showgirl was more open

and less apologetic about her bodily displays. In interviews taken mostly from Fantasio,

these lesser-known femmes des revues candidly expressed feelings of personal freedom,

selfish joy, and pride about their exhibitionist acts. With its dubious reputation for manufacturing juicy gossip, Fantasio may have influenced the respondents’ statements, encouraging them to adopt a position that may or may not have been in sync with how

they truly felt. Because of their suspect credibility, the autobiographical sources

pertaining to la femme nue must be scrutinized for the way in which these atypical

women self-fashioned a certain personae for themselves. Taken together, their

statements nevertheless provide the raw material for a rough, yet viable framework for

making basic generalizations about la femme nue in spite of disparate motives, outlooks,

and experiences.

In sum, a modern female sexual identity predicated on bodily exposure emerged

out of a specific strain of artistic life infused with gender and body politics at the end of

the nineteenth-century. Artist balls and music halls provided the creative space for

women, artists, impresarios, and the illustrated press to cast the natural body as a valuable

and worthy instrument of self-expression. In posing, singing, acting, and dancing d’après

la nature (in accordance with natural law), la femme nue as a cultural ideal and real

figure acted as a screen onto which various groups projected their artistic drives, sexual

desires, monetary interests and cultural anxieties. A centuries-long tradition of equating

civilization with clothing eventually broke down in the face of a collective effort to

integrate la femme nue as a figure of mainstream popular culture. What had once been

19 denigrated and denounced as a sign of vulgar working-class sexuality had become an increasingly acceptable part of bourgeois womanhood by the twentieth-century.

CHAPTER 2 FROM THE STUDIO TO THE STREETS: THE FEMALE NUDE ARTIST IN FIN-DE- SIÈCLE PARIS

In 1895 the writer and social critic Gustave Coquiot defined the subject of his book,

Les bals publics, “not as a ball open to everyone but rather a market of women—with

music.”1 While others might have described these semi-public festivals by their festive nature with colorful costumes, illuminated halls, and fanciful decorations, Coquiot looked past the artifice to describe what he saw as the very undercurrent of social and economic change occurring in Belle Époque Paris: the obsequious commodification of female bodies under the guise of popular entertainment.

This chapter engages with Coquiot’s statement by examining a cultural institution where pockets of resistance to a primarily male-oriented visual culture emerged. The first half of the 1890s constituted a critical juncture where the female nude, sanctioned to reside within the restrictive space of the atelier, moved out onto the streets of Paris to become an active subject in her own right. The appearance and exhibitionist exploits of the studio model within semi-public festivals gave occasion for students and journalists to celebrate and to represent the freedom of expression through her bodily image while reaffirming a professional identity based on masculine privilege for themselves. The bal public, with its carnivalesque reversal of social mores, provided a forum through which students and models of the École des Beaux-Arts, in conjunction with an avant-garde literary press, staged one of the first public demonstrations of female nudity in Belle

1 Gustave Coquiot, Les bals publics (Paris, 1895), 5.

20 21

Époque France. “A pretext for the revelation of completely pure beauty,” the bal public

would open up a space where further revelations of the female flesh would take place just

a few years later.2

Chapter 2 explores the framing of female bodies at bals publics in terms of

commodification and female agency. It argues that bals publics functioned as a

springboard from whence living nude spectacles garnered attention, gained acceptance,

and expanded into the more public arena of the music hall. Rather than examine bals

publics as a whole, I limit my investigation to two bals publics organized and enjoyed by members of Bohemia, namely journalists, artists, and youth who together comprised and

inhabited a counter-culture that opposed the materialism and social hypocrisy of

bourgeois society. The Bals de Courrier Français and the Bals des Quat’z-Arts’

positioning of the female nude as a central icon of change and modernity exemplifies the

way in which the illustrated press and art world collaborated to give expression to the

dynamic tensions underpinning Belle Époque social and gender relations.

The first section of this chapter presents a general historical overview of bals

publics, highlighting their importance within nineteenth-century French society and

suggesting how the most popular bal public of the Second Empire, the Bal de l’Opéra,

paved the way for and facilitated the expansion of erotic corporeal display in late

nineteenth-century France. After the morally and politically repressive decade of the

1870s and a loosening of press laws in the 1880s, an explosion in mass media further

galvanized the reading and viewing public’s interest in the female body. The second section identifies the female body as a critical site of experimentation and contestation

22 St. Albin, “Le nu au théâtre,” Mercure de France, vols. 1-4 (Paris, 1911): 452.

22 within the public sphere of the illustrated press and its corporately sponsored bals publics.

The Courrier Français, with its reputation for mildly pornographic drawings of unclothed women, experimented with images of the female body by playing upon academic art’s artificial distinction between “nude” and “naked.” Its Fête du Nu acted as a source of inspiration for the creation of artists’ balls where the canonical pillar of Art, the nude/naked binary, dramatically collapsed. The last two sections of the chapter address the problematization of the female nude-as-naked within nineteenth-century

French art and specifically within the 1893 Bal des Quat’z-Arts. An overview of nineteenth-century French artistic conventions and motifs that governed the nude’s appearance in official art provides a point of contrast for thinking about when, how, and why moments of slippage in its representation within fine art and bals publics engendered debates, scandal, and concern about Art’s relation to morality and society. In the process, the chapter discusses how a change in studio practices in the last half of the century altered the way in which art students physically confronted and engaged with the Nude’s real-life counterpart, the studio model. A gendering of the artist-model relationship made the female nude’s containment within official art and the studio even more important although the institutional restraints limiting one’s access to her were becoming increasingly difficult to sustain with the rise of a mass consumer culture. Artists themselves threw into question and undermined established protocols regulating their interactions with and their painting of the nude studio model by allying themselves with the popular press in the formulation of new forms of artistic expression that challenged centuries-old presentational and viewing strategies of the nude. In short, adaptations of the female nude in fin-de-siècle visual culture testified to the centrality and potency of the

body in both projecting concerns about and redefining the limits of self-expression for

both artists and models.

History of Public Balls

To a great extent, balls have been an overlooked and understudied feature of

Parisian daily life. Francois Gasnault, in his book Guinguettes et Lorettes: Bals publics et danse sociale à Paris entre 1830 à 1870, has made an important contribution to our understanding of the bal public by showing how it played a central role as an emotional, social, and sexual safety valve in the first half of the century.3 Originating under the

reign of Louis XV, public balls were a social institution oriented towards physical

recreation that had been transformed, after 1789, from an elite to a popular pastime.

Individuals who shared a common identity or purpose united together in an expression of

group solidarity that was annually or seasonally displayed at banquets and festivals. By

the mid-nineteenth century, dance had become a central aspect of these balls.4 As Sarah

Cohen has shown for the ancien régime, dance as a social practice promoted individual

and corporate identities as well as secured one’s place within a hierarchical power

structure.5 This continued to be the case for the post-revolutionary period but with one

difference. As dance throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century

gradually encouraged bodily contact between the sexes, it acquired a dimension of

3 Francois Gasnault, Guinguettes et Lorettes: Bals publics et danse sociale à Paris entre 1830 à 1870 (Paris, 1986).

4 Theodore Zeldin, A History of French Passions, 1848-1945, vol. 2: Intellect, Taste, and Anxiety, (Oxford, 1973), 657, 659, 663-665.

5 Sarah Cohen, Art, Dance, and the Body in French Culture of the Ancien Régime (Cambridge, 2000).

heightened eroticism that subsequently transformed balls into spaces for titillating

encounters.

One of the more famous balls of the nineteenth-century, the Bal de l’ Opéra,

highlighted the progressive eroticisation of this leisurely activity within highbrow

milieus. Known by the derisive sobriquet, “the ball of hands,” the Opera Ball joined

together members of an aspiring bourgeoisie with those of an influential yet financially

destitute aristocracy in a physical embrace that signified potential marriage contracts

between the two parties.6 The waltz, which had replaced the more formal, aristocratic

dances of the minuet and polonaise as the most current form of modern dance, became a seasonal courting ritual showcased at the event. At a time when “many still took the view that a lady should never come into contact with a gentleman who was not a near relative or an actual or probable husband,” the waltz contributed to a heightened awareness of and social anxiety about physical contact between the sexes.7 Symbolizing

“the license and vulgar impropriety that had become only too patent in modern life,” the

waltz, when combined with the decolletés (low-cut necklines) popular in women’s

fashion, stirred fears about an uncontrollable male sexuality as well.8 Moral prudes

worried that the sight of “a corner of skin” could arouse the most “indescribable erotic

furies” in men and lead them to commit “vulgar and obscene acts.”9

6 Louis Morin, Les carnavals parisiens (Paris, 1898), 22.

7 Peter Fryer, Mrs Grundy: Studies in English Prudery (London, 1963), 218, 220.

8 Ibid.

9 Georges Montorgeuil, Paris dansant (Paris, 1896), 126.

The sexually charged nature of the Bal de l’Opéra, alongside the gestural and

vestimentary practices of nineteenth-century social dances, only reinforced the working classes’ impression of the Second Empire as a morally corrupt regime. The Bal de

l’Opéra’s association with the nouvelles couches sociales, an enterprising group of individuals who had recently come into wealth through the capitalistic ventures of the

Industrial Revolution and opportunistic marriages, left it vulnerable to attacks and open to ridicule by those disenchanted with and marginalized within society.

A number of balls started in the 1880s highlighted the hypocritical notion of bourgeois respectability flaunted within such venues. Jules Levy, a member of an eclectic group of artist-poets who sought to undercut the notion of noblesse oblige, founded the Bal des Incohérents as a foil and “rival to the long-established, elegant Opera

Ball.” Playing with the notion of fixed social and gender identities, the Incohérents Ball encouraged guests to dress as inanimate objects or sexually ambiguous stock characters from the theater in order to expose the absurdity of bourgeois life. Sponsored by the journal, Courrier Français, the Bal des Incohérents enjoyed a decade of popularity as

Paris’ anti-establishment ball even after the Courrier Français founded its own ball in

1887. Together, the two balls “opened up the freer world of artistic fantasy to a larger public” which sought the same sexual freedoms of the upper echelons but without the duplicity.10

Little has been written on the costume and masked balls of the Third Republic.

10 Charles Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Époque: Entertainment and Festivity in Turn-of-the-Century France (New Haven, 1985), 61-62.

What we do know has come to us in large part from research conducted by Charles

Rearick who has mapped out the various kinds of balls in existence during the Belle

Époque and their role in developing a modern leisure culture oriented towards

entertainment and festivity. He notes that “calls for regular fêtes (festivals) intensified”

after the first “modern” Bastille Day was celebrated on July 14, 1880.11 The making of

Belle Époque France had a great deal to do with the return of republicanism which re-

instated festivals both as an expression of patriotic pride and a form of social diversion.

As Rearick explains, “the traditional fêtes were falling into decay” as symbols of an

outdated “artistic tradition that was solemn and ponderous” and indicative of a static way

of life which no longer conformed to modern times. 12 In “a conscious effort to break

with a traditional culture now judged too austere or too elitist,” the citizens of Bohemia

repackaged long-established forms of merry-making to enact their “struggle for fantasy,

more natural enjoyment, liberty, and social justice.”13 As an integral part of Bohemian

life, balls vaunted the same primitive and peculiar, exotic and erotic, downtrodden and ostracized subjects that circulated within the avant-garde’s literary declamations, poetry

readings, and cabaret song turns. As a physical site, the public ball acted as a forum

where writers, painters, and students could collectivize and imagine an alternative social

order while simultaneously launching attacks against an oppressive bourgeois system in a

playful, je m’en fout (“I don’t give a damn”) manner.

11 Ibid., 5.

12 Ibid., 36.

13 Ibid., 24, 47.

Rearick’s portrayal of Parisian life in the fin-de-siècle provides an excellent

overview of leisure culture, that is to say those individuals, events, sights, and sounds that

made Paris Europe’s leading pleasure capital. However his discussion of public festivals

and popular theater, while vaguely alluding to the contestatory role they played in

clamoring for new aesthetic and bodily regimes, ignores the issue of gender altogether.

The spectacularization of women’s bodies within late nineteenth-century forms of

amusement was, as Susan Glenn claims, the outward expression of “a dynamic tension

between women’s desire (on as well as off the stage) to use theatrical spectacle as a

vehicle for achieving greater voice in culture and politics,” and the bourgeoisie’s

“countervailing urge to turn female spectacle into a symbolic expression of male

mastery.”14

Susan Glenn’s study of how unconventional actresses from the 1880s to 1920s struggled to break free from the restrictive modes of thinking that influenced how one appeared and performed in public as a true woman encourages one to consider how the nude model posed and was posed within artists’ balls at the fin-de-siècle. Like the female

journalists and play-actors who, according to Mary Louise Roberts, used subversive

strategies such as mimicry and parody to destabilize contemporary cultural constructions of the New Woman, the performative nude model operated as a satire not only of

bourgeois society but also of bourgeois femininity.15 The transgressive quality of her

exhibition signaled a new femininity rooted in corporeal pride and sexual difference. At

14 Susan Glenn, Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Votes for Women (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 3.

15 Mary Louise Roberts, Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-Siècle France (Chicago, 2002).

the same time, artists constructed particular visions of the feminine that variously

deviated from, conformed to, and complicated a normative bourgeois aesthetic of the female body. Their attempts to control the performative nude model through what cultural critic Laura Mulvey has called “the male gaze” reinforced the subjugation of female bodies in the interest of male desire and fraternization.16 Artists too made certain

claims about their personal and professional identities that were occasionally at odds

with, but also mutually supportive of and beneficial to, those of the female nude model.

The Press, Graphic Artists, and Public Balls

The expansion of the Parisian popular press from the 1830s onward gradually

reoriented the reading public away from politics towards art, literature, and

entertainment. Newspapers of the July Monarchy and Second Empire, which primarily

published installments of racy serialized novels known as romans-feuilletons,

embellished their literary columns with drawings of unclothed women during the Third

Republic. Some of the most famous artists of the day, such as Adolphe Willette, Jules

Chéret, and Théophile-Alexandre Steinlein, worked for these papers as their primary

source of income. The popularity and financial success of illustrated journals relied

upon an edgy, avant-garde aesthetic produced and promoted by these graphic artists

whose connection to the Incohérents imbued their works “with a direct challenge, albeit

tongue and cheek, to the art establishment.”17 As an outgrowth and conflation of literary

realism and artistic naturalism of the mid nineteenth-century, these papers purported to

16 Laura Mulvey, “‘You don’t know what’s happening, do you Mr. Jones?’” in Rosizka Parker and Griselda Pollock, eds., Framing Feminism (London, 1987), 131.

17 Ann Galbally, Charles Conder: The Last Bohemian (Melbourne, 2003), 80.

document ‘real’ life in the French capital, giving an up-close and personal view of

Parisian sexual practices for a few centimes or less. Rearick notes that “papers such as

the Fin-de-Siècle and the Courrier Français specialized in relating the more rakish

boulevardier’s view of Paris to readers who may rarely have seen the boulevards.”18

Saucy illustrations often depicted amorous encounters between the bourgeoisie, who bought the papers, and the bohemian society that produced them. Referred to by Rearick as “champions of pleasure,” these journals “carried on a running battle against native

French prudes, hypocrites, and censors,” serving as the “best expression of the raffish and hedonist belle époque.” In order to establish its reputation for being the most libertine of illustrated papers, the Courrier Français “defiantly published drawings of nudes in modern settings” which it then distributed to cafés across France, over 997 in Paris alone.19

The editor and founder of the Courrier Français, Jules Hippolyte Roques, had

grown up in a family of oppositional journalists during the Second Empire. While his

mother earned a living as a teacher, his father Jean Pierre directed the first Courrier

Français as an organ for attacking the politics and person of Napoleon III. Although the

journal folded as a result of its condemnations of the regime, the Roques’ played a pivotal

role nonetheless in undermining France’s last imperial dictatorship. When the Commune

broke out, Jules chose to stay in Paris and work in public administration rather than

relocate with the government to Versailles. He would later follow in his father’s

footsteps, being pursued by government authorities throughout the late nineteenth-

18 Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Époque, 176.

19 Ibid., 42-43, 67.

century for his radical politics and violations of public morality.20 An 1890 article in the

journal L’Égalité traces his real notoriety back to 1884 when, yielding to Montmartre

artists upset that not a single artistic journal was at their disposition, he resurrected the former Courrier Français whose politics, rather than being anti-imperial, were now artistic and literary.21

In its first issue, dated November 16, 1884, a contemporary Lady Liberty graced

the Courrier Français’ cover. Holding a torch above her head in one hand, while in the

other a mirror directed down towards a well, La Verité (The Truth) was the pictorial embodiment of the journal’s mission to make visible that, which remained hidden and concealed.22 This project of enlightenment was stylistically represented through the

graphic arts, which enabled the illustrator to depict the nude in shades of black and white

and thereby dramatize those areas of French society where secrecy, corruption, and

hypocrisy prevailed as a result of governmental repression and bourgeois exploitation.

Long considered a lower form of drawing for its crude renderings, the graphic arts in and

of itself was considered an open challenge to “the highly finished techniques preferred by

academic painters and magazine illustrators.” 23 In choosing to depict traditional subjects

20 Claude Bellanger, Jacques Godechot, Pierre Guiral, Fernand Terrou, Histoire générale de la presse francaise vol. 3, (Paris, 1972), 372.

21 L’Égalité, November 30, 1890.

22 Heather Dawkins notes in her visual analysis of the Courrier Français that the journal exposed the limits of artistic freedom by adopting “the tradition of using the nude to represent abstract symbols like Liberty.” See The Nude in French Art and Culture, 1870-1910 (Cambridge, 2002), 44.

23 Rebecca Zurier, Art for the Masses: A Radical Magazine and Its Graphics, 1911-1917 (Philadelphia, 1988), 139, 153.

of art in a less stylized manner, graphic artists consciously broke away from academic art

and redefined the nature of art itself.

The artist’s right to freely express himself was central to this project of aesthetic reform which was undertaken by the illustrated press and applied to the realm of bals publics. Avant-garde literary and artistic papers pushed the limits of what was morally acceptable both in print and performance by taking advantage of the recent abolition of press censorship in 1881.24 Holding annual festivals became one way in which the

Courrier Français contested the foundations of late-nineteenth century visual culture.

Through the creation of its own bal public, the Courrier Francais drew upon “the same

kind of imaginative zaniness in costume that the Incohérents pioneered” while producing

what Bernard Gendron calls “secondary aesthetic practices--aesthetic activities by artists

not originally considered part of their ‘real oeuvre,’ but that had considerable impact on

the way the ‘real oeuvre’ was originally received.”25 Artists affiliated with the Courrier

Francais used the occasion to play with the idea of Art by blending high and low cultural

forms together in the ball’s display of poster art and bodily exhibitions. This

experimental exercise not only helped them to think more creatively about present and

future projects, but was used by the paper as a marketing strategy or publicity ploy to

attract attention as well. The idea that bals publics as commercial entertainment could be

24 Once a majority of liberal republicans had came to power in that late 1870s, censorship of the press was seen as being largely incompatible with the new Republic’s broadening of civil liberties. However, abolition of the censorship administration did not prevent images deemed “obscene” and “violations of public decency” from being seized and destroyed nor from their authors being tried before a court of law. For a more detailed account of the 1881 legislation dealing with freedom of the press, see Dawkins, The Nude in French Art and Culture, 26-30.

25 Bernard Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde (Chicago, 2002), 18.

harnessed for the purpose of serving artistic interests had an impact that far-outreached

subsequent Bals de Courrier Français.

Located in Montmartre, “the leading Belle-Époque pleasure district,” the Elysée-

Montmartre embodied Bohemia’s “fascination for the unusual and the spectacular.”26

Situated along the infamous Rue Pigalle, a street known to this day for its erotic establishments, the Elysée-Montmartre competed against the Moulin Rouge, the

Eldorado, the Divan Japonais, and La Cigale as the French capital’s most decadent music hall. By 1913, the Elysée-Montmartre was the oldest existing ball in Montmartre. Over a century old, the dance hall had been transformed from a simple guingette to a bal parisien after Montmartre was incorporated into the city of Paris in 1860. Madame

Rosin who had bought the establishment from the original owner’s son, Adrien Serres, organized the first masked balls there in 1867.27 At the height of the Second Empire,

Tout-Paris climbed its way up to 80 Boulevard Rochechouart to take part in the

merriment of Bohemian society. When the War of 1870 and the subsequent fighting of

the Commune broke out, the hall’s nocturnal revelries ground to a halt.28 It was not until

after the war that dancing recommenced, but by this time, the ball’s character had

changed. No longer solely patronized by elegant demi-mondaines and their lovers in

search of privacy, voyeuristic pleasure, and opportunities for slumming, the Elysée-

26 Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Époque, 52, 133.

27 André Warnod, Bals, Cafés, et Cabarets (Paris, 1913), 82-84. A guingette was originally a drinking establishment that had over the years introduced a variety of entertainments, namely song and dance.

28 Warnod, Les Bals de Paris (Paris, 1923), 37.

Montmartre had become a gathering place for an eclectic clientele.29 Prior to World War

One, men of letters, painters, and sculptors frequented the establishment rubbing

shoulders with members of the eighteenth arrondissement’s working-class, composed

mostly of “poor girls, unemployed workers, and young people without a well defined

profession.”30 Emmanuel Patrick, in an 1886 article for the Courrier Français, listed some of the dance hall’s most illustrious visitors, among them the former-Emperor Louis

Napoleon’s mistress Cora Pearl, actress Blanche d’Antigny, as well as journalists and writers like Charles Monselet, Paul Lafargue, Alexis Bouvier, and Arnold Mortier.31

The former glory of the Elysée-Montmartre was restored under the direction of

Monsieur Desprez, “who thought of hosting fêtes there which would enthuse all of

Paris.” Having taken ownership from Madame Rosin in 1881, Desprez unleashed the latest dancing craze to entrance thrill-seeking Parisians.32 With Dufour at the head of the

orchestra, and Nini Patte en l’Air, Miss Rigolette, and La Goulue on stage, the quadrille

realiste was born, replacing the caveau with “appalling exhibitions of women snatched from the lowest gutters.”33 Whereas the former working-class dance had perfected the art

29 Warnod, Bals, Cafés, et Cabarets, 86.

30 Warnod, Bals de Paris, 37.

31 Courrier Français, August 22, 1886.

32 Warnod, Bals de Paris, 41.

33 Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Époque, 104. As a sexually charged import, the can-can was regarded with suspicion by the British who blamed traveling French dance companies for their spectacles’ troubling yet titillating influences. Contemporary critics could not help but liken the ‘Mabille’ dance step to anal sex where one dancer, assuming a masculine role, swung her leg around simulating the circular motion of a penis while her more feminine counterpart repeatedly bent forward to expose her derriere. Making the distinction that “the dress is one thing and the action of the dressed another,” the Lord Chamberlain’s office “banned the cancan from theaters by the 1870s yet left the matter of dress to managers within his orbit to

of raising one’s leg, the quadrille realiste (or can-can as it was later known) perfected

“the art of raising one’s skirt.” While women were by no means the only practitioners of the dance, they far outnumbered their male counterparts, as “the can-can became something of a display of female sexual power.”34 The twirling motion of a dancer’s leg,

delineated by black silk stockings from behind a backdrop of white lace knickers,

“allowed one to see the natural roundness of their forms.”35 Following a visit to one of

the most popular bals parisiens, the Jardin Mabille, during the Second Empire, Mark

Twain recalled his initial shock at the sight of this unruly form of exhibitionism.

The Dance had begun…I placed my hands before my face for very shame. But I looked through my fingers. They were dancing the renowned ‘cancan’…The idea of it is to dance as wildly, as noisily, as furiously as you can; expose yourself as much as possible if you are a woman; and kick as high as you can, no matter which sex you belong to. There is no word of exaggeration in this.36

The erotic display of exposed legs kept inspectors such as Courtelait du Roche,

France’s “Père-la-Pudeur” of the 1870s and 1880s, busy surveying the quadrilles and

making sure that the dancers wore undergarments.37 As long as “one was content to

watch the professionals of the quadrille, la Goulue, Grille d’Égout, la Môme Fromage,

Valentin le Décossé prance about,” the can-can remained a symbol of working-class

“gaiety and revolt.” And yet it was only a matter of time before “everyone grew tired of

regulate according to the principles of laissez-faire.” See Tracy Davis, Economics of the British Stage, 1800-1914 (Cambridge, 2000), 130-131.

34 Galbally, Conder, 86.

35 Warnod, Bals, Cafés et Cabarets, 60.

36 Barbara Shapiro, ed., Pleasures of Paris: Daumier to Picasso (Boston, Mass., 1991), 125; Samuel Clemens, The Innocents Abroad; Roughing It or Pilgrim’s Progress (New York, 1984), 108.

37 Courrier Français, May 9-16, 1895, 2.

this spectacle,” as the can-can gave way to more daring and explicit semi-nude and nude

performances in the last decade of the nineteenth-century.38

It was at this moment and in this setting that the annual Bal de Courrier Français

came into being, marking the pinnacle of the famed can-can and Elysée-Montmartre’s

existence. Maurice Artus, a contemporary observer of Parisian nightlife, explained how

the journal’s selection of the establishment for the site of its inaugural ball was both an

obvious and a destined choice. Like so many other civil servants from the faubourgs

(suburbs), Roques found himself strolling along the Boulevard Rochechouart one spring

evening in the 1870s when he “involuntarily stopped…before the brilliantly illuminated

ball of the Elysée-Montmartre from which the joyous accords of the orchestra” could be

heard. Casting “an envious eye towards the tempting establishment,” Roques reached

into his penniless pockets. Unable to afford “the thirty sous entrance fee,” Roques turned

to his benevolent girlfriend who “slid her little pocketbook into the hand of the young

man” as they climbed the stairway to Heaven.39 Roques’ initial impression of and

encounter with the Elysée-Montmartre as a place of excitement and adventure influenced

his decision as founding editor of the Courrier Français to select the heavenly-lit site for

the first Bal de Courrier Français in 1887.40

38 Warnod, Bals de Paris, 41-43.

39 Warnod, Bals, Cafés, Cabarets, 93-94.

40 At the time of the Bal de Courrier Français and Quat’z-Arts, guests entered the music hall through a monumental entrance off of the Boulevard Rochechouart. After having passed the ticket office, one noticed “a great staircase straight ahead and then a dancing room.” The great hall, containing large paintings and moldings that were in the Louis XV style, remained relatively unchanged during the Belle Époque despite modifications in the hall’s use. In a three-year period, from 1887 to 1890, the Elysée-Montmartre housed both a salle du théâtre, where small plays and revues were presented, and a roller-skating rink. Ibid., Bals de Paris, 36, 44.

The most infamous, yet least known, of the Courrier Français’ balls was the Fête

du Nu (Festival of the Nude) held at the Elysée-Montmartre in the spring of 1889.

Roques’ two papers, L’Egalité and Courrier Français, publicized the greatly anticipated

event by providing front-page coverage.41 Louis Morin, who documented numerous bals

publics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century, credited the Fête du Nu for having inaugurated the first “beauty contest.” The fact that the judging centered upon the contestants’ legs and not their facial features give us some idea as to how feminine beauty was construed within the ball itself.42 Unlike America’s Gibson Girl, whose

attractive anglicized face represented a distinctly modern version of femininity

characterized by purity and civility, the French expressed a much more ambivalent

attitude towards the modern woman. Focused attention on a woman’s bosoms and legs

rather than her face, the conduit to one’s soul, evidenced a uniquely French obsession

with the female body that denied any recognition of female subjectivity. The

anatomization of the female sex, which was theorized, shaped by, and reflected in fin-de-

siècle French art, literature, and science, interpreted feminine beauty not as reflection of

personal qualities or moral depth but as an object of physical desire and visual

spectacle.43 Linda Nochlin suggests that the fragmented figures portrayed in Edouard

41 Roques, who owned and operated both papers, reserved L’Égalité as a political mouthpiece espousing socialist doctrines in the same vein as Le Cri de Peuple. However, its failure to win the support and following of socialists left it a quasi-anarchist paper by 1891. Bellanger et al., Histoire Générale de la Presse, 372.

42 Morin, Carnavals, 10.

43 Robert Nye has made the case that sexual fetishism first appeared in France in response to geopolitical and demographic concerns connected to the loss of Alsace-Lorraine. See his article, “Medical Origins of Sexual Fetishism,” in Emily Apter and William Pietz, eds., Fetishism as Cultural Discourse (Ithaca, N.Y., 1993), 26; David Ferris, ed., Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions (Stanford, Calif., 1996), 136.

Manet’s Masked Ball of the Opera (1873) operated on three levels: as fetishes, “as

synedoches or part images of the body as a whole,” and “as signboards advertising

commodities, touting the erotic wares on offer at the Opera ball.”44 Whereas the “cut-off

elements” of women’s legs and the bodies of formally-attired men spoke to the ways in

which photographic realism had influenced and to some extent colonized painting, Manet made deliberate choices in terms of color palette and figural placement that pictorially represented and confirmed what Coquiot and Manet biographer Julius Meier-Graefe have

called a “fleshmarket.”45 Bals publics, as well as the paintings which represented them,

posed the female body as a problematic specter that eluded the fixed boundaries of an

image’s frame and doubled as sign and commodity.

The night of the Fête du Nu, a dozen agents stood off to either side of the entryway

checking invitations as the guests passed through the music hall’s doors. A concern that

these golden tickets were being sold on the street to the highest bidder prompted the

ball’s organizers to keep the event as private as possible.46 As party-goers entered the

auditorium, their attention was drawn to the main staircase where amidst bouquets of

flowers was a canvas by the artist Ferdinand Lunel entitled La Réclame. The pictorial

representation of a nude La Verité, surrounded by a mélange of illustrated journals such

as the Courrier Français, L’Évenement, and Tout Pour Rien, smiled down from above as

her hands positioned seductively above her head, signaled the ball’s opening with the

44 Linda Nochlin, The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity (London, 1994), 38-41.

45 Julius Meier-Graefe, Édouard Manet (Munich, 1912), 216.

46 Courrier Français, March 31, 1889, 2. One individual proclaimed that he would not have sold his invitation for five hundred francs, a sum which in 1893 was worth approximately a third of a skilled laborer’s annual salary.

clanging of a gong. Unlike the “pornographic” nude who assumed similar poses of

physical abandonment as a sign of sexual availability, Lunel’s nude retained a degree of

idealization, being devoid of pubic hair and other coarse features such as “sagging breasts

and rolls of flesh.”47 The painted nude’s ambiguous status as a figure of reality and

fantasy established a framework through which other female bodies presented that night

could be viewed.

Just nine months prior to the Fête du Nu, Roques, along with two artists and a

printer, had been put on trial by the Tribunal correctionnel for the publication of two

cover illustrations featuring an equally stylized yet contemporary nude.48 While the defendants were found innocent of affronting public decency, the Court of Appeals rendered the original acquittal invalid less than two months later. In this second trial, the defendants were joined by a third artist, Jean-Louis Forain, who was responsible for a scurrilous illustration that had depicted the Minister of Justice Ferrouillat, with hands tied in front and on bended knee, looking but not touching a chorus line of nude women covering their buttocks with copies of the Courrier Français.49 On January 19, 1889, the court convicted all five individuals for having “overtly affronted public modesty by displaying to the public gaze nude women in equivocal poses obviously calculated to

47 Elizabeth Anne McCauley, Industrial Madness: Commercial Photography in Paris, 1848-1871 (New York, 1994), 183.

48 Individuals responsible for authoring images considered injurious to standards of public morality were tried before a magistrates’ court or tribunal correctionnel. The new press law of 1881 granted partial freedom of the press by allowing writers to appear before a trial jury or cour d’assis and thereby escape the magistrates’ arbitrary control over written expression. The uneven meting out of justice to painters, illustrators, lithographers, and engravers, in contrast to the judgments handed down to their literary cohorts, occurred as the image gradually replaced the word as the most potent cultural signifier.

49 Courrier Français, August 12, 1888.

stimulate lustful ideas.”50 Roques, having received the harshest penalty for being the

most responsible and therefore the most culpable of the group, was sentenced to four

months in prison and given a two thousand franc fine.

Roques’ loge at the ball, having been “transformed into a prison,” made allusion to

this recent scandal that had been played out for readers in the pages of his journal.

Decorated with bales of hay, a loaf of black bread, and a sandstone pitcher, the somber

prison cell stood in stark contrast to the costumed prisoner who, guarded by two men

disguised as police officers, stood off to one side of the hall greeting everyone who

entered.51 Wearing a white robe, halo, and iron chains around his hands, Roques asserted his innocence as a martyr who had “assumed the roles of both defender of freedom of the press and defender of freedom of art in general.”52 Despite the ironic allusion to Roques’

previous imprisonment, the atmosphere was light, festive, and gay. Within the first hour,

bacchus-like waiters had disposed of over one hundred bottles of champagne while

members of the orchestra, disguised as Olympian gods with crowns of roses atop their

heads, entertained guests with raucous melodies. One such song, the polka Maladies de la

peau, fittingly indicated the start of the legs contest.53

Seated behind a large curtain so as to preserve the modesty of everyone concerned, fifteen female contestants lifted their skirts and projected their bare legs through

protrusions in the cloth. Similar to what one might see at a carnival or fair, the rest of the

50 Dawkins, The Nude in French Art and Culture, 52.

51 Courrier Français, March 31, 1889.

52 Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Époque, 43.

53 Courrier Français, March 31, 1889.

contestants’ bodies were caricatured on the fabric, creating what one observer called “the

most crazy thing that one could imagine.” While we know nothing of the images

themselves, the juxtaposition and conflation of real bodies with the cartoonish sketches

signified a further blurring of boundaries between representation and reality, the nude and the naked, which took place on a more material, tangible level than Lunel’s painting. The contestants’ legs, severed from the rest of their bodies by the curtain, functioned as fetishistic objects. Guests were encouraged to paw the legs in order “to make sure that there were no padded bodysuits” and that what they were seeing was in fact the ‘real thing.’54 The transgressive act of physically displaying and mediating the encounter

between woman-as-object and spectator-as-subject tinged the legs’ contest with erotic

overtones. To see and touch a part of the female anatomy traditionally cloaked by layers

of material was an activity traditionally sanctioned to occur only within the hallowed

walls of the Écoles des Beaux-Arts and de Médecine respectively. There, one could

“look them [undressed women] up and down and finger them, from head to toe, with a

connoisseur’s eye and finger.” 55 Like the artist and doctor who assessed female bodies

as to “whether their figure is correct or defective,” the ball’s guests functioned as an

informal, amateurish jury, dissecting, scrutinizing, and formulating an opinion as to

which was the most perfect lower appendage.56 Disconnected from her subjective half,

the contestant’s body was made less threatening as a result of her transformation into an

54 Ibid.

55 Emile Blavet, La vie parisienne (Paris, 1886), 332.

56 Ibid.

object of study analogous to the plaster molds, sculpted marble legs, and anatomical

models that inhabited the artist’s studio and medical college’s amphitheater.

Little is known regarding who and how old these contestants were, what their

socio-economic status or professions were, or how they felt about having their bodies

objectified and man-handled by a throng of people. The apparent ease with which they

covered their faces while exposing the rest of their bodies recalled a professional modeling stance that interpreted masks and veils as a means of self-protection rather than devices of physical effacement and violation. In the context of late nineteenth-century

American models, Martha Banta had this to say: “If those windows are shuttered to prevent Peeping Toms from staring voyeuristically in upon one’s private nature, then the happenstance that one’s private parts are exposed is of relatively small importance.”57

Their identities, like their faces, have been obscured from posterity with the exception of

Paris’s first modern “beauty pageant” winner, Marcelle de Bremont. In the years to come

she became a regular fixture at the Courrier Français’ balls as an honorary figure who

bestowed various prizes and awards to guests on behalf of the paper.58

To compound the specular desire for women’s bodies, the ball featured women’s

wrestling matches, a popular pastime of fairs and circuses most recently adopted by

music halls to attract customers and encourage alcoholic consumption.59 A sketch by the

artist Couturier in a March 1889 issue of the Courrier Français indicates that the Elysée-

57 Martha Banta, Imaging American Women: Idea and Ideals in Cultural History (New York, 1987), 240.

58 In its coverage of the 1889 Bal du Courrier Français, L’Égalité reported in its March 26th issue that “Finally, Marcelle de Bremont has unanimously won the top prize; with regards to the other prizes, they must be given for form, the merits being almost equal.”

59 Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Époque, 110.

Montmartre had reconfigured this exhibitionist sport of aggressive, male strength and

virility into a sexually charged show of well-endowed, scantily-dressed women literally

competing for the attention of male voyeurs. Printed just days before the fête, the drawing depicted two women reaching for each other’s exposed breasts in a gesture

reminiscent of the notorious l’homme qui pique, a lecherous male type of the Belle

Époque “who derived sexual pleasure from pricking the breasts of prostitutes.”60 The

“most handsome sampling of Paris,” dressed in tight body suits and sometimes lace masks, unabashedly offered their natural forms to spectators. Even though men and women competed against one another and members of their own sex, it was the

Amazonian female wrestler who enraptured spectators.61 An illustration from the April

4th issue of the Courrier Français depicted Saint Roques presiding over such a match.

The drawing showed a curvaceous female contestant victoriously planting her foot on top of a prostrated male opponent who had, according to the caption, allowed himself to

“complacently fall” under the seductive power of his opponent.62

Such diversionary pastimes that involved the display of shapely female bodies or

body parts illustrate the ways in which a gender ideology based upon sexual difference

made itself known and found expression in a highly sensationalized avant-garde cultural

aesthetics. The grainy black and white sketches of contemporary nude and semi-nude

women produced by experimental graphic artists found a commercial outlet in the pages

and publicity stunts of the Courrier Français. The carnivalesque practices that brought

60 A copy of this drawing can be found in ibid., 185; Bodies of Modernity, 141.

61 Morin, Carnavals, 10.

62 Courrier Français, April 4, 1889, 6-7.

these images to life rejected high art practices by rooting the unconventional display of

female bodies in a traditional Rabelaisian spirit. Nevertheless, the bizarre insertion of a

real body part into a farcical tableau, alongside the conversion of wrestling from a sport

into pornography, announced the coming of a new age, the modern, when artists,

musicians, actresses, writers, and the demi-monde transformed la vie quotidienne into a

theatrical stage production “where the excitement of performance gave every deed the

double significance of private gesture and public action.” The cultural elite’s “desire to

outrage the public by making innovations in life as well as art” was materially and

symbolically intertwined with redefinitions of the female body.63 The Fête du Nu’s

spectacularization of the female nude as a wholly sexual, partially naked body became a

template from which future artist and student balls advanced their own social aesthetics.

Its revolutionary break with traditional presentational strategies of the female body paved the way for a new style of presentation, “the solemn rise of feminine beauty without the veil.”64 An overview of the iconographic and historical evolution of the female nude in

the nineteenth-century will establish a backdrop for this definitive moment in the history

of the artistic nude by elaborating upon the conditions, assumptions, and practices under

and through which her image was transformed.

The Female Nude in Nineteenth-Century Art

Within the last two decades, scholars of art, history, and literature have focused

upon the theme of decadence, a term employed by late nineteenth-century social

63 Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War One (New York, 1955), 6, 28.

64 St. Albin, “Le nu au théâtre,” 451.

44 commentators, art critics, and writers to describe a feeling of impending doom and social decay that was intimately tied to changing gender roles.65 In Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin-de-Siècle, Elaine Showalter argues that the emergence of modern feminism, alongside the appearance of new, sexually ambiguous or aggressive literary and artistic characters, functioned as visible signs of gender blurring and indicated a state of “sexual anarchy” where “all laws that governed sexual identity and behavior were breaking down.”66

Growing fears about sexual transgressions and moral degeneration at the end of the

nineteenth-century were quickly matched by strict border controls around gender

definitions which found expression in two cautionary depictions of modern femininity

gone a rye, the New Woman and la femme fatale.67 One area where these border controls were conceived, constructed, maintained, contested, and subverted was in art. As a bastion of bourgeois authority, this liberal profession played a significant role in defining

65 Roberts, Disruptive Acts, 2, 5, 127-128; Patrick Brantlinger, Bread and Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture as Social Decay (Ithaca, N.Y., 1983); Louis Marqueze-Povey, Le Mouvement decadent en France (Paris, 1986); Jennifer Birkett, The Sins of the Fathers: Decadence in France, 1870-1914 (London, 1986); Barbara Spackman, Decadent Genealogies (Ithaca, N.Y., 1989); Charles Bernheimer, Decadent Subjects: The idea of Decadence in Art, Literature, Philosophy and Culture of the fin-de-siècle in Europe (Baltimore, M.D., 2002).

66Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin-de-Siècle (New York, 1990); Art historian Bram Dijkstra, exploring various fin-de-siècle fantasies of feminine evil, identified innumerable negative female types (the ondine, vampire, cat-woman, lioness, back-broken, the collapsing woman, cat women, vampires, tiger women, snake-charmers, and man-eating tarantulas) that reflected a virulent misogyny within late nineteenth-century arts. See Idols of Perversity (New York, 1986) and Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality and the Cult of Manhood (New York, 1996).

67Patrick Bade, Femme Fatale: Images of evil and fascinating women (London, 1979); Deborah Gorham, The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal (London, 1982); Carole Vance, ed., Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (Boston, Mass., 1984).

modern-day norms of male and female sexual behavior.68 The subject positioning of the

male artist in relation to the object of his gaze, the studio model, in addition to the ways

in which he chose to represent his subject matter became, as Linda Nochlin has argued,

“the cornerstone of a conventional body politics” in fin-de-siècle France. 69

The artist’s transformation of the vulgar body into an ideal nude, and his ability to

regulate the viewer’s “wandering eye” through the application of “conventions and

protocols of art,” demonstrated two characteristics commonly associated with a

normative bourgeois heterosexual masculinity, the power of creation and of control.70

The artist’s ability to mask the working-class origins of his model and to adhere to a prescribed set of artistic motifs that recalled women’s essential nature perpetuated the cultural myth of the artist as a heroic, virile, yet sexually innocent genius. As this next section demonstrates, the artist’s conceptualization and framing of the female nude was as much a product of aesthetic tradition as it was a commentary on current assumptions about gender.

The decline of the Académie-Salon system, which had overseen artistic production since the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture’s founding in 1648, occurred simultaneous to the rise of the bourgeoisie and its displacement of the state as the primary

68 Legal and medical professionals, alongside artists, represented heterosexuality as a normative aspect of sexual behavior in their construction and interpretation of the law and scientific classifications. See Angus McLaren, Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries, 1870-1930 (Chicago, 1997); Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-siècle Russia (Ithaca, N.Y., 1992); Robert Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor (New York, 1993); William Reddy, Invisible Code: Honor and Sentiment in Post-Revolutionary France (Berkeley, Calif., 1997); Marie Lathers, Bodies of Art: French Literary Realism and the Artist’s Model (Lincoln, Neb., 2001), 47.

69 Linda Nochlin, Representing Women (New York, 1999), 217.

70 Ibid., Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity, and Sexuality (London, 1992), 6.

patron of art. Official art, as a medium for the fabrication and articulation of social

identities, became beholden to a new master with a distinctive taste for “the feminine.”

The rise of the middle class, predicated on a sublimation of sexual desires through appropriate disciplinary channels such as art, music, and reading, encouraged the rise of the female nude in art and her usurpation of the male nude as the central icon of painting and sculpture.71

Having been restricted to a limited number of persons and public spaces, the female

nude model was introduced to the École des Beaux-Arts in the 1830s. Drawing from the

female nude model soon became the high point of an art student’s education as her body

epitomized “the proving ground for artistic ambition” by the fin-de-siècle..72 Classical

and contemporary stories of “the artist who must prove himself through the masterful

representation of the naked body of a woman” came into vogue during the second half of

the century.73 Novels, such as Honoré de Balzac’s Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu and

theatrical productions of Praxiteles, perpetuated a cultural myth of the artist as a heroic

genius who transformed inert matter into an ideal, nature into culture.74 The male artist’s

power to give life and meaning to inanimate objects, expressed through an “assertion of

71 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London, 1972), 47; Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art, and Ideology (London, 1981), 116; Nead, Female Nude; Nochlin, Representing Women, 217- 218; Michael Moriarity, “Structures of Cultural Production in nineteenth-century France,” in Peter Collier and Robert Lethbridge, eds., Artistic Relations: Literature and the Visual Arts in Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven, Conn., 1994), 15-29; Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation (London, 1997); Angus McLaren, Trials of Masculinity, 191; Lathers, Bodies of Art, 23.

72 Lathers, Bodies of Art, 46; Nochlin, Representing Women, 236.

73 Nochlin, Representing Women, 217.

74 Marilyn Brown, Gypsies and Other Bohemians: The Myth of the Artist in Nineteenth-Century France (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1985), 17.

virility and the will to dominate,” characterized an emerging avant-garde expressionism in early twentieth-century art.75

The artist of the École des Beaux-Arts, more so than his contemporaries in law and

medicine, occupied an ambiguous and “uneasy rank” in society for reasons other than the

financial precariousness of his trade.76 While the figure of the artist-artisan enjoyed a

cult-like status in France, the individual himself was only assured notoriety and success if

he gained acceptance to and underwent a formulaic aesthetic training prescribed by the

École. Those who were lucky enough to be admitted to Europe’s most prestigious art

school soon found their dreams of obtaining a Prix de Rome or entry into the annual

Salon dashed by the reality that “the atelier’s real role was to prolong the status quo. It was not a system in which the imaginative thrived for long.”77 With his freedom of

creativity stifled, the Beaux-Arts student began to question the foundations upon which

academic art rested. Torn between two ideological extremes with regard to the function

of art, the role of the artist, his political loyalties, and the nature of his work, the artist

was increasingly looked upon with suspicion by bourgeois culture.78

Holding out for the slightest hope of future acclaim, the artist confirmed his commitment to artistic canons and the status quo by continuing to connect the female nude in art to nature, either through allegory or classical references. In order to downplay

75 Carol Duncan, “Virility and Domination in Early Twentieth-Century Vanguard Painting,” in Norman Broude and Mary Garrard, eds., Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany (New York, 1982), 300.

76 Joy Newton, “The Atelier Novel: Painters as Fiction,” in Richard Hobbes, ed., Impressions of French Modernity (Manchester, 1998), 179.

77 Galbally, Conder, 68.

78 Lathers, Bodies of Art, 27.

the titillating aspect of viewing the once banished female model in his studio, he deflected claims of “overt sensuality and the embodiment of desire” by pointing to the

“heroism, sublimation, knowledge of anatomy and antique exemplars” evident in his

work.79 The depiction of anatomical classes at the Écoles des Beaux-Arts and de

Médecine within academic painting during the 1880s and 1890s, art historian Anthea

Callen argues, helped to shore up a male professional identity by reorienting “the dominant model for looking” typified by Baudelaire’s flâneur around “a medical and an

artistic gaze.”80 Constantly put on the defensive by the very moralizing discourse of

respectability that he in turn used to counter rumors of social and sexual deviancy, the

male artist had to protect his professional reputation more than ever since the individual

painter, under the newly established dealer-critic system, became the object of evaluation

rather than his work or relationship to a particular master or artistic doctrine.81 In a

statement that holds equally true for the artists’ balls as for their artwork, Callen writes,

“The staging of male professional solidarity constitutes and celebrates the homosocial

world. It is a phenomenon which aptly, one might argue, becomes more urgent when

hierarchies of power or status are subject to gendered renegotiation, and at times of crisis in masculine identity.”82

79 Nochlin, Representing Women, 218-220.

80 Anthea Callen, “Doubles and Desire: Anatomies of Masculinity in the Later Nineteenth-Century,” Art History 26 (November 2003): 669.

81 Moriarity, “Structures of Cultural Production,” 19.

82 Callen, “Doubles and Desire,” 673.

Consequentially, artists like other male types of their time, were afflicted with what

some historians have identified as a “crisis in masculinity” in the last quarter of the

nineteenth-century.83 Moral panic brought on by labor unrest, feminist demands for social and political equality, a decline in the national birth rate, the rise of a highly visible gay/lesbian subculture, and a white-collar service sector undermined older notions of gender and social relations.84 Experts in the social sciences propagated the notion that

men were suffering from “what might be termed the ‘Baudelaire syndrome,’ that is to say

they were prone to lethargy, ennui, despair and ultimately inaction” at precisely the same

time that writers and painters imagined women as “more energetic, decisive,

irresponsibly destructive and all-consuming.”85 Literary scholar Marie Lathers has

argued that like their nude models, artists “were themselves often depicted as decadent

and neurotic.”86 A feminization of the studio, whereby female artists and models became

a visible presence in life-drawing classes, threw the artist’s masculinity into question.87

The artist’s special privilege of viewing “forbidden bodily territory,” having remained

intact for the student of the École as long as the studio and artistic practice was gendered male, was losing its exclusivity at a time when women were demanding greater freedom and more rights.88

83 McLaren, Trials of Masculinity; Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor; Reddy, Invisible Code.

84 McLaren, Trials of Masculinity, 31, 35.

85 Newton, “The Atelier Novel,” 177-178.

86 Lathers, Bodies of Art, 41.

87 Lathers, Bodies of Art, 47.

88 Nochlin, Representing Women, 236; Lathers, Bodies of Art, 47-51.

The bourgeoisie’s need to sublimate feelings of passion and desire through fine art manifest itself in the female nude who replaced the male nude as the standard by which artistic enterprise was measured.89 No longer the central focus of fine art, the male nude receded into the background as “Nude” in nineteenth-century parlance acquired a greater connection to the female body and sexuality. Connoting notions of passivity, powerlessness, purity, and beauty, the female nude evoked erotic fantasies at the same time that it endorsed the submissive nature of female sexuality. Languidly posed next to a body of water within a historical or mythological setting, the female nude complied with and upheld a visual culture obsessed with transforming the exposed female body into an unadulterated piece of high art for male scopic pleasure.

Ultimately what determined one’s interpretation of the female nude were the frames of reference in which it was found. Content, context, audience expectation, and medium gave meaning to the visual image, differentiating the female nude from representations of other undressed bodies with distinct social and aesthetics values.

When the female nude could no longer be nicely compartmentalized into an existing ontological category signifying the aforementioned qualities, its meaning became unstable and contested.

Art historians generally agree that nineteenth-century spectators used the derogatory term “naked” to describe images of undressed bodies that were outside of their proper context or addressed inappropriate content. Representations of nakedness were most commonly associated with pornography, a genre of visual production that aimed to sexually stimulate its viewer. Although more blatant in its style of presentation,

89 Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation (London, 1997).

pornography shared a predisposal with erotic art to create an unequal power relation between viewing subject and pictorial object. The subject, oftentimes construed in patriarchical societies as male, derived pleasure through the hyper-sexualization of the object’s sexual body parts in isolation from the rest of the body. This had the effect of robbing the female nude of an active subject position or identity based on a sense of wholeness traditionally accorded to the male nude. Denied its most valuable source of power, sexuality, the female nude underwent a process of objectification, commodification, and fetishization in the handling, manipulation, exchange, and arousal of consumers within artistic and pornographic frames of reference.

Captured in the assertion that “men act and women appear,” St. Albin revealed a

fin-de-siècle conceptual model of spectatorship and performance based upon the

articulation of sexual difference.90 Predating John Berger’s famous quote by some

seventy years, St. Albin’s statement confirms the presence of an omnipresent, omniscient

“male gaze” that film critic Laura Mulvey has used to explain the objectification of

women’s bodies within historically-specific systems of visual representation.91 It is in

this context that the female nude was culturally coded as a sexual spectacle and thus

presented as an invitation to voyeurism.

This mode of seeing was by no means hegemonic as recent analyses of Edgar

Degas’ pastel nudes by art historians Charles Bernheimer, Carol Armstrong, Edward

Snow, and Eunice Lipton have found. Suggesting that an “extraordinary self-sufficiency,

90 St. Albin, “Le Nu au théâtre,” Mercure de France, vols. 1-4 (Paris, 1911), 460.

91 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London, 1972); Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, (Bloomington, Ind., 1989).

separateness, and sensuous privacy of the women depicted” characterized the artist’s

bathing subjects, these scholars claim that a pictorial strategy of resistance existed within

some late nineteenth-century images of female nakedness.92 Although their gazes are

diverted away from the viewer’s gaze, these bather-prostitutes evinced a sense of self-

awareness by denying the viewer an appropriation of their bodies through closed poses.

Nevertheless, Degas himself recognized the voyeuristic desire latent in his pictures.

“Hitherto the nude has always been represented in poses which presuppose an audience,

but these women of mine are honest, simple folk, unconcerned by any other interests than

those involved in their physical condition. Here is another; she is washing her feet. It is

as if you looked through the keyhole.”93 Based on this statement, art historian Gill

Saunder has argued that Degas’s “pastels of women washing and drying themselves”

were not such a drastic “departure from the voyeuristic tradition of the female

nude...While seeming to subvert the traditional nude, he in fact presents us with a woman spied upon–in a private act and the nakedness retains its voyeuristic frisson of forbidden pleasure.”17

The ambiguous nude figures within some artists’ work suggested a degree of

challenge or confrontation between the viewing subject and pictorial object. Scandals involving momentary breaks in the traditional iconography of the female nude serve as examples of those “not-so-subtle” tests when the artist created, and the spectator

92 Charles Bernheimer, Figures of Ill Repute: Representations of Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 168-170.

93 Otto Friedrich, Olympia: Paris in the Age of Manet (New York, 1992), 186-187.

17Saunders, 25.

translated, the female body as “naked” rather than “nude.” Under the guise of

“modernizing la femme nue,” artists’ began to depict the female nude not as a sign of

antiquity but as a sign of modernity, that is to say an object of desire outside of any

narrative structure. Gustave Courbet’s The Painter’s Studio (1855) poignantly marked

this transitional moment in artistic praxis. In this painting, Courbet portrays the female

nude as a lightly veiled model who, standing off to the artist’s side, is still connected to

nature through the landscape tableau juxtaposed behind her. The unclothed figure

straddles both the ancient and modern worlds, exercising the traditional function of an

artistic muse subordinate to the artist’s will while asserting an identity that is

contemporaneous with that of the viewer’s.94

Edouard Manet, who extended Courbet’s iconography of the female nude into the

1860s, “gave a salutary jolt to the notion of the nude as timeless and elevated.” 95 Devoid of any classical or mythological motifs, Olympia (1865) and Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1866) indicted the bourgeois spectator’s interest in money and sex by reinterpreting the female nude as a working-class model or, at the very worst, a prostitute of ambiguous class origins. In both canvases, the female nude-as-model sits or reclines languidly amidst other racially or sexually distinct figures that implicate her body in a material and social reality. The impassive nature by which she exposes her body for the viewer is countered by her aggressive response to the gaze, an act that reverses the operating principle behind fin-de-siècle spectatorship and representation that “men look and women appear.”96 Art

94 Nochlin, Representing Women, 222.

95 Ibid., 219.

96 St. Albin, “Le nu au théâtre,” Mercure de France, vols. 1-4 (Paris, 1911), 460.

historian T.J. Clark’s reading of Olympia as a blurring between the naked and the nude

indicates how deviations from pictorial conventions could denote transgressive acts on the part of both the artist and model whereby sexual desire becomes a function and an

“attribute of woman’s unclothed form.”97 Gill Saunders explained that objections to

Olympia, like other “naked” women immortalized in the paintings of Gustave Courbet,

Pablo Picasso, and others, were founded not in her class, her profession, or indeed her

nakedness but in her unashamed awareness of the spectator’s desire. “Staring is a male

prerogative, a strategy for dominating women, controlling and circumscribing their

actions,” Saunder stated, “and thus it is Olympia’s gaze which has been characterized by

male critics as immodest. Olympia points up the stereotype embodied in most images of naked women in our culture, where female sexuality is set up as passive, exhibitionist, narcissistic.”98 Depictions of the female nude exposed as a working-class model or a

prostitute practicing her trade in bodily exposure underscored a vanguard social

aesthetics bent on documenting, integrating, and celebrating the modern body as natural,

ordinary, unromanticized form of fine art.

Because the studio model served as a prototype for the “artistic” and

“pornographic” nude, she acquired a degree of sexual agency that made her an

increasingly visible and readily identifiable type in the French public eye. The model of

the second half of the nineteenth century was, according to Lathers, a person of growing

importance whose “heyday” extended from the 1870s to 1914. The elaborations of

97 T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (New York, 1985), 79-146.

98 Gill Saunders, 14.

national model types, whereby the pasty white la Parisienne outstripped the dark-

complected Italian model in grace and elegance, served to shore up ethnic differences and

metamorphose the French grisette from a profane to sacred, real to ideal, animal to

spiritual allegory of national pride. Because of biological and cultural factors, la

Parisienne evinced a more tasteful, civilized style of undressing that transformed her

from a mere visual referent into a spectacle of French superiority.99 This aestheticization

of the model’s work, from a clumsy physical pose to a graceful performance, articulated a

“doubled otherness” that allowed the French model to function both as sign and

commodity.100

By the end of the century, the model’s modesty is that of the poseuse—defined by a dance of dissimulation that identifies the female body as less a referent to be copied by the artist than the subject of a performance before which the painter and museum-goer are spectators. The woman herself, and the nude as category, is spectacle.101

Not surprisingly in many instances la Parisienne, after having passed a certain age and

physical state of beauty, left the atelier to become an artist, that is to say an actress, a

singer, or a dancer, in her own right.102

And yet the reality of la Parisienne’s life was such that she weathered a host of

mockeries and sexual innuendos when she stepped away from the sexually neutral space

99 Ibid., 50-58, 109.

100 Here I am referring to Jean Baudrillard’s notion of consumption where “the commodity is immediately produced as sign, as sign value, and where signs (culture) are produced as commodities.” See For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (St. Louis, M.O., 1981), 147-148.

101 Lathers, Bodies of Art, 58.

102 Ibid., 26.

of the platform and encountered male students.103 Although the artist’s studio was in

theory to be a safe, non-threatening work environment for the model, this often times

proved not to be the case. After waiting outside the gates of the École in the early

morning hours, models were admitted into an undressing room and from there into a

posing room where they were inspected by the massiers or most senior students. If the

artists found their figures both pleasing to the eye and hand, the models were employed

for the week, receiving approximately thirty to forty francs or one hundred sous per four

hour session of which there were two a day.104 As has already been noted, the personal politics of the studio was laced with erotic overtones which took the form of sexual intimidation and harassment as artists viewed, touched, made inappropriate remarks about as well as played pranks on their female employees. The hazing of models continued to escalate until 1883, after which time their presence was curtailed to one week a month when the professor was able to supervise the studio.105

Modeling required a degree of strenuous, physical exertion as the artist employed a

host of nooses, bars, boards, and brackets to help the model maintain a pose. The most

important tool or prop in the model’s trade, however, was the pedestal upon which she

stood. Here the boundary between artist and model was most visibly drawn, creating a

transformative space where the ordinary working-class woman to metamorphosed into a

103 The hazing of models only worsened with time until the École decided in 1883 to curtail their presence to one week a month when the professor was able to supervise the studio. Ibid., 44-45.

104 Ibid., 55; Morin, Revue de quat’ saisons: Revue trimestrielle illustrée (Paris, 1900), 180. A sous was the equivalent to five centimes. The model’s wage, while considerably better than the average working woman’s income of two to five francs a day, was vulnerable to seasonal fluctuations in work and economic downturns.

105 Lathers, Bodies of Art, 44-45.

model. In this respect, the platform functioned to mark “the threshold between

acceptable nudity and unacceptable nakedness” by converting the model from a profane

to sacred, real to ideal, animal to spiritual body.106

Yet in having violated social prescriptions governing the exposure of the female body, la Parisienne contributed to the circulation of rumors denigrating models as women

of easy virtue or as prostitutes. Conceived of as a desiring subject and desirable spectacle

in pictorial and living form, the model figured prominently in a rising tide of sexual

erotica, becoming a source of social angst related to the mass consumption of

photographic and theatrical pornography in the last three decades of the nineteenth-

century. The extent to which la Parisienne’s propriety and professionalism could be

preserved depended upon the avoidance of physical contact with artists. The question of

touch, an issue currently feeding anxieties about sexual, racial, or foreign Others, found

expression in contemporary artistic and literary representations of the atelier where a

parallel between the artist and his muse and the prostitute and her client cast doubt on the

involved parties’ moral standing. Paintings by Maurice Bompard (A debut in the studio,

1881), Remy Cogghe (Anxiety, 1887) and Jean-Léon Gérôme (The Artist and His Model,

1890-93) reflected and played upon bourgeois culture’s suspicion about the artist’s

personal and professional propriety through allusion to the model’s sexual initiation or

the violation of her modesty.

If the artist is represented as only touching the work, not the model herself, the gesture presumably provides the observer with an enjoyable little frisson over this close call, and a sense of power, however fleeting, through identification with the

106 Ibid., 50, 109.

all-powerful artist in painting who at once exercises such complete control and yet such admirable restraint in his dealings with an unclothed woman.107

Artists of the École, because of their privileged status within the institutional organization of art, could innocently assume the traditional role of artist-as-social critic while retaining some semblance of allegiance to bourgeois culture. However what one finds in these and many other similar paintings is that the sexual tension that existed between the artist and his female model was safely channeled into a relationship that reinforced rather than destabilized the lines of sexual difference. As Marilyn Brown has shown, the oscillation between positions of social criticism and social absorption characteristic of the Académie’s self-proclaimed bohemian artist ended once the

“successful arriviste” had translated aesthetic freedom and innovation into economic progress.”108 Consequentially, the artist-model relationship depicted in their works

instructed viewers on the proper way to engage with the female nude-as-naked. On a

professional, spectatorial and representational level, notions of control, mastery,

objectification and sublimation of the female nude as an asexual art form significantly

informed and shaped popular attitudes about sexuality.

The Bal des Quat’z-Arts

In the 1906 edition of the L’Intermédiare des Chercheurs et Curieux, a reader

calling himself Candide wrote the following:

Since 1893, the École des Beaux Arts (imitated since then by the École de Médecine) gives with the approval of its professors and the goodwill of the government, annual balls where there has appeared a thousand young women most of whom were scantily dressed and a hundred completely nude. Initially, the state

107 Nochlin, Representing Women, 223-224.

108 Brown, Gypsies and Other Bohemians, 17.

pursued the organizer of the first ball, but ended up decorating him. The balls do not give rise to a single space of disorder; members of the Institute, Parliament, and the Courts go there in great numbers and hide nothing: it is a new national institution…How have French mores evolved from strictness to the indulgences of today?109

Within a span of thirteen years, Candide claims to have witnessed a decline in

French morality that he attributes to the École’s annual Bal des Quat’z-Arts. This event, with its daring display of women in various stages of undress, openly challenged and eventually overthrew a whole tradition of artistic practices and cultural conventions that confined the Nude to the purview a certain body of professionals and a limited number of spaces. At a time when a woman’s moral virtue was based in part upon the amount of clothing she wore, Candide expresses astonishment over the degree of tolerance shown towards public nakedness by some of the Third Republic’s most prominent cultural leaders. What initially appeared as an outrage à la pudeur (insult to public decency) had been normalized under the banner of republicanism as a novel institution of the French nation.

The artists’ balls of the 1890s and early 1900s provide a space for thinking about the spectacle of the “performative” female nude. Having had many precedents to follow, namely those of the Opéra, Incohérents, and Courrier Français, this particular kind of bal public based its success upon the skillful employment of common motifs that veiled social critique with myths, personifications, and ancient themes. It is here to the interstices of a commercialized popular entertainment and an emergent Parisian counter- culture oriented towards greater self-expression that this chapter now focuses its attention. These balls, which possessed the capacity to adapt and conform to the

109 L’Intermédiare des Chercheurs et Curieux, vol. 53 (1906): 788.

60 standards of the time, also exercised the power to change them. Artists educated

Parisians on how to approach issues of gender and sexuality in the coming century with as much humor and silliness as they would with seriousness and fear.

Several late nineteenth-century social commentators wrote about their experiences and observations of artists’ balls. Louis Morin, the most prolific of these writers, documented numerous Parisian festivals spanning over a decade in his Revue de Quat’

Saisons and Les Carnavals Parisiens. Hailing them as the “fêtes of tomorrow,” Morin sought to explain from where and how this new form of modern public spectacle came about.110 After recording and analyzing the ways in which Parisian bal publics, like paintings, posters, books, and the theater contributed to art’s evolution and French gaiety, he concluded that the popularity of fin-de-siècle artist ball had grown out of a desire to modify social and artistic practices. In their struggle to break from “a philistine bourgeoisie” and an art establishment bent on suppressing originality, fin-de-siècle painters found themselves ideologically and financially torn between “producing for their arch enemy, the well-heeled bourgeois, sugary confections which bordered on the titillating,…painting cheap decorative pictures for the mass market and trade,” or generating an art that spoke only to their own sense of self but did not attract paying customers or the institutional support of the Académie.111 As a result, artists launched an internal “revolution” against traditionalist powers hoping to bring forth a whole new era where one would be free to live and work without prejudice, moral suffocation, or fear of

110 Morin, Revue, 31.

111 Newton, “Atelier Novel,” 178, 180.

starvation.112 The artists’ ball materially and symbolically represented their vision in the

form of the studio model, who divested of her clothing within Paris’ most popular

entertainment site, the music-hall, exemplified the artist’s “insistence on his inalienable

right to reject tradition, choose his own-subject matter and express his own feelings.”113

Unlike many of France’s other state-supported vocational schools, such as the

Écoles Normales, Polytechnique, Centrale, Natation, Forestière and Coiffure, the École des Beaux- Arts was one of the last to host its own annual ball. Under the student leadership of Henri Guillaume, a planning committee was organized in the fall of 1892 to conceive of a festival fit for the country’s, indeed the world’s, most renowned art school.

The ball’s name, derived from a course required of all students of painting, sculpture, architecture, and engraving popularly known as “the course of Quat’z-Arts,” expressed the unity of the student body. Along those lines, students envisioned the ball as an affair

“composed exclusively of students…plus their models” that would take place behind “a closed door, like the atelier.”114

The first Bal des Quat’z-Arts, held at the Elysée Montmartre on April 23, 1892, was described as “a primitive affair,” a simple “dress rehearsal” for what awaited participants the following year.115 Although the theme Femmes (Women) did much to attract public attention, the ball was for artists only. Since formal recognition of female

112 Morin, Carnavals, 4.

113 Newton, “Atelier Novel,” 176.

114 Courrier Français, February 5, 1893; Montorgeuil, Paris dansant, 122.

115 Berkeley Smith, The Real Latin Quarter (New York, 1901), 70; Warnod, “Le Bal des ‘Quat’z’Arts,” La Renaissance Politique, Littéraire, Artistique (Paris, n.d., ca. 1920), 17.

artists did not occur until their admittance to the École des Beaux Arts in 1898, the Bal

des Quat’z-Arts was a homo-social event attended by male cross-dressers and a few of

their female guests. On behalf of his fellow artists, Louis Morin articulated their disgust

at the thought “that the man dressed-as-a-woman inspires us.”116 What he and his

contemporaries yearned for was a real woman who would bring together what historian

Charles Rearick calls “the allure of exotica and history.”117

The infamous Bal des Quat’z-Arts of 1893 surpassed its predecessor in both fanfare and transgression. The ball’s selection of and partnering with the Courrier Français as its advertising medium and source of financial support, alongside a change in venue to the newly opened Moulin Rouge (1889), contributed to an aura of subversion.118 As the

brainchild of Jules Roques and Henri Guillaume, the Quat’z-Arts distinguished itself as a

ball “unlike any other.” An admixture of désir, idée, and rêve, made it “the last refuge of

fantasy at the École des Beaux Arts” as well as “the logical outcome of all the traditions transmitted by one generation to the next.” The playing of Eugene Pottier’s famous socialist hymn Internationale cast a revolutionary and treasonous air over the ball.119

116 Morin, Carnavals, 16.

117 Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Époque, 138.

118 The planning committee sought to make the event even better than the first by cutting costs and increasing its size numerically and spatially. Unlike the financially struggling Elysée-Montmartre, which had charged a coat-room charge of one franc in order to cover the hall’s rental, the newly opened Moulin Rouge (1889) offered the ball’s organizers a larger space and free vestiaire (coat room). The Moulin Rouge continued to host the event for several more years. On February 9, 1903 the Elysée-Montmartre hosted the ball’s decennial celebration but closed later that year. Roques, as director of the Courrier Français, was responsible not only for finding a location for the ball, but for the cost of lighting and the printing of invitations. These costs were recouped through the sale of ads in the journal. See Gazette des Tribunaux, June 24, 1893.

119 Warnod, “Le Bal,”17; A copy of this song can be found in Charles Sowerwine’s France since 1870: Culture, Politics, and Society (New York, 2001), 26.

What made this “great artistic festival” so distinct was that for “the first time since

Ancient Greece…a crowd of admirable young women could move about freely in heavenly costume in the middle of groups of poets and artists.”120

What actually happened at the 1893 Bal des Quat’z-Arts has been a matter of

conjecture and debate for over one hundred years. Both contemporaries and historians

have characterized the ball as a “night of orgiastic frenzy, drunkenness, and

pandemonium,” indicative of a “pagan festival.”121 The supposed insanity and madness that reigned over the mobs of students and guests who arrived at the music-hall’s doors

“in Charenton-like style” supported rumors concerning the appalling lack of clothing

among the participants which threw into doubt assertions that “absolute propriety…was

strictly adhered to by all.”122 (See Figure 1.) Those sympathetic to the artists and their

models tried to dismiss claims of immorality by acknowledging that while “the gestures

and attitudes can be daring, and the costumes reduced to nothing, it is fundamentally, and

above all, a good big laugh, a sane and unbuttoned gaiety.”123 An eyewitness account of

the 1907 ball described the costuming of guests in the following manner.

Although costumes were ‘de rigueur’ it happened that long before the clocks struck midnight the female contingent of this riotous assembly had dispensed, for the most part, with every vestige of garment. Some, indeed, had not far to go to arrive at this stage, as, after taking their cloaks off in the vestibule of the hall, they appeared clad only in the thinnest of gauze veils, which they either discarded by their own free

120 St. Albin, “Le nu au théâtre,” 451.

121 Charles Castle, The Folies-Bergère (New York, 1982), 94; Morin, Carnavals, 17.

122 Fantasio, June 1, 1907, 88. This phrase, translated into English as “in theory ‘charenton-like,’” makes reference to the infamous insane asylum Charenton situated on the outskirts of Paris.

123 Warnod, “Le Bal,”17.

will after the first ‘stirrip-cup’ of champagne, or lost as they pressed through the dense throngs of dancing Grecian heroes, who waylaid their every step.124

Figure 2-1: An artist and his models at the ball

By denying any wrongdoing and by evading responsibility for the promiscuous state of their female guests, students used the occasion to shore up an image of the artist as a carefree and fun loving yet rational and chaste individual. In defense of their innocence, they argued that there was no difference between what had taken place at the ball and what normally transpired in the studio or life-drawing classes of the École.

“Nothing seemed more natural than to see all those beautiful bodies offering themselves, without shame nor bother since models are accustomed to heroic nudity, to the glances of all the youth of the studios and schools.”125 A reader of L’Intermédiare wrote:

I have attended almost all of these Quat-z’Arts balls where the artists, among them and for them, composed magnificent floats, as they will compose their paintings. The models who pose as characters, if the situation lends itself, are nude, as they are nude in the ateliers of the most morally stringent and pure of artists. Therefore

124 Ernest Parsons, Pot-Pourri Parisien and First Impressions of New York (New York, 1916), 37.

125 St. Albin, “Le nu au théâtre,” 451.

for me, I am used to seeing in the body only a grammar of art, nothing shocking, neither rare.126

Like the studio model’s professional modesty that protected her from feelings of

shame, physical, and psychological vulnerability, the artist claimed to possess a similar

“propriety of spirit and manners” that allowed him to see “in his model anything but an

undressed little girl.”127 This allusion to child pornography, a popular vice among

bourgeois males, was an attempt to counter allegations that desire played a part in the

École’s costume balls. The artist’s objective, or so it was said, was to observe and study

the human form evolving in nature within an institutionally sanctioned space.128

As an artists’ ball, the Quat’z-Arts was first and foremost a “festival of character”

where prizes were awarded to individual ateliers for the most accurate reconstitution of a

historical period.129 Roughly forty studios, including those of Jean-Léon Gerôme and

Gustave Moreau, prepared for months in advance, devoting themselves to “the creation of

spectacles and in the costuming of students and models.” Their goal was to fabricate a display that emboldened a feeling where “one is impressed by its artistic completeness, its studied splendor, and permissible license, so long as a costume (or lack of it) produces an artistic result.”130

126 L’Intermédiare, 990.

127 Morin, Carnavals, 9.

128 Morin, Revue, 14.

129 Ibid., 7, 30; L’Intransigeant Illustré, February 9, 1893.

130 Smith, The Real Latin Quarter, 70-72.

To test and apply their knowledge of ancient history, crafts, architectural and costume design, the annual ball served as a practicum, a laboratory, and “a school of gesture and antics” for students where they could “see and understand the nude gesture.”131 While the state spent millions of francs training art students to study ‘still

life’ through the imitation of wax figures, dissected bodies, and immobile models, the

ball provided the one occasion where the artist could observe the principal subject of his

work, the female nude, in motion. Organizers encouraged ateliers, in accordance with the

Académie’s rigorous emphasis on historical and mythological subject matter, to

“represent a lost epoch, a fragment of a century where the woman walked in the street,

breasts ignorant of the corset, the tunic slit from the hips.”132 By relying upon a rhetoric

of serious scholarship to sanction their realistic portrayals of a distant past or foreign

cultures, artists could construct floats and props, costume and depict characters that violated current social taboos and artistic conventions, especially with regard to traditional representational strategies of women’s bodies. An 1899 memo posted around the school insinuated this much in its statement that judging would be based on an atelier’s “artistic merit and beauty of their female display,” however, it sarcastically warned the students that “the [male] Nude, as always, is PROHIBITED!?!”133 It is

131 Coquiot, Bals publics, 28; Morin, Carnavals, 20.

132 Fantasio, June 1, 1907, 88.

133 Smith, The Real Latin Quarter, 75. What the circular indirectly alluded to and what the students found so amusing was the rise of a moral discourse condemning nudity in public spaces. Emanating from the recently established League Against License in the Streets, under the direction of its founder and president Senator René Bérenger, this conservative politician decried and attacked “the causes of an epidemic in indecency.” One of the organization’s objectives was to prohibit specifically these kinds of indulgences that “flatter the depraved tastes of certain spectators. That is what we attack, it is the immorality wanted and searched for itself, these are the obscene exhibitions or the licentious scenes which are not motivated by a single effort towards art or towards literary beauty.” FOL JO-30842: La Morale Publique Contre la

67 interesting to note that it was the female nude and not the male nude that was at issue here. Even though the ball was to be an artistic endeavor, students used the occasion as a titillating display of female nudity.

The massier of each atelier issued invitations to the students whose requests had to be made known before a specified date. Initially each student was given one invitation that entitled him, along with a guest, entry into the ball. By 1895, the restriction of one invitation per student was lifted, thereby enabling a student to invite multiple guests.

Local committees were also set up solely for the benefit of independent artists who could make written requests for invitations. Once approved, the independent artist could visit one of two locations on the right (25 rue Turgot) and left bank (68 rue d’Assas) of the

Seine to obtain his invitation upon presentation of an identification card, usually a carte de domicile. Those who had subscribed to the Courrier Francais by the first of the year, prior to the announcement of the gala, received an invite as well. Roques noted that the number of invitations demanded always superceded the number of invitations. Had the organizers been able to accommodate everyone, they would have held the event at the former 1889 World Exposition’s Galerie des Machines which at that time was “the largest iron-framed building ever constructed…covering nearly fifteen acres.”134

Since the demand for invitations far exceeded the supply, organizers devised a plan to prevent the fabrication of counterfeit invitations by placing the Committee’s special stamp next to the bearer’s name in order to verify its authenticity. Without such proof, a

Licence des Rues et du Comite National pour la Repression de la Traite des Blanches: Bulletin Trimestriel de la Societe Centrale de Protestation, no. 1 (Feb.1901): 5.

134 Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Époque, 121.

guest would be refused admittance. Printed on embalmed paper, the invitations were

charged with both overt and subliminal sexual references. Color-coded white for men

and blue for women, they featured the same kinds of nude figures found in the pages of

the Courrier Français and drawn by Jules Chéret, Louis Metivet, and Louis Morin for the

ball’s “pretty posters” and “ravishing lithographs.”135 For example, the 1893 invitation

featured Chéret’s iconic chérette, “a figure of brazen sexual invitation” who symbolized the “pleasures of consumption” found at the Moulin Rouge and similar entertainment establishments. Flying through the night sky as an autonomous, “other worldly” character in a fit of ecstasy, the chérette seemed to leap out of her one-dimensional universe into that of the viewer. The choice of the chérette for the invitation’s illustration created expectations of what guests might see at the ball. Visual motifs commonly associated with her representation on music hall posters conjured up images of women energetically dancing in provocative costumes, wearing masks, or riding that carnivalesque emblem of lechery, the donkey.136 To underpin the subversive nature of

the drawing and the event itself, a square in the far-right hand corner where the stamp

would normally appear, bore the unheeded warning “Drawing suppressed by

censorship.”137

135 Courrier Français, February 5, 1893; Paul Gsell, Le carnaval et les mascarades dans les Beaux-Arts (Paris, 1906), 500.

136 Montorgeuil, Paris dansant, 123; Verhagen, “The Poster in Fin-de-Siècle Paris: ‘That Mobile and Degenerate Art,” in Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, eds. Leo Charney and Vanessa Schwartz (Berkeley, 1995), 105.

137 Courrier Français, February 5, 1893; Warnod, “Le Bal,” 17.

The exclusivity of the ball rested with not only possession of an invitation but of a

costume with “enough artistic originality or merit.”138 For its first year, the ball

prohibited guests from wearing garb traditionally seen within the atelier. The black suit

of the bourgeois master artist or visitor, alongside the artist’s blouse and men’s bathing

trunk, an item worn by male models during breaks between poses, were among the most

obvious items excluded. In subsequent years, costumes depicting monks, Pierrots, pimps,

and infantry soldiers were added to the list of “mediocre” and “hideous” disguises.139

Those found in violation of the dress code exited through a door on the right of the entryway, while those who passed the jury of painters and sculptors hovering by the portal entered on the left.

Students commenced the night’s festivities with apéritifs at cafés located within the

Odéon district. Joined by “their models or their girlfriends” who reportedly lacked the appropriate dress because their meager incomes did not permit them to own many clothes, the artists processed through the Latin Quarter, across the Seine, and up to

Montmartre where the “flamboyant wings of the Moulin Rouge” marked their final destination.140 The arrival of guests, described as a massive throng of characters coming

from “all four corners of Paris,” consisted of “Assyrians, Hercules, bayaderes, Saphos,

gymnosophists, Cleopatras, vestals, Apollonius, Eves, saints and satans.” The choice of

costumes, drawn from Greek and Roman mythology, Ancient history, and Christianity,

conformed to the traditional subject matter of academic art. The doors of the Moulin

138 Smith, The Real Latin Quarter, 70-71.

139 Courrier Français, February 5, 1893; Montorgeuil, Paris dansant, 122.

140 Montorgeuil, Paris dansant, 123; Courrier Français, February 12, 1893.

Rouge, having opened at midnight sharp, permitted the hoard of villainous, heroic, and

seductive personalities to pass through an entryway strictly guarded for two hours by

Guillaume and Roques who checked and verified 4,000 invitations “in order that not a single uninvited person could hide in the crowd.”141

Once inside, guests encountered an artificial pleasure garden filled with flowers

hanging down from the upper-tier boxes where the massiers and masters of the individual

ateliers stood bestowing a solemn and official endorsement on the fête.142 In an

atmosphere much like that of a music hall, revelers mixed in the large open space below

as they simultaneously enjoyed performances by the verrophonist Togam and La Cigale’s

Spanish dancers Magnitta and Estrella del Moral, two stars who had “consecrated their reputation for pretty castillan legs.”143 Women’s wrestling matches, as well as special numbers performed by singers like La Scala’s Camille Stefani, kept guests occupied before the commencement of the evening’s main festivities.144

At two o’clock in the morning, a sounding of trumpets and a beating of drums prompted the beginning of the parade. As the Mabille orchestra struck up some marching tunes, the guests gathered in the middle of the room to watch the magnificent procession of banners that announced each atelier’s float.145 An “orgy of colors” made up “of blond,

brown, and red flesh” burst forth into the hall in the form of historical and mythological

141 Courrier Français, February 12, 1893.

142 Montorgeuil, Paris dansant, 124.

143 Courrier Français, February 12, 1893.

144 L’Intransigeant Illustré, February 9, 1893.

145 Fantasio, June 1, 1907.

characters from ancient Rome, Gaul, the Levant, and Mount Olympia. Among the

female contingency of nude and semi-nude characters arriving “on floats, beds of

flowers, enthroned on a dome, carried by Hercules, or walking” was a “smiling” Egyptian

captive and a Diana who walked “with deliberate step” “nude and proud.” Following the procession was the “Queen of the Ball,” Sarah Brown, a “superb red-head” who had

posed for Jules Lefebvre’s Lady Godiva (1890) and Georges Rochegrosse’s Les Derniers

Jours de Babylone (1891). Carried on top of a platform by four semi-nude male slaves,

Brown appeared as a teutonic version Cleopatra.146 Despite a few pearl necklaces and

gold bracelets that adorned her body, she remained “chaste in her nudity” as she executed

a series of artistic poses before a crowd of “cannibals” who devoured her with their

eyes.147

Sarah Brown greeted the crowd’s praises with melodramatic flare, playing up an

“Oriental apathy” typically associated with Middle-Eastern women.148 The exoticism of

Brown’s persona was only heightened by her own reputation as an “imperious Jew” of unpredictable behavior.149 Roberts’ study of the actress Sarah Bernhardt highlights the

ways in which anti-Semitic and anti-feminist discourses intersected over the New

146 Courrier Français, February 12, 1893; Montorgueil, Paris dansant, 125; Marie Lathers concludes her book with a discussion of Sarah Brown who literally “incarnated” depictions of the artist’s model in nineteenth-century French literature and photography. See Bodies of Art, 243. The chariots and litters upon which the models rode were designed by Metivet, Rapin, and Bellery-Desfontaines, all first-class decorators. See Gsell, Le Carnaval, 500.

147 Bradimbourg quoted in Warnod, “Le Bal,” 17; Fantasio, June 1, 1907; Courrier Français, February 12, 1893.

148 Courrier Français, March 19, 1893; Montorgeuil, Paris dansant, 126.

149 Courrier Français, February 10, 1893.

Woman’s body to express fears concerning a disruption of racial and gender norms.150

Words like “impulsive, headstrong, passionate” characterized Brown as an emotionally driven force whose life remained plagued by a chain of unsuccessful love affairs. Her erratic behavior inside and outside the studio, manifest in her hospitalization for hysterical attacks, political activism in various student movements, and public outbursts, made Brown “a sort of bohemian mascot” prized for her independence and disregard for social conventions.151 Even Paris’ most distinguished art critics, Jules Claretie and Jules

Lemaître, found something worthy about Brown, if not in her personal life then in her

ability to make art come to life.152 Those who knew her commented on how she literally

“lived and reigned like a queen” similar to the characters for which she posed, expressing

a power, an authority, and a freedom that on the one hand seemed mysterious and distant

while on the other inviting, familiar, and modern.153

On-lookers described the fleshy display of feminine beauty in the language of the

studio noting the “very artistic ensembles” and “academic poses” of the performers.154

The white shoulders and pink thighs that emerged beneath the togas, maillots, and transparent shirts of Diana, Esmerelda, Truth, and Fortune contrasted in color and texture with the rough exterior of armor-clad Romans or fur-cloaked cavemen. What might have looked once like plaster or marble in one of the atelier’s staged tableaux vivants, had

150 See Roberts’ discussion of “Sarah Wandering Jew” in Disruptive Acts, 203-213.

151 Lathers, Bodies of Art, 243-244.

152 Anonymous A.B.X., L’Intermédiare, 990.

153 W.C. Morrow, Bohemian Paris of To-day (Philadelphia, Penn., 1899), 58.

154 Gazette des Tribunaux, June 24, 1893.

been turned into the most “precious substance: flesh.”155 Guests stood in awe as they

gazed upward to see framed within one of the hall’s loges the model Manon posing as a

nude caryatid. Having barely moved the entire night, she captured the crowd’s attention

when she transformed herself from a static sculpture into “a living feminine beauty.” The

“harmony of her contours” recalled those of the Venus de Milo and of other sculpted

marbles considered quintessential examples of bodily perfection in art. 156 Like Carosi

the Living Statue who greeted customers in the Folies-Bergère’s vestibule from eight

o’clock in the evening until midnight, Manon embodied the artists’ desire and intention to

turn art into life and to confuse the boundaries between high art and popular

entertainment.157 Six months later, she repeated this exploit at a similar ball sponsored by the Courrier Français’ rival the Fin-de-Siècle, and then subsequently for a wider audience of “habits noirs [black tuxedos]” within the music hall.158

Their tasteful presentation and orchestration of nude bodies outside the studio in the less formal music hall setting was not, however, to be confused with the vulgar

exhibitions often times seen in such locations. The presence of the famous music hall

dancer La Goulue reminded guests that there was an art and science to the living and

painted female nude. Best remembered for her awkward, if not grotesque, profile in

Henri Toulouse-Lautrec’s publicity poster for the Moulin Rouge, La Goulue attended the

1893 Bal des Quat’z-Arts in the disguise of an Indian. Although in her natural environs,

155 Montorgeuil, Paris dansant, 125-126.

156 Montorgeuil, L’année feminine, 1895: Les déshabillés au théâtre (Paris, 1896), 3.

157 RO 15.722-R123273: 1907 Folies-Bergère Program

158 Montorgeuil, Paris dansant, 127.

La Goulue appeared out of place as she “wandered in distress” through the throngs of

artists and models who “paid little attention” to her. Even though she sported the same

transparent fabric that the other models used to reveal their lovely figures, La Goulue flaunted a “flesh that lacked character” and appeared to be “only the accidental undressing, a condiment of carnal appetites” commonly seen within the “cabinets particuliers” of bourgeois pornographers. 159 In essence, La Goulue and her poses acted

as a foil for artists to both visually and physically demonstrate and draw a distinction between what they called “the nude in its normal milieu, and the casual nude.”160 The revelation and comportment of one’s bare body as a thing of ideal beauty constituted what modernists interpreted as the Nude, that is to say a well-proportioned, powerful, and

“confident” form and therefore a meaningful and worthy object of analysis.161 On the

other hand, “the nude who compromised herself” represented a cowering, embarrassed

mass of flesh that carried the weight of materiality on her shoulders.162 She recalled the

same coarse, clumsy, and unattractive visions of the naked body produced by amateur

photographers and sold under cover in bookstores, on street corners, and through the

postal mail.

The Bal des Quat’z-Arts’ mixture of anonymity, sexual desire, drunkenness and

human flesh, as evoked in the poem Sortie de bal, instigated concerns about female

159 Ibid., Paris dansant, 127.

160 Ibid.

161 Ibid.

162 Ibid.

sexuality that were couched in a discourse on the model-as-prostitute.163 Like her

feminine counterpart, the model received monetary renumeration for dressing and

undressing in front of male voyeurs. Parisians feared that, having developed a “habit of

showing themselves nude, everyday, in the ateliers,” “the ‘New Woman’ of the atelier”

would ply their trade and “pose for a more numerous audience” in the city’s many

theaters and music halls, a fear that was later confirmed by Manon’s professional move

into the world of popular entertainment.164 The model’s new-found independence,

exemplified by her transgression of public-private boundaries, recalled…

163 Elle avait un beau maillot rose Garni de rubans de satin Elle a dansé jusqu’au matin Malgré sa toux et sa nevroseError! Bookmark not defined.

Elle a barbouillé de champagne Sa frimousse et trempe ses doigts Dans plus de dix plats à la fois Sans facon, comme à la campagne!

Et comme elle était un peu grise Quand nous avons quitté le bal, --Eclairé par le blanc fanal De l’aube dans le ciel cerise—

J’ai reconduit mon inconnue, La soutenant dans l’escalier Et prenant à chaque palier Des baisers fous sur sa chair nue! Alex Dreville, Sortie de bal, Courrier Francais, March 26, 1893, 11.

164 L’Intransigeant Illustré, “Le nu au Senat,” March 21, 1893; Lathers, Bodies of Art, 39.

Contrary to popular belief, an overwhelming sense of mutual respect and

camaraderie existed among the students and their guests. “Women circulated

unceremoniously, without immodesty, among the men whose look followed them without

covetousness. A very ordinary familiarity visibly reigned between the sexes.”165

Students denied categorically that the women in attendance were either treated as objects of male lust or symbolically represented the degenerative effects of modernity. The female nude, they argued, was transformed into a living model for aesthetic reform only.

However within this transformation was the implicit claim that the nude-as-model was no longer the classical female nude, but a more modern, up-dated version. Part and parcel of the social awakening that shook the art world in the 1880s and 1890s was a desire to integrate art into everyday life, and in the case of the Quat’z-Arts ball, this reintegration took the form of the self-actualization and physical realization of the female nude.166

Like the artist, the models assumed the role of actors in a living tableau where life

imitated art and vice versa.

The assertion that the human body should be venerated and celebrated as a work of beauty relied on the assumption that it contributed a rational dimension to artistic knowledge. Nochlin recounts how “for many advanced artists of the nineteenth-century,”

plaster casts in the studio served as “reminders not so much of vanished glory as of a

repressive academic education which they were all too ready to forget.”167 The female

165 Montorgeuil, Paris dansant, 124.

166 Eugenia Herbert, Artists and Social Reform: France and Belgium, 1885-1898 (New Haven, Conn., 1961), 16.

167 Nochlin goes on to describe how Vincent Van Gogh eventually left the Antwerp Academy out of disgust because “they rarely had an actual nude to pose.” See The Body in Pieces, 47.

nude’s presence at the ball transformed what would otherwise be viewed as an orgy into a

thoughtful study of the human body in motion. One observer recalled,

It is there, there only, that the painters and the sculptures can observe that which should be the principal object of their studies: the nude in movement…Never will they have seen the human body evolve in freedom…This spectacle, which is for them the most necessary, they only enjoy one time a year, in a ball which they created--and right at the limits of the School’s rules. But it is a School where there should even be installed a great courtyard, wherein chosen models would make the rounds down the runway! There is an unfortunate lacuna that we point out to the Minister of Public Instruction. It is a little thing to furnish a corpse to the young people on a table where they can study the proportions of the skeleton and the muscular attachments…Until the creation of a course of movement, the Quat’z- Arts will have to suffice, in order to develop among the youth the science of gesture and those of costume and of historic character.168

Unlike the Bal de l’Opéra and other bals publics associated with the morally hypocritical nouveaux riches, the artists’ ball functioned as a space “where women are no longer sold, where it does not conclude itself in a bill of sale, where each one comes with his own girlfriend, the lover with his mistress, the artist with his model” in search of pleasure that was free and not tied to a cash nexus.”169 Like Coquiot, art students professed an objection to the commodification of female bodies in visual culture although in reality they reinforced a system of visual referents that privileged male spectatorship over the female nude. Their need to encounter and create what English scholar Martha

Bantha calls “the real thing” was on the one hand a reaction to a loss of aura resulting from an “increasing mechanization of reproducible technology” (i.e. photography and film), as well as a rethinking of art, represented by the female nude, not as an objectified

168 Morin, Revue, 14-15.

169 Montorgeuil, Paris dansant, 126.

commodity of bourgeois consumption but a meaningful sign of universal beauty that

could appeal to popular viewing audiences on a humanistic level.170 In this way, artists

turned against the whole organization of society, and indicted the capitalist system itself. Hence their hopes as artists as well as individuals became centered on the construction of a new order in which art would meet with the favor that now eluded it.171

Building upon the “ball of hands” metaphor for the Bal de l’Opéra, participants and

observers likewise referred to the Bal des Quat’z-Arts in corporeal terms as a “festival of

eyes.”172 Sexual difference, rather than being erased, constituted an integral part of the ball’s success. While the Quat’z-Arts promoted a sense of liberty, equality, and fraternity among its guests, participants were well aware of the double standard that existed between the male actors and their display of female nudities. “It’s okay for the women, but as for you men, you do not need to appear completely nude! As regular attendees of the ball, where the masculine académie has never been supported, the rebuke would seem funny.”173 By creating an annual ball “for and by artists,” the students of the École des

Beaux Arts discovered another means by which male voyeuristic desires could be

institutionalized and propagated within the Académie on the eve of women’s entry into

its hallowed halls.174 Guests were advised before entering the ball “to learn to see with

170 See Chapter 3, “Artists, Models, and Real Things,” in Banta’s Imaging American Women, 143-178.

171 Herbert, Artists and Social Reform, 210.

172 Courrier Francais, February 12, 1893.

173 Morin, Revue, 11.

174 Morin, Carnavals, 22.

the eyes of a painter and to keep the nude as the last state of undress.”175 The subtle

implication that the living nude was reserved for the gaze of a male expert resonated with

a range of other professional bodies. Journalists who collaborated with graphic artists

formerly-trained at the École provided the most visible proof of how the female nude’s

commodification within illustrated dailies could reinforce dominant gender norms. By

the same token, doctors and lawyers, like their artist friends, would reinforce the notion

that male privilege, and hence professional authority, depended upon the subjugation of

women and their bodies within their respective professional circles.

Like other predominantly male recreations of the time (body-building, organized

sports, hiking clubs, and dueling associations), the Bal des Quat’z-Arts contributed to a

redefinition of masculinity at the turn-of-the-century.176 As Robert Nye and William

Reddy have pointed out in their studies of masculinity in nineteenth century France, the

preservation of one’s masculinity became integral to constituting a professional self. In

addition to the athlete, soldier, wrestler, journalist and bourgeois entrepreneur, the artist

possessed the same qualities of discipline and self-control that secured his virility in an

increasingly feminine world. As one individual admitted, “everyone, obviously, is not

prepared for such spectacles.”177 The artist’s ability to study and socialize with nude

women without succumbing to base, natural instincts reaffirmed his masculinity and

legitimized art as a chaste and intellectual trade. According to George Mosse, artists (like

175 Warnod, “Le Bal,” 17.

176 For works on masculinity and Modern France see Tamar Garb, Bodies of Modernity: Figure and Flesh in Fin-de-Siècle France (London, 1998); Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor; Reddy, The Invisible Code.

177 Warnod, “Le Bal,” 17.

other questionable fin-de-siècle social types) deflected their preoccupation with the

physical onto more spiritual ideals of human beauty to avoid possible character attacks.178

However in moving the nude beyond the private walls of the École and into more

public spaces for reasons of edification and aesthetic appreciation à la nature, artists

unwittingly contributed to rumors concerning their deviant sexual behavior. Candide’s

correlation between the artists’ ball and the “indulgences of today” illustrates the ways in

which their semi-public costume dances had elicited apprehension about the masculine

gaze’s violation of female bodies when it was exercised outside of a purely professional

context. St. Albin, in endorsing the artist’s right to practice his trade outside of any

regulatory system of morality, defended them against allegations of decadence and

depravity as popular naturalism came to represent the vulgarity of private life and the

body in the 1890s.179

What if the professional artist ended, forced to live in the company of his models, by being completely indifferent to the beauty of women. It would be necessary to complain about it if it was true, but it is not true. As long as one did not enter into decrepitude, one experiences a very intense sensual pleasure, where the man sees and the woman appears [emphasis added]. It is a fact, that is all…Therefore the artists have reason to protest against the accusation of immorality that one throws at them and they have founded, as one says, a ‘League for the freedom of Art’ in opposition to the League of Senator Bérenger…They do not confuse good and evil. Never has an artist refused society the right to punish with rigor, first and above all, the rape of children and adults, abortion, offenses against public decency, white slavery, exhibitionism…but in a question of pure beauty, they really have an equal say in the matter.180

178 George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York, 1985).

179 Lathers, Bodies of Art, 221.

180 St. Albin, “Le nu au théâtre,” 460.

Bohemia’s alliance with commercial journalism and music halls to spectacularize

female nudity called into question its claim to respect the “pure beauty” of women. This

“taint of commercialism,” which would always characterize Bohemia despite its pronouncements otherwise, would continue to trouble and complicate artistic renderings

of the female nude in the modern era.181

More than a “daring and merry fling,” the Bal des Quat’z-Arts had become “an

annual manifestation of artistic life in Paris” with significant applications, implications,

and ramifications for gender and body politics in the years leading up to the Great War.182

Because of their outsider status, artists were able to stage the nude in ways that others could not and make certain claims about the nude that helped to mediate its presence outside the confines of art. Paul Derval, owner-manager of the Folies-Bergère from 1923 to 1932, credited the display of nude models at Bohemia’s bals publics as a springboard for new forms of entertainment, namely the striptease which “spread like wildfire” less than a year after the 1893 Bal des Quat’z-Arts. “The artistic cabaret, artists’ costume balls, and nudity (really, semi-nudity) in music hall sketches and revues (from 1894 on) became rages almost suddenly.”183 This transference of female nudity from the semi-

public space of the bal public to the very public venue of the music-hall was facilitated by

the revue de fin d’année (end-of-the-year revue) which recapitulated the newsworthy

events of the year in satiric style. The Bal des Quat’z-Arts provided the perfect pretext

181 Jerrold Seigel, Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830-1930 (Baltimore, M.D., 1986), 338.

182 Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Époque, 46.

183 Ibid., 75.

for exhibiting nudity on stage as demonstrated in a critique of the Théâtre de Cluny’s

1893 revue de fin d’année Ah! La pau…la pau…la pau…

Never before has such luxurious stage direction been seen at the Cluny. The eyes and ears have what they need to be satisfied. Floats, fanfare, and a battalion of undressed pretty girls in charming costumes. Such are the attractions that make up the diverse tableaux of the revue and among them the Bal des Quat’z-Arts and the Fête Franco-Russe.184

In making the ball their central subject, revues such as the Ambassadeurs’ Les

Quat’z-Arts l’ont bien passée and Emilienne aux 4 Z’Arts presented at the Folies-Bergère

in December 1893 attracted large crowds with displays of half-dressed chorus and

showgirls under the guise of reportage.185 Scenes entitled “Bal des Quatz-Arts,” or some

variation thereof, continued to be a regular fixture of erotic dance revues up until 1914

despite increasing attacks against female performers “not wearing enough of the maillot

[bodysuit].”186

In addition to providing inspiration to a number of musical comedies where

reference to le déshabillé, be it to the practice or practitioner of undressing, was central to

the event’s action and popularity, the balls of the Courrier Français and Quat’z-Arts

became models for future “fêtes de caractères.”187 Other popular illustrated journals

jumped on the bandwagon by sponsoring their own corporate balls. Roques’ leading

competitor Mainguy, editor at the rival paper Fin-de-Siècle, held the Bal de Fin-de-Siècle

184 RO 17941 (7): Press Clippings for the Théâtre de Cluny, September 12, 1893.

185 Gilles Sardant, “Au Temps des Ambassadeurs,” Monde Illustré, December 7, 1929; Courrier Francais, August 6, 18; Montorgeuil, L’année feminine, 37.

186 “Le Bal de 4z’Arts” ended the first act of Sans Culottes, a revue performed at La Cigale in March 1911. Similarly, one of the two tableaux presented in Parisiana’s revue Les Colles de la Femmes was entitled “Bal des Quatz-Arts.” Paris Qui Chante, May 5, 1907.

187 Morin, Revue, 7.

just six months after the 1893 Bal de Quat’z-Arts. Almost a direct carbon copy of its

predecessor, the ball took place at the Elysée-Montmartre where the same models were

“given the task of incarnating living feminine beauty.”188 Other students imitated and

tried to improve upon the Bal des Quat’z-Arts by making their own balls more creative,

more fantastic, and more nude than ever. Not to be outdone, medical and law students transformed their traditional banquets into a colorful, nonsensical exposition of artistic talent, wit, humor, and satire.189 In their simulation of Quat’z-Arts-like balls, this second group of academicians revealed the erotic impulse behind artists’ attempts to modernize the female nude.

The Bal des Quat’z-Arts, having been eclipsed by more fantastic balls, devolved into a mere shadow of its former self by the early twentieth-century as an expression of an “artistic spirit” which “has the opportunity less and less to manifest itself.”190 The

suppression of complete nudity within the ball by police order in 1904, alongside the death of Roques in 1909, also contributed to the ball’s waning popularity in the years leading up to World War One.191 By 1914, the ball had moved out into the Paris suburbs

of Neuilly in an apparent attempt to escape the governmental oversight that had

188 Montorgeuil, Paris dansant, 127.

189 The one official social release medical interns took part in annually was the Bal de l’Internat, hosted by the École de Médecine every October.

190 Warnod, “Le Bal,” 17.

191 L’Intermediare, vol. 64 (1911), 126. Roques died from a hernia operation on March 9, 1909 at Saint- Antoine Hospital a year after the ball’s displacement to the outskirts of Paris. In paying homage to his life, the paper La Patrie called him a “great organizer of ingenious publicity, who often attracted the attention of gawkers in favor of such or such product, also rendered real services to the cause of art.” La Patrie, Obituary for Jules Hippolyte Roques, March 10, 1909.

increasingly restricted its extravagant exhibitions of sensual pleasure and social spoof.192

With the clouds of war looming on the horizon, the French capital could no longer tolerate subversive, “disruptive acts” that would jeopardize the nation’s moral and gender order.

The centrality of bals publics in the popularization of the performative female nude helps to explain the gradual, almost innocuous, acceptance of female nudity within late nineteenth-century Parisian entertainment. Visions of women’s fleshy arms, legs, feet, and shoulders within traditional locales and social events where social dancing occurred were repackaged and expanded upon by individuals, groups, and institutions wanting to counter and escape the materialism and moral hypocrisy of bourgeois society. The passing of the model’s body from the atelier to the theater, via the bal public, illustrates the ways in which modern notions of sexuality and subjectivity were fostered by new, more immediate modes of corporeal expression among women within mass culture.

Ironically, the female body underwent further objectification, fetishization, and commercialization by bohemians despite the aestheticized and playful settings in which they posed her. An alliance between the Courrier Français and the artists of the École des Beaux-Arts precipitated the living nude’s crowning moment within the finely tuned, well-orchestrated, and highly publicized Bal des Quat’z-Arts.

Those most used to living in a state of undress, artists’ models, dominated the ball’s visual landscape as a symbol of the Third Republic and its installation of a new modern democratic era. Not only did the model’s body function as an imaginary site of contestation within mid to late nineteenth-century French literature, as Marie Lathers has

192 RO 13006: Invitations to the Bal des Quat’z-Arts

shown, but also as a very real and tangible matrix within which French artists and

physicians could physically grapple with such issues as sexuality, desire, spectatorship

and representation. Her transformation from an immobile figure of the enclosed studio

into an active speaking, walking, and dancing subject of the streets, suggests that an

artistic and social movement was afoot to openly challenge dominant bourgeois

assumptions, canons, and practices governing French art, morality, and gender relations.

The Bal des Quat’z-Arts, in its symbolic and material re-imagining of a new social order

and aesthetics based on truth and transparency and embodied in the figure of the

performative nude model, was the most blatant manifestation of this cultural shift.

However these utopian ideals did not translate into everyday life as the model’s

professional and sexual liberation evolved under the parameters of a predominantly male

gaze. Disparities and contradictions within artists’ rhetoric and presentation of the living

nude reveal that artists, rather than challenging, actually reinforced bourgeois culture by

reserving the nude for the purposes of male fraternization, pleasure, and the assertion of a

masculine, professional self.193 Her objectified status, in addition to being

institutionalized by the École des Beaux-Arts annual artists’ ball after 1893, was then

replicated within the music hall. Having played host to bals publics over the years, the

music hall naturally incorporated the balls’ theatrics within dance revues, capitalizing

upon these cultural events by using them as occasions to introduce the act of undressing

and nudity as the latest crazes in modern theater. Although the “artistic” nude had moved

from the semi-public to the public sphere and, as one will see in the next chapter,

193 Sowerwine discusses the “construction of a brotherhood, a male bond among bourgeois and, later, artisan males” in terms women’s exclusion from the polity and reduction to “objects of the male gaze.” See France since 1870, 46.

transformed herself from a passive figure into a relatively active subject, she remained

inscribed within an environment where male needs and desires were “played out through

the bodies of women” to create a less threatening state of “hom(m)o-sexuality.”194 Men of all classes and political persuasions visibly reassured themselves that virility was alive and well in fin-de-siècle France despite rumors of decadence and degeneration.

194 Luce Irigaray, “Women on the Market,” in Kelly Oliver, ed., French Feminism Reader (Lanham, M.D., 2000), 212.

CHAPTER 3 FROM THE STREET TO THE MUSIC HALL: THE FEMALE NUDE PERFORMER IN BELLE ÉPOQUE PARIS

In March 1908, the journal Fantasio remarked that “in the year 1908 where

Anastasie is retired, it is fashionable to display in all self-respecting revues a woman of

pure lines and without veils.”1 Other journals of the day similarly pronounced that in

Paris, the City of Light, le nu au théâtre was all the rage.2 With the removal of theatrical

censorship having occurred just three years before, the Parisian public and entertainment

industry enjoyed an unprecedented level of artistic and scopophilic freedom. Between

1894 and 1914, music halls from Montparnasse to Montmartre capitalized on Tout-Paris’ passion for scantily-clad women in erotically enticing revues entitled À Nu Paris, Paris

Tout Nu, Cache Ton Nu, À Nu Les Femmes, La Femme Nue, Avez-vous Vu Mon Nu? Nue

Cocotte, and Mais n’te promène donc pas toute nue! And if the titles or publicity posters

for Sans Culottes, C’est Nature, À poil, La Chair, La Feuille de Vigne, Le Coucher

d’Yvette, or Le Bain de Champagne were too ambiguous or not explicit enough—the

actresses’ cameo shots within the programs left nothing, literally, to speculation or

conjecture.

1 Fantasio, February 1, 1908, 659. Anastasie was the soubriquet for the system of preventive censorship that existed in France from 1850 until 1905. “En l’an grace 1908 où Anastasie est à la retraite, il est de mode d’exhiber dans toutes les revues qui se respectent une femme aux lignes pures et sans voiles.”

2 Fantasio announced that “À Paris, ville lumière, une mode en ce moment sevit la mode du nu. Elle est au théâtre en attendant pire.” “L’Audace du nu,” April 1, 1908, 809. Paris Théâtre echoed that same observation over a month later when it stated “Le nu fait rage! Aussitôt, ce sera une mode!’” “Entendu au music hall,” May 23, 1908, 12.

87 88

By the 1890s, Parisians had made leisure not just a distraction but also an art form.

In response to a period of civil war, economic depression, and puritanical political rule in

the 1870s, Parisians built a world of phantasmagoria composed of cafés-concerts,

circuses, horse races, wax museums, morgues, merry-go rounds, dioramas, and dance

halls. The invention of new visual and print technologies in the first half of the

nineteenth-century fostered a taste for spectacle that became a defining aspect of Belle

Époque society. Elaborate representations of the fantastical and the mundane, “in the

artists and student festivals, in expositions, theaters, balls, on buildings, in painting and in

the street, in the book and the image,” worked to distract Parisians “from little everyday

bothers.”3 The predominance of art, and in particular spectacular, public and performative art within la vie quotidienne encouraged Parisians to act out “their lives with fine theatrical flair” on the streets, stages, public thoroughfares, and parks of

Europe’s pleasure capital.4 In fact, “for many years, and even after 1900, Paris remained

the Capital of Spectacle” where performances were taken up by a variety of individuals,

for a number of different reasons, in diverse settings, and assorted ways.5 Yet none were

so controversial as the performance taken up both on and off-stage by la femme nue.

3 Louis Morin, Revue de Quat’ Saisons: Revue trimestrielle illustrée (Paris, 1901), 3-4.

4 Charles Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Époque: Entertainment and Festivity in Turn-of-the-Century France (New Haven, Conn., 1985), 173.

5 L’Académie du Cirque et du Music Hall, (Edouard Beaudu, Pierre Bost, Robert Baze, Yves Brayer, Jacques Chesnais, Marcel Duvau, Paul Gilson, Dr Fernand Mery, Jean Texcier, Maurice Feaudierre dit Serge), Histoire du Music Hall (Paris, 1954), 91. Recent studies on some of the Belle Époque’s more exceptional women, such as Marguerite Durand, Nellie Roussel, and Sarah Bernhardt, have been interpreted through the lens of performativity, a concept elaborated upon by Judith Butler in her book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Feminine Identity (New York, 1999). See Mary Louise Roberts, Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-Siècle France (Chicago, 2000); Jo Burr Margadant, The New Biography: Performing Femininity in Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley, Calif., 2000); Heather McPherson, The Modern Portrait in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, 2001).

Before examining in Chapter 7 the real women that existed behind the music hall’s

production of nude spectacles, Chapter 3 situates la femme nue as a representational

subject within a burgeoning Parisian entertainment industry and its ongoing quest for

novelty. Chapter 2 traced the progressive eroticization of public life in the last quarter of

the nineteenth-century arguing that the artist’s model, as the living muse for the female

nude, straddled the realms of high art and mass culture to become a central focus of

Parisian spectatorship. Bals publics served as a conduit through which the model made

her eventual moves from the studio into the music hall, another site where she could

experiment with and imagine alternative subject positions. Chapter 3 undertakes a

review of the music hall as a space where, like the bal public, art and life converged over

the modern female nude. An assessment of the music hall’s interior décor, audience, and

programs in Section One reveals that a gradual imprinting of the modern body, as a

sexual and self-aware yet objectified body, coincided and culminated with the early

beginnings and coming of age of la femme nue who performed in various states of

undress before a Parisian public between 1894 and 1914. Actresses, dancers, and posers,

many of whom started their careers as models, negotiated a series of transitions that took

them from the studio to the theater, from dress to undress, and from reality to fantasy.6

As discussed in Section Two, the performative spaces opened by mass culture within photography and the press, alongside the theater, enabled la femme nue to aestheticize everyday life in such a way that concerns about the subversive effects of mass culture, particularly in relation to the mixing of dance, alcohol, social classes and sexes, were mollified by visions of erotic females. The suggestive display of these women as

6 Marie Lathers, Bodies of Art: French Literary Realism and the Artist’s Model (Lincoln, Neb., 2001), 54.

representational subjects in performance, photography, and literature, both literally and

figuratively, defused a collective fear of the New Woman by staging the “performative”

nude as a wholly sexual and available object whose image could be bought, sold,

consumed and exchanged through various products associated with the entertainment and

advertising industries. And yet, the ability of female entertainers to tap consumers’

desires “by posing corsetless and en déshabillé” in mediums of mass suggestion

threatened to destabilize a seemingly natural gender and moral order. The artistic nude’s

transformation from an immobile figure of beauty into a hyper-sexualized stock character

of Parisian drama compounded the influence la femme nue wielded over the public as

images of her or those made in her likeness were reproduced within commercial art and

pulp literature. Thanks to the music hall and the various other forms of mass culture

associated with it, la femme nue emerged out of the artist’s relatively obscure studio and

entered the public limelight evolving from a statuesque figure posed on stage to an

acting, speaking, dancing subject who complicated the socially-coded categories and

practices informing one’s understanding of art, pornography, and gender despite her

objectification.7

Le Music Hall

In his study of the French theater, F.W.J. Hemmings recounts how a veritable

“crisis in the theatres” erupted in the early 1880s and plagued France until the new

millennium. While many factors contributed to la crise théâtrale, the most damaging cause originated with “the newer sources of amusement which competed directly with the

7 McPherson, The Modern Portrait, 58-59.

theatres for the spare cash of their former clientele.”8 The popularity of these new forms

of entertainment reflected ultimately the rise of a new leisure class who had, in the words

of one commentator, “un appétit général d’émotions et immédiates.”9

For almost a century, strict licensing laws had prevented any theater, aside

from the four state-subsized theaters of the Opéra, Odéon, Opéra Comique, and the

Comédie Francaise from performing musical or dramatic entertainment.10 This was due

in large measure to the state’s desire to regulate public morals through the theater.11

Théâtres de genre, or non-subsized theaters, existed alongside the théâtres subventionées offering a repertoire that ranged from vaudeville, to farce, to pantomime and anywhere in-between.12 The periodic revolutions that punctuated nineteenth-century France

provided momentary opportunities for a “loosening of government restrictions on the use

of costumes, accessories, and gestures” until the prohibition was finally rescinded in

8 F.W.J. Hemmings, Theatre and State in France, 1760-1905 (Cambridge, 1994), 195.

9 Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley, Calif., 1998); Rae Beth Gordon, Why the French Love Jerry Lewis: From Cabaret to Early Cinema (Stanford, Calif., 2001); Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Époque, 47; Andre Arnyvelde, “Les Trois Nudités,” Le Matin July 27, 1908.

10 This prohibition was based upon an arrêté dated November 12, 1807.

11 For a nice summary of the debate involving Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the public utility of moral instruction in the theater, see Sally Charnow’s Popular Practices/Modern Forms: Theater in Nineteenth-Century France (New York, 2005), 79-80.

12 Hemmings, Theater and State, 193. Barbara Shapiro claims that in the last two decades of the nineteenth-century “half a million Parisians went to the theater once a week and more than one million visitors attended at least once a month.” See Barbara Shapiro, ed., Pleasures of Paris: Daumier to Picasso (Boston, Mass., 1991), 109.

1867.13 Consequently, a new institution emerged to forge a connection between the high

and low, official and popular theaters that became known as the café-concert.

Considered a part of the theater world, in the broadest sense of the word, the café-

concert lured Parisians away from the legitimate theaters with enticements of free

admission, unrestricted mobility, and unlimited sociability. Hemmings notes that by

“1894 there were as many cafés-concerts in Paris as there were theatres,” many of which

were grossing as much, if not more, in box office receipts than the state’s premier theater

the Comédie Française. While Hemmings claims that the café-concert’s success had

everything to do with how “markedly cheaper” a typical night at Olympia or

Ambassadeurs cost, he overlooks the way in which the café-concert offered its customers

the one thing state-sponsored theaters could not, the combination of live entertainment

with drinking and carousing.14

The spatial reorganization and opening up of the capital’s streetscape under Baron

Haussmann during the Second Empire coincided with the building of lavish concert halls along the grands boulevards.15 Like its newly emergent counterpart in the world of

commerce, the department store, the café-concert was a palatial establishment tastefully

13 Concetta Condemi, Les cafés-concerts: Histoire d’un divertissement (Paris, 1992), 77; Regina Sweeney, Singing to Victory: French Cultural Politics and Music During the Great War (Middletown, Conn., 2001), 19; Theodore Zeldin, A History of French Passions, vol. 2: Intellect, Taste, and Anxiety (Oxford, 1973), 699.

14 Hemmings, Theater and State, 196. Hemmings makes a comparative cost analysis between a night at the theater, which cost a couple thirty francs, as opposed to an evening at a café-concert where, for a mere six francs, the same couple could enjoy a similar theatrical experience.

15 By the early 1890s, the Parisian nightlife had moved away from Montmartre’s cabarets to central Paris’s music halls. See Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Époque, 74.

decorated with crystal chandeliers, gold candelabras, and monumental staircases.16

Features of a modern aristocratic or nouveaux riche home, such as velour seats, faux satin curtains, and gas lighting, made luxury and comfort an integral part of the café-concert experience. Rays of emerald green light projecting from the “fairy lamps” on individual tables created a relaxed, almost magical, atmosphere where one could sit and admire the sexually charged figures painted on murals and stained glass windows, sculpted into the moldings of columns and bas-reliefs, or drawn onto the stage curtains themselves.17

Many of the decorative elements, having been cast in the antique, baroque, or neo- classical style, set the tone for the evening’s entertainment with images of sensuous, erotic women framed within a refined interior space.18

The actual size of the café-concert, its seating capacity, and structural arrangement greatly colored one’s overall impression of this social space and determined one’s participation within it.19 (See Figure 1.) Typically seating anywhere from two to eight

hundred spectators, the café-concert serviced both small and large crowds almost

everyday of the year between its salles d’été and salles d’hiver.20 Regardless of whether

16 Condemi, Les cafés-concerts, 75-76.

17 Berkeley Smith, How Paris Amuses Itself (New York, 1903), 167.

18 Condemi, Les cafés-concerts, 73; Bernard Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: PopularMusic and the Avant-Garde (Chicago, 2002), 51-55.

19 Michael Hays, The Public and Performance: Essays in the History of French and German Theater, 1871-1900 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1981), 3.

20 Condemi points out how the salles d’été were opened from April to September and offered matinée programs on Sundays, Mondays, and holidays from 2 to 7 o’clock. The salles d’hiver adopted this formula after the 1871 Commune. See Les cafés-concerts, 84. Max Aghion identified those cafés-concerts still in existence before 1914 as being salles d’hiver and salles d’été respectively: Bataclan, Concert Mayol and Eldorado; Alcazar, Ambassadeurs and Folies Marigny. See Hier à Paris (Paris, 1947), 141.

94 the salle de spectacle was located indoors or outdoors, the stage area comprised the largest of the concert hall’s many alcoves where one could go to be entertained.21

Figure 3-2: The Folies-Bergère Source: Folies-Bergère program

A promenoir or gallery-lounge wrapping itself around the back and sidewalls of the building acted as a space where, in addition to serving as a traditional “haunt for prostitutes,” side attractions were offered during the intermissions.22 Manet’s depiction of Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère (1881) records a second competing distraction for café- concert patrons, the highly frequented bar stands. Situated along the periphery of the

Folies-Bergère’s salle de plein air, a series of rather utilitarian counters subtly blended in behind a backdrop of Grecian statutes, fountains, and shrubbery that comprised the hall’s faux Moorish garden. Since the purchase of an obligatory drink served as one’s

21 The salle de spectacle constituted a separate room, constructed along the lines of a theater, where the evening’s entertainment unfolded before an audience seated in balconies, galleries, and stalls.

22 Smith, How Paris, 168. With regard to the Folies-Bergère’s promenoir, Feschotte mentions that it was not part of the original building plan and was created three years after the hall’s opening in 1871. See Histoire du Music Hall (Paris, 1965), 28. Peter Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 116.

95 admission fee, these bars stayed fairly well attended throughout the evening.23 The dangling feet of a trapeze artist reflected in the mirror behind Manet’s barmaid indicates that despite efforts to designate specific activities to certain spaces, the layout of the café- concert fashioned a leisure experience that was marked by fragmentation and unity. At the same time that the café-concert brought the seductions, distractions, and entertainments of the boulevard together under one roof, a constant circulation of people, a cacophonous mixture of noise, and a conflation of spectacle with modern life characterized the institution.24

It was in this whirl of noise and motion that entertainers found themselves having to “capture the attention of a large and increasingly anonymous crowd otherwise engaged in the rival attractions of eating, drinking, conversing, gazing, posing, lounging, flirting and promenading.”25 Given that the suggestive lyrics of a chanson sensuelle alone could not divert a patron’s focus away from the halls’ other competing attractions,

certains artistes ont reussi à imposer de nouveaux modèles du corps et de nouvelles figures de séduction. Ils ont également su mettre en oeuvre des stratégies elaborées de représentation de soi à travers l’habile construction d’une image et d’une réputation.26

Yvette Guilbert, Polaire, and Thérèsa, some of the Belle Époque’s most iconic stars, drew attention to their distinct attributes through sensual body language, “extravagant or eccentric stage dress,” and vulgar gestures in order to fashion the French public’s taste

23 Hemmings, Theatre and State, 196.

24 Novelene Ross, Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère and the Myths of Popular Illustration (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1982), 78.

25 Peter Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City (Cambridge, 1998),131.

26 Condemi, Les cafés-concerts, 150.

for what Rae Beth Gordon has called the exotic, unconventional, and lewd “white savage” of the Parisian music hall.27 Ultimately the popularity and success of an artist

owed as much to one’s skills in acting, singing, or dancing as to one’s ability to exert a

physical presence over the audience.28 As one will soon see, an accentuation of the

artist’s physicality, as well as the growing importance of sex as a theme of entertainment,

spilled over into and influenced the music hall program.

Having originated in England during the 1840s, the music hall acquired a distinctly

French flavor when it grew out of the café-concert scene in the last quarter of the

nineteenth-century.29 Up until this time, only the most refined Parisians in the most

prestigious quartiers (neighborhoods) surrounding the Opéra and the Comédie Française

had the leisure time to enjoy a “musical commentary on political figures, scandals, or the latest fashions” presented through café-concert song turns.30 However it was not long

before these exclusive concert halls expanded beyond le centre de ville into

arrondissements further afield. As the café-concert’s geographic purview widened, so

too did its repertoire. Absorbing acts taken from circuses, street fairs, and high theater,

the café-concert-turned-music hall diversified its program in order to attract a wider

27 Hemmings, Theatre and State, 200; Bailey, Popular Culture, 131; Gordon, “Fashion and the White Savage in the Parisian Music Hall,” Fashion Theory, vol. 8, no. 3, 267-300.

28 Condemi, Les cafés-concerts, 138. Since “male singers exhibited less of their body,” this criterion applied almost exclusively to female singers. See Ibid., 147.

29 Hugues Hotier and Jean-Claude Chevalier, Le Vocabulaire du Cirque et du Music Hall en France (Paris, 1972), 14; Peter Webb contends that British music hall performances were dependent upon an evocation of ‘Frenchness’ which they accomplished through the staging of acts and cancan dances behind Montmartre backdrops. Only rarely did they indulge “in spectacular costumes and scenery which had been the trademark of the big Parisian halls.” See The Erotic Arts (London, 1983), 315.

30 Sweeney, Singing to Victory, 18; Condemi, Les cafés-concerts, 74.

clientele, one that could now afford to participate in a level of conspicuous consumption

previously beyond its reach.

Servicing the approximately two and a half million people living within the city’s

limits, the Parisian music hall functioned as an important means of socialization,

amusement, distraction, and social control. According to Maurice Talemyr,

“Everybody!” went to the music hall, a collectivity that encompassed “the worker and the

rentier (property owner), the people and the aristocracy, men, women, and children!”31

Because the music hall appealed to a “larger and more socially diverse audience than cabarets and the theater,” it naturally became “the ideal divertissement (diversion)” of the masses, and conversely, a vehicle of cultural assimilation.32 Since variety entertainment

had something for everyone, the lower classes could be exposed to the finer aspects of

French culture, that is to say operettas, ballets, and tableaux vivants, while the upper classes could experience “the lighter side of life” through the art of slumming.33

In satisfying modern man’s “need for escape,” the music hall provided a release for those most affected by France’s conversion to a modern industrial economy; a fact that was not lost on one Jesuit priest who thanked “God for opening those luminous halls to my brothers of the working classes in order to make them forget for a few hours the hard workday.”34 Implicit within this statement was the assumption that without music halls,

31 Maurice Talemyr, “Café-Concerts et Music Halls” Revue des Deux Mondes (Paris, 1902), 184.

32 Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Époque, 83, 94; Feschotte, Histoire du Music Hall, 30.

33 Gavin Weightman, Big Lights, Big City: London Entertained, 1830-1950 (London, 1992), 49, 60.

34 Jacques Chabannes, “Louis Roubaud au Music Hall,” Volonté, March 1929; Bernard Vaughan, Paris Qui Chante, March 5, 1907.

the working classes would turn to activities of vice, namely gambling, drinking, violence

and theft. In this respect, the popular theater could operate as a check on immoral

impulses through the dissemination of uplifting and “wholesome pleasures.”35 Regina

Sweeney’s study on World War One France has demonstrated the important work of

Parisian music halls in mobilizing entire populations around a certain set of values. Its

role in the development and transmission of a national French culture, as well as in the

ralliement of citizens to the nation’s defense, slowly replaced the church and home as the central social space where the public could “acquire and procure a ‘collective’ morality.”36

Taken as a whole, however, music halls “were not yet forums for mass culture”

because “social barriers and privilege remained strong and poverty widespread” during

the Belle Époque.37 Concetta Condemi’s examination of press articles and tourist guides

suggests that a hierarchy of music halls based on three levels of distinction existed.

Factors such as location, sumptuousness of décor, and clientele determined whether a hall

was de luxe, modeste or innommable.38 An unskilled laborer earning approximately three

francs a day, Rearick tells us, could not have afforded to see a spectacle that cost more

35 Vaughan, Paris Qui Chante, March 5, 1907.

36 Arnyvelde, “Les Trois Nudités,” 3.

37 Rearick, The Pleasures of the Belle Époque, 94-95.

38 Condemi, Les cafés-concerts, 68. This hiearchization held true for London music halls as well. An 1891 article in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine described how local music halls could “be roughly grouped into four classes…where the audiences, as might be expected, correspond to the social scale of the particular place of entertainment.” See Wolf von Eckardt, Sander Gilman, and J. Edward Chamberlin, eds., Oscar Wilde’s London: A Scrapbook of Vices and Virtues, 1880-1900 (New York, 1987), 186-187.

than the obligatory bock or mazagran (beer or cup of coffee). 39 If one wanted to see a

revue performed at the Folies-Bergère in 1905, for example, one had to pay an additional

three to eight francs for a seat in the salle de spectacle.40 Paradoxically, music halls

upheld the status quo by attracting audiences segmented along social class lines, a

practice that “made it difficult for the classes to unite in leisure or for them to forge a

shared culture.”41

If the 1890s was in fact an “era of various publics,” as contemporary sociologist

Gabriel Tarde suggested, a transitory, fleeting unity nevertheless wove itself into the

fabric of French society by way of visual entertainment. In addition to the “passing and

partial experience that the press provided its readers and the railroad its passengers…one

can add new music halls and cinemas as important new shapers of leisure publics.”42

Max Aghion noticed that although the publics frequenting Ambassadeurs and Alcazar d’Été differed in wealth and elegance from those at Eldorado and Ba-ta-clan, the spectacle presented at the respective music halls remained “about the same.”43 It was not

uncommon to see a performance of the same act, sketch, or play at a number of different

39 Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Époque, 95; Hemmings, Theatre and State, 196.

40 RO 15.722- R 123273 (microfilm): Folies-Bergère programs from 1900-1905.

41 Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Époque, 111. Weightman has shown this to be true for London music halls as well. See Big Lights, Big City, 49-50.

42 Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Époque, 188.

43 Aghion, Hier à Paris, 145.

100

halls, although not at the same time nor necessarily by performers of the same social

class.44

As a uniquely modern and urban cultural institution, the music hall offered “visions of a more luxurious and experiential life” than its predecessor, visions that coincided with and mirrored the city’s current staging of world’s fairs and international expositions.45 In remarking how quickly “the attraction is overtaking the song,” Gustave Frejaville pointed to the way in which a Parisian taste for spectacle had encouraged some of the city’s most famous cafés-concerts to convert to music halls. Defined as a “salle de concerts ou de théâtre avec orchestre, où l’on donne des spectacles,” the Parisian music hall brought together all the “elements of spectacle from the theater, café-concert, cabaret, circus, and fair…to compete in the entertainment of the modern public.”46 Clowns, acrobats,

tightrope walkers, jugglers, illusionists, and phénomènes (monstrosities) appeared in a

series of variety numbers that consisted of tableaux vivants, pantomimes, “circus and

vaudeville acts, commercial ballets, short operettas, and farces.”47

The performances, which “followed one another almost without interruption,”

created a viewing environment where audience members could “watch an act, ignore it,

think about business, a love affair, or read a newspaper” during a continuous change of

44 Although Colette debuted in La Chair [The Flesh] at the Apollo in the fall of 1907, the play subsequently went on a European tour for two years before returning to Paris’ Gaité-Montparnasse. See Judith Thurman, Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette (New York, 199), 182.

45 Lewis Erenberg, Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890- 1930 (Westport, Conn., 1981), 61.

46 Gustave Frejaville, Au Music Hall (Paris, 1922), 275.

47 Shapiro, Pleasures of Paris, 125.

101

spectacle.48 The multi-sensory experience of watching a series of disconnected musical, artistic, and performative acts produced an exhausting and mind numbing strain on the

spectator.49 Whereas café-concert audiences had “joined in singing familiar choruses and

cried out to performers,” music hall spectators were lulled into “a moronic state.”50 A

shift from active to passive audience participation, that began within the cafés-concerts of

the 1880s and came to realization within the music halls by the twentieth-century,

accompanied the Parisian public’s conversion from aural to visual entertainment. Having

replicated the continuous bombardment of stimuli emanating from the streetscape, music

halls contributed to the development of what historian Wolfgang Schivelbush calls an

“industrialized consciousness.”51 An awareness of the transitory, fleeting character of

one’s surroundings made the individual a selective spectator who, by cultivating an internal defense mechanism, filtered out less-than-desirable images or impressions.52

“Like voyeurs of dull transparent cards, without life and without art,” music hall patrons

watched with disinterest as “animated signs…sexual symbols, figurations of their gods,

48 Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Époque, 84.

49 Paris Illustré, August 1, 1886, 140.

50 Rearick partially attributes this transition from active to passive, uniform to varied audience participation to professional cancan dancers (Grille d’Égout, La Goulue, Nini Patte en l’Air) whose performances embarrassed customers from taking part in the performance. See Pleasures of the Belle Époque, 135, 186; Paris Illustré, August 1, 1886, 140.

51 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, Calif., 1986), 159-170.

52 Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret, 23-24. The fragmentary nature of the program, and indeed one’s experience of the hall as an interactive space, derived from the urban modernity from which it arose

102

crude images of their struggles, appetites, and fears” passed before their eyes in a succession of imagistic clips.53

As a microcosm of the cosmopolitan city and a simulacrum of modern life, the music hall became an integral part of how Parisians defined and interpreted their way of

life.54 Unlike the café-concert that presented life from the perspective of “fantasy and the unreal,” the music hall represented a “mirror” and “striking expression” of modern life

where problems and concerns about urbanization, industrialization, democratization,

alienation, commercialization, and a blurring of gender, as well as art and life, were

projected, magnified, and understood.55 Its shows, in taking “the best and the worst” of boulevard culture, registered, recorded, and re-enacted larger shifts occurring within

French culture and put them on display for thousands of spectators a week.56 In doing so,

the music hall offered inhabitants of the modern city a way to confront and work out the

social tensions permeating everyday life in a light-hearted, humorous setting.57

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of modernity to social elites was the rise of mass

culture and the potentially harmful and detrimental effects it could have on the most

vulnerable segments of the French population. This fear co-existed with the belief that

53 RO 15 690-Ambassadeur press clippings: Claude Berton, “Le Concert des Ambassadeurs,” newspaper unknown, July 4, 1921; Octave Uzanne, “Le Nécessaire Assainissement des Cafés-Concerts,” newspaper unknown, n.d.

54 Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club, 35.

55 Frejaville, Au Music-Hall, 286; Louis Roubaud quoted in Chabannes, “Louis Roubaud au Music Hall,” Volonté, March 1929.

56 Sweeney, Singing to Victory, 217.

57 Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Époque, 200.

103

the music hall, as a result of its ability to spread information, shape public opinion, and

modify social mores, had instigated “the downfall of good taste and lowering the

intellectual and moral level of the masses.”58 “Under the pretext of painting a social

illness,” popular theater publicized and propagated values that challenged traditional

values connected to social propriety and sexual morality.59 One moral crusader complained of how “The music hall…becomes, in our large towns, but especially in

Paris, a truly bad place.” There in the “great music halls of the Right Bank,” one could observe the most morally reprehensible acts on stage, of “feminine nudity triumphing” in tableaux vivants and variety numbers or the “staged performances of sexual relations.”60

For the first half of the nineteenth-century, only the upper echelons of society within their “drawing rooms, embassies, ministries, the Tuileries, and the Château de

Compiègne had the privilege of these [tableaux vivants] amusements.”61 The

dramatization of tableaux vivants by society women within aristocratic drawing rooms

during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-centuries represented one of the first

attempts to convert the staging of “living pictures” into a diversion of sophisticated

society. The removal of light negligées or shawls wrapped around the performer’s body

not only re-enacted familiar poses of classical female figures known as attitudes but made

the unveiling of feminine beauty a spectacle in and of itself. Because they took place in

58 Ibid., 101.

59 Victor Hallays-Dadot, La censure dramatique et le théâtre: Histoire des vingt dernières années, 1850- 1870 (Paris, 1871), 21.

60 Emile Pouresy, Le bilan actuel de la pornographie (Bordeaux, 1928), 10-11.

61 Tristan Remy, “La féerie des tableaux vivants,” La Vie Parisienne, no. 193, January 1967.

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more domestic, less elaborately staged settings before small gatherings of invited guests

belonging to the cultural elite, the attitudes offered within salons shared the same pretensions of high art as those of the studio.62

In spite of this, the creation of new technologies, media, and entertainment widened

the scope of the performative female nude’s circulation by the last quarter of the

nineteenth-century. During this time, the notion of living art underpinning the salon’s

attitude was quickly transformed into two popular forms of nineteenth-century

entertainment known as the pose plastique (artistic pose) and the tableau vivant.63

Whereas the former modified the attitude by enacting pantomime impersonations of contemporary secular figures, the latter continued to concentrate on the more heroic,

dignified subjects of Antiquity and mythology. (See Figure 2.) Despite this difference,

the terms pose plastique and tableau vivant eventually became synonymous with one

another as the number of establishments that could perform them rapidly expanded after

the Second Empire from théâtres de genre to fairs, circuses, bals publics and music halls.

Even the most socially diverse audiences were offered some semblance of nudity by the

fin-de-siècle.64

62 Georges Normandy, Le nu à l’église, au théâtre, et dans la rue (Paris, 1909), 170.

63 Kirsten Gram Holstrom, Monodrama, Attitudes, and Tableaux Vivants: Studies on Some Trends of Theatrical Fashion, 1770-1815 (Stockholm, 1967), 241-242.

64 Charles Castle, The Folies-Bergère (New York, 1982), 98; Webb, The Erotic Arts, 302.

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Figure 3-3: “La Belle D’Herlys” in a 1912 Moulin Rouge tableau vivant. Source: Program for Cache Ton Nu

Tableaux vivants, by their very association with the studio and salon, afforded

directors an opportunity to experiment and play with the audiences’ perceptions of

nudity. As imitations of pictorial high art, tableaux vivants were staged as large

illuminated picture frames within which performers stood motionless in their flesh-

colored maillots. Such protections as immobility and covering endowed the tableau

vivant with a cloak of respectability that the animated, sometimes ribald, pose plastique

lacked.65 And yet, the exhibition of women in nude maillots, while de rigueur in most music halls during the last decade of the nineteenth-century, fell out of fashion by the

65 Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, 1978), 343. The artistic genre of tableaux vivants first appeared on the Paris Opera stage in 1838 and quickly became assimilated into Parisian popular entertainment. By 1848 the police were raiding cabarets where men and women re-enacted famous paintings of mythological and historical scenes. The women who appeared “more or less denuded” in poses held for long periods of time were known as poseuses or models. The popularity of the genre extended throughout the Second Empire into the Third Republic. A temporary ban suppressing tableaux vivants under the Moral Order (1873-1877) ensured that tableaux vivants from that point onward would only represent historical scenes similar to the kind found in the capital’s wax museums. More movement and light accompanied their reintroduction in the circus and then secondary theaters under the name poses plastiques. Eventually tableaux vivants moved into the music halls and became characterized by the serpentine dances made famous by Loie Fuller. See Rémy, “La féerie des tableaux vivants,” La Vie Parisienne, no. 193, January 1967.

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twentieth-century. The adoption of rice powder and white grease to cover the bodies of

figurantes (models) assisted in this process as evidenced by a 1907 production of Psyché

courtisée par Eros. Marking “the first time a beautiful girl” appeared at Ba-ta-clan “nude down to the waist,” the performance featured a female goddess who, in wearing nothing but rice-powder and a diaphanous veil “that she had pulled up modestly against herself,…offered to the eyes two alabaster breasts in perfect harmony.”66 In that same

year, a crowd marveled over the Alhambra’s refashioning of The Modern Venus, a staple

tableau vivant of many theaters. The director, having “renounced the academic maillot”

in favor of white grease, endowed the figurante’s breasts with “the appearance of

plaster.”67 By finding alternative techniques with which to recast the female body

d’après la nature (according to nature), directors simultaneously adhered to an

aesthetically sanctioned frame of reference for presenting the living nude while violating

prescriptions that restricted her image to certain socially acceptable arenas.

However refined or sophisticated their contexts and forms may have been, tableaux

vivants retained a hint of the erotic by violating one of society’s most principal taboos,

the sight of an undressed woman. Moral imperatives of the time were such that a couple,

even on their wedding night, abstained from undressing when engaging in sexual acts.68

In light of this, the public exhibition of unclothed women in artistic poses could not help but redefine the public tableau vivant from a thing of art and contemplation to a thing of

66 St Albin, “Le nu au théâtre,” Mercure de France, vol. 1-4 (1911): 453.

67 Paris Qui Chante, February 17, 1907.

68 See Mary Lynn Stewart’s chapter “Sexual Initiation and Sex Education,” in For Health and Beauty: Physical Culture for Frenchwomen, 1880s-1930s (Baltimore, M.D., 2001).

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spectacle and titillation. This last point is reinforced by the fact that these seemingly

innocent representations of an essentialized, de-eroticized female sexuality were

strategically placed within the music hall program to spark a frisson de désir (shiver of

desire) within audiences before the main act.

As part of a “larger fin-de-siècle fascination with the ‘sexual,’” the Parisian music

hall contributed to the dissemination of sexual knowledge by making sex, and especially

the undressed female body in motion, a central part of the performance and the

audiences’ cultural consciousness.69 Although the propagation of sexual material by the

music hall took many forms, one of the most effective means was the music hall revue

itself. Having arrived in France after the Franco-Prussian war, the revue was made up of

“a series of disconnected scenes; usually written by a number of playwrights, each

inventing one episode.”70 Defined as “a play, generally a comic act with musical

elements” that recounted “notable events of the past year, scandals, literary sensations,

even scientific discoveries and technical achievements…in an amusingly irreverent way,”

the revue constituted the most original part of the music hall’s program, of which tour de

chants and attractions were also included.71 What distinguished the French revue from

69 Sweeney, Singing to Victory, 100.

70 Hemmings, Theatre and State, 237. This coincides with Sweeney’s observation that “‘revues’ had been around since at least as early as 1874” and were not so much a “simple transplant” as an amalgamation of foreign influences with native cultural practices. See Singing to Victory, 151.

71 Feschotte, Histoire du Music Hall, 28, 30. As introduction numbers borrowed from the café-concert, the tour de chants signaled the beginning of the program and were intended to draw crowds into the salle de spectacle before the various attractions featuring well known artists and circus animals performing songs, dances, or acrobatics. According to Rearick, these “small opening acts, consisting of monologues, songs, acrobatic acts, poetry readings and piano pieces” preceded the revue, a comic act or operette with musical and dance elements taken from Antiquity or other national cultures. See Pleasures of the Belle Époque, 200.

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other national types were its elaborate décor, colorful costumes, and reliance on a shared

“knowingness” that was intimately connected to the revelation of a woman’s body.72

The revue’s cast, comprised almost entirely of “female singers, dancers, and ‘les girls,’” highlighted the revue as an overtly feminine theatrical production. Generally a star or vedette, whose widespread notoriety and acclaim could attract large crowds on any given night, held the starring role among the various female performers known collectively as femmes de revue.73 Although it was customary within the cafés-concerts for the premier singer to hold this title, this gradually became less so as the music hall showed greater preferential treatment towards the dancer and eventually the nude show girl by the inter-war period. The actresses’ déshabillé, which had once served to accentuate the grivois (saucy) song, now became the performance itself as those attending the theater came “less to see the spectacle (song) than the costumes.”74

The Second Empire’s fondness for the chanteuse’s (singer’s) daring, yet chaste, décolleté was quickly replaced during the Belle Époque by a “predilection” for a more

“ideal costume”—that being “almost no costume” at all!75 The presentation of women en

déshabillé owed its ascent in large measure to the 1893 Bal des Quat’z-Arts staging of

female nudity as well as the incorporation of tableaux vivants as backdrop scenery within

72 Feschotte, Histoire du Music Hall, 76; Stanislas Rzewuski, “Concerts et Music-Halls,” Le Théâtre à Paris en 1911, (unknown); Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret, 26; Bailey, Popular Culture, 8; Sweeney argues that part of this ‘knowingness’ relied on audience recognition and memory of “Montmartre classics or recent café-concert hits” which in turn created a shared experience between its socially diverse constituents. See Singing to Victory, 217.

73 Robert Trebor, “La Revue,” Excelsior, February 4, 1911; Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Époque, 84.

74 Lenard Berlanstein, Daughters of Eve: A Cultural History of French Theater Women from the Old Regime to the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), 235.

75 “Le Costume au théâtre,” Le Gaulois, January 23, 1904.

109 the revue. Of the twenty-five tableaux comprising Ba-ta-clan’s 1907 revue Faut voir ca!, five of them referred directly to artistic motifs that, having been borrowed from ‘official’ art, were translated into popular tableaux vivants. Although there is no way of knowing exactly how “Le nu artistique,” “La source,” “Le baiser de vague,” “Les baigneuses,” and

“L’Amour et Psyche” were staged, the titles of these scenes alone suggest that an allusion to art by way of posing was made.76

Eventually the performance of tableaux vivants, where a “woman showed one breast, then two” until “one had undressed ‘the upper levels,’ as well as ‘the bottom floor,’” gave way to the ever popular, ever troublesome strip-tease. “The directors, not content to leave nude women immobile like beautiful statues, made them come to life” as

Parisian entertainment establishments vied with one another to produce the most audacious displays of a woman’s sexuality. Whereas for several years only the most luxurious “Parisian music-halls had exhibited a very decolletée woman” for those most able to afford such opulent treats, “all the large and small establishments had their naked lady” by the fin-de-siècle.77

Born out of the whole music hall phenomena, les petites femmes became “an indispensable element in the revues” as they posed and danced in the most revealing costumes.78 “Routinely codified as a group rather than noted as individuals,” petites femmes represented a distinct species within the theater profession. Because they were

76 RO 15.693: Ba-ta-clan programs.

77 Normandy, Le nu à l’église, 216.

78 Hotier and Chevalier, Le Vocabulaire, 106, 110. For a time, a distinction was made between those who danced (chorus girls) and those who posed (show girls), until the latter were finally permitted to move and dance across stage.

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selected more on the basis of beauty than their ability to dance or sing, these girls

generally ranged in age from late teens to early twenties.79 Since the financial success of

a revue depended upon satisfying the public’s taste for “the voluptuous vision of a

woman’s beautiful body,” music halls paid a premium for attractive young women.80

“Viewed as a commodity to which a price could be fixed,” the bodies of figurantes and femmes nues represented an invaluable asset to the music hall industry. The average nightly wage for a figurante, according to Marc Lepetit’s 1912 book, Silhouettes

Théâtrales, was five francs, a wage comparable to that of a skilled worker.81 Having

become a “staple fare in Parisian music halls,” one writer estimated that by 1895 over

2,000 performances showcasing the white savage had taken place in the French capital

alone.82 Recalling his early stage career before the First World War, Paris’ most famous

male comedien, Maurice Chevalier, described how the nude showgirl’s rise to stardom

alternately corresponded with a decline in the careers of some highly paid celebrities.

79 Angela Latham, Posing a Threat: Flappers, Chorus Girls, and Other Brazen Performers of the American 1920s (Hanover, N.H., 2000), 113; Roubaud, Music Hall, 67.

80 St Albin, “Le nu au théâtre,” 453. “Il n’y eut plus de revue se respectant qui n’offrit au spectateur la voluptueuse vision d’un beau corps de femme.”; Normandy, Le nu à l’église, 216.

81 Quinel et Montgon, La cité, 39; Marc Lepetit, (pseud. Montgely), Silhouettes théâtrales (Paris, 1912), 59. See Mark Traugott, ed., The French Worker: Autobiographies from the Early Industrial Era, (Berkeley, Calif., 1993).

82 Webb underscores the fact that nude showgirls played a very limited role in British music hall revues as motionless, statuesque backdrops to the shows’ action. See The Erotic Arts, 315; F.A. Ersky, Est-il le nu au théâtre impudique? (Paris, 1909), 15. According to Gavin Weightman, the nude revue, with it’s singing and dancing showgirls, did not become a part of British entertainment until World War II when one witnessed the waning of variety theatre. See Big Lights, Big City, 77.

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Director Paul Derval even threatened to “shut up shop” if he had “to dispense with” what had become known as “the sine qua non of shows at the Folies-Bergère.”83

Having found that the key to fame and fortune lay in the transgression of moral prescriptions, entertainment entrepreneurs “pushed the envelope” so to speak when it came to representing the female body. 84 The abolition of theatrical censorship after 1905 made this especially true as the staging of a “woman without a maillot” no longer required the covering of grease or powder, but only “some diverse ornaments consisting of stones, lace, and light veils masking some parts of the body.”85 The directors’ desire to expose more and more of the female body outside of a purely artistic context motivated their search to find plots where the act of undressing was central. As mentioned in Chapter 2, some of the earliest examples of striptease drew upon the 1893

Bal des Quat’z-Arts for inspiration. The infamous bal public provided the ideal circumstance for directors to fuse art and life together. Because la femme nue had evolved gradually from an admixture of high and low aesthetic practices, the presentation of an artist’s model as the first striptease performer did not seem to be as far-fetched.

Perhaps it was for this very reason that critics and audiences described her initial appearances as “amusing, original, dainty, even tantalizing.”86 The artist’s model, who had once performed a secondary and static role as figurante or poser preceding the main attraction, now became the attraction herself. Within a short time, the female performer

83 Castle, The Folies-Bergère, 104-108.

84 By their own admission, they confessed that “the dirtier the word, the freer the gesture, the more success we have.” See “Propos d’un Parisien,” Le Matin, June 24, 1911.

85 Normandy, Le nu à l’église, 216.

86 St. Albin, “Le Nu au théâtre,” 463.

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who practiced the art of undressing on her own platform, the music hall stage, assumed

the title femme nue, a term which had originally referred to an artist’s model.

To gain a sense of what one of these early striptease performances looked like, I

have chosen to analyze the short two-act comedy Emilienne aux Quat’z-Arts produced by

the Folies-Bergère in December 1893. The plot, based on the actual event, made use of

the erotic overtones underpinning the artist-model relationship often depicted in fin-de-

siècle paintings to arouse “anxieties about looking.”87 Gazing upon the female body,

either literally or figuratively, constituted the most transgressive act of looking in the

nineteenth-century because it violated conventional notions of Woman as sexually

modest and self-effacing. Some of France’s most famous pieces of art and literature from

the period were deemed pornographic because their revelatory style of presentation

resembled a prostitute “who would take off all her clothing” in front of the consumer.88

Like the prostitute, the artist’s model received a fee for her bodily services that included dressing and undressing before a male audience within the private space of the atelier.

The penetration of the spectator’s vision into this privileged world exploited a public obsession with artists’ models who, as Marie Lathers has shown, were implicated with modern conceptions of desire, sexuality, and femininity.89

87 Jann Matlock, “Censoring the Realist Gaze,” Margaret Cohen and Christopher Prendergast, eds., Spectacles of Realism: Body, Gender, Genre (Minneapolis, 1995), 32.

88 “Requisitoire, Plaidoirie et Jugement,” in Gustave Flaubert’s Works, vol.2 quoted in Ibid. Here I am thinking of Gustave Courbet’s Origine du Monde (1866), Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’herbe (1863) and Olympia (1865) for art and Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857) and George du Maurier’s novel of Trilby (1896) for literature.

89 Écho Dramatique, April 1, 1908, 3; A.N. F18 1045: Folies-Bergère; Lathers, Bodies of Art, 2.

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The cast, consisting of an aging artist and a gangly assortment of scantily- dressed

women, were situated within an artist’s studio where a sign hanging above the doorway

read: “This evening, at 9:00, the Bal des Quat’z-Arts. One requests for a perfectly

beautiful woman to be the Queen of the Festival. Address yourself here.” The dilemma

posed at the outset of the play centered on the artist who, disgusted by the selection of

candidates, considers calling off his search to find the perfect muse. Just at that moment,

a turning point occurs as a knock is heard at the door and a young girl, wearing an old

raincoat once fashionable under the Second Empire, expresses her desire to take part in

the competition. Begrudingly, the artist agrees to conduct a preliminary examination of

her physique, one that will conclude with an assessment of her toute nue. Horrified by the prospect of undressing before an audience, “Emilienne” modestly refuses to undress before anyone except the artist. After excusing the other candidates from the room, the artist and his model find themselves alone during one of the most intimate and titillating scenes of the narrative. To the artist’s command of “Undress yourself my child!”

Emilienne obediently takes off her raincoat, hat, and skirt as her male voyeur, sitting in a chair, begins to roll a cigarette. Leaving nothing more on than her stockings, boots, and a pink diaphanous shirt, Emilienne overwhelms her critic whose search for the ideal beauty is at long last over. Following the story’s climax, the artist falls to his feet making ardent declarations of love before handing Emilienne the scepter and crown that will officially be bestowed upon her at the ball. As the couple falls into each other’s arms, the curtain closes until the second and final scene, the Bal des Quat’z-Arts, reinforces the revue’s tribute to feminine beauty with a triumphal procession of artists and their models toasting

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“the sovereign beauty of Emilienne” who poses before the raucous crowd in the play’s

finale.

Unashamed, the woman who stripped her clothes off on stage and stood proudly

before a room of spectators symbolized, on a visceral level, the porous border between

prostitution and the theater. While the tradition of prostitutes working as actresses and actresses prostituting themselves extended as far back as the seventeenth-century, the act of a woman physically prostituting herself on stage was something entirely new and modern to nineteenth-century drama. The conflation of everyday life with art, as revealed by the revue’s staging of Emilienne as a prostitute-turned-artist’s model, called into question the moral character of the performer herself who appropriated the art of undressing as a trade of the theater. Because their bodies were consumed by the public eye as well, actresses and dancers embodied, played upon, and were implicated in the same contemporary social anxieties surrounding their prostitute-like characters.

Consequentially, audiences’ demand to see more skin turned the atelier into a

standard trope of music hall revues. Revues performed at the Folies-Bergère and

elsewhere with titles like L’Atelier Fin-de-Siècle and L’Atelier de Roucet introduced le modèle habillé, le déshabillé du modèle, or le nu du modèle as essential features of a new form of entertainment, the striptease. A conflation between the “artistic” and “modern”

Nude in scenes representing “le nu style Renaissance et le nu style Little Palace,” transformed potentially vulgar expositions of naked women into comforting programs modeling what the modern woman should look like, a classically posed Nude.90

90 RO 15.735: Little Palace program for the revue C’est Très Salée.

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The practice of undressing, typically associated with the métier of prostitutes and

artists’ models, was finally introduced into portraits of the bourgeois home via light

vaudevilles known as cubicular plays, where the central action of a woman removing her

clothes revolved around a bed or cubiculum in Latin. 91 According to Eugen Weber, these

plays were inaugurated as early as 1894 and often had as their titles Le Lever de…, Le

Réveil de…, Le Coucher de…, or simply La Puce or bedbug.92 One of the earliest of

these performances dates back to an 1894 pantomime entitled Le Coucher d’Yvette presented at the Alcazar d’Été.93 Mademoiselle Holda, whose reputation for captivating audiences with provocative poses implied that she had some kind modeling experience, played the role of a newly married wife who spends her first night away from her husband alone. Central to the pantomime’s action was Holda going through the routine of putting herself to bed: slowly taking off her shoes, stockings, blouse, bodice, skirt, bloomers, and undershirt before blowing out the candle to signal the play’s end. The staging of similar plots in the bourgeois bedchamber characterized two one-act comedies performed at Little Palace on February 17, 1906, Coucher Seule! and Le Pyjama, as well as the 1897 ballet-pantomime Sport presented at the Folies-Bergère.94 By the second

91 Eugen Weber, France: Fin-de-Siècle (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 162.

92 A poster archived in the Bibliothèque Nationale’s Cabinet des Estampes documents that the Folies- Bergère performed a similar kind of sketch, entitled Le Réveil d’une Parisienne, on May 28, 1894. See Figure 1.

93 This performance, documented in the weekly journal Courrier Français, took place a week prior to the journal’s publication in mid-May. Montorgueil insinuated that the renowned café-concert diseuse Yvette Guilbert served as both its namesake and star although I have found no other factual information to support this claim. See L’Année Féminine, 1895: Les Déshabillés au Théâtre (Paris, 1896), 11. Castle mentions that Le Divan Fayouau performed Le Coucher D’Yvette as early as March of that year. See The Folies- Bergère, 96.

94 RO 15.735: Little Palace programs, 1906-1917.

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decade of the twentieth-century, directors had expanded the scope of a woman’s toilette

to include scenes of her bain (bath) and douche (shower) in the various tableaux comprising the music hall revue.95

In order to evade government censorship, directors often situated female nudity in

the historical past or an imaginary world in order to frame it either as a product of French

culture or a natural and universal condition of human nature. The Moulin Rouge’s

presentation of Mademoiselle Nudita in La Chemise à Travers les Ages innocently traced

the evolution of women’s fashion that began with Creation and proceeded through

Antiquity, the Middle Ages, Renaissance, the Ages of Pompadour, Louis XVI, and

Empire, up to present times.96 The author’s choice of historical periods, which

demonstrated a shift between liberal and conservative sartorial regimes, suggested to the viewers that one’s perspective of appropriate dress was a result of cultural conditioning and not some timeless truth. In the same way, productions situated in the historical past,

like the Casino de Paris’ 1900 revue Cléopatra, could present scenes of “Le Lever de

Cléopatra” or “L’Orgie” as factual portraits of an earlier, distant, alien culture.97 By the same token, representations that drew upon mythology, like the Moulin Rouge’s 1907 program Eglé, presented characters as mythical gods and creatures living in a primeval state of existence.98 The use of antique drapery and foreign, exotic costumes functioned

95 For example, the Moulin Rouge’s revue C’est Très Excitant featured “La Douche” and “La Toilette de Madame” as scenes in its January 20, 1911 performance. See RO 15 743 (R 123324): Moulin Rouge.

96 RO 15 743 (R 123324): Moulin Rouge.

97 PRO B 62: Casino de Paris programs.

98 Ibid.; PRO B 257: Moulin Rouge program.

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to distance the actual performer from his or her character, thereby rendering the

exhibition of unclothed figures benign.

Striptease performances were most always accompanied by music that contributed

to and accentuated the performance’s erotic content and the performer’s lewd gestures.

Program summaries identifying specific roles for les femmes nues and les modèles

contained references to le deshabillé and le nu in both the action and melodies.99 For instructions on how to untie one’s skirt, one could listen to Mademoiselle Alice Bonheur singing Les Couplets du Déshabillé to her “students” in la Scala’s revue La Chula.100

Before becoming director of the music hall Ba-ta-clan, Gaston Habrekon worked as a songwriter whose chansons sensuelles, like Déshabillez-vous, appeared in revues that later established his reputation as one of the Belle Époque’s famous lyricists.101 Such

tunes were mostly likely to have stuck in one’s mind since they were short, catchy, and

could easily be remembered, if not for the melody itself, then for the impression that the

female body left with the spectator as it moved across stage and discarded layers of

clothing to the syncopated rhythms of the orchestra.

Photographic Representations of La Femme Nue

Almost immediately critics likened music halls to secret museums and their

exhibition of nude women to the exposition of pornography.102 Regardless of its genre,

99 RO 17.969: The 1896 tune Le Nu was part of the Divan Japonais’ La Revue Enragée.

100 PRO B 335: La Soirée Parisienne, no. 4, n.d.

101 PER F 210 (f): Courrier des Concerts

102 “Les Soirées de Paris: Au Balai,” Le Matin, November 27, 1906; Jane Ussher, Fantasies of Femininity: Reframing the Boundaries of Sex (New Brunswick, N.J., 1997), 148.

118 pornography’s primary aim was to sexually stimulate the viewer through bodily representations. Although knowing what excited one person may not excite another complicated how one defined pornography, people living during the nineteenth-century generally assumed that only the most unsophisticated and sexually naïve individuals could fall prey to their baser instincts. By nature of their child-like attributes, women, children, and the working classes were forbidden from consuming what for some middle- class men was merely erotic art. However by the mid-nineteenth-century, a reduction in cost and greater access to visual culture made erotica more freely available thanks in part to the music hall which brought what had been “initially limited strictly to bourgeois gentleman” to the larger public.103

Pornography, while broadly construed as any act or object that was intentionally produced, displayed, and/or performed for the benefit of corrupting minors, could be readily identified by various visual motifs. Regardless of whether the undressed bodies were revealed in the real or the abstract, they were considered pornographic when they presented “extreme examples of the female body distorted for male fantasy and gratification.”104 The unequal power relation that existed between viewing subject and object was replicated in pornography as the viewer, defined as ‘male,’ derived pleasure from the hyper-sexualization of female sex organs in isolation from the rest of the body.

In effect, pornography robbed the feminine Other of a sense of wholeness traditionally accorded to male nudes through the fetishization, mutilation, and fragmentation of the female body. By denying her a sense of agency and sexuality, pornography both

103 “Les Soirées de Paris: Au Balai,” Le Matin, November 27, 1906; Webb, The Erotic Arts, 361.

104 Gill Saunders, The Nude: A New Perspective (Cambridge, 1989), 72.

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objectified and commodified the female body as an object intended for the handling,

manipulation, exchange, and arousal of consumers.

The positioning of la femme nue on stage, as well as in photographs, reaffirmed la

femme nue’s status as an object of visual and sexual pleasure. Photographs published

within music hall programs, theater reviews, and magazines not only tell us a great deal

about a particular performance or the performer herself, but they provide insight into the

many different ways in which the music hall popularized the feminine charms of la

femme nue.105 Like the theater, photography constituted an important arena where the arrangement, posing, and display of undressed bodies served a number of cross-purposes with regard to the producer, performer, and consumer. The technological reproducibility of photographs contributed to the decontainment of the performative nude’s sexualized performances, moving her away from the physical site of the theater into the street, public gathering places, and private homes. Because her image was not bound to any one place,

“the artist’s body exercised a significant fascination” and influence over the public. 106

How one decided to interpret la femme nue, as an available and vulnerable or liberated body, had a great deal to do with her staging en scène (on stage) as well as in publicly circulated photographs.

One of the more famous white savages of the Belle Époque period was Jane de

Lyane, a premier dancer who appeared in numerous revues at the Moulin Rouge, Folies-

Bergère, and Olympia. While not much is known about her personal or professional life,

Jane de Lyane enjoyed fairly widespread recognition as her name, as well as image,

105 “Le déshabillé au théâtre,” Feux de la Rampe, December 26, 1896.

106 Condemi, Les cafés-concerts, 136.

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appeared prominently in music hall programs and the theatrical press. Listed alongside

the British sensation of chorus line girls known as The Tiller Girls, de Lyane occupied the rank of a minor headliner who played a supporting role to the likes of Max Dearly and

Mistinguett.107 Although she herself was not the star of the show, portraits of her within

the printed programs suggest something quite different. A cameo picture of her dressed in a leotard with exposed breasts indicates that her “La Danse de l’Eventail” in the

Moulin Rouge’s program La Belle de New York was more than just one of many dances performed during the show.108 (See Figure 3.)

Figure 3-4: Jane de Lyane in La Belle de New York

Likewise, a photograph of her standing center stage during a scene of Eglé signifies that

de Lyane’s performances consisted not only of graceful, ballet-like steps or movements

but still-life poses of her body as an ideal work of art and feminine beauty. Completely

undressed except for a cache-sexe (chastity belt), jewel pasted on either breast, and veil

draped behind her body, de Lyane stood before a crowd of fully dressed actors and

107 PRO B 169: Folies-Bergère programs.

108 PRO B 257: Moulin Rouge programs.

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actresses who, having receded into the background, turned their attention to her. (See

Figure 4.)

Figure 3-5: Jane de Lyane in 1912 revue Eglé Source: Fantasio, 1907.

In order to ensure the best possible view of the female body, directors and

photographers posed de Lyane and other white savages with either their arms spread out

or tucked behind their heads. A veil, which was attached to the forefingers of the

actresses’ hands, hung down behind them in order to soften the appearance of bodily

curves and to accentuate their forms from the extravagant backdrops. (See Figure 5.)

Theatrical and photographic representations of completely undressed performers were

rare, for many of them wore, at the very least, a covering over their pudendum, be it an ornamented cache-sexe or a woven belt that wrapped around their hips and triangulated at the crotch. In addition to these accoutrements, armbands, necklaces, headpieces, and transparent or netted slips worn in the absence of a shirt or bodice called attention to the

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actress’s transgression of sartorial conventions and the primitiveness of the presentation

itself. (See Figure 6.)

Figure 3-6: Jane de Lyane posing for the Olympia music hall Source: Fantasio, 1911.

Shown in Oriental or Hellenic garb, la femme nue engaged in the fabrication and dissemination of contemporary racial and ethnic stereotypes as the issue of race became of vital importance to Europeans by the late nineteenth-century. A revived interest in the

West’s classical heritage, resurgence in Social Catholicism, and an immediate concern over an international scramble for territorial acquisitions abroad led France to embark on a civilizing mission that had for its goal the acculturation of indigenous peoples under the framework of empire. In response to France’s drive to become an imperial power, a craze for all things foreign manifest itself in the theater in the form of ancient and Eastern

inspired texts, acts, décor, dances, and backdrops. Yet behind theatergoers’ fascination

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with les exotiques was a need to differentiate themselves from groups they considered to

be less physically, mentally, or culturally evolved. By default of their sexually

provocative and hysterical style of presentation, can-can dancers, epileptic singers, and

semi-nude chorus girls developed reputations for being what literary scholar Rae Beth

Gordon has dubbed “The White Savage in the Parisian music hall.”109 An index of

“humanness” so to speak was mapped out onto la femme nue’s body as positive and

negative connotations of bodily exposure were most often framed by images of the ideal

Greek nude and the naked savage.110 This dichotomization not only helped to

differentiate between meanings of nudity and nakedness, as well as tasteful and unsavory

nude spectacles, but it also worked to displace a fear of undressed bodies onto a foreign

or distant Other.

Double colonization, a concept borrowed from post-colonial studies, is helpful for

thinking about the way in which imperial and patriarchical ideologies informed

photographic representations and theatrical presentations of la femme nue. Placed in

positions of subordination as slaves, les mouqueres (prostitutes), les bayaderes (exotic

dancers), or les almehs (figures of the harem), femmes de revues re-enacted the

master/slave relation associated with colonialism. They participated in the creation of a

social knowledge about the East that expressed Western dominance through distorted

representations of the Orient. Known as Orientalism, this project relied heavily upon

sexual imagery to justify racial, cultural, and male superiority.

109 Rae Beth Gordon, “Fashion and the White Savage in the Parisian Music Hall,” Fashion Theory, 8, no. 3 (2004): 268.

110 Ruth Barcan, Nudity (New York, 2004), 80-81, 160.

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A distinctively French tradition of displaying non-European women stripped of

their clothing at ethnographic exhibitions can be traced back to the first decade of the nineteenth-century. Sartjie Bartmann, known as “The Hottentot Venus,” represented the first of a long line of African and Eastern women who would serve as objects of a colonialist gaze. Posed in exotic postcards and showcased at world fairs, the racial Other satisfied a French desire to dominate by acting as a receptacle for male and female sexual

fantasies. Malek Alloula’s study of the colonial postcard has suggested that the erotic

subtext underpinning images of half-dressed Algerian women complemented France’s military and political conquest of the region as it arranged its indigenous subjects in positions of abandon and powerlessness.111

When one considers the racialization of female entertainers performing as les

almehs, les bayadères and les mouqueres in Parisian music halls, this same form of

colonial domination through visual representation translated into sexual repression at

home. When juxtaposing their photographic images together, la femme nue and her

Oriental counterpart bore strong resemblances to one another in many respects. First, the

placement of jewels and veils between or around their breasts was aimed initially to

produce an artistic effect by drawing the viewer’s attention to the natural curves of the

bosoms. And yet the loose and disheveled appearance of the women’s breasts as they fell

awkwardly to the side of the aforementioned props suggested that a secondary objective

actually underpinned and informed the first. In the case where the subjects’ breasts were

111 Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem (Minneapolis, 1986), 52.

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completely devoid of covering, an impression of raw sexual abandon or assertiveness pervaded the image.112

What made these pictures, and the women they depicted, so appealing was the

fact that their meanings were not fixed and that the viewer possessed a degree of license

in how he or she interpreted them. The uncertainty built into these images, and their

subjects, only heightened anxieties surrounding the revelation of female flesh. The

appropriation of primitive dress, perverse gestures, and hyper-sexual attitudes commonly

associated with so-called “lesser races” by Parisian actresses and dancers alarmed

xenophobes, cultural purists, and moralist threatened by an assumed loss of

“Frenchness,” an attribute that was in the process of being redefined by one’s character rather than where one lived.

According to historian Susan Glenn, these concerns were not entirely unfounded as white Oriental dancers created “a vehicle for representing the unruly New Woman in the costume of exotic Eastern otherness.”113 Their exceptional status as women of the

theater, as Chapter 7 will show, enabled them to articulate a raw sexual energy that

challenged moral ideologies under the guise of artistic spirituality. Les femmes nues’

proposal to dispel a seemingly timeless Judeo-Christian belief that conflated the concepts

of “civilized” and “clothed” offered a critique of modern society that also destabilized

contemporary racial and gender typologies.

Yet audiences could rest assured that despite their similarities in pose and framing, la femme nue and her Oriental Other would always differ in one major aspect:

112 Ibid., 106.

113 Glenn, The Female Spectacle, 99.

126 flesh tone. An omission to paint their bodies “black,” a practice common among white entertainers performing in black minstrel shows, reinforced the beauty of whiteness through flesh colored tights, gold-tinted grease, and pink pasties for the private parts. A disconnect between the performer’s own racial identity and that of her character’s accentuated the performative aspect of the show, serving as a comforting reminder to spectators that what they were seeing was not the real thing. Consequentially, the nudity connected to la femme nue performances could be interpreted as part of the performer’s racial disguise rather than her true nature.

Figure 3-7: D'Herlys in 1914 revue Orgie à Babylone

Because the performative arts possessed a fleeting and transitory character, music hall entrepreneurs marketed their revues through the selling of programs. Spectators could recall the leisure experience of watching a particular revue through the collection of playbills, a form of memorabilia that circulated well beyond the music hall and its targeted consumer. One’s appreciation of feminine beauty during a revue could be relived through cameo shots of their favorite stars within music hall programs. The program covers advertised the halls themselves with artfully crafted colored drawings of

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the buildings and usually a mythical or contemporary female figure that acted as a form

of enticement. While the Moulin Rouge’s chérette is probably the best-known emblem of

music hall entertainment, bare breasted showgirls dancing with satyrs and men in tuxedos

advertised the carnal pleasures of the music hall by gracing program covers, as well as

posters, on a regular basis after the twentieth-century.114 (See Figure 7.)

Figure 3-8: 1912 Folies-Bergère program cover

In contrast to the cover, visions of la Parisienne en déshabillé inundated the

music hall spectator on a number of different levels, beginning with the erotically

enticing poster art pasted on Parisian Morris columns, and extending on to program

covers, and eventually the performance itself. Even the programs’ advertisements

marketed a range of commercial products (beauty creams, jewelry, bras, perfumes,

weight loss pills, electric breast and face massagers, and bathtubs) that sold the idea of

health, beauty, and sex with illustrations of scantily-dressed women as their main selling

114 PRO B 131: Divan Japonais programs; PRO B 37: Ba-ta-clan programs.

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points.115 (See Figure 8.) To further prove that the music hall’s endorsement of erotica

was not exclusive to the revue itself, a list of illicit books and magazines for sale, such as

Charles Carrington’s La Flagellation!, was printed on the very back of some program covers.116

Figure 3-9: Advertisements from La Cigale program, ca. 1900

Oftentimes, the photographic representation of the actresses within the revue’s

program came very close to resembling, if not drawing upon, a set of visual motifs

associated with the pornographic nude of the streets. Ironically, some of the very first

erotic photographs to appear in France depicted models and courtesans in suggestive

poses that were intended to attract prospective lovers and employers.117 The

115 The electric breast massager or douche ésthetique appeared in a La Cigale ad and was intended to improve the “beauté des seins.” See PRO B 92: La Cigale programs.

116 PRO B 62: Casino de Paris programs.

117 Interestingly, some of the first photographers were artists who saw a need to supply struggling colleagues, who could not afford living models, with albums of carte-de-visites. These small, intimate, and relatively inexpensive images quickly found a niche on the black market trade as “soft-porn” pin-ups. Mark Gabor and others date the emergence of the first pin-up to the early 1850s. See Eric Howe, How to Draw Pin-Ups (London, 1963); Richard Wortley, Pin-Up’s Progress (London, 1971); Paul Gerhard, The

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photographic insets found in music hall programs operated in much the same way as

academies and cartes-de-visite (pin-ups), staging women of dubious moral status for the

consumption and delectation of bourgeois males.118

The viewer’s discernment as to whether or not these photographs functioned as art or pornography had a great deal to do with the use of props and lighting, as well as the

pose itself. Since so many of these pictures captured a woman’s image from the torso up,

the breasts remained a central focus. (See Figure 9.) The detachment of one part of the

female anatomy from the rest of the body not only highlighted the subject’s anatomical

perfection but the fetishistic quality and intent behind the photograph. On the one hand,

actresses’ bodies emerged from a blank background that denied the viewer any sort of context with which to read the image. With the aid of historical props, costumes, and accessories, however, the actress could be situated in the distant past as a vision of feminine beauty that posed no present danger to the gender order. (See Figure 10.)

Pillow Book, or A History of Naughty Pictures (London, 1972); Ralph Stein, The Pin-Up from 1852 to Now (London, 1974); Mark Gabor, The Pin-Up: A Modern History (London, 1982); Elizabeth Anne McCauley, AAE Disderi and the Carte-de-Visite Portrait Photograph (New Haven, Conn., 1985); Dan Younger, “Cartes-de-Visite: Precedents and Social Influences,” California Museum of Photography Bulletin 6:1-24; Maria-Elena Buszek, “Representing ‘Awarishness:’Burlesque, Feminist Transgression, and the 19th- Century Pin-up,” The Drama Review 43, 4 (Winter 1999): 141-162.

118 Elizabeth Anne McCauley, Industrial Madness: Commercial Photography in Paris, 1848-1871 (New Haven, Conn., 1994), 166-167, 175.

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Figure 3-10: Les femmes nues

Figure 3-11: Mlle Rethore as “La Deese Raison” in La Cigale revue Source: Fantasio, 1908.

The absence of sexual stimulation, modesty, and pubic hair equally reinforced the status of these images as art. Even though they were presented in a state of undress, the actresses did not appear as if they had just emerged from or were currently engaged in a

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sexual act. At no point did these actresses attempt to cover or stimulate their genitalia in

order to attract the viewer’s attention, a motif commonly associated with pornographic

nudes. (See Figure 11.) Thanks to the obligatory cache-sexe, the sight of pubic hair was

avoided altogether even though more revealing images of these women suggest that they

shaved on a regular basis anyways.119

Figure 3-12: Blanche Dorfeuil in La Boite à Fursy's revue Une Femme Nue Source: Fantasio, 1908.

And yet, if one situates these pictures in a larger context and juxtaposes them alongside other images of more contemporary characters printed in the music hall program, the viewer becomes aware of what Elizabeth Anne MacCauley refers to as

119 St. Albin reported “a lot of theater women pluck the hair under their arms and certain ones approve of the whitening of their living ivory without stain, while others praise their sisters for keeping the rebellious opposition to the light of skin of a darker, curly tuft.” See “Le nu au théâtre,” 458.

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pornography’s “crass materiality.” The actresses’ corporeal body, while having been

turned into an objet d’art through the process of aestheticization, nevertheless remained a

body captured on film, reproduced, sold, and circulated throughout Paris. Because it

purported to document reality through a lens of objectivity, photography brought the

aesthetic and the material, the past and the present into confrontation with one another.

Regardless of how well one staged the photographic subject or manipulated the

outwardly visible symbols connected to race, class, and sex, moments of slippage

occurred within the photograph when artifice and the imaginary were exposed under the

light of photographic realism.120 The introduction of props, typically associated with

modernity rather than the period being represented, betrayed the photograph’s claim to

truthfulness. The appearance of an animal skin rug, upon which Mademoiselle Laly

d’Auray posed as Danae for the revue T’En As Un Oeil, opened up a liminal space where

the viewer’s understanding of the “artistic” and “pornographic” nude became blurred. As

a commonly used prop in nineteenth-century pornography, the animal skin rug

highlighted the animalistic qualities of the actress who, tilting her head back, invited the

viewer to embrace her with outstretched arms.121

Whereas the “crass materiality” of pornography could be identified through a

conflation of the past and the present, the ideal and the real, either within the same frame

or between frames, the blatant display of an eroticized female body devoid of artistic

pretension functioned as the most obvious sign of pornography. Even if the attitude or

120 Leonore Davidoff, “Class and Gender in Victorian England: The Diaries of Arthur J. Munby and Hannah Cullwick,” Feminist Studies 5 (1979): 87-141.

121 PRO B 257: La Soirée Parisienne: Au Moulin Rouge, no. 10, Numéro Spécial; Castle, The Folies- Bergère, 106.

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role unfolded within the context of art where a “modèle de Montmartre” appeared

wearing contemporary dress with the exception of her shirt, the audience interpreted her

as a naked body, or as art historian Bernard Rudofsky put it, “a body minus clothes” rather than an aesthetic ideal.122 (See Figure 12.) Mademoiselle Jean Perriat’s pose for a

1911 La Cigale program suggests that there was little effort on the part of the

photographer to cast the actress as an abstraction of womanly chastity, purity, and beauty.

Addressing the viewer in a frontal pose, Perriat stood in an expensive robe de ville that

had been unzipped to reveal her breasts through a thin piece of transparent cloth.123

Figure 3-13: Jane de Lyane as “Le Modèle de Montmartre” in the Moulin Rouge's La Revue de la Femme Source: Fantasio, 1908

As total nudity and revue entertainment became co-terminus with one another,

music halls unabashedly represented the female form in graphic detail with drawings and

122 Bernard Rudofsky, The Unfashionable Body (Garden City, N.Y., 1974), 27.

123 PRO B 92: La Cigale program dated December 10, 1911.

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photographs of contemporary showgirls exposing their breasts through the jeweled

netting that wrapped around their bodies.124 A growing emphasis on the individual within music hall programs between the late 1890s and 1920s materialized as additional space was given to actresses whose pictures gained greater prominence to the exclusion of ads. This shift in focus away from material commodities to the images of the actress herself as a selling point for the revue indicates the degree of cultural cache accumulated by the femme de revue in the brief time she had occupied the music hall stage. As a result of her ability to command more of the public’s attention, la femme nue challenged an older perception of actresses as commodities of the theater alone. “Through the use of visual imagery,” she projected her theatrical identity beyond the stage, rejecting and/or modifying negative stereotypes that had formerly cast her in the role of a sex object.125

Since the image had surpassed the written word as the primary vehicle of emotive

production, visual media represented the best way to heighten consumer desire by the fin-

de-siècle. Advertising, when “combined with the erotic appeal of a feminine image,”

wielded an immense power, influencing the consumer’s thoughts and actions through the

awakening of irrational, sexual instincts.126 Representations of la femme nue to promote

a music hall’s revue relied on a series of advertising strategies that were later

appropriated by a variety of consumer product labels. Scantily-dressed girls wearing

jeweled bras redirected the viewer’s attention away from other competing advertisements

with a sexual allure that promised beauty, health, pleasure and emotional fulfillment.

124 PRO B 37: Ba-ta-clan programs.

125 Buszek, “Representing ‘Awarishness,” 142.

126 Weber, France: Fin-de-Siècle, 155.

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Riding a wave of popularity surrounding the public’s fascination with femmes nues, a

Russian cigarette company selected for its pin-up girl a modern Phryné, making a veiled

reference to the modern strip-tease artist via her ancient predecessor recently made

famous through a number of revues.127 In this same way, the cough syrup manufacturer

Kipsol chose to market its product with the seductively posed Mademoiselle Pepée of

Little Palace. Wearing a tiara, snake armlet, jeweled bra, and wrap around skirt, Pepée

addressed her viewers stating “One would think that, seeing me in this simple costume…I

am going to catch some frightful cold.” In highlighting the fact that she was relatively

undressed, appearing “without coat, scarf, hat, or parasol,” Pepée nevertheless declared

that she had “nothing to fear” because she took Kipsol.128 The marketing of sex through

illustrated or photographic images of la femme nue both reconfirmed the “crass

materiality” caught up with her representation and demonstrated the self-embodied

awareness that these women possessed in using the medium of advertising to their advantage.

In the process of being positioned by the image in commercially and sexually exploitative ways, la femme nue found an opportunities where she could assert an

authority about matters concerning what was chic and good for one’s health. The rise of

the fashion press, alongside mass entertainment, provided them with the structure and

form to create what Concetta Condemi refers to as a “machine for success.” Through the

manipulation of physical attributes and self-presentational strategies, actresses created

127 RO 15.722- R 123273 (microfilm): Folies-Bergère programs from 1900-1905.

128 La Vie Théâtrale, April 10, 1907.

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“new models of the body and forms of seduction” that were initially popularized by the

theater and diffused through the advertising, fashion, and cosmetics industries.129

Alongside this, a popular obsession with performers’ public and private lives, evidenced by articles recounting the “rupture of contract, conflict with an impresario or director, engagement abroad” or “marriage, divorce, illicit meeting, relationship with an illustrious man or crowned head of state,” not only stimulated the public’s curiosity about these women but normalized the blurring of boundaries that had once cast them as social pariahs.130 A beautiful example of how this process took place is represented in a 1911

article published by a magazine of theater gossip, Comoedia Illustré. Entitled “Questions of Elegance,” the article engaged with a debate currently circulating in the Parisian press as to whether or not “the modern costume” was, as Jules Lemaître had claimed, “vile.”131

In interviewing some of Paris’ leading actresses, the author included the voice of one

Hortense Malay who cites a transference, or rather exchange, of avant-garde fashion

between the theater and the street as being responsible for what Normandy called “the

spectacle of normal human nudity.”132 In declaring that the most modern and “beautiful

costume for a pretty woman” was not to have one at all, Malay became one of the first

avatars of the twentieth-century to consciously encourage and publicly throw her support

129 Here I am thinking of Polaire’s waist, Theresa’s monstrous mouth, Yvette Guilbert’s distinctive silhouette, Colette’s eyes, Jane Avril’s long arms, and La Goulue’s red hair.

130 Condemi, Les cafés-concerts, 150. For the creation of an international star system, see Eric S. Salmon, ed., Bernhardt and the Theatre of Her Time (Westport, Conn., 1977); Heather McPherson, “Sarah Bernhardt: Portrait of the Actress as Spectacle,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 20 (1999): 409-54.

131 Vanina, “Questions d’Élegance,” Comoedia Illustré, November 1, 1911.

132 Normandy, Le nu à l’église, 198.

137 behind a woman’s right to wear whatever she wanted.133 While radical for the time, her statement signifies an important turning point in France’s march towards modernity where an actresses’ self-embodied awareness of being on display could inspire the adoption of more active poses within performance, photography, and everyday life.

In this last and final section, I analyze a third medium through which images of la femme nue were produced, projected, and understood, that of the literary novel. Along with the revue and publicity photograph, the novel operated as an additional framing device through which visions of la femme nue and her meteoric yet problematic ascent within Parisian entertainment were borne out of, recorded, as well as embellished by the

French cultural imagination.

Literary Representations of La Femme Nue

The appearance of the New Woman as a cultural representation in sources of mass suggestion (newspapers, novels, salon art, and commercial posters) played a large role in shaping millions of individuals’ attitudes towards la femme nue. La Parisienne, as the coquettish New Woman would be known in France, symbolized the seductive and yet corrupting aspects of modernity, namely the introduction of capitalism and a sexual self.

Art historian Griselda Pollock has noted how some of the best known examples of French modernism, such as Pablo Picasso’s painting Les desmoiselles d’Avignon (1908), cast her image as a metaphor for the commercial exchange of sex.134 Within fin-de-siècle literature, la Parisienne symbolized the conflation of money and libido for writers such as

133 Fin-de-Siècle, March 7, 1897.

134 Hollis Clayson, Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era (New Haven, Conn., 1991), 5.

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Emile Zola who told tales of how financially “independent and corrupt women had

feminized men and hastened France’s moral collapse” in his novels Nana (1880) and Les

dames du bonheur (1883).135 Similarly, the fetishization and commodification of female

bodies affected the performative arts where late nineteenth-century productions of the

ultimate femme fatale, Salome, marketed actresses’ undulating hips, beaded breasts, and

bare feet as commodities of desire and repulsion.136

It would not take long before la femme nue captured the literati’s attention as a highly visible and popular figure of the Parisian landscape. Whether or not she took the form of a chanteuse, comedienne, or figurante, la femme nue represented in life and in literature an emerging modern femininity rooted in and expressed through her corporeality. Emblematic of the New Woman, who at the time was “more a literary and aesthetic production than a social reality,” la femme nue and the fictionalization of her life illustrates the fact that “the more naked the body becomes, the more the body dominates perception, the more the body assumes an abstract identity.”137 If “the history

of the novel cannot be understood apart from the history of sexuality,” as Nancy

135 Berlanstein, Daughters of Eve, 158.

136 For a discussion of turn-of-the-century Salome performances, see Lawrence Kramer, “Cultural and Musical Hermeneutics: The Salome Complex,” Cambridge Opera Journal, 2 (1990), 269-94; Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin-de-Siècle (New York, 1990); Richard Bizot, “The Turn-of-the-Century Salome Era: High and Pop Culture Variations on the Dance of the Seven Veils,” Choreography and Dance 2 (1992), 71-87; Gaylyn Studlar, “Out-Salomeing Salome: Dance, the New Woman, and Fan-Magazine Orientalism,” Michigan Quarterly Review, 34 (1995), 487-510; William

Tydeman and Steven Price, Wilde: Salome (Cambridge, 1996); Toni Bentley, Sisters of Salome (New Haven, Conn., 2002); Judith Walkowitz, “The ‘Vision of Salome’: Cosmopolitanism and Erotic Dancing in Central London, 1908-1918,” American Historical Review, (April 2003): 337-376; Davinia Caddy, “Variations on a Dance of the Seven Veils,” Cambridge Opera Journal, 17 (March 2005): 37-58.

137 Showalter, Sexual Anarchy; Karl Toepfer, Empire and Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910-1935 (Berkeley, Calif., 1997), 1.

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Armstrong has claimed, then this next section examines the content of and degree to which literary discourses on the femmes nues mirrored the reality of their lives and

advanced a more self-aware cosmopolitan sexuality.138

As alluded to earlier, no image or performance captured the fin-de-siècle’s obsession with the New Woman more than the vision of Salomé whose mythical “Dance

of the Seven Veils” figured the unclothed female body as a religious and moral

transgression of uncontrollable self-expression, irresistible seduction, and spiteful

revenge against men. Several literary critics, art and cultural historians have investigated

the difficulty which turn-of-the-century female artists faced after being “conflated with

Salomé in the public mind and condemned for lasciviousness and perversity.”139 Mata

Hari, one of the first exotic nude dancers to perform in Paris, symbolized the seductive yet threatening allure of female sexuality on public display, a charm that would eventually prove fatal for her in representation and in life.140 Her dances, which typically

ended with a loss of self-control and death, were in keeping with contemporary pictorial

and literary representations of femmes fatales whose fatal demise signaled sexual

disempowerment. Mata Hari’s own death before a firing squad for allegedly committing

treason against the French state, served as a cautionary tale for women who stepped

138 Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction (New York, 1987), 9.

139 Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, 159; Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity (New York, 1986); Walkowitz, “The ‘Vision of Salome’”; Caddy, “Variations on a Dance of the Seven Veils.”

140 Mata Hari’s name has become synonymous with exchanging sex for national top secrets. She was arrested, charged, convicted, and executed for committing espionage in 1917. See Russell Warren Howe’s Mata Hari: The True Story (New York, 1986); Julie Wheelwright’s The Fatal Lover: Mata Hari and The Myth of Women in Espionage (London, 1992); Margaret Darrow’s French Women and the First World War: War Stories of the Homefront (New York, 2000).

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outside of prescribed roles for women and gave added force to the notion that sexually

liberated women would inevitably follow a path of self-destruction.

While it is not my intent to summarize or contribute to this body of literature per

say, I mention it to make one specific and general point. First, the legend of Salomé, and

tales like it, acted as a culturally potent narrative and visual motif throughout the Belle

Époque that served as a lens through which the French viewed nude performance artists

as individuals and social beings. The legend’s identification with and popularization of

the process of physically unveiling oneself on stage paralleled the nineteenth-century

faits-divers’ unveiling of private life in print.141 The same openness and legibility that la

femme nue sought on stage was borne out on paper not only by la femme nue herself but

by third party observers who purported to know the truth about these women.

Consequently, fictional works about femmes nues, in addition to published interviews

and memoirs, contributed to and shaped the reading public’s opinion about la femme nue

as a New Woman.

One of the earliest and most widely read fictional accounts of the Parisian music

hall’s white savage is Emile Zola’s Nana. His fictional story about a prostitute/actress

employed the literary style of realism to dissect and lay bare contemporary concerns

about the corrupting influence of unregulated female sexuality within French society

during the early Third Republic. Written in 1878 and published two years later, Nana

told the story of a beautiful yet vulgar actress-turned-demi-mondaine whose aggressive

141 To quote from Gregory Shaya, a historian of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century mass press in France, the term faits divers “has both the particular meaning, rooted in nineteenth-century journalism, of news items (evident in a literal translation of the term) and a more general meaning, reading apparent in the late nineteenth-century and today, denoting curious, violent, or shocking news.” See his article, “The Flaneur, the Badaud, and the Making of a Mass Public in France, circa 1860-1910,” American Historical Review, (February 2004): 42.

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sexuality threw into question traditional notions of male and female gender roles. Like

the tale of Salomé, Zola’s narrative established a social scientific connection between the

female protagonist’s body, the depravity of her character, and that of Parisian society as a

whole. Her insatiable appetite for vice, made manifest by acts of homoeroticism, transvestitism, self-exhibitionism, and lesbianism, illustrated the power with which the

human body functioned as a source of individual pleasure and empowerment, as well as

social subversion and destruction. The radiant, naked beauty of the Théâtre des Variétés’

Blonde Venus represented in Zola’s own words “a cunt in all its power; the cunt on an

altar, with all the men offering up sacrifices to it.” The magnetic, hypnotic force she

exerted over men with and through her body incited a moral crisis marked by disrespect for human dignity, as evidenced by her transgression of social and moral conventions.

By the novel’s conclusion, Nana, “simply by means of her sex and her strong female odor,” ends up “destroying everything …and turning society sour just as women having a period turn milk sour.”142 Read in light of the early Third Republic, Zola’s naturalist

construction of the literary femme nue as modernity’s femme fatale signified an initial

reaction to the introduction of nudity within the popular theater.

In contrast La cité des femmes nues presented an early-twentieth century

perspective of la femme nue that illuminated a shift in social attitudes towards nudity in

the theater since Zola’s publication. A realist novel written by Charles Quinel and A. de

Montgon and published some time in the first quarter of the twentieth-century, La cité des femmes nues exposes in the “frankest spirit” the hardships, disappointments, and small triumphs that accompanied showgirl stardom while offering a less sensationalized,

142 Emile Zola, Nana, trans. George Holden (London, 1971), 11.

142

demonized account of how nude performance artists reconciled their professional and personal lives.143 The crux of La cité’s plot centered on its main character, Baroness

Odette Rops, who takes revenge against her philandering husband by answering a general advertisement for “femmes nues” found in the daily paper. The baroness, who was some

forty years younger than her husband and possessed an impeccable body to boot,

explained her act in terms of re-appropriating and taking back what rightly belonged to

her. “What I will never forgive him for,” Odette declared, “is the moment when he

prepared himself to leave with another (woman), having publicized in front of witnesses

his certainty that nobody would contemplate my figure, that my body was only created

for his exclusive use.”144 With this statement, Odette exposed the dilemma driving the

narrative’s plot, that a woman’s body was not her own. Hoping to evade social strictures

that considered women the property of men, Odette turns to the music hall where she

believes she can live a life of sexual freedom and financial independence. In adopting the

stage name “Lola,” a name which belonged to her chambermaid, Odette reaffirms the

way in which such re-appropriations of the body were construed as deviant, garish, and

belonging to a lower social order. Through her encounters with various white savages

Odette discovers that, despite their autonomous appearance on stage, these women were

143 Jacques Nargaud, “La cité des femmes nues,” Le Petit Poleu?, September 24, 1936. According to Max Aghion, Quinel, along with Henry Moreau, Georges Arnould, and Eugene Heros, habitually furnished the Folies-Bergere, Olympia, and Moulin Rouge with revues that “consistait en defiles de jolies filles bien en chair et court vetues.” See Hier à Paris, 162. Since the publication date for La Cité is unknown, one must assume that it must have occurred during or after Quinel’s lifetime. A 1907 program for Ba-ta-clan’s Faut Voir Ça, a revue that Quinel wrote in collaboration with Moreau, and a Folies-Bergère program printed around that same time suggest that he was actively composing works for the theater at least until the Great War. I have been unable to find any information on A. de Montgon.

144 Charles Quinel and A. de Montgon, La cité des Femmes Nues (Paris, n.d.), 34. “Ce que je ne lui pardonnerai jamais, c’est, au moment où il s’apprêtait à partir avec une autre, d’avoir affiche devant un temoin sa certitude que personne que lui ne contemplerait mes formes, que mon corps n’etait crée qu’à son usage exclusif.”

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no more emancipated than the femme du foyer (housewife) was in a conventional,

unfulfilling marriage. Taken together, Nana and La cité des femmes nues provide us with unique literary, insider’s perspectives on la femme nue’s evolution from a socially reviled yet scintillating creature to a respectable working woman of pride and character.

In both of these accounts, the fictionalized femme nue was depicted in much the same way that her literary counterparts-the flower girl, laundress, and shop clerk girl-

were, as individuals who had “lived for a long time, and very poorly, in the provinces”

before coming to Paris in search of work, opportunity, and freedom from familial

constraints and responsibilities.145 Nana’s coterie of friends hailed from the northern and southwestern parts of France and had worked in such occupations as housekeeping and cow herding.146 Similarly, one of Odette’s colleagues at Paris-Palace, Jeanne Dorgelet,

stated that she “was born in Bayonne” where her father was garrisoned. Most likely the

illegitimate progeny of an illicit love affair, Jeanne “came to Paris looking for work” as

did so many young girls of her time who lacked the necessary support network that secured one’s financial and social stability.147 For those provincials blessed with good

looks and figures, one could respond to ads published in the Parisian dailies by music halls in search of fresh faces and scintillating flesh. Such an ad might have looked

similar to the one Odette responded to which read: “One requests very pretty models of

145 Ibid., 61.

146 Zola, Nana, 112.

147 Quinel et Montgon, La cité, 61.

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an impeccable pose to be able to play nudes. Handsome pay. Present yourself between

5:00 and 7:00 a.m. at the manager’s office of the Paris-Palace. Urgent.”148

Because femmes nues symbolized the “raison d’être” of the hall, the failure to

obtain good-looking female performers placed an entertainment establishment in a

financially precarious position. As part of the job interview, these young girls were

shuffled in one at a time behind closed doors and asked to undress before the scrutinizing

eyes of the director.149 Like animals inspected at market, white savages underwent a rigorous, demeaning, selective process where their sexual body parts were openly critiqued in order to ensure the hall’s credibility and success. The nude women displayed on a theater’s stage served as a kind of advertisement for the theater itself as the proprietor of Paris-Palace, Monsieur Bedarides, explained to his director.

Is that what you call femmes nues! That! Is that what Paulin Plorette writes about in his idiotic press releases, that they are the most exciting in the world? Do you want the Paris-Palace to go bankrupt! Ah! They will laugh at the gals of the ‘first’ [act] and what will one put me through in the papers or do I not get any publicity?150

In response to the theater critic Fauchery’s comment that he would “have a flop” on his

hands “if this Nana of yours can’t sing or act,” the director Bordenave responded,

148 Ibid., 34. “On demande très jolis mannequins d’une academie impeccable pouvant jouer les nus. Beaux cachets. Se presenter de 5 à 7 à la regie du Paris-Palace. Urgent.”

149 Ibid., 9, 38. “--Alors quoi! Gronda-t-il en frappant son sous-main d’un coupe-papier d’ivoire, c’est à qui me fera perdre le plus de temps! Allons, f…toi à poil. Il se reprit en regardant celle qui pentrait chez lui: --Déshabillez-vous, Madame. En un tourne-main Odette fut nue, sauf pour un slip qu’elle avait eu la précaution de passer.”

150 Ibid., 16, 7. “C’est ca que tu appelles des femmes nues! Ca! C’est ca don’t Paulin Plorette écrit dans ses communiqués imbeciles que ce sont les plus excitants du monde? Tu veux que le Paris-Palace fasse faillite! Ah! Ils rigoleront les zebras de la ‘première’ et qu’est qu’on me passera dans les journaux ou je ne fais pas de publicité?”

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A flop? A flop! Does a woman need to be able to sing and act? Don’t be stupid, my boy…Nana has something else, dammit, and something that takes the place of everything else…You’ll see, you’ll see; she’ll only have to appear and the whole audience will be hanging out their tongues.151

Once a prospective candidate had passed the selection process, she signed an

unfavorable contract which required her to work everyday, including holidays and

weekend matinées for which new pensionnaires (understudies) went unpaid.152 The

typical workday, consisting of countless fittings at the dressmaker’s as well as dress

rehearsals, left little time for eating or socializing.153 Rehearsals, which were generally

announced for eight o’clock but never began before ten in the morning, were noted as

being especially long and frustrating.154 Oftentimes, the performers rehearsed the same

scene twenty times in order to incorporate the extras into the revue.155 If on the

unfortunate occasion the performer was sick and missed a day of work, she received a

fine.

Before a performance, the stairwells and corridors backstage were depicted as a

“din” of noise. People scurried busily from one place to the next laughing, screaming,

151 Zola, Nana, 22.

152 Quinel et Montgon, La cité, 39.

153 Colette’s semi-autobiographical essay entitled “Une Répetition” verifies la femme nue’s demanding work schedule. The actress, Mme. Loquette, rushes into the theater late for her dress rehearsal after spending four hours at a fitting with the famous costume designer Landolff. As she stands before the owner and playwright in a gauze gown that makes her shiver, she “ne répond rien et souhaite seulement, de toutes les forces de son âme, un sandwich au jambon, ou deux, avec de la moutarde.” See “Une Répetition,” Fantasio, January 1, 1911, 365.

154 Quinel et Montgon, La cité, 75, 13, 70.

155 Ibid., 66.

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and calling for and to one another.156 On his first venture “behind the scenes at a

theater,” Nana’s infatuated suitor, the Count Muffat, was “filled with a feeling of malaise,

a vague repugnance mingled with fear.”

The Count raised his eyes as he passed and glanced up the staircase well, startled by the sudden flood of light and warmth which fell on the back of his neck. Up above there was a clinking of basins, the sound of laughter and shouting, and a banging of doors, which in their continual opening and shutting let out a variety of feminine smells, the musky scent of paint and powder mingling with the pungent odor of women’s hair. He did not stop; on the contrary, he quickened his step, and almost took to his heels, his skin tingling with the thrill of this exciting glimpse of a world he knew nothing of.157

Once the spectacle was underway, the cacophony turned into a strange monotony as the

artists settled down into knitting sweaters, cleaning lingerie, strolling about and chatting

with one another until their stage call.158

The dressing rooms represented an informal home-away-from-home for young

girls. Ten to twelve girls crowded into small, poorly ventilated “hot rooms” where one

ate, drank, rested, knitted, cleaned and changed clothes.159 “Glimpses of naked flesh,

white skin, and pale underwear” could be caught in this troglodyte world that Zola

compared to a “lower-class brothel” filled “with a score of women crowded together amid a litter of soaps and bottles of lavender water.” The smell of cheap perfume mixed with sweat, the sound of laughter and conversation, as well as the sight of bare skin,

156 Ibid., 64.

157 Zola, Nana, 146-147.

158 Quinel et Montgon, La cité, 94.

159 Ibid., 13; 58.

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delineated an additional erogenous zone within the theater next to that of the stage and

promenoir.160

The fictitious nude performance artist, like her real-life counterpart, earned very

little money for the time and energy she spent rehearsing and performing at the theater.

Those who were fortunate enough to know how to sing and dance received special

treatment and monetary supplements.161 Regardless of her role as a figurante, chanteuse,

or danseuse, the white savage of the music hall thought constantly about when she was to

be paid and at what point she could receive an advance.162 Nana and La cité des femmes

nues imply that this concern was tied to the fact that she had to earn enough to support her children who either lived in the provinces or at home. In the scene following her triumphant première as The Blonde Venus, Nana’s first thoughts turned to “her little

Louis, a child she had had when she was sixteen, and who had been left in the care of a nurse in a village near Rambouillet.” With a cabal of creditors banging at her door, Nana slipped out a back entrance to ‘earn’ the three hundred francs needed “to pay off the nurse and to place the boy with her aunt, Madame Lerat, at Les Batignolles, where she could go and see him as often as she liked.”163 The maternal love for a child motivated

Henriette Marmagne to appear in a state of undress on stage as well. After having been

kicked out of the house by her husband upon seeing her on the Paris-Palace stage, her confidant Odette went in a spirit of intercession to speak to Henriette’s husband. In a

160 Zola, Nana, 165-166.

161 Quinel et Montgon, La cité, 38.

162 Ibid., 59.

163 Zola, Nana, 51.

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moment of compassion, she begged him to realize, “Your wife is brave, if she lied to you, it was a sign of love that she gave you…It is not from the happiness of her heart that she

entered the music-hall. She dreams of her children, of you.”164

Despite being portrayed as a “good-natured” and loving creature, the fictional white

savage possessed a moral “weakness” for self-exhibition, especially her legs. This instinctive shortcoming was thought first to have been put to use in the artist’s atelier and

then later in the music hall where she posed in tableaux vivants. Lepetit described this kind of theatrical performer, the figurante, as a “beautiful girl” in her early twenties whose “tall and well made” stature lent itself to provocative poses plastiques. 165 In truth, talk surrounding the white savage’s predisposition towards nudity was a ruse for ignoring the economic reality that forced some women to expose their bodies. The Rebouillon

Sisters of Paris-Palace, who “had made a living as models at the studios of Montparnasse artists” before “an [economic] crisis” forced them to find other work, explained how they

“only knew of one thing: modeling. Since there was no longer a means of making a living from it, we presented ourselves here [Paris-Palace].”166

Once they were employed by the theater, such women were expected to submit to

the director’s, rather than the painter or sculptor’s, artistic discretion. In an episode that

could have easily occurred in the atelier as in the theater, Colette evoked the tension that existed between the director, who needed to incorporate outrageous stunts into theatrical

164 Quinel et Montgon, La cité, 136. “Votre femme est courageuse, si elle vous a menti, c’est une marque d’amour qu’elle vous à donnée…Ce n’est pas de gaieté de Coeur qu’elle est entrée au music-hall. Elle songeait à ses petites, à vous.”

165 Zola, Nana, 12; Lepetit, Silhouettes, 57.

166 Quinel et Montgon, La cité, 97-98. “Nous n’en connaissions qu’un: celui de modele. Comme il n’y avait plus moyen d’en vivre, nous nous sommes presentees ici [Paris-Palace].”

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numbers as a means of attracting more clientele, and the artist who was trying to maintain

her modesty despite the demands of her métier. In her semi-autobiographical essay “Une

Répetition,” the actress stands on stage stupefied.

--Not nude enough! What are you looking for? --Eh! I must have…I don’t know. The effect is good, but not striking enough, not fleshy enough, not nude enough, I stand by my word!…I should have… Inspired, the owner retracted three steps, extended his arms, and, in the voice of a pilot leaving the earth: --Take out a breast! he screamed.167

In the public’s imagination, the white savage was conflated with other female types

like the prostitute and demi-mondaine who exposed their bodies in exchange for money

and gifts. The implication that most femmes nues were kept women added to the scandalous nature of their work and to the rumors concerning their availability after the show. This reciprocal relationship between sex and money did not seem to bother social climbers like Nana who, “dressed only in her drawers, with a bit of her chemise poking out behind, began playing the great lady, Queen Venus, opening her private apartments to the dignitaries of State” during intermission breaks.168 In the loges of the Paris-Palace,

Odette listened as her friends shared their sicknesses and secrets with one another,

admitting “that they had had numerous lovers,” most of them married, who had paid for

them “to be sent to Paris like a package.” “Huegette Gigoux narrated with immodest joy

her affairs by the week, day, or hour. She had run around just about everywhere even to

167 Colette, “Une Répetition,” 365. “--Pas assez nu! Qu’est-ce qu’il vous faut? --Eh! Il me faut…je ne sais pas, moi. L’effet est bon, mais pas assez eclatant, pas assez charnu, pas assez nu, je maintiens le mot!…Il me faudrait…Inspire, le patron recule de trios pas, etend le bras, et, d’une voix d’aeronaute quittant la terre: --Lachez un sein! Crie-t-il.”

168 Zola, Nana, 152.

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a café in Alger.”169 It mattered little to them who they were meeting or where since they

greeted every opportunity to travel as a luxury that they themselves could not afford both

literally and figuratively. These romantic adventures and moments of escape were in

reality few and far between as the white savage of the Parisian music hall remained

enslaved within a cash nexus where she functioned as an indispensable commodity.

Nana complained of how “Bordenave had refused to give her even the shortest leave,

putting her off” until the end of the theatrical season because “he did not intend to put an

understudy in her place.”170 The irreproducible nature of her body and performance kept

la femme nue tied to the money and the demands of her lovers and the theater.

Contrary to Zola’s conflation of la femme nue with the sex trade, writers of the

twentieth-century portrayed her not as sexually reprobate but as a hard-working, honest

single or married woman struggling to earn a living and survive. While some were openly

honest about their amorous indiscretions and misfortunes, others expressed “a hermetic

attitude” towards their shameful misdeeds, poor decisions, and embarrassing

“ruptures.”171 The bookstore-stationary business that the Rebouillon sisters had opened

on the Boulevard de Clichy with a small inheritance left to them by a deceased aunt,

folded shortly after two loafing lovers arrived on the scene. Left with no other source of income, the sisters put their modeling skills to use by applying to a Paris-Palace ad for

169 Quinel et Montgon, La cité, 96. “Huegette Gigoux narrait avec une joyeuse impudeur ses liaisons d’une semaine, d’un jour, ou d’une heure. Elle avait roule un peu partout et meme dans un beuglant d’Alger.”

170 Zola, Nana, 176.

171 Quinel et Montgon, La cité, 96-97.

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femmes nues.172 Lesser-known dives of the music hall industry became sources of

opportunity for individuals like Nathalie Aramis who paid her way through medical

school by performing as a white savage. As one of the girls explained to Odette, “She is

almost a real medical doctor. Since medicine costs a lot to learn, she works here as a

femme nue.”173 These women, who had been “called to become good little tranquil girls,

destined, as all virtuous women, to a single spectator,” had merely fallen victim to a

series of unfortunate circumstances such financial bankruptcies, unsatisfying marriages,

abandonment, and abusive relationships that altered the course of their lives.174 In the

first quarter of the twentieth-century, the fictionalized femme nue’s career had come to be seen as a means to an end--to pay for one’s education, support oneself and one’s children, or to seek revenge against a philandering husband. Despite the hardships, la femme nue remained optimistic about the future. Knowing “that little creeks make big rivers,” she persevered and struggled against deeply entrenched social conventions governing female

behavior, moral injunctions regarding public nudity, and economic inequalities facing

female wage earners. On the eve of the First World War, one could write of la femme

nue as a “philosophe and good girl” who, in seeking emotional and physical fulfillment in

her professional and personal life, saw “la vie en rose.”175

172 Ibid., 98-99.

173 Ibid., 35. “Elle est presque docteur en médecine pour de vrai. Parait que la médecine ça coute cher à apprendre, alors elle fait ici la femme nue.”

174 Reboux, “Le nu,” 9.

175 Lepetit, Silhouettes, 57-59.

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While the precise date and location of the first déshabillé may never be known, the exhibition of nude women-that is to say women with exposed breasts and/or a covering across their pudenda-had become a common sight and abstraction within Parisian entertainment, commodity and literary culture by 1914.176 Whereas the late 1880s and early 1890s framed a moment in time when the undressing of women was first introduced on-stage and became an essential part of an emerging Parisian nightlife, her objectification as a model of feminine beauty and object of sexual desire reached new

heights in the first decade of the twentieth-century when various promotion materials

associated with the music hall marketed her physical charms to a broader public.177

Within the transformative spaces of performative art, photography, and literature, les femmes nues flaunted modern notions of femininity and womanhood, smudging the conventional polarities of lady and whore in her staging, representations, and discussions of the modern body. Although these multiple forms of representations “encouraged rather than protested one looking at them,” they established new parameters within which a woman’s undressed body could be seen, represented, and interpreted.178 In its drive to

176 Rearick states that from “1894 on artistic cabaret, artists’ costume balls, nudity (semi) became the rage.” See Pleasures of the Belle Époque, 75.

177 Zeldin, A History of French Passions, 706. The difficulty with establishing a chronology for nudity in the French theater is a result of semantics since late nineteenth-century chroniclers used different terms to describe the phenomenon of la femme nue For example the word “déshabillé,” which according to the Grand Dictionnaire Universel du XIX Siècle, connoted the act of undressing, the state of undress, or a type of simple house robe worn by a woman to receive guests in, was appropriated by Georges Montorgeuil to refer to Paris’ first striptease. He recalls how an act performed at the Folies-Bergère on November 30, 1886, entitled Place aux Jeunes, re-enacted a painting by Emile Bayard where two women entered into a fight that ended with the two dualists ripping each other’s clothes off until their tight fitting skin-colored bodysuits were all that remained. According to Montorgueil, this performance initiated a theatrical trend that came to fruition “six or seven years later” when “everything would be a pretext for undressing.” See Pierre Larousse, Grand Dictionnaire Universel du XIX Siècle, (Nimes, 1990), vol. 8. and Montorgueil, L’année féminine, 22. Still others, such as Georges Normandy and St. Albin, chose to use the expression “le nu au théâtre” as opposed to journalists who placed a more artistic spin on the nude dancer with the name “la femme nue.”

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spectacularize reality and create artificial dream worlds, the music hall revue

unconsciously or unknowingly obfuscated the dangers and threats inherent in her exotic and seductive body while simultaneously drawing attention to it. As one will see in

Chapter 4, her presence in the public sphere did not go unnoticed as those most closely associated with preserving the status quo initiated a campaign to thwart the public’s flirtation with les femmes nues while simultaneously seeking to preserve their exhibitions for a more select audience

178 Buszek quoting Kathy Peiss, “Representing ‘Awarishness,’”144.

CHAPTER 4 THE POLITICS OF MORALITY IN BELLE ÉPOQUE FRANCE

Acceleration in the performative nude’s visibility beyond the restricted spaces of

the studio and the salon corresponded with both a real and an imagined fleau de

pornographie (flood of pornography) by the end of the nineteenth-century. Considered

the least mediated form of representation, performance differed from other visual media

by merging the audience and performer within a single frame or context. Although

performative art was not as easily reproducible as posters, postcards, photographs, and

film, it had the effect of producing an immediate response within the viewer. In the

minds of moral conservatives, a feminist aesthetics that interpreted the female body as a source and a site of jouissance (pleasure) threatened to expend men’s moral capital and imbalance an already fragile gender order. For this reason, the policing of public decency focused upon those areas tied to la voie publique or public routes of circulation. Hence, streets, sidewalks, public balls, and music halls became “the most closely monitored and heavily censored sites of female performance.”1

Numerous individuals and groups tried to contain the undressed female body to a

limited number of locations and persons. The creation of moral leagues during the Third

Republic resulted from bourgeois fears about degeneration, a theory put forward by Dr.

Bènèdicte-Auguste Morel in 1857 to explain the deleterious effects of modernization on

1 Angela Latham, Posing a Threat: Flappers, Chorus Girls, and Other Brazen Performers of the American 1920s (Hanover, N.H., 2000), 3.

154 155

society.2 These leagues waged a cultural war against iconographic and performative representations of la femme nue and actively participated in shaping public opinion and

social legislation on pornographic literature, photography, art, and performance. Through the use of a moralizing discourse, vice crusaders challenged the construction of newer, more relaxed standards of morality that accompanied modernity. Not only did moral leagues play a central role in national politics by lobbying for stricter regulations of

commercialized sex, but they also protested, published, networked, and hosted conferences for the purpose of creating a line of defense against pornography’s incursion

into the civilized world. The history of these leagues offers a rich glimpse into the social construction of morality in Belle Époque France and how the spectacular female nude artist shaped and was shaped by anxieties underpinning a redefinition of those cultural values.

Sections One and Two explore the Social Purity movement in Belle Époque

France, first through the political career of René Bérenger, and then second, through the reform efforts of organizations that he either created, presided over, or allied with. This chapter situates their work in relation to rising apprehensions regarding aspects of degeneration: depopulation, the breakdown of the family, venereal disease, and a growing urban nightlife. More importantly, their “decision to impose the bodysuit on all women who desired to show their charms to the public,” highlighted the ways in which these concerns consolidated around the female body and its exposure within printed materials and performative spaces. 3 Section Three illustrates this last point with an analysis of the

2 Theodore Zeldin, A History of French Passions vol. 2: Intellect, Taste, and Anxiety (Oxford, 1973), 833.

3 Romi, Le nu (Paris, 1982), 95.

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trial concerning the 1893 Bal des Quat’z-Arts’ exhibition of lightly veiled models. This

trial, more than any other event during the Belle Époque, propelled the issue of female

nudity before the state and the court of public opinion. A generational clash between

Parisian youth and their elders over the meaning of individual liberty and its relation to

French mores erupted into a week of violent riots and protests which set the stage for

future confrontations over la femme nue and her proper place within society.

Even though the moral leagues’ efforts to combat the proliferation of commercialized sex were ultimately unsuccessful, the hotly contested debates involving social groups of various religious, political, and social hues testifies to the French people’s preoccupation with shifting notions of sex and the regulation of sexual behavior on the eve of World War I.4 The fact that “barely a single pursuit was engaged against an

obscene book in Paris” following Bérenger’s death on August 29, 1915, serves as a

poignant reminder of how a more modern, market-oriented, and sexually expressive

bodily regime predicated on pleasure rather than procreation had superceded an older

bourgeois conception of sexuality as private, reproductive, and tied to the family.5

René Bérenger

No other figure of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries would be so

closely associated in the public’s mind with issues of guardianship, censorship, and

hypocritical moral policing than Senator René Bérenger. His long and influential political career, which spanned the entire Belle Époque period, has yet to be assessed in light of his vigorous campaigns against public immorality. For a quarter of a century,

4 Emile Pouresy, Dix années de lutte contre la pornographie (Bordeaux, 1912).

5 Ibid., Le bilan de la pornographie (Bordeaux, 1928), 9.

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Bérenger fought the rising tide of pornography and prostitution, winning himself the

unpopular title of Père la Pudeur. His special blend of devout Catholicism, moderate

republicanism, ardent nationalism, and social activism earned him a place as one of the

most important figures in turn-of-the century France. However unlike his American

counterpart Anthony Comstock, Bérenger is rarely mentioned in the most basic texts of

fin-de-siècle or Belle Époque France.6 No longer a familiar household name in the

French lexicon, this Gaulois version of Comstockian prudery, respected by some yet

reviled by others, has slowly disappeared from the annals of history. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 4-14-René Bérenger (far right)

His colleagues in the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques remembered

Bérenger as a person of “true character” who possessed “a moral force” and “authority” unequalled by any other. Although he never held a cabinet position during his forty years

6 Roger Shattuck, Eugen Weber, and Jerrold Siegel make no reference to Bérenger in their books The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant Garde in France, 1885 to World War One (New York, 1968), France: Fin-de-Siècle (Cambridge, Mass., 1986); idem, Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830-1930 (Baltimore, 1986) respectively. Christophe Prochasson mentions him once in his book Les années électriques 1880-1910 (Paris, 1991), 126 as does Jean-Claude Bologne in Histoire de la pudeur (Paris, 1986), 240.

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of national service as Deputy and Senator from the Drôme, Bérenger proved to be a

tenacious legislator, showing tremendous courage in the face of personal and professional

character attacks—a power “not given to everyone.” As a “defender of good morals,” he

accepted the difficult “role of censor, in a blithe and mocking society” which failed to

appreciate the depth of his compassion and loyalty to a strong, morally unified French

Republic. His fight to humanize the French Penal Code, to prevent the spread of contraception, and to eradicate pornography, white slavery, child abuse, and prostitution gained him the respect and homage of the prestigious Institut de France, an organization to which he belonged for twenty-five years.7

Even though “the old Puritan’s” repression of obscenity was construed and

criticized as an infringement upon liberty during his lifetime, the French press showed

great tact and respect for the Senator at the time of his death.8 “Journalists who had

ridiculed him for most of his existence as a result of his campaigns against public

immorality recognized the goodwill and useful work accomplished by him.”9 Putting his

own personal interests aside in order to work for the well being of the nation, he defended

religious tolerance and supported the secularization of the Republic, believing that

religion and politics should occupy two separate spheres. While upholding the belief that what one did in private was a personal matter, he nevertheless advocated state intervention with respect to protecting minors from the sexual exploitation and physical

7 Institut de France: Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, “Discours de Alexandre Ribot, President de l’Académie, prononcé à l’occasion de la mort de René Bérenger, member de l’Académie, lu dans la séance du 4 Septembre 1915,” (Paris, 1915), 1-4.

8 St. Albin, “Le nu au théâtre,” Mercure de France, vol. 1-4, 451.

9 Emile Pouresy, La fédération des sociétés contre l’immoralité publique…son but, son caractère, son programme, ses moyens d’action et de propagande (Bordeaux, 1929), 30.

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violence that often accompanied la puissance paternelle.10 In this vein, he worked to

establish a juvenile court system and safe houses where indigent young girls could escape

a life of streetwalking for one of moral education until the time they obtained their

majority.11 His most famous and lasting contribution to French law was the 1891 loi

Bérenger, also known as la loi de sursis, which permitted judges to hand down suspended

reprieves to first-time offenders. Bérenger’s passion to rehabilitate the next generation of

French citizens was most evident in the last year of his life when he retired to his home in

Alincourt, an estate that he converted into a convalescent home for the wounded of

World War I.12

Born in Bourg-les-Valence on April 22, 1830 to a long line of dauphinois

magistrates, lawyers, and politicians, Bérenger shared his family’s passion for legal

reform, particularly with regards to criminal justice.13 After receiving his law degree in

1853, Bérenger began his career in public service, first as a deputy public prosecutor in

Evreux, then as a state prosecutor in Bernay, Neufchatel and Dijon before accepting the post of counsel for the prosecution in Grenoble and Lyon by 1867. During his fourteen- year tenure as a public official under the Second Empire, he tended to be “inflexible and severe and hardly concealed liberal opinions which made him an adversary of the

10 TOL 4-Z-1617 Institut de France: Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, “Discours de Charles Lyon-Caen, “Séance,” (Paris, 1923), 51.

11 Bernard Schnapper, “Le Senateur René Bérenger et les Progrès de la Repression Penale en France (1870- 1914),” Annales de la Faculté de droit d’Istanbul, no. 42, (n.p., 1979), 247.

12 Anne-Marie Ballansat, Les Jurisconsultes Dauphinois du XIX Siècle (Grenoble, 1985).

13 Ibid.

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authoritarian regime.”14 Despite his oppositional stance against Napoleon III’s rule,

Bérenger was arrested and sentenced to a short prison term by Lyon’s Committee of

Public Safety under the Government of National Defense with the outbreak of the

Franco-Prussian war. Upon his release, he enlisted in the National Guard of the Rhône at the age of forty and took part in military combat until he was wounded by a shot to the

arm at the Battle of Nuits on December 18, 1870.15

As a member of the Lyonnais bar, Bérenger ran for election as Deputy to the newly

established Third Republic’s National Assembly on February 8, 1871, winning a majority

of the votes in both the Rhône and Drôme departments. Following family tradition, he

served as a deputy for the Drôme, joining the Centre Gauche as a notable “republican of great independence.”16 Bérenger’s conscience led him to take on unpopular causes, even

when they opposed his closest colleagues in the National Assembly.17 At a time when politicians of strong conviction gravitated towards political extremes, Bérenger preferred to strengthen the political center by playing a unifying role within the National Assembly and his own party.18 As a républicain du lendemain, Bérenger “rallied to the Republic or

more specifically to the person and policies of [Adolphe] Thiers” when he was selected to

14 Schnapper, “Le Senateur René Bérenger,” 226.

15 Lyon-Caen, “Séance,” 33.

16 Schnapper, “Le Senateur René Bérenger,” 227. In his history of the French Senate, Paul Smith notes that politicians of this order were mostly businessmen from old prominent political families hailing from the Northeast and South. See A History of the French Senate, vol. 1: The Third Republic, 1870-1940 (Lampeter, 2005), 20-21, 140, 212.

17 Lyon-Caen, “Séance,” 36-37.

18 Bérenger served as president of the Centre Gauche in 1890. See Smith, A History of the French Senate, 489.

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serve as Minister of Public Works for six days in May 1873 before the National

Assembly called for Thiers’ resignation at the end of the month. In the capacity of

Deputy from 1871 to 1875, he submitted several propositions, most notably for the creation of a special jury in matters of the press and the reorganization of the judiciary.19

Less than a year after his election to the Senate, Bérenger was one of the seventy-five

senators given lifetime appointments on December 16, 1875.20

During his forty-year tenure as Senator, Bérenger walked a fine line between the

liberal and conservative agendas of Republicans, Socialists, Bonapartists, Catholics, and

Monarchists.21 Whereas he supported workers’ interests as long as they did not interfere

with public order, he opposed an 1882 law that would have given different professions

the right to unionize under one syndicate. In another volte-face, Bérenger upheld the family as a microcosm of the state and the notion of paternal authority, even as he argued that fathers were not above the law and that the state should hold fathers accountable for their actions, even in private matters. To this end, he proposed a law, albeit unsuccessfully, that would extend paternity suits to cases of rape and seduction.22 His politics reveal a strong bourgeois adherence to preserving moral and social order through state control in instances where the liberal ideal of a self-regulating individual collapsed or failed.

19 Ballansat, Les jurisconsultes dauphinois du XIX Siècle (n.p, n.d).

20 Schnapper, “Le Senateur René Bérenger,” 227.

21 Considering himself a defender of liberty, Bérenger disapproved of Marshall Mac-Mahon’s dissolution of the Chamber of Deputies on May 16, 1877 and the establishment of a reactionary government under the monarchist de Broglie. See Ibid.

22 Ballansat, Les Jurisconsultes Dauphinois du XIX Siècle.

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With regard to religion, Bérenger professed adamantly a belief in the separation of

church and state.

Je n’accepte pas la doctrine qui veut attribuer à l’Église, en dehors de son domaine naturel qui est la prière, la direction des consciences et la charité, une influence sur la conduite des affaires politiques et qui prétend régler la politique d’après les dogmes de foi. Il n’est pas acceptable que le prêtre se mêle à nos débats politiques.23

Yet in the same breath that he advocated a secular state, he asserted that the government

would be remiss if it neglected one of its principle duties: to protect and favor religious faiths. To do otherwise would be a misinterpretation of personal freedom and, by extension, an offense to one’s freedom of religion. Bérenger’s belief in and support of a strong secular republic was predicated on the preservation of moral values inculcated through organized religion. It is this seemingly contradictory fusion of republican laicité with religiosity that led him to oppose a bill proposed by Jules Ferry concerning the

“freedom of higher education” in 1879. Alongside Jules Simon and twenty-eight other members of the Centre Gauche, Bérenger defeated the law that would have denied qualified religieuses the right to teach in public or private schools.24 This legislative

debate, Smith writes, had far-reaching effects for the Republic as the course of Belle

Époque politics would be shaped thereafter by the formation “a group of between twenty

and thirty dissident Centre Gauche senators liable to side with the right on issues of

public and private freedom.”25

23 Lyon-Caen, “Séance,” 36.

24 Schnapper, “Le Senateur René Bérenger,” 227.

25 Smith, A History of the French Senate, 184-185. Similarly, he protested against an 1883 law that would have suppressed the traditional role of priests as spiritual healers within Parisian hospitals. See Ballansatt, Les jurisconsultes dauphinois du XIX Siècle.

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It is in this context that Bérenger’s personal views and public statements about

pornography and immorality shed light on how the state and vice leagues justified their

intervention into areas of private life. Within the nebulous sphere of ethics, where the

personal and political impinge upon one another, Bérenger articulated and acted upon a

set of moral and political beliefs that viewed the nation as a social body composed of

interdependent parts. Solidarism, as the notion and movement would be known, gained

adherents throughout the 1890s as people began to question the benefits of classical

liberalism. Consistent with this thought, the family, the church, and the government

formed solidarities with one another in an effort to defend and maintain the boundaries of

bourgeois moral authority.26 “According to the norms of Belle Époque bourgeois culture, to reveal in public acts officially considered immoral was to transform those acts from mere aberrations of behavior into something that threatened to redefine one’s character.”27 The unprecedented degree to which erotic images were bought and sold on

street corners and sidewalks and sexual transgressions exposed in literature, the theater,

and the press indicated that individual abnormalities had infected the collective body

thereby turning private sexual matters into public concerns.

From the Senate’s podium, Bérenger railed against the corrupting influences of pornography upon society, outlining what he believed to be the principal causes of demoralization and the means necessary to repress them. First and foremost, Bérenger cited an insufficient moral instruction of the youth within the Republic’s laic and

26 For a discussion of Solidarism, see Edward Berenson, The Trial of Madame Caillaux (Berkeley, Calif., 1992), 155-156.

27 Ibid., 130.

164 parochial educational institutions. He proposed reforming the current system by restoring

“religious sentiments” and exercising “benevolent but firm authority.” Second, he pointed to the government’s passivity towards, even tolerance of, irreprehensible acts that

“have been left to root themselves gradually” within French mores. Bérenger attributed the current state of moral disorder to a lack of governmental repression extending all the way back to the revolutionary events of 1870. Whereas these causes were “not born with the current epoch” but rather with the Second Empire, a regime that had “tolerated public manifestations of libertinage,” Bérenger and other moral conservatives throughout the

1890s assumed that the founding of the Third Republic had only exacerbated an already extant ‘moral crisis.’ A series of new laws, from the relaxation of press censorship

(1881) to divorce (1884), had permitted a whole range of license to take place in the name of liberty and freedom. To compound the situation, lacunas within outdated statutes, such as the prohibition to distribute and sell obscene publications on the streets but not through the mail, needed to be eliminated or revised if the government was to maintain control over an increasingly mobile populace with rapidly changing needs and lifestyles. The press played a large role in moral complacency, as it tended to “paralyze” public officials with a fear of public reprisal for speaking out against and taking an active role in combating popular vices. In order to prevent the causes of demoralization,

Bérenger called upon the press, courts, and police to show greater consideration for those who “have truth, common sense, and morality,” to uphold the law in matters of outrages aux bonnes moeurs, and to take more decisive action against perpetrators.28

28 René Bérenger, Les causes principales de la demoralization publique et des moyens necessaries de répression (Paris, 1895), 5-8.

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Even with legal reform, the government would experience difficulty and ultimately

remain ineffective in the pursuit and prosecution of individuals and businesses

responsible for the production, distribution, display, and sale of obscene materials. An

army of volunteer citizens serving as the government’s eyes and ears was needed if

pornography was to be eradicated once and for all. In reaction to the gradual expansion

of new opportunities for sexual expression outside of the home, a broad spectrum of

middle-class reformers engaged in a moral reform movement to redefine the meaning,

accessibility, and appropriateness of certain forms of sex and sexual behavior. As a result

of their highly publicized debates, protests, and writings, these vice crusaders contributed

to the modern understanding of sexuality as a political and social issue rather than an

intensely personal and familial matter. The following section will demonstrate how the

formation of moral leagues at the end of the century signified a growing distrust of the

Republic’s liberal individualism and a desire to restore moral authority to the collective

or general will.

Moral Leagues

Following a decade of dramatic social disruption, political upheaval, and moral

repression, the ascent of a republican-dominated legislature in 1875 ushered forth a new

era of individual freedom. The passage of liberal laws ensuring freedom of the press, the

right to free public education, to divorce, to unionize and to hold unauthorized public

meetings laid the foundation for the Third Republic’s value system, one characterized by progress, order, justice, and liberty. Simultaneous to this trend in political democratization was a broadening of French visual culture, particularly in terms of spectatorship and self-expression. The lifting of press censorship in 1881 had an especially profound effect on French society by exposing a large number of readers to a

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corpus of formerly interdit (forbidden) ideas and images. Drawings of nude women

within popular magazines operated as previews of what would later materialize on

Parisian stages. This consumption of erotica was indicative of a “more casual approach

to life, aiming not at permanent contentment, but at momentary fun, not at married bliss,

but sexual gratification.”29 Having shed its former association with suffrage and the right

to work, individual liberty, in the modern sense, denoted what writer Paul Adam called

the “the right to license and enjoyment.”30 Secure in their financial, political, and social circumstances, Parisians devoted themselves to the pursuit of pleasure and paid little heed

to where those pursuits might lead them.

Behind Parisians’ search for happiness laid “an impending sense of doom” that

incited fear as much as reckless abandon.31 “An awareness of guilt was an inseparable” and complementary part of one’s lack of restraint.32 A moral tension between suffering

and sacrifice on the one hand, and happiness and excess on the other, had traditionally

underpinned and tempered French actions and behavior.33 However with the creation of

“a new social state,” a “general relaxation in the observation of rules governing social

29 Zeldin, A History of French Passions, 697.

30 Paul Adam, “Les Énergies,” Revue Blanche 10, no.71 (May 1896): 435, 438, 441.

31 Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Époque, 202.

32 Zeldin, A History of French Passions, 679.

33 Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Époque, 71.

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morality, individual morality, and family ties” had occurred. The current state of moral

affairs, defined by a false sense of individualism, had confused freedom with license.34

One wants liberty for all and for oneself, liberty to do everything, to prevent everything, to say everything, to critique everything, without any other reason than the right or the interest that one believes to have, and without any worry for the right or interest of one’s neighbor, of punishment, one does not want to hear it spoken of, limitation, one would not know to have it: would freedom suffer from it?35

Less than a decade later, the same Paul Adam who had refused “the ethic of sacrifice” in

championing the individual’s newly found liberty “called for checks on individualism, indolence, and the pursuit of pleasure.”36 A litany of social sicknesses, ranging from

prostitution, alcoholism, crime and infanticide to homosexuality and feminism, had

begun to take their toll on nation’s health. Whereas some Parisians would benefit from

the aid of hindsight and experience, others would espouse moral reform on the basis of

religious conscience.

A number of events in Church history provoked a string of moral crusades whose primary concern centered upon the conservation of the race.37 After years of opposition

to the founding of the Third Republic, Pope Leo III made two pronouncements that

radically altered Catholics relations with the state. His Rerum Novarum of May 1891 and

encyclical of February 1892 officially accepted France’s democratic government and

sanctioned Catholics’ participation in it, especially in those areas where social problems

34 Albert Eyquem, De la morale publique aux bonnes moeurs ou de la pornographie au point de vue historique, juridique, legislative et social avec une étude complète de droit comparé (Paris, 1905), 198.

35 Ibid., 188.

36 Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Époque, 209.

37 La ligue francaise de preservation morale et sociale de la jeunesse, (Paris, 1909).

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were addressed. 38 In what became known as Social Catholicism, the Catholic Church

assumed “a new missionary attitude towards the people,” focusing upon the moral and

spiritual rehabilitation of the working classes and the creation of “alternative forms of

social relations and economic organization.”39

In many respects, the Pope’s edicts were attempts to regain spiritual ground lost to

Protestants in the interim between the French government and Catholic Church’s fallout

and reconciliation. Social Christianity, a movement initiated by Protestants following

their first synod in 1872, transformed this religious minority into a visible part of French

communities. As examples of their biblical piety, Protestants established mutual aid and

philanthropic associations emphasizing “the reciprocal dependence of the individual and

the community.” The convening of an 1888 conference in Nîmes by the ‘Protestant

Association for the Practical Study of Social Questions’ disparaged liberal individualism

for neglecting the poorest and weakest members of society. These “militants of middle

class culture” preached solidarity between the Church and the community, modeling

temperance and morality for their working class brothers through evangelical acts of

reciprocity, moral and social education.40

The moral militantism of Catholics and Protestants in the last two decades of the nineteenth-century, notes Annie Stora-Lamarre, arose in response to “an anguish of which the origin is not easily identifiable but of which the manifestations are

38 Charles Sowerine, France Since 1870: Culture, Politics, and Society (New York, 2001), 66.

39 Zeldin, A History of French Passions, 1000.

40 Bernard Charles, “Faire Société: La pertinence contemporaine du solidarisme, l’un des projets du Christianisme Sociale,” Introduction du colloque: Foi chrétienne et extreme droite, 29 janvier- 1 février 2004, à Strasbourg, http://www.protestants.org/foi-extreme-droite/charles_texte.html.

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spectacular.”41 Republican politics’ emphasis on competition and secularism led some to fear an unraveling of the country’s moral fabric. As a result, “religious life became

active in innumerable societies” which intervened in the areas of the family, leisure,

personal hygiene, and public health in order to address the social consequences wrought

by modernization. 42 The church-as-social critic attacked “modern civilization, progress,

industrialization, capitalism, socialism, urbanization and virtually every new

phenomenon, as sources of temptation, degradation, and immorality.”43

The first of France’s largest and most influential moral leagues was La Ligue pour le relèvement de la moralité publique (also known and heretofore referred to as La Ligue française de la moralité publique) founded by Pastor Louis Comte in 1882. Having grown out of an 1876 visit to Paris by British reformer Josephine Butler, La Ligue took

Butler’s call for the abolition of regulated prostitution and the suppression of the moral

police to heart.44 In the wake of her Continental tour, she established national

committees that became loosely tied together in an international anti-vice federation

whose function was to coordinate policy and action between member nations. For

41 Annie Stora-Lamarre, “La lacune et le remède: la tâche du législateur républicaine,” Revue d’histoire de l’enfance irrégulière, no. 2, (1999), http://rhei.revues.org/auteur170.html.

42 Zeldin, A History of French Passions, 1001.

43 Ibid., 986.

44 The most central figure within La ligue francaise de la moralité publique was its founder, Louis Comte, a pastor from Saint-Étienne who served for twenty-nine years in various capacities from Secretary General of the Ligue’s Central Committee to Agent Général en Mission. See Pouresy, Une Journaliste, 6, 8. Under Comte’s leadership, La ligue francaise de la moralité publique sponsored public awareness campaigns against licentious literature and alcoholism in 1887 and 1894 respectively. Gaufres, La Corruption, 12; Tommy Fallot, Notre nouvelle campagne (Paris, 1891), 34. With regards to the former campaign, the league acquired over 30,000 signatures in four months for a petition that was later presented to the Senate by one of its own members, the ordained minister and Senator Edmond de Pressense.

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reasons not yet known, the Parisian Committee pour le relèvement de la moralité

publique et la Traité de la Blanche Étoile decided to separate from the British/

Continental federation and form its own organization sometime in the early 1880s.45

Having originated and established its headquarters in Lyon, La Ligue française de

la moralité publique became a strong moral presence in the provinces. Chapters in

Nîmes, Roubaix, Saint-Hippolyte-du-Fort, and Sainte-Croix-Vallée-Francaise later joined

some of the league’s earliest chapters, located in the towns of Marseille, Saint-Étienne,

Millau, Mazamet, and Bergerac, by the end of the century.46 Since La Ligue française de

la moralité publique worked in conjunction with other philanthropic societies to rid their

towns of vice, it could carry out its work in places like Rouen, Lille, and Alais without

formally establishing local chapters.

Within a decade of its founding, La Ligue française de la moralité publique’s

ability to combat pornography on a local level had become increasingly problematic.

Paris, the capital and heart of the French nation, was funneling smut to the provinces so

rapidly that the Ligue’s Parisian Section could not effectively help its sister cities.47

Bérenger, who believed that the wave of public immorality “emanating from Paris” had to be treated first if France was to be healed of its moral contagion, recognized the need

45 Le Relèvement Social, “Origins of the League,” December 1, 1893.

46 Ibid.; Gaufres, La Corruption, 1.

47 Supplement au Relèvement Social, December 1904. The Parisian Section, which consisted of nine vigilante committees dispersed throughout the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, tenth, fourteenth, and seventeenth arrondissements, held regular meetings at the Musée Social. Founded at the end of the nineteenth-century, the Musée Social was initially intended to be a private foundation reserved for the study and research of “les economies sociales.” Located on the Rue de las Cases in Paris’ sixth arrondissement, the institution’s facilities were used by a diverse range of professional organizations and political groups that bestowed a semi-public character on the Musée Social. For more information, see the website http://www.sciences- sociales.ens.fr/hss2001/logement/acteurs/museeSocial.html.

171 for a league centrally located and administered in Paris that could lobby national legislators and governmental officials. Consequently in 1892, Bérenger along with

Senators Simon, de la Berge, Passy, and Sorbonne Professor Sabatier founded La Ligue

française contre la licence dans les rues or La Société Centrale de Protestation contre la

licence des rues (hereafter La Société Centrale).48 In addition to its headquarters in Paris,

La Société Centrale established chapters in Lyon and Rouen, as well as sub-committees in Nîmes and Niort and informal starter groups in Rennes, Le Havre, Clermont-Ferrand, and Bordeaux.49

Eventually the committees and sections of these two leagues, alongside other social

reform groups concerned with fighting public manifestations of immorality, united

together as La Fédération française des sociétés contre l’immoralité publique after the

First National Congress against Pornography in 1905. Temporarily headquartered in

Bordeaux, at 39 bis rue de Laseppe, La Fédération defined itself not as “an organ of

action, but mostly coordination, documentation, and information.”50 As the nerve center

48 Société Centrale, “Le Compte Rendu,” 1-3. Frederic Passy won the first Nobel Prize for Peace in 1901.

49 Ibid., 10-11. Two categories of membership existed; one for those who were active and paid at least a five franc membership fee, the other for adherents who set the amount of their yearly contribution. By its second year of existence, the Societé Centrale consisted of more than 4,000 members among whom over 147 held positions of power as members of the bar, judiciary, government, institutions of higher learning, and Institut de France. Lyon and Rouen were the Société’s two largest provincial chapters with 335 and 140 members respectively. A petition with over 900 signatures was circulated with Bordeaux on the Société Centrale’s behalf.

50 Pouresy, La Fédération Française, 1, 12. The publication of the Fédération’s statutes, in addition to the organization’s administrative functions, was confided to the Fédération’s board members. This board, composed of Bérenger (President of the first Congress and of the Société Centrale de protestation contre la licence des rues) A. Bayssellance (President of the Comité bordelais de vigalence pour la protection morale de la jeunesse et la repression de la licence des rues) F. Gast (lawyer, President of the Comité de vigilance de Rouen) Hemmel (President of the lyonnaise section de la Ligue francaise de la moralite publique) Vidal (President of the toulousaine section de la Ligue), was a fairly representative sampling of the groups which, in principle, adhered to the Fédération since its formation.

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for the federated committees, it helped to procure the necessary weapons with which the

various groups could take public action against pornography. La Fédération’s

sponsorship of annual meetings, its provisioning of money to cover delegates’ travel

costs, as well as its expenditures for “moral propaganda,” assisted vice crusaders in

coordinating efforts to regulate morality and sexual commerce. La Fédération and its

federated committees became one of the only means through which French communities

could actively protect themselves from undesirable influences.51

The members and leaders of these moral leagues were almost entirely composed of

bourgeois men holding some of the most distinguished positions in French society. As doctors, lawyers, politicians, and clergymen, they were involved in a variety of social reform movements from temperance to the anti-regulation of prostitution, the protection of children to the prohibition of animal abuse. United by a desire for “liberal reform,” marked by a strict “observation of laws,” these community activists shared tactics, strategies, and coordinated resources across a whole spectrum of special-interest groups including but not limited to L’Oeuvre Liberatrice, L’Oeuvre des Congrés Jeanne d’Art,

Ligue fraternelle des enfants de France et le Patronage de l’enfance et de l’adolescence,

Ligue de defense de la famille contre l’image obscene, L’Action social anti-alcoolique,

Union française anti-alcoolique, Solidarité Alsacienne, and Étoile Blanche.52

51 Ibid., 22.

52 Supplement au Relèvement Social, May 15, 1904. Paul Robin, founder of Régénération Humaine and President of the Malthusian Society joined the cause, supporting Comte and others in fighting against “evil excitations produced by obscene publications on children.” However his participation in the league was met with suspicion, as he believed that once one had obtained the age of puberty, one should not interfere to restrict “human liberty.” Bérenger, who considered Robin’s doctrines to be dangerous, thought that Robin’s books fell under the law against pornography since they described contraceptive objects and the means to employ. See Ibid., 7. Past presidents and vice-presidents of La Ligue francaise de la moralité publique included Doctor Legrain, the founder and former president of Union Française Anti-Alcoolique, Raoul Allier, a professor at the Faculty of Protestant Theology, and Charles Gide, professor at the Faculty

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One of the leagues’ most effective means in publicizing the struggle against public immorality was through the role of the agent général en mission. Responsible for

“addressing the public in large towns across France,” these men spoke to audiences comprised of soldiers, students, anarchists, and libertarians about their sex lives, the dangers of venereal diseases, the hardships of abandoned women, and the consequences of conjugal infidelities.53 Emile Pouresy, who held many honorary titles typical of an affluent bourgeois gentilhomme of the time, exemplified the agent général en mission.

Recognized as a Chevalier within La Légion d’Honneur and Laureat of the Institut de

France, Pouresy succeeded Tommy Fallot as Secretary of La Ligue de la moralité

publique at the end of the first decade of the twentieth-century after having served as the

Ligue’s Minister of Propaganda in 1907.54 In addition to being a lawyer, Pouresy penned numerous books and articles on the subject of public immorality one of which, his history of the Fédération, won the Academie des Sciences Morale et Politique’s Prix Le Dizzez de Pennaurum.55 In over thirty years of public service, Pouresy talked to the French

of Law and School of Ponts et Chaussées and President of the Central Committee of the Cooperative Union. See Supplement au Relèvement Social: Bulletin Parisien de la Ligue Française de la Moralité Publique, February 15, 1904. Members of La Ligue française de la moralité publique paid an annual membership fee based upon their level of involvement within the organization. Whereas “associates” paid between two and five francs, “actives” paid between five and ten francs, “honorary” members between ten and twenty francs, and “benefactors” between twenty and one hundred francs. To renew one’s membership, members paid forty francs while associates paid one hundred.

53 Le Relèvement Social, “Origins of the League,” December 1, 1893; Pouresy, Le testament, 237; Pouresy, La Fédération Française, 17. Pouresy was appointed Committee Director of a delegation responsible for spreading moral propaganda to affiliated organizations at the Second Congress Against Public Immorality held in Paris in 1912.

54 Pouresy, Une journaliste, 102; Pouresy, La Fédération Française, 15-17.

55 Pouresy, Masques arrachés, (Bordeaux, 1916), 7. The Prix Le Dizzez de Pennaurum, bestowed on June 20, 1914, recognized Pouresy “for the group of his publications consecrated to fight all forms of immorality.” These publications, which included La gangrene pornographique (1908), Dix années de lutte contre la pornographie (1912), increased over the years with the addition of La Pornographie à la rue, Le

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people about the importance of sexual responsibility that a person owed to oneself, one’s

partner, and one’s nation in meetings held all across France.

The moral press, comprised of various league publications, constituted a second

means of spreading moral propaganda and promoting the Social Purity movement’s cause. The publishing house and headquarters for La Ligue de la moralité publique’s journal, Le Relèvement Social, was situated only blocks away from Bérenger’s home and

La Société Centrale’s main office in Paris’ eighth arrondissement.56 For over thirty

years, Le Relèvement Social operated as the mouthpiece for the organization’s principles, agenda, and activities. First printed on a monthly basis beginning in 1893, the journal had acquired a readership of 4,700 subscribers by the 1920s. For an additional cost, a one could receive the Bulletin Parisien de la Ligue française de la moralité publique, a supplement to the journal which contained interesting columns on the current state of mores within the capital’s cafés-concerts and theaters, the progress made against white slavery, as well a section where individuals could write in asking questions about certain laws, legal procedures, and voice frustration about the lack of moral order in their hometowns. La Fronde’s Avril de Sainte-Croix, who wrote under the pseudonym

problème sexuel pose devant la jeunesse masculine de classe ouvrière, La pornographie litteraire, La Traité des blanches, immoralité et neo-malthusienne, L’État actuel de la pornographie et les moyens precis de la reprimer (post-1920), Honneur de France, Souvenirs de vingt-cinq années contre l’immoralité publique (Bordeaux, 1928), Le bilan actuel de la pornographie (Bordeaux, 1928), La fédération francaise des sociétés contre l’immoralité publique: Son but, son caractère, son programme, ses moyens d’action et de propagande (1929), Recueil de decisions juridiques et administratives contres les outrages aux bonnes moeurs (1932), Une journaliste au service de la moralité publique (1935), La vie morale et le Respect de la femme (1938), Au Service de la vie et la verité sexuelles (Saint-Antoine de Breuilh, 1939), Morale academicien à Jean Richepin (n.d.), and Le Testament de ma viellesse: choses vues,etc.

56 Ibid., 31. The offices of Le Relèvement Social and La Société Centrale were located at 97 rue Malsherbes and 10 rue Pasquier respectively.

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Savioz, was one of a number of leading female journalists whose articles on abortion, the

regulation of prostitution, and La Ligue du Droit des Femmes’ appeared in the paper.57

Working in the same vein, the Bordelaise committee of the Fédération began publishing the Bulletin mensuel d’informations anti-pornographiques in 1908 to warn league members of the offensive shows being performed in the provinces.58 The

“Bérenger Manual” as it was more popularly known was the only paper of its kind,

informing Fédération members of “judicial and administrative decisions concerning the

repression of pornography and immorality.” Quarterly supplements included lists of

associations loosely tied to the Fédération with their respective addresses, the most

current “bans pronounced by mayors and prefects against traveling theatrical troupes,”

and recent judicial rulings handed down by the tribunal and appeals courts.59

When a society joined the Fédération, it was sent, free of charge, a copy of the last

two meetings’ proceedings, five copies of the Bulletin, and five copies of supplement #13

disclosing the laws and rules concerning the administrative repression of public

indecencies in theaters, cinemas, spectacles, fairs, dances, and anatomical museums.

After the first year, all affiliated groups were required to subscribe to the Bulletin through

one of two ways. Depending upon its size, an affiliated group could pay twenty francs

57 Pouresy, Une journaliste, 7-8; The price of the paper rose from ten centimes in 1893 to one and a half francs by 1904. A little less than half of an unskilled laborer’s daily wage, the paper remained affordable to the working class. See Pleasures of the Belle Époque, 95; Le Relèvement Social, November and December 1898; Le Relèvement Social, July 1, 1898 printed an ad for Emilie de Morsier’s ‘La Mission de la Femme: Discours et Fragments sur les questions de moralité publique et reglementation.’ It is unclear whether these articles were written specifically for the league’s paper; they were most likely reprints of articles that had appeared in other papers.

58 By 1910, responsibility for the Bulletin’s editing and publishing had transferred from the Bordelaise Committee to the Fédération under the direction of Emile Pouresy. Pouresy, La Federation Française, 22.

59 Ibid., 13, 23.

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and receive two free copies per issue, or pay forty francs and receive five complementary

copies. Some committees chose to subscribe all their members to the publication, even

administrative and judicial representatives in their community. Although these annual

subscription fees underwrote the Féderation’s cost for printing the Bulletin, the

publication of the monthly paper and its quarterly supplement seem to have been rather

irregular. In 1929 when Pouresy wrote his history of La Fédération française, the

Bulletin was only being published three times a year and thirteen supplements existed.

The failure of various groups to send information communicating interventions,

judgments, and measures taken against pornography on a regular and consistent basis was

partially responsible for this.60

Moral leagues across France profited from learning about the successes and mistakes of one another as well as their counterparts on the Continent and abroad. 61

Great Britain’s National Society of Vigilance (also known as the Society for the

Suppression of Vice) served as a model for anti-vice organizations throughout nineteenth-century Europe. Its role in lobbying for an 1857 law making it illegal to manufacture, distribute, sell, and display printed materials of a licentious character provided a template for regulating access to so-called “moral poisons” and for “securing

60 Ibid., 21-25. Another plausible reason for the Federation’s decision to limit the Bulletin’s print run was its elimination of individual subscriptions when over two hundred subscriptions of this type went unpaid at a cost of six francs a piece. After its compilation in 1927, five hundred copies of a fourteen volume set consisting of the Bérenger manual and its thirteen supplements were distributed and sold to the federated societies for thirteen francs. Divided into chapters concerning the diverse forms of immorality and the judicial and administrative decisions concerning them, these sets were intended to make known the Fédération’s mission, concerns, and actions by serving as references for individual members and public representatives

61 Ibid., 11.

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the urban environment and maintaining public order.”62 Some twenty years later,

Anthony Comstock’s New York Society for the Prevention of Vice became “the terror of

authors and publishers of immoral publications” when it urged Congress to pass and

enforce laws of equal severity as those in Great Britain.63 Shortly thereafter in the early

1890s, Le Bureau genevois d’information contre la litterature immorale (a Swiss

Association Against Immoral Literature) was founded. Headquartered in Geneva, this

organization held an important conference in the city of Lausanne in 1893 to forbid the

introduction, display, and sale of immoral writings and drawings. Similar to Switzerland,

Belgium had been a notorious haven for publishing subversive works outside of France since the seventeenth-century. The Belgian government, however, showed greater leniency in matters concerning the press, particularly after its Constitution abolished censorship in 1831.64 The penalties exacted for publishing materials that fell outside of the law’s protection accounted for approximately one-fifth of the prison sentence and a quarter of the fines for the same crime committed in neighboring France.

A standardization of laws regarding violations of public decency remained a primary objective of these various leagues throughout the Belle Époque and was

62 Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon People, Streets, and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven, Conn., 2005), 157-158. M.J.D. Roberts has categorized the Society’s activities into three distinct periods. From its founding in 1802 to the 1820s, the Society concerned itself with promoting public standards such as weekly observances of the Sabbath. In its second phase, lasting throughout the 1820s and 1830s, the Society prosecuted cases of blasphemy and libel. The third phase was marked by a campaign in the 1850s campaign to eradicate prostitution and other acts deemed “immoral.”

63 Gaufres, La corruption, 9. Through its affiliation with the Young Men’s Christian Association, the New York Society for the Prevention of Vice’s primary objective, like so many other anti-obscenity organizations nation and world-wide, was the protection of youth. See Andrea Friedman Prurient Interests: Gender, Democracy, and Obscenity in New York City, 1909-1945 (New York, 2000), 14.

64 Gaufres, La Corruption, 9-10. For more information regarding the liberal Belgian Constitution of 1831, see Constitutions of Nations, ed. Amos J. Peaslee (Concord, N.H., 1950) vol. 1, 123-43.

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accomplished through the aid of national and international conferences. The Bordelaise

Committee of the Société Centrale organized and hosted the First Congress Against

Pornography and Public Immorality in Bordeaux in March 1905. Representatives from the two largest leagues (La ligue contre la moralité publique and La ligue contre licence des rues) and members from over twenty affiliated associations, sections, and vigilance committees, including delegates from the Bureau international contre la litterature immorale and groups of the La ligue de l’étoile blanche contre l’immoralité privée, were among the 3,000 individuals gathered in the municipal Salle d’Athenée.65 As evidenced

by the Congress’ large turnout, a need on the part of French and foreign vice leagues for

greater communication and coordination gave rise to subsequent conferences held over

the next fifteen years that confirmed France’s leading role in Europe’s campaign against

pornography.

On May 21, 1908 Senator Bérenger as President convoked the Congrès

international des associations de la moralité publique with the purpose of formulating

repressive measures against pornography on an international scale that would be adopted

by governments worldwide. Inspired by similar international congresses organized for

the repression of the white slave trade and prostitution (La Traité des blanches), the

Congrès united together eighty-six anti-vice associations in the Musée Social’s meeting

hall, forty-two of which were from France alone.66 The conference studied a number of

questions, one of which was the repression of crimes against public decency committed

65 Pouresy, La Fédération Française, 28-30.

66 Conference internationale relative à la répression de la circulation des publications obscenes (Paris, 1910), 41.

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through the production, transport, sale, and possession of obscene materials. United in

their desire to eradicate the trafficking of pornography across national borders, delegates

passed a motion agreeing to hold a second international meeting in two years time.

Between April 18 and May 4, 1910 delegates from over fifteen countries, representing the United States, Germany, Russia, Great Britain, Austria, Hungary, Belgium, Brazil,

Spain, Switzerland, Sweden, Italy and Ireland, met at the Second International

Conference for the Repression of the Circulation of Obscene Publications to review,

improve upon, and expand the work initiated two years prior.67

Reports, discussions, motions and speeches presented at these meetings dealt mostly with the preventive or repressive actions taken by individuals and committees or proposed legislation concerning outrages aux bonnes moeurs.68 Delegates moved that

bills be passed to repress contraceptive material in the form of advertisements,

instruments and remedies and to forbid all correspondence addressed under initials or

conventional formulas from being delivered to children through the mail. Ministries of

Interior were called upon to use the legal weapons at their disposal to vigorously apply

the existing laws for the repression of moral affronts and demands were made for the

right to direct citation to be extended to associations so that they could carry out justice in

the interest of social order and of public decency.69

On the subject of pornography in the theater, the commission responsible for

censorship under the Ministry of Beaux Arts was attacked for its inability to prevent

67 Pouresy, La fédération française, fn. 1, 37.

68 Ibid., 31.

69 Ibid., 11.

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certain theatrical performances deemed contrary to morality. In a paper entitled

“Scandals of the Theater: Repression or Censorship” given at the Fédération’s Second

Congress Against Pornography and Public Immorality in 1912, Manuel Fourcade, a lawyer à la Cour and member of the Conseil de l’Ordre lobbied for an expansion in the laws promulgated on August 2, 1882, 16 March 1898 and 7 April 1908 in order to incorporate affronts committed by the sight of public spectacles. He called upon Paris’

Prefect of Police and provincial mayors to use their legal rights to forbid or suspend spectacles contrary to public decency. In addition, he encouraged the public to be aware of its social duty with respect to immoral, licentious, or obscene spectacles.

Communities wielded a power of collective action that could force theaters to modify and restrain their programs. Fourcade invited members of the societies of public morality to give their moral and pecuniary support to attempts which would forbid all immoral or licentious performances and he urgently expressed a need to furnish the working classes with a knowledge that would help them discern between great artistic and literary works from smut.70

In their efforts to ward off an invasion of obscene print materials, images, and

performances, the French leagues’ differed initially in opinion about who should serve on

the frontlines. In a speech given not long after his election as Société Centrale president,

Jules Simon addressed the fathers of France calling on them to unite and take action in default of a “powerless” police force and Ministry of Justice. In the beginning, La

Société Centrale viewed the struggle to prevent the breakdown of the French family as a prerogative of the male sex as opposed to its counterpart, La Ligue française pour la

70 Ibid., 35-37.

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moralité publique, which had procured the involvement of both men and women from the

very start. Whereas no record exists of a woman being present at La Société Centrale’s

first General Assembly held in December 1892 and very few figured in its membership

lists, La Société Centrale’s initial predisposition to define itself as an all-male

organization appears to have been only temporary. A copy of a pamphlet published

shortly after the Société’s debut indicates that the document’s original title, ‘Call to

Fathers of Families,’ was changed some time later to a ‘Call to Mothers of Families.’

Mothers and Christian women, “who have never feared to confess their faith and stand up

for what was good,” were invited by La Société Centrale to “join forces and combat evil”

since faith without action was as good as being spiritually dead.

It is in our hands that God gave the gift of life, it is in the home that God calls us to action, to respond to his voice, do not be scared to be women who fight for their homes…let us engage our influence to stop the progress of corrupting literature, let us address directly the competent authorities in order to ask them to prevent the circulation of these demoralizing papers at high school doors and women’s workshops.71

Eventually La Société Centrale followed the lead of its counterpart and predecessor in supporting women’s efforts to take a more active role in public life on behalf of the home.72 As one member of La ligue française de la moralité publique

stated, “It is certainly time to finish with the servitudes that overwhelm the woman and

paralyze the free blossoming of her activity in the home.”73 This broadening of female

71 A handful of women varying in age, marital status, and occupation were recognized by the organization. Of those listed were property owners, an art dealer, and a professor. Societé Centrale, “Compte Rendu,” 32-34.

72 John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York, 1988), 154.

73 Fallot, Notre nouvelle campagne, 14.

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activism included women’s suffrage, one of the many “virtues of a true democracy” that

the Social Purity movement viewed as a potential moralizing force within the Republic.

I remain convinced that everything will change on the day when the right to vote is accorded to women, because women take everything seriously and know to place in the foreground the moral preoccupations which must supercede all others.74

To illustrate the advantages of female enfranchisement, Pouresy used the case of

Wyoming where women had enjoyed the privilege of voting in state and local elections for twenty-four years. There, the female voter had

largely helped to banish crime, poverty and vice in this state; this without a single violent or oppressive legislation; she has ensured the peace and order in the elections, a good government, a remarkable degree of civilization and public order. We note with pride that there does not exist a single prison in our countryside, which our prisons are almost empty and that crime is almost unknown.75

By extension of their domestic roles into the public sphere, Pouresy argued that France’s

wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters could play a pivotal role as the nation’s moral

guardians. The inclusion and acceptance of French women and their concerns within the

leagues’ ranks was part of a two-pronged effort to broaden the movement’s public

support and to strengthen a brand of maternal feminism which “linked the emancipation

of women to the welfare of the family and of the Republic.”76

74 Pouresy, Une journaliste, 161-162.

75 Ibid.

76 For a discussion of feminism in the context of nineteenth-century France and Europe, see Claire Goldberg Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth-Century, (Albany, N.Y., 1984), 200. See also Joan W. Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, Mass., 1996); Leila Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton, N.J., 1998); Margaret McFadden, Golden Cables of Sympathy: The Transatlantic Sources of Nineteenth-Century Feminism (Lexington, K.Y., 1999); Karen Offen, European Feminisms, 1700-1950 (Stanford, Calif., 2000); Sylvia Paletschek and Bianka Pietrow-Ennker, eds., Women’s Emancipation Movements in the Nineteenth-Century: A European Perspective (Stanford, Calif., 2004).

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Under the conviction that “democracy would not prosper without high moral

ideas,” moral leagues aimed “to unite the world of moral and social action, all those who

have some concern improving the public morality of our country.”77 Moral reformers

called upon French men and women “to fight against obscene literature, immorality in the

streets, the regulation of vice, gambling, alcoholism” through a “coalition of conscience”

that advocated “a single standard of morality for the two sexes as well as one standard of

conduct for the individual and the state.” 78 Claiming to be non-partisan and secular in

nature, the leagues attracted a wide range of people to its causes by respecting a

“diversity of opinions.” In addition to “Catholics, Jews, Protestants, Masons, and unbelievers,” its grass-roots membership consisted of peoples “from all corners of the country and all classes.” Nevertheless, white middle-class reformers represented by academy rectors, primary school principals, public administrators, teachers, mayors, notaries, lawyers, ecclesiastics, workers, and justices of the peace comprised the majority of league members, expressing a desire for moral and social order by submitting sexuality outside of the home to state and community control.79

In everything they did, the leagues promoted a strategy of moderately regulated

sexuality for fear of seeming too radical at a time when liberal individualism was a highly

prized value. “In all measures of repression, it is necessary to remain equitable. Moral

persuasion, moralizing action, youth education, will permit us to improve the state of our

77 Fallot, Notre nouvelle campagne, 2; Pouresy, Une journaliste, 8.

78 Pouresy, Une journaliste, 7.

79 Fallot, Notre nouvelle campagne, 2, 34; Pouresy, Une journaliste, 7.

184 mores.”80 A “salutary and moralizing agitation” would show the people the error of their ways and instill in them a feeling of responsibility for their actions.81 Severe repression would, in the leagues’ opinion, only make the problem worse. Drastic measures on a national scale were to be avoided until local agitation had taken its full effect. Central committees implored its members to increase the leagues’ ranks by approaching individuals who were “interested in the protection of children, …the vigor of the body and soul.” Worker syndicates, hygienic associations, and philanthropic societies were considered to be some of the most likely associations to join the cause.82

The principal task of league members consisted of securing the defense and future of the country which they saw as being “compromised” by the visible effects of pornography. Innovations in technological reproducibility, the rise of mass communication, transit, and entertainment were blamed for an “upsurge of obscenity” in

“within the last twenty-five years.”83 Postcards, advertising brochures, “novels, the theater, periodicals more or less artistic, and the daily and weekly press” participated in the production and distribution of obscene images that had rendered “the home humiliated, the woman degraded.” As a regular feature of the modern city’s visual landscape, pornography had “become so lucrative” to “publicity entrepreneurs” that they unabashedly displayed their erotic wares “on sidewalks, in certain stores, journal kiosks, on walls.” Showing no respect for “boundaries,” obscenity invaded the streets and

80 Pouresy, L’état actuel, 15.

81 Fallot, Notre nouvelle campagne, 39.

82 Ibid., 42.

83 Eyquem, De la morale publique, 187.

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schools where the most innocent of on-lookers could be found. Once exposed to the

public eye, these “evil curiosities” “artificially” created “premature needs” by

overexciting the brain and arousing sexual instincts “that should otherwise lie dormant.”84

The satisfaction of those desires most blatantly occurred at the heart of the city’s leisure and mercantile crossroads where brothels, cabarets, cafés-concerts and music halls represented on a symbolical and material level the dangers of commercial sex, mass consumption, and urban nightlife.

Those thought to be most susceptible to the entertainment industry’s lascivious displays, the French youth, made the problem of pornography even more immediate as they represented “the reserve of the future” and “the living force of the nation.”85 In

keeping with a scientific discourse concerning the impact of hereditary and

environmental influences on a whole new class of degenerates, league members

emphasized the importance of class in shaping one’s moral character. Whereas the

acquisition of literate, affective, and moral sensibilities through education and culture by

“the children of the bourgeoisie” enabled them to resist pornography’s corrupting

influences, “workers’ children whose school is the street and mutual vice their lesson”

suffered from a range of anti-social behavioral problems including illiteracy, cruelty, and

deviancy. By viewing la fleau de pornographie as a social disease that afflicted the

progeny of the lower classes, vice crusaders perceived themselves to be fulfilling a moral

and social obligation by providing those less fortunate with moral uplift and instruction.86

84 Fallot, Notre nouvelle campagne, 16-17, 38; Gaufres, La corruption, 7.

85 Fallot, Notre nouvelle campagne, 16-17.

86 Gaufres, La corruption, 20.

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An examination of the solutions posed by groups closely aligned with and sharing the La Ligue francaise de la moralité publique and La Société Centrale’s concerns for moral reform provides some insight as to how the problem of ameliorating the moral weakening of France’s youth was addressed. La Ligue française de preservation morale et sociale de la jeunesse, founded by three prominent feminists- Maria Martin, Camille and Hyacinthe Belilon-in the first decade of the twentieth century, had for its sole mission the protection and defense of French youth against vice.87 Most of its four

hundred members, comprised of bourgeois professionals ranging from primary school

principals, teachers, lawyers, and doctors to merchants and property owners of both

sexes, came together for the common purpose of stopping the flood of pornography,

which “threatens to submerge the essential qualities of the race.” 88 League members

invited “all those who love France, irrespective of religion, politics, nationality, who

deplore the relaxation of mores” to join them in the struggle. Arguing that indifference

and apathy had contributed to the country’s state of demoralization, the league held the public rather than any one individual, social group, or commercial form responsible for the nation’s current state of morality.89

87 MD (Marguerite Durand) DOS MAR/ DOS BEL: Maria Martin’s relationship with the Belilon sisters most likely developed through her role as editor for the Journal des Femmes. As a feminist-journalist, Camille published numerous articles in France-Mode, Mode Pour Tous, as well as Journal des Femmes. According to an undated obituary, Camille, who died at the age of 79, was an ardent defender of women’s rights serving as President of Groupe Français d’Études Feministes, Vice-President of Suffrage des Femmes, and was a member of Jury Féminin. She, along with her sister Hyacinthe who was founder of Jury feminin and Vice President of Groupe français d’Études féminists, were close friends of and collaborators with Marguerite Durand. See Les femmes d’aujourd’ hui, (Paris: n.d.), 196-198.

88 Members were organized by arrondissement with their addresses and professions indicated.

89 La ligue francaise de preservation morale et sociale de la jeunesse, (Paris, 1909).

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La Ligue française de Preservation Morale, along with La Ligue francaise de la

moralité publique, put forward several projects as viable solutions to turning the tide of

demoralization. Both organizations lobbied for the severe application of the law

forbidding the sale of obscene postcards, particularly outside of school walls, and

mandating the obligatory instruction of children in order to prevent vagabondage. The

recommendation that sports education and alcohol prevention programs be established for

the physical and moral rehabilitation of French youth was in keeping with a turn-of-the-

century ethos that a strong, healthy body “cultivated gender-appropriate moral

qualities.”90 With regards to juvenile delinquents, La Ligue française de preservation

morale suggested that they serve their sentence working outdoors in order to avoid “evil

promiscuities,” such as masturbation and the reading or viewing of illicit materials, which

took place behind close doors. In their advocacy for the well being and protection of

children, the leagues’ also reinforced the notion of parental responsibility through the strengthening of the nuclear family and marital bonds as means to avert the abandonment of poor children.

With the threat of class warfare on the horizon, foreshadowed by the rise of syndicalism and an increase in anarchist bombings and assassinations throughout the

1890s, the leagues sought to instill the industrial proletariat with feelings of self-respect and human decency, two dominant middle-class values that were applied to the leagues’ public discussions of sex. A large part of the leagues’ affirmation of human dignity focused upon building respect for women, an appreciation that had been torn down by the

90 Mary Lynn Stewart, For Health and Beauty: Physical Culture for Frenchwomen, 1880s-1930s (Baltimore, M.D., 2001), 160.

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spread of pornography particularly within working-class communities, or so it seemed.

According to the leagues and their spokespersons, a respect for women was “an absolute

condition for social progress,” without which “the virtues of democracy” would

disappear. Not only did pornography’s primary theme, “the scorn of women,” denigrate

half of the population but also it threw “ridicule on the union of sexes and future

generations” by offering a non-procreative alternative to sex. In sum, it represented “a

daily insult to the dignity of women” as individuals and reproductive bearers of the

nation.91 Moral reformers called upon all those interested in “the life and love of mothers, families, and country” to respect “ALL women,” because they either merited it

for their honesty, deserved it out of pity, or because they posed a potential danger and

threat to the social order if their own sexuality was not contained.92

Moral leagues blamed a public obsession with young, pretty girls in art, literature,

and the theater for this eroding esteem of the female sex. These three forms of media

“have exalted the woman as a divinity” and placed her upon an unrealistic pedestal. In

sum, “they have reproduced a woman who is not even female. It is an Eve of another

humanity, without decency, dignity, virtue, and sometimes without mores.” Pouresy faulted authors and artists’ glorification of “the adulterous woman and mother” for

“exciting the young girl to live a life abandoning work and duty.”93 He pointed to the

thousands of female sex workers in France who prostituted themselves in the “foul task of appeasing the sexual passions…with their bodies.” From the working class grisette to

91 Fallot, Notre nouvelle campagne, 14.

92 Pouresy, La vie morale, 40.

93 Pouresy, Le testament, 37.

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the demi-mondaine, women of high and low gallantry served to satisfy the carnal desires

of men of all classes and ages. Included within this category of sexually deviant

typologies was a long list of female entertainers and performers, such as lyric artists,

figurantes, café-concert singers, and gommeuses (epileptic dancers) of the music hall,

whom he claimed had been raised “for the most part…as young, honest and virtuous girls.” In an attempt to understand “the fall” of these “lecherous and degraded creatures,”

Pouresy suggested that at some moment in their lives they had yielded to laziness, taken the bad advice of a co-worker, or encountered a depraved Don Juan on a sidewalk from whom they had accepted an invitation to stroll unescorted. For the actress, singer, or model, he surmised that it was the vanity of an obnoxiously extravagant toilette that had sullied their moral characters. Every evening before a “hostile and mean crowd,” these

“priestesses of sensual pleasure” became the willing “the victims of men” by placing their sacrificial bodies at the base of capitalism’s alter.94 Upon completion of their sexual

initiation, society had lost respect for these women, deeming them “of worthless value”

and subjecting them to all forms of sexual, physical, emotional, and psychological

exploitation. “Who respects them,” Pouresy inquired, “these young artists, singers,

figurantes of the theater that are hired in order to assure the profit of the café-concert,

music hall, or operette?”95

In order to prevent women’s objectification within French culture, moral crusaders endorsed the benefits of chastity, the family, and moral discipline as tools for teaching

94 Ibid., 39.

95 Pouresy, La vie morale, 36-38.

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appropriate gender and sexual relations.96 These virtues could be achieved through

education which could counter the negative effects of pornography by targeting “young

men during the decisive crisis which marks the beginning of virility,” puberty.97 While it is unclear as to whether this national program of sex education was to take place in the home or school, its main goal was to eradicate male sexual privilege which lay at the root and heart of the problem. As John d’Emilio and Estelle Freedman have noted in their history of sexuality in America, “The social purity movement of the late nineteenth- century incorporated many of the ideas of moral reform, especially the demand for a single sexual standard.”98 In opposition to a centuries-old double standard of sexual

morality that endorsed a man’s right to act upon an innate sexual instinct, the leagues

advocated premarital abstinence and monogamy for men. Claiming that modesty was

just as natural an instinct as one’s sexual appetite, the leagues encouraged young men to

think about the ways in which their “sexual acts, outside of marriage, would always have

a more or less serious consequences for the woman.”99 By attacking current assumptions

about male sexuality that condoned the satisfaction of male sex drives by means of

prostitution and adultery, the movement intended to eliminate the propagation of venereal

diseases and illegitimate births, two social problems which posed serious threats to the

health of the nation’s race.100

96 Pouresy, Au service de la vie et de la verité sexuelles (Saint-Antoine-de-Breuilh, 1939), 193.

97 Fallot, Notre nouvelle campagne, 45.

98 Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, 150.

99 Pouresy, La vie morale, 40.

100 Pouresy, La fédération française, 50.

191

Aside from sex education for boys, moral reformers advocated the use of public

opinion as the most effective “means in extinguishing ‘the evil.’”101 The organizations

hoped that through public meetings and the press, it could not only convey its message to

a wider audience but place pressure on governmental officials to act on the movement’s

behalf. “This troubling growth” in obscenity, according to jurist Albert Eyquem, had been facilitated by “the production of weak and insufficient repressive laws.”102 Others

felt that while “the present laws” were “largely sufficient to assure the repression of

pornography,” a lack of “concerned magistrates” had resulted in their ineffective

application.103 Having ignored their original purpose of serving as a weapon for the

legislature, the courts procrastinated from getting involved in controversial matters until

they received “a sign from the public to exercise pursuit.”104 Oftentimes it was “the

judges’ state of spirit and morality” rather than any strict adherence to the law that

determined the pursuit, prosecution, and condemnation of moral crimes.105 Likewise,

police authorities were viewed as “accomplices” of the pornographers for their failure to prevent public manifestations of evil and to suppress them when they occurred.106 If the

101 Fallot, Notre nouvelle campagne, 39. Likewise, the Lord Chamberlain acknowledged the difficulty in manipulating public taste. In a statement given ca. 1870, he remarked, “I am conscious that there are also several English Burlesques which no decent woman can go to see without blushing for her sex, but it is useless to attempt to put them down unless one has public opinion on one’s side.” See Tracy Davis, The Economics of the British Stage, 1800-1914 (Cambridge, 2000), 136.

102 Eyquem, De la morale publique, 188.

103 Pouresy, L’état actuel, 14.

104 Fallot, Notre nouvelle campagne, 36

105 Pouresy, L’état actuel, 7.

106 Fallot, Notre nouvelle campagne, 29.

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leagues did not bring public opinion to bear upon these two governmental entities, they

feared that all measures initiated by public powers would be wasted.107 Seeing that

league members were “numerous, active, and energetic enough,” affiliated sections and

chapters were encouraged to protest and to bring public action against those who cause damage to our youth and children.”108

Accordingly, the leagues’ vigilante work of pursuing “obscene displays,

clandestine dives, drunkenness, the mistreatment of animals, violations of protective

public health laws, and acts of white slavery” was divided among various committees and

their respective members. Provided that each individual “would assume a task

proportionate to one’s own abilities or free time,” one might be

charged with watching over paper kiosks and the display of bookstores, another would occupy himself with the protection of mistreated children or those in moral danger, a third would be charged with cabarets, or even cafés-concerts and theaters, etc…or several persons could share between them the surveillance of kiosks, each one responsible for a certain number of streets and boulevards.109

In keeping with the La Ligue française de la moralité publique’s ethos that

“Vigilance is something more than just inspection,” members desired, and in fact

demanded, the right to direct citation.110 The ability to hand out warnings each time they

encountered a reprehensible act, a right which already existed in England and America,

would be “the best weapon…to accord to citizens and associations.”111 The debate as to

107 Ibid., 42.

108 Supplement au Relèvement Social, December 1904; Pouresy, L’État Actuel, 9.

109 Supplement au Relèvement Social, “Les Comité de Vigilance Parisiens,” June 15, 1904, 3.

110 Ibid.

111 Ibid.; Pouresy, L’état actuel, 15.

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whether direct citation should be given to every association or just those recognized as

having a “public utility” appears to have gone unresolved as Ligue members were

directed to resort to “the right of denunciation,” a right conferred on them by Article 11 of the Code of Criminal Instruction.112

In general, the leagues believed in working through official channels in order to

obtain and standardize administrative interdictions and judicial condemnations of objects,

journals, and spectacles contrary to bonnes moeurs.113 Members were told to enlist the

help of those who “possess the most effective administrative weapons,” namely mayors,

prefects, managers of tabacs, administrators of railroad stations, and bookstore owners.114

Moreover, they were encouraged to address their complaints about the spread of

pornography by writing to local, departmental, and national representatives, even the

Ministers of Public Instruction and Justice “who can only act in the presence of a

complaint or a flagrant offense. If we want that public action be put into action against

pornography, let us address the Prosecutors of the Republic...And if they do not act, they

will always tell us why.”115

The importance of fighting degrading forms of mass culture was a message that the

leagues’ brought to both the government and public’s attention. Holding public lectures

112 Supplement au Relèvement Social, November 1904; Supplement au Relèvement Social, “Les Comité de Vigilance Parisiens,” June 15, 1904, 3.

113 Ibid., May 15, 1904, 6.

114 Pouresy, L’état actuel, 13. He refers to a municipal law of April 5, 1884 which gave mayors the right and sovereign control over public spectacles (music halls, casinos, cafes-concerts, fête forains, theaters, and anatomical museums). A footnote references an article in the Bérenger Manuel which summarized the Instructions and Arrêtés pertaining to mayors.

115 Ibid., 15; Fallot, Notre nouvelle campagne, 3, 35. Letters received by the league from Belgium indicate that the league was successful in forcing traveling troupes to take refuge elsewhere.

194 throughout France, league members initially targeted those spaces that directly impacted the visual landscape through the open sale of obscene literature and images. As Lynda

Nead has pointed out in her book on Victorian London, the commodification of obscenity represented a spatial problem for vice societies, the police, and legislators who formed temporary coalitions “to remove the sites of obscenity from the metropolis.”116 It is for this reason that the leagues first concentrated on cleaning up the streets by requiring journal kiosks to obtain authorization to sell their wares on public thoroughfares. Comte observed that as a result of the Ligue’s public relations campaign to make pornography a national issue, governmental officials had “become less timorous, and no longer fear to compromise their advancement, in order to advance our desires and to pursue obscene papers themselves.”117 Within a matter of time, “serious results were attained” and the leagues turned their attention to bookstores located in Parisian train stations and along its streets.118

Eventually the surveillance and suppression of pornography extended far beyond those areas designated entrée libre. Realizing that it was “not only the novel which takes the allure of obscene press” but “the theater, cafés-concerts” and other popular entertainment sites, several provincial chapters encroached upon and tried to regulate areas ordinarily reserved for paying customers and invited guests.119 Elie Gounelle,

President of Roubaix’s Étoile Blanche chapter, reported how in Alais and in Lille “our

116 Nead, Victorian Babylon, 150.

117 Supplement au Relèvement Social, May 15, 1904, 7.

118 Gaufres, La corruption, 14.

119 Ibid., 16.

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friends and fellow members of Étoile” protested and hurled themselves outside the closed doors of a local theater preparing to present harmful théâtre libre spectacles.”

Disappointed by the ineffectiveness of their public demonstration, fourteen fathers, all of whom were members of Étoile or Solidarité Alsacienne, proceeded “to obtain a ban from the mayor for the repression of” the théâtre libre’s two presentations, Bonne à tout faire and Casserolle.”120 Demonstrating in front of disreputable kiosk owners and writing letters to the mayor or newspaper editors were two tactics shared by the President of

Solidarité with the Ligue that his organization had found useful in inciting local authorities to action. In protest against a performance entitled Lit d’Amour, Neel boasted

that his section had successfully pressured the municipality to intervene through the

approbation of local townspeople and unsolicited publicity from Le Pétit Meridonial, a

regional paper which did not ordinarily cover issues of prudery. In addition to leaving a

the mayor also agreed to send a police commissioner to the train station informing

traveling actors that an agent would be present at the first performance in order to

determine if the proposed play was obscene or not. Moreover the chapter received

permission to affix posters to city walls stating the following:

The members of Étoile Blanche loudly protest, in the name of offended public morals and of the violated law, against the new scandal constituted by the spectacle that the ‘théâtre libre’ must give anew in Alais. It invites all citizens to join it in this protest by one general abstention. For too long similar stains have dishonored

120 Supplement au Relèvement Social: Bulletin Parisien, May 15, 1904, 6. Gounelle wrote a biography on Louis Comte and, along with Wilfred Monod, was responsible for bringing Social Christianity or the Solidarity movement to urban centers. See Charles, “Faire Société.”

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our walls and help bring about the decomposition of our city. A democracy without mores is a democracy without future. 121

The chapter’s immediate response in mobilizing members, enlisting the aid of city

officials and other reform-minded groups, as well as raising community awareness

through public announcements, resulted in the efficacious prevention of the play’s

performance.

In addition to public protestation in the streets and press, vice crusaders embarked

on an educational campaign to train theatergoers to recognize ‘good’ and ‘bad’ art. This

approach remained in large part the work of an elite organ of famous Parisian playwrights

and critics who endeavored to “follow, help, and direct dramatic art in its evolution” by

“banning all endeavors of moral or social demolition and degradation.” Headquartered in

the sixteenth arrondissement at 2 rue Francisque-Sarcey, Action Théâtrale included some

of the most prominent playwrights and critics of the Belle Époque as members of the

society.122 While the date of its inception is unclear, the journal Paris Théâtre referred to

Action Théâtrale as a “new group” in its May issue of 1908.123 Perceiving that a “great

number of current theater pieces” simply represented “a display of ugliness and vileness

121 Ibid., 4. Similarly, Adolphe Sevin, founder of the La ligue française de la moralité publique’s Tourcoing section, succeeded in prohibiting a traveling acting troupe from performing obscene theater pieces in his community by applying pressure on the municipality before the fact.

122 Albert Soubies, Almanach des spectacles (Paris, n.d.). Paul Adam, Henri Bataille, Adolphe Brisson, Franc-Nohain, and Jules Lemaître held membership in Action Théâtrale. There were three categories of membership: sociataire, founders, and benefactors. “Sociataires” paid an annual membership fee of 20 francs, while founders paid 100 francs, and benefactors at least 1,000 francs. All members received a free subscription to the society’s journal and two seats to its annual meeting. Founders were given the privilege of having two seats to all the society’s sponsored performances, while benefactors would have their names written down among the list of Parisian personalities. The society’s affairs were carried out by a handful of individuals who oversaw six committees dealing with Litigation and Disputes, Publishing, Music (Albert Soubies, Vice President of la Societé de l’Histoire du Théâtre and author of Almanach des spectacles), Performances, Propaganda, and Meetings.

123 Paris Théâtre, May 9, 1908, 3.

197 exposed by esprit de commerce (capitalism),” Action Théâtrale sought to “strip dramatic art of all the false ornaments in order to rediscover true Beauty.” Rather than convert the theater into a school of morality, its founder-director Robert Guillou aspired to define what was and was not dramatic art, allowing for “talent and word” to speak for a work’s value rather than “the grotesque note and trivial expression” found in second-rate plays.

As part of its mission to initiate and spearhead theatrical reform, Action Théâtrale outlined four objectives. First, it held an bi-annual theatrical conferences that studied, discussed and, if possible, resolved questions pertaining to art, artists, authors, architecture, theatrical lighting, the public, production, employees and artists. The organization published a weekly journal Action Théâtrale, which operated as a mouthpiece for the organization itself. Secondly, it encouraged its members to publish brochures and books that would shape the theater-going public into an informed, active and critically-minded audience by educating them to recognize what was good and bad theater. As a part of an aesthetic mission moralisatrice, the society would perform works of known and unknown authors on different Parisian stages that emblematized their ideal of ‘high’ art. The purpose of these performances was two-fold: to demonstrate to the public what the society deemed was good art and also to establish or legitimate credible venues for the performing arts where its supporters in Paris and in the provinces could attend plays without the threat of being exposed to obscenities.

Efforts by these leagues and associations to create a single standard of morality based on bourgeois values of order, moderation, and sexual discipline and to cleanse

French society of everything contrary provoked conflicting responses that were articulated by and conveyed through the press. For its part, the conservative paper La

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République Française welcomed the leagues’ pursuit of “odious obscenities” as “an

excellent initiative that merits being praised in every free country.” The leagues’

proactive efforts to “hunt down” and expunge France of vile attractions contrasted with

“the inertia” of the French people in taking advantage of “the means that are at the

disposal of every citizen.” The most effective weapon against pornography, public opinion and pressure had been most effectively channeled and directed by the leagues, which alone had “put the laws into motion.” However, the paper cautioned them to follow a certain degree of discretion by “ne pas aller au dela de la mesure que fixent les moeurs et l’esprit public.” While their intentions were “an object worthy of the public’s attention” and “praise,” their actions did not speak for the nation and were not above the law.124

The Trial of the Bal des Quat’z-Arts

This last point was dramatically, if not tragically, illustrated by the clash that

occurred between conservative and liberal forces over the extent to which a woman’s

body could be put on display. The 1893 Bal des Quat’z-Arts, more than any other event during the Belle Époque, brought Bérenger and French moral leagues into the public spotlight. From 1882 to 1892, moral leagues had organized and mobilized more conservative elements of French society all the while remaining on the fringe of public consciousness and mass politics. The Bal des Quat’z-Arts’ staging of what some believed to have been the first strip-tease performance in France captured the public’s attention with rumors about girls who, in standing on top of tables, showed their ankles to

124 La République Française, May 27, 1893.

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a group of men before exposing “their legs, thighs, hips, buttocks, breasts, shoulders.”125

The timing of the ball could not have come at a worse time as the newly created Ligue

contre la licence dans les rues was searching for a red herring with which to draw

attention to its cause and assault the degenerate elements of modern culture. What started

out as a harmless display of artistic chicanery and experimentation quickly turned into a

cause célébre for both artists and moral leagues in the months following February 9th.

The Bal des Quat’z-Arts would be the first of many instances where the exhibition of

unclothed women would become the focus of vice societies, a target of judicial pursuit,

and source of aesthetic and moral debate between conservative and liberal factions,

ancient and modern forces.

On behalf of the Société Générale de Protestation contre la licence des rues,

Senator Bérenger addressed a letter to the Republic’s Chief Prosecutor five days after the

infamous ball had taken place. Appalled by “the fact that fifteen or so women, entirely

nude, except for some very transparent gauze around their private parts, had been

admitted to pose in the costumed procession which preceded the ball and then mixed with

the invited guests and danced,” Bérenger castigated the government for inaction towards,

even tolerance of, so-called ‘artistic’ manifestations that could “excite collegians or

demoralize little girls.”126 “One sees it everywhere,” he declared, “on the walls, on the kiosks, on the sidewalks, in the balls” thanks to the success of such notable dancers as La

Goulue and Grille d’Égout who fed Parisians’ obsession with nude, even semi-nude

125 Charles Castle, The Folies-Bergère (New York, 1982), 94.

126 RO 13007: André Warnod, “Le bal des Quat’z’arts,” La Renaissance Politique, Litteraire, Artistique, (Paris, n.d.), 18; André Vervoort, “Le nu au Senat,” L’Intransigeant Illustré, March 21, 1893.

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women.127 What he found most offensive about the ball itself was the “state of publicity”

afforded to its nude models. According to his estimation, “several thousands of persons”

entered the Moulin Rouge with invitations that been passed out indiscriminately to

“anyone who asked for one.” While he himself had not been a witness to the affair, his

review of the Courrier Français’ issue days prior “confirmed” the second-hand

information he had received. In his concluding statement, Bérenger requested that his

complaint be registered with the Garde de Sceaux or Lord Chancellor of the Senate if the

Prosecutor was not going to file action against the perpetrators.128

In a meeting of the Senate a month later, Bérenger’s moralistic rhetoric intensified

as he sought stricter regulation of prostitution, the publication of pornographic drawings

within “certain illustrated papers,” and the prosecution of celebratory “orgies” that had

taken place at “the Bal des Quat’z-Arts.”129 His antagonism of artists and women

without means raised the ire of the grivoiserie press which in the ensuing months

depicted the Senator as a lecherous Puritan and hypocrite who, in the privacy of his own

home, enjoyed the company of a naked cook, femme de charge (head mistress), and

cleaning lady.130 Jokes about politicians as Peeping Toms pretending to scrutinize

pictures of the “orgiastic” ball for purely political purposes circulated in most every illustrated paper. André Vervoort of L’Intransigeant stated that Bérenger “did not have the right to stick his nose” in affairs that did not concern him or about which he knew

127 Emile Bouisson, “Le Senat,” L’Intransigeant Illustré, March 22, 1893.

128 Warnod, “Le bal,” 18.

129 Emile Bouisson, “Le Senat,” L’Intransigeant Illustré, March 22, 1893.

130 Courrier Francais, April 16, 1893; Courrier Francais, March 26, 1893, 7.

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nothing. Bérenger’s obsession with the Nude was ill conceived and misdirected, as the

Senator himself appeared to have problems defining the word. Vervoort rhetorically

asked Bérenger as to whether or not he considered “the senators’ heads” nude, and if so,

advised that he “quickly put a fig leaf on his colleagues heads!”131 In describing

Bérenger’s fits of rage against the ‘nude’ as “pathological,” journalists assisted artists in

creating a popular image of the Senator as senile, crazed, and mad.132 A drawing

comparing his cranium with that of Dr. Guillotin’s intended to illustrate just how hateful

a man he was.133 His irrational pursuit of tableaux vivants and erotic dancers at the

Cirque Molier and other entertainment nightspots threatened to bring down the very

edifice of society.134 Suggesting that public nudity had a public utility, the caption

beneath a caricature of a femme de revue, standing among a group of three men in slightly transparent dress, captures this last point: “If Bérenger suppresses me, there will no longer be shareholders, public officials, or guardsmen.”135 It was logical to reason

that an economy of desire created by “the half-naked woman” operated in the service of

national interests by providing the marketplace, government, and law enforcement with a

131 André Vervoort, “Le nu au Senat,” L’Intransigeant Illustré, March 21, 1893.

132 Emile Bouisson, “Le Senat,” L’Intransigeant Illustré, March 22, 1893.

133 “Guillotin et Bérenger,” Courrier Francais, July 23, 1893, 8.

134 Courrier Francais, June 16, 1895.

135 Ibid., June 2, 1895.

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raison d’être.136 What some Parisians did not understand was why the government would

want to attack and do away with one of its most valuable cultural assets.

On June 23, 1893 the Eleventh Chamber of the Correctional Court of Paris

convened to hear one of the most important trials of the nineteenth century involving

public nudity. Four studio models noted for their “remarkable beauty,” Marie Rayer

(‘Sarah Brown’), and Clarisse Roger (‘Yvonne’), Joséphine Lavolle (‘Manon’), and

Emma Denne (‘Suzanne’), sat on the defendant’s bench facing the judge. Next to them

appeared an equally striking young man whose long hair, velveteen trousers, and flowing

necktie identified him as a student of the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts.137 A throng

of spectators, mostly fellow students and inhabitants of the Latin Quarter, packed into the

courtroom to support Henri Guillaume and his four co-defendants. The walkway leading

to the witness stand was so pressed with on-lookers that the bailiff had to repeatedly

remind them to “Make way for the witnesses!”138 The intensity of the noonday heat,

alongside the courtroom’s cramped atmosphere, prefigured the weight that this case held

for the French as a barometer for gauging public morals.

Throughout the trial’s proceedings, the atmosphere of the courtroom remained

light-hearted and gay. On numerous occasions, laughter erupted from the audience as the

136 Davis, The Economics of the British Stage, 118-119. Under a newly emergent belief system known as neo-classical economics, Parisians interpreted the value of an object or a performance differently and it was this difference in the consumption of bodily spectacles that impacted that those assessments had on public morality writ large. Within this vein of economic philosophy, a perishable or non-consumable commodity was to be judged according to the consumer’s subjective desire and not the social need or labor provided by the object itself.

137 See Margery Williams, Peeps at Great Cities: Paris (London, 1910), 58 for a description of fin-de- siècle attire among students of the École des Beaux Arts.

138 Gazette des Tribunaux, June 24, 1893.

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defendants responded with cunning remarks to the prosecution’s questions. Suzanne and

Sarah proclaimed that is was common knowledge that they were wearing a maillot in

their characterizations of Cleopatra and Diana. Manon admitted that while her costume

of a simple black tulle shirt was “very thick” in nature, she opened it occasionally

because her surroundings were “very hot.” Likewise Yvonne, who had appeared in the ball mounted on a white donkey representing one of the ‘four arts,’ Architecture, claimed

that the colored ribbons adorning her body had served as a foil for nudity!

As the massier of his atelier, organizer of the ball, and designer of Brown’s

costume, Guillaume mounted the stand in order to maintain that the ball’s costumes and floats had been created with only the most artistic intentions in mind. Pointing out that

Brown’s costume, consisting of little more than a strip of black velour around her thighs, was in fact a reproduction of the one worn by Brown as Cleopatra in Rochegrosse’s La

Mort de Sardanaple. Having merely given advice concerning the model’s attire,

Guillaume denied playing a role in the actual dressing process. The defense depicted the

prosecution as naively prudish and its complaints about Brown presenting herself “almost

in a state of complete nudity” as unfounded. One eyewitness certified that Brown had

worn “a very appropriate costume” consisting of “stockings and a black shirt!” Police

agent Garnaux testified that Brown’s float had “appeared absolutely artistic” and that not

“a single protest” or complaint was raised. Having been responsible for the surveillance

and maintenance of public order at the event, the municipal policeman reassured the court

that he “would have left and addressed a hearing” if he had seen “something obscene.”

Ironically, the state’s representative in the case verified the veracity of the defendants’

statements. When asked by the judge if he had seen nude breasts, Garnaux drew a

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comparison between the scantily-clad bodies at the Bal des Quat’z-Arts with those of a

more familiar and less controversial bal public. Unlike the “nude busts” that had figured

in the accused models’ “academic poses,” Garnaux characterized those he had seen “at the Opera’s balls…obscene.” After Roques and two unnamed journalists attested to

seeing nothing but a “very artistic ensemble” devoid of “immoral” elements, the defense

rested its case arguing for the innocence of the four models and asking the court to apply

la loi de sursis and inflict a small fine on Guillaume.139

A week later on Friday, June 30th, the court reconvened to announce its verdict.

Calling the charges of outrage public à la pudeur brought against the models “fully

justified,” the court condemned the four young women for showing themselves “in

obscene costumes” that lacked “artistic sentiment.” In designing Brown’s costume,

Guillaume had intentionally caused a scandal by showing her in an undressed state

“before a public of 3,000 individuals…belonging to the world of ‘galanterie’ and of the

‘boulevard.’” Because a number of the ball’s guests were not artists, “did not know one

another,” nor the event’s organizers, the nude spectacles constituted an act of publicity

that attracted people through the speculation of women’s bodies. Whereas Guillaume

“could not be held accountable for all of these acts of immorality which were produced”

at the ball, the court stated that he nevertheless “acted with a foolishness and

carelessness” that compromised his honor. In the end, the court fined Guillaume and the

four models 100 francs each, and irony of ironies, excused them from serving time in

prison through its application of la loi Bérenger.140

139 Ibid.

140 “Tribunaux,” Le Matin, July 1, 1893.

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Although the 1893 Bal des Quat’z-Arts occurred in a span of only five hours, its

spirit and legacy lived on in memory, myth, and the mass media. And yet no one event

would immortalize the ball more than l’Affaire Nuger. The murder of an innocent shop

clerk in July 1893 deepened the students resolve to oppose any restriction on their freedom of expression. Bérenger’s public condemnation of the Bal des Quat’z-Arts as an orgy of undressed women that should be prosecuted for offending public decency incited a confrontation between two camps within French society holding opposing views about

art, morality, and modernity more generally. Even though students hoped for an

acquittal, they prepared for the worst, organizing a demonstration in the name of art and

liberty if Guillaume and their model friends were found guilty. On the evening of the

court’s verdict, students affixed posters in all of the Beaux-Arts ateliers announcing the

following:

Dear friends,

According to the condemnation of the accused of the Bal des Quat’z-Arts, we all find our pleasure and artistic freedom in offense. This last blow bears upon our unity and our force/strength if we do not energetically protest against such a condemnation…Therefore…we invite the artists, regardless of school or party affiliation, to take part in an anti-bérengiste heckling-riot organized for tomorrow evening. The meeting will be fixed at 9:00 p.m. sharp. The rallying sign will be, ostensibly a fig leaf, carried by everyone.’141

Saturday morning, students wearing “The Vine Leaf of the Academy” on their

slouch hats went along their daily routine, making purchases from various street peddlers

and congregating at their favorite local gringottes (pubs). By 8:30 that evening,

according to one officer’s report, a large concentration of students had formed at the Café

d’Harcourt. Waving a banner with a large feuille de vigne (fig leaf) on the top of a pole,

141 Journal des Debats, July 9, 1893.

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approximately 2,000 individuals awaited the signal to march.142 As the clock of the

Sorbonne struck 9:00 p.m., two young people ran out ahead of the crowd. One of them, a famous chansonnier, led the crowd in singing La Marche des Étudiants. Written by

O’Neur and sung to the tunes of Paul Arène’s Mobiles du Midi and Une, deux!, this song rang throughout the sweltering summer sky. Combined with the oppressive heat, the song’s revolutionary chorus created a combustible environment reminiscent of the 1848

June Days. Voices singing “Le quartier bouge, tout est rouge, un’deux, nous nous foutons bien d’eux!” (The quartier moves, everything is red, one, two, we don’t give a damn about them!) expressed the je m’en foutisme attitude and socialist leanings of the student population. Of the nine stanzas, the first two began with Police Prefect Lozé airing his frustration over the students’ merrymaking. Believing the artists’ incessant laughter to be a public disturbance, the Police Chief uses the ball as pretext for reinstating a state of oppression that students had experienced under the Empire. Lozé is painted as an unlikable commissioner whose deep-seated hate for the Parisian youth typifies the attitude of the government and the bourgeois establishment. The remaining seven stanzas served as a rallying cry for the students to join forces, remaining true to their revolutionary ancestry and intellectual heritage by serving as models for future generations in the fight for and the preservation of freedom.143

142 A.P.P., BA 1525: Manifestations des étudiants, Comptes Rendues adressé au Ministère, rapport du premier juillet 1893, “Troubles dans le Quartier Latin” par le Commissariat de Police, cinquième arrondissement.

143 A.P.P., B.A. 27: Étudiants: La Marche des Étudiants, translated as follows: Lozé saying that he wants to shoot all of the youth that he sees on his way laughing ceasely in the old Latin Quarter, he does not want that they take so many frolics, their bursts of laughter bother old Bérenger, like under the Empire, one is going to straighten them out! (then I think this is the author speaking) My wife is going to have a word with Madame Carnot and the youth can scream/ howl like a dog, but her Altesse will say that everything is well…of the crowds in herds, one is going to tear a hole in the skin? That the brigades charge in the saber the squads will mark off/ pierce in the skin…Bravo! Students, lift your children and the story you will

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From the Place de la Sorbonne, the students set out along the rue de Medicis until

they came to the Palais du Luxembourg. Home to the Senate and the nefarious Senator

Bérenger, the mob shouted “Vieux nenuphar (You old fart)!” as they turned up the rue de

Tournon. A police blockade at the intersection of Tournon and the rue Saint Sulpice had

been set up to disperse the young people who, undaunted, continued past the

Romanesque church of Saint-Sulpice and then turned left onto the rues de Rennes and

Saint-Pères. In the heart of the Saint-Germain district, police agents attempted once

again to bar their passage across the river Seine. Despite their efforts, the crowd broke

into smaller groups reforming into one mass on the right bank and then following the rue

Rivoli, up to the rue Saint-Florentin, then turning left on to the rue Saint-Honoré,

proceeding across the rue Royale until they reached the corner of the rue d’Anjou where

twenty police officers were stationed.144

At approximately 9:30 p.m., somewhere between 700 and 1500 individuals stood in

front of 9 rue d’Anjou.145 Outside Bérenger’s house, students could be heard singing

“Bérenger is an old c…la faridondaine, la faridondaine!” while the cry of “Down with

Bérenger! Long live the Quat’z-Arts! Bérenger à l’eau!” served as their refrain.146

recall the refrains, to the memory of all these ?…companions of Harcourt, tighten yourselves this day since this is the hour, we will show without if it is necessary that one dies, that one always knows to die…loyal descendants of old students in the battle, run and hold good to the canaille/rabble, give a lesson…when tomorrow of Lozé one will be relieved, that the youth under the summer sun finally reborn in full freedom!…now in order to purge us of Monsieur Bérenger and his band, we damn this damnation without delay in a public place to this old Abailard.

144 “Bagarre au Quartier Latin,” L’Intransigeant, July 9, 1893.

145 While a July 2, 1893 article in Le Figaro estimates the crowd to be between 700-800, a report from the Eight Arrondissement’s Prefect Bacot, dated July 1, claims the number to be as high as 1500. See A.P.P., B.A. 27: Étudiants: Rapport de Prefet Bacot, huitième arrondisement, July 1, 1893.

146 Le Radical, n.d.

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Having knocked on the door of the Senator’s home and received no response, the

students ripped out the doorbell.147 This act of property destruction incited the police to

drive the mob up to the Boulevard Malesherbes. For fifteen minutes, “a charivari from

hell of deafening cacophony” transpired.148 According to one police report, the

protesters, armed with walking sticks and clubs, turned and hit the agents. In an act of

self-defense, the agents pulled out their sabers, but refrained from using them.149 Some

of the protesters traveled to the Place de la Madeleine to serenade another senator of the

hated “ligue pudibonde.” Still others went to sit on the steps of the Opéra where they

“yelled and sang dirty songs” parodying Père la Pudeur to the applause of those sitting at nearby cafés.150 Meanwhile the Eighth Arrondissement’s police chief, Prefect Bacot,

hurriedly closed the city hall’s doors within seconds of protesters arriving and trying to

pry them open.151 From there, the mob consolidated its forces on the rue de Richelieu, in

front of the Bourse, to face a charge by the police once again. With the onset of rain, the

rioters dispersed, crossing back over the river to gather once again in the pubs of the

Latin Quarter.152

147 APP., B.A. 27: Étudiants, Rapport de Prefet Bacot, July 1, 1893.

148 “Les Conséquences d’une Condemnation,” L’Éclair, July 9, 1893.

149 A.P.P., BA 1525: Manifestations des étudiants, Comptes Rendues adressé au Ministère, lettre de la prefecture au Président de Conseil, le 2 juillet 1893.

150 A. Coutin, Huit siècles de violence (Paris, 1969), 315.

151 A.P.P., B.A. 27: Étudiants: Rapport de Prefet Bacot, July 1, 1893.

152 Coutin, Huit siècles, 316.

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What some protesters found when they returned to their beloved Café d’Harcourt was a scene of utter destruction replete with broken glass, a burning omnibus, over turned chairs, tables, shrubs, and blood. Unbeknownst to them, a second mêlée had occurred shortly after their departure from the Place de la Sorbonne. Forewarned about the students’ anti-bérengiste call-to-arms prior to Saturday evening, the police chief assigned

“agents of the Fifth Arrondissement alone to secure public safety,” seeing that the protest was being “organized by young people and did not appear to be very important.” On the evening of July 1st, one squadron had orders to pursue the students once they had left the

Sorbonne. For added protection and support, several agents were stationed in front of the

Palais Luxembourg while a contingency of thirty police agents remained posted around

the Place de la Sorbonne. A reinforcement of fifty agents were charged with re- establishing circulation on the “Boul Mich’” and clearing the Place de la Sorbonne following the aftermath.

It was this last group of police which, hovering under the shadows of Notre Dame

Cathedral, descended upon a peaceful crowd that remained at the Café d’Harcourt.153

According to Lozé, these officers encountered great difficulty in securing the peace since

the terraces of neighboring cafés were packed with customers and the curious. While

most of the on-lookers retreated inside the cafés or left the area begrudgingly, a few

protested energetically the police’s presence by whistling, shouting expletives, and

throwing chairs, glasses, and match-box holders at the police. Whereas the crowd employed “everything” as “a projectile,” the Prefect maintained the police’s innocence asserting that they had simply thrown flour in their adversaries’ eyes in order to blind

153 “Bagarre,” L’Intrasigeant, July 9, 1893

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them momentarily. In the ensuing chaos, a profoundly regrettable incident occurred when a customer sitting at one of the terrace tables was struck on the head by a match-

box holder. Antoine Felix Nuger, a single, twenty-three year old shop clerk from

Clermont-Ferrand lost consciousness and was subsequently transported first to a

pharmacy on the Place Medici then to the Hôpital de la Charité where he died at 3:00

a.m. the next morning.154

With civil order having been restored by 10:30 p.m., the police took account of the

night’s events. Numerous arrests had been made, although no one had been held or

detained. A report of the injuries indicates that several police agents and students had

been kicked and hit. Among the most seriously wounded were a sergeant who sustained

a blow to the head by a club, an agent who had been knocked over and wounded in the

right knee, and a student who had a concussion on his forehead.155 In sum, a total of one

hundred fifty people were transported to the Hôtel Dieu, three of whom had been injured

in the mêlée at the Café d’Harcourt.156 La Lanterne gave an account of the injuries

sustained by two of the youths, describing the bloodied head of one young man, the ear of

a Beaux-Arts student half torn from the blow of a saber and how a fellow journalist of Le

154 A.P.P., BA 1525: Lettre de la prefecture au Président de Conseil, July 2, 1893.

155 “Les Consequences,” L’Éclair, July 9, 1893. One of those arrests occurred at 10:00 p.m. when Emile Allen, a twenty-year old student of the Académie Julian, was brought in to the station for having taken part in the demonstration. Believed to be one of the police officers’ assailants, Allen was released by 11:30 because, according to Bacot, “the magistrate was at the theater that night.” See A.P.P., Rapport de Prefet Bacot, July 1, 1893.

156 Coutin, Huit siècles; L’Écho de Paris, July 3, 1893.

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Soleil was violently hit with blows from a chair and someone’s fist even though he was

several meters away from the café.157

The riots incited by the court’s condemnation of Guillaume, the artists’ models, and the subsequent murder of Nuger were costly, not only for the loss of life and the deep

social divisions incurred, but monetarily as well. Two groups of petitioners came

forward to petition the government for recompense; the omnibus companies and vendors

whose businesses had been affected by the destruction of private property and the victims’ families. In seeking reparations totaling 65,000 francs, the petitioners received

support from some of the most powerful politicians of the day, including Rene Viviani,

Millerand, George Berry, Edouard Vaillant and Albert Petrot, who sympathized with

those victimized by ‘The Troubles of 1893.’ They presented a bill to the National

Assembly opening a 100,000 franc line of credit in the Minister of Interior’s budget to

compensate the victims of this event.158

Papers critical of the police cited the “revolting brutality” with which the police responded to the protest. The brigadier in charge had reportedly “recommended to his squadron to strike hard” the massive demonstration forming at the Place de la Sorbonne which was “more noisy than dangerous” and completely “inoffensive.”159 Stories

circulating about the relentless pursuit with which they attacked the students, barring

their movement and brandishing sabers, enflamed public opinion. “One time more the

157 “Protestations des Étudiants,” La Lanterne, July 9, 1893.

158 Journal Officiel, no. 67, March 8, 1896, 1601.

159 “Protestations,” La Lanterne, July 9, 1893.

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police have just shown what they are capable of: assommades.”160 Fernand Xau writing for Le Journal, a relatively conservative paper that typically avoided criticism of the police, called their actions “worrisome.” The “hate” that the police harbored towards and

expressed in their attacks against “defenseless students” affected an innocent bystander

who had found himself in the mix. In recognizing the difficult role that police played in

ensuring the public’s security, Xau laid blame for Saturday’s events on Lozé as well as

the Council President who had given the police chief his orders.161

On the other end of the political spectrum, the ultra-conservative paper National drew a historical parallel between “The Troubles of 1893” and those of 1848. Like their forefathers before them who were impassioned by the revolutionary discourses of

Michelet and Hugo, the students would one day find themselves working as “serious professors, rich industrials, serious magistrates, lawyers and distinguished doctors, maybe brilliant legislators.” In a few years time, these renegade youth would traverse the great social divide and as liberal professionals “be the first to ask for peace in the streets, to want that public order protect the exercise of their talents, the security of their property.”

To avoid the overexcitement that had caused so many problems in the recent past, the author of the article urged students to find “satisfaction in their grief…and in the regular course of justice,” lobbying for moderation and calling for reason over emotion.162

In the days following Nuger’s death, such warnings went unheeded as relations

between the students and the police rapidly deteriorated. On the evening of July 2, a

160 “Bagarre,” L’Intransigeant, July 9, 1893.

161 Le Journal, “Les Étudiants et la Police: Une Question à M Dupuy,” July 3, 1893.

162 National, (Paris?, n.d.)

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“noisy and overexcited crowd” of 500 to 600 people gathered outside of the Bal Bullier

where a line of police officers stood barring their entry. Further down the Boul Mich’ a mass of approximately 1500 people stood on the Pantheon’s steps and outside the

Prefecture de Police calling the police “Assassins!” shouting “Down with Lozé!” and demanding his resignation. Students continued to pillage, destroy, overturn, and burn kiosks as well as assail police agents with rocks and wooden boards.163 By the third

night, the complexion of the crowd and the nature of the riot changed. What had started out as a relatively peaceful student protest had grown into an uncontrollable mob.

Rowdies descending from Menilmontant and Belleville joined in the tumult, running through the streets setting fire to the local police station, demolishing kiosks, and

overturning omnibuses on the Boul Mich.’164 Having arrived in Paris shortly after Bal

des Quat’z-Arts trial, Richard Davis observed that the riot, which had “originated with

the students but was carried on by the working-class,” had become known on the streets

as the “Revolution of Sarah Brown.”165

By the morning of July 4, the Latin Quarter was in a pitiful state. Smashed shop

windows, fallen lampposts, and burnt omnibuses on the Boulevards St. Germain and St.

Michel characterized the streetscape.166 The police suspended all activity in the area,

ordering the omnibus company to change its itinerary of certain lines and halting the

163 “Troubles,” July 1, 1893.

164 Maurice Garçon quoted from an eyewitness police report dated August 3, 1933 confirming information published in an article of Le Matin, July 23, 1933.

165 Richard Harding Davis, About Paris (New York, 1895), 52.

166 F. Fayot, Les étudiants parisiens, mémoire de maîtrise (Paris, 1973), 43-53.

214 circulation of cars on the Boulevards du Palais, St Germain, and St. Michel. Shop owners and waiters proceeded to pick up tables, chairs, and shrubs along the Boul Mich’ as police officers stationed in front of the Café de la Source looked on as they awaited additional reinforcement from the Republican Guard. 167 Thanks to the extra military presence, there was no serious engagement despite the stones thrown at agents as they walked past the Pantheon, a gathering spot for students.168 In order to ensure public tranquility, former Paris Police Chief Lépine, a man noted for his flexibility, replaced

Lozé as Paris’ Police Commissioner after Lozé tendered his resignation.169 However a student march to La Charité for the purpose of removing Nuger’s body and conducting a funeral procession through the streets of Paris incited further violence. Just before

Nuger’s body was to be transferred for burial to Clermond-Ferrand, students surrounded the hospital exits, bringing themselves into contact with police officers charged with clearing the doorways. Agents of the central brigade threw themselves upon the youth, trampling some women that were passing by in the process. Nurses and patients spectating from the hospital’s windows joined in the street fighting by tossing various objects on the assailants.170 In the midst of all the street fighting, 150 horsemen escorted the wagon carrying the body of Nuger to the Villeneuve-St. Georges train station.

Whereas the Dreyfus Affair has often exemplified the political struggle that divided the French on issues of race, religion, and cultural accommodation, the Bal des Quat’z-

167 A.P.P., BA 1525: Manifestations des étudiants, rapport de police, July 5, 1893.

168 “Troubles,” July 1, 1893.

169 Jayot, Les étudiants parisiens, 43-53.

170 Coutin, Huit siècles, 314.

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Arts trial and the riots that followed in its wake illustrated the extreme polarization of and struggle to redefine French moral precepts at the end of the nineteenth-century.

Representative of an increased outpouring in and visibility of sexual expression, the ball

captured the attention of Bérenger and fellow social purists at a time when anxieties

about the loosening of family, church, and community ties caused by industrialization were having their greatest impact. The creation of moral leagues in Belle Époque France

were not unique expressions of national woes but part of a larger movement sweeping

across Western culture that aimed to “‘better protect public morals, defend the health and

happiness of youth, prevent the degradation of women and girls, and preserve the honor

and respect due to woman.’”171 In pursuit of this objective, moral leagues intervened in

matters of public life encroaching upon spaces that had traditionally been reserved for the

expression of collective and/or individual desires.

The leagues’ attempts to define what was good and bad art, normal and abnormal

sexual behavior, raised the ire of French youth, the very group league members sought to

protect. The fact that these reformers looked “for licentiousness in the ball,” and yet had

“no problem with the same deformed nude of the Opéra,” alienated a younger generation

who preferred that an individual “be anything but hypocritical.”172 Furthermore, having

been raised during the carefree, politically stable and economically prosperous period of

the Belle Époque, they held any attempt to restrict or limit their autonomy with deep

suspicion and disdain. Although both camps, in critiquing “specific conceptions of the

relationship between individual and community, the desirability of change, the fixedness

171 Friedman, Prurient Interests, 15.

172 Louis Morin, Les carnavals parisiens, (Paris, 1898), 6.

216 of morality, and the nature of authority,” desired change, their means and ends differed greatly. The battle to impose their respective visions for a regenerated social order on the other half were fought over the body of the performative female nude artist whose contours denoted the transgression and maintenance of sexual, gender, and class norms.

The 1893 trial of the Bal des Quat’z-Arts served cross-purposes, publicizing the leagues’ campaign to shore up traditional rules governing intimacy, leisure, and gender prescriptions on the one hand, and exposing the youth’s questioning and challenging of those same principles. As Randy McBee has found for turn-of-the-century America, confrontations that brought vice crusaders and the youth together over issues of dance, alcohol, chaperonage, and the New Woman were more “about a clash of cultures, the ongoing struggle between generations, and the formation of new identities and gender roles” than simply protecting “the innocence of young womanhood.”173

How one interpreted a respect for women constituted the heart of modernity’s debate regarding morality. The French youth placed the performative female nude artist in the center of their struggle against bourgeois moral hypocrisy by arguing that, as a sexual being, she represented the true nature of woman. Claiming that images and performances of the undressed female body debased women as sexual objects, vice crusaders targeted public balls and music halls for their inappropriate displays of the modern woman. “The Social purists’ attacks on prostitution, abortion, homosexuality, and pornography,” Carolyn Dean notes,

were thus not simply attacks on increased democratization cast as efforts to control the presumed immorality of working-class men, nonwhites, and (especially

173 Randy McBee, Dance Hall Days: Intimacy and Leisure Among Working-Class Immigrants in the US (New York, 2000), 11.

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‘fallen’) women; they were attacks on the erosion of class and gender hierarchies and hence assaults on an uncontrolled and uncontrollable femininity.174

By failing to recognize and accept a new set of moral codes predicated on the

essentialization of women as visible figures of sexual agency as well as abnegation, the

Social Purity movement in France denied itself the assistance of a whole generation of adherents who could carry its cause forward into the new century. In the following chapter, I will analyze how the state officially responded to la fleau de pornographie, identifying theatrical censorship as one area of social power that the French government could employ at moments when self-censorship or league activism were unsuccessful.

174 Carolyn Dean, Sexuality and Modern Western Culture (New York, 1996), 14.

CHAPTER 5 CENSORSHIP IN BELLE ÉPOQUE FRANCE

In May 1908 the editors of L’Autorité, Paul and Guy de Cassagnac, called for a

campaign against pornography in the theater that would specifically target “the unworthy

individuals…who exhibit nude women on the shadiest of stages.”1 Their proposal to

eradicate such scandalous displays of “nude women with half a dozen bald-headed

censors” would essentially reinstate theatrical censorship, an institution that had come

into existence with the rise of Louis Napoleon, been maintained under the Third

Republic, and suppressed just three years prior to the article’s publication. 2

The road to repealing the 1850 decree establishing theatrical censorship had been a

long and arduous one, taking more than fifty years to complete. In the end, the law’s

suppression lasted only briefly from 1905 to 1914.3 A review of the archival materials,

mainly newspaper clippings, governmental correspondence, and parliamentary debates

indicates that theatrical censorship had become one of the most divisive issues in France

by the turn-of-the-century. Theatrical censorship called into question a whole range of

concerns related to the unrestrained growth of the state and commercial culture, the

power to legislate public morality, the degree of individual and artistic freedom

1 “La Censure!” L’Intransigeant, May 9, 1908; “La Politique: Pas de Censure!” L’Action, May 10, 1908.

2 Ibid.

3 A.P.P., DB 105: 1914 Arrêté from the Police Commissioner Hennion on the organization and control of order and of the police in establishments of public spectacle; “M. Hennion et les théâtres,” Le Matin, April 12, 1914.

218 219 permissible under a republic, the auto-suggestive influence of “the visual,” and the extent to which spectators’ and performers’ possessed discriminating taste, knowledge, and agency.

Prose, verse, even black and white images no longer appeared as threatening as the

Belle Époque theater, a site fraught with contestatory meanings over what was ‘art’ and

‘obscenity’ and competing aesthetics where it concerned the privileging of form over sensorial experiences or vice versa. In addition to universal expositions and wax museums, the proliferation of cafés-concerts and music halls between the years 1880 and

1914 contributed to “the popularity of a represented and sensationalized reality” that rapidly overtook print culture as the most influential means of communication.4 Dramas, comedies, vaudevilles, and revues, inspired by a turn towards realism in mid-nineteenth- century French literature, painting, and photography, created a market for the theatrical by piquing interest in performances with strong sexual content.5 Bourgeois moralists like former imperial censor Victor Hallays-Dabot considered “any public reference to sexual

4 Claude Delpeuch accounts for over 1,200 cafés-concerts in all of France by 1900. See “Le Café-Conc’ en 1900” Détente, December 18, 1941. Maurice Talemyr states that there were more than three hundred café- concerts, music-halls and debits-chantants in Paris at the time his 1902 article, “Café-Concerts et Music Halls,” published in Revue des Deux Mondes (R.O. 15655). The seminal texts for discussing the cultural manifestations of realism in fin-de-siècle Paris are Vanessa Schwartz’s Spectacular Realities:Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley, Calif., 1998); Jann Matlock’s Scenes of Seduction: Prostitution, Hysteria, and Reading Difference in Nineteenth-Century France (New York, 1994); Michael Miller’s The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869-1920 (Princeton, N.J., 1981); Rhonda Gharelick, Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender, and Performance in the Fin de Siècle (Princeton, N.J., 1998); Rae Beth Gordon’s Why the French Love Jerry Lewis: From Cabaret to Early Cinema (Stanford, Calif., 2001); Paul Greenlagh’s Ephemeral Visits: The Exposition Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs 1851-1939 (Rochester, N.Y., 1988).

5 Patricia Boyer argues “Prior to 1887, traditional theater was controlled by the taste of the bourgeoisie” which sought to maintain “moralistic and comforting entertainment.” This social class waged war against ‘an era of experimentation of change’ which “brought naturalism to the stage” by introducing “subjects that Manet had developed in painting or Zola in writing” as well as provided “candid treatment of sexual matters.” See Artists and the Avant-Garde Theater in Paris, 1887-1900 (Washington, D.C., 1998), 13-14.

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desire or sexual practice” a commercial vice.6 Arguing that “libertine acts of the

imagination should be read in the discrete silence of the home and not revealed by the

magnifying light of the [stage’s] foot lamps,” Hallays-Dabot attributed the introduction of

private matters into the public domain to the theater, the center of Parisian public life in

the second half of the nineteenth-century. 7

As one entered cautiously, and for some reluctantly, the age of modernity, where the “centrality of the body as the site of vision, attention, and stimulation” combined with new forms of entertainment and a heightened consumer desire for novelty, theatrical censorship came to be considered by many individuals more vital to the moral health and well-being of the French nation than censorship of the press.8 In spite of opponents’ use

of recent history to demonstrate the institution’s incompatibility with such republican

ideals as freedom of expression, the government continued to push for a reformed, more

limited “preventive” version of theatrical censorship that would intervene in cases where

public morality, social order, national security, or individual persons were endangered.9

Lofty standards of decorum, practiced in the home and exercised in public, functioned as

keystones for domestic tranquility, harmonious foreign relations, and the formation of a

moral citizenry.

6 Andrea Friedman, Prurient Interests: Gender, Democracy, and Obscenity in New York City, 1909-1945 (New York, 2000), 17.

7 Victor Hallays-Dabot, La censure dramatique et le théâtre: Histoire des vingt dernières années, 1850- 1870 (Paris, 1871), 11.

8 Leo Charney and Vanessa Schwartz eds., Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley, Calif., 1995), 3.

9 A.N. F21 1330: Minister of Public Instruction and Beaux-Arts, “Note on Censorship,” June 1, 1891.

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Building upon the assertion that new social, political, and cultural meanings were

attributed to the body during the nineteenth-century, this chapter argues that la femme

nue played a central role in debates concerning theatrical censorship and public morality

from the 1890s to 1914. As a new social actress, the performative female nude exposed

the fault lines of an out-dated bourgeois moral code. By blurring distinctions between art

and pornography, public and private spheres, la femme nue contributed to the anxiety

surrounding a perceived moral crisis on the eve of World War One.10 Politicians, writers,

artists, and journalists employed la femme nue as a trope in arguments for and against the preservation, suppression, and re-establishment of theatrical censorship before and after

1905. Not only did their debates reflect opinions about what constituted a ‘public’ or

‘private’ space and the degree to which those spaces should be policed for indecent exposure, but they also expressed fears associated with an unregulated commerce in sex and an unprecedented level of sexual expression embodied by the New Woman.

This chapter examines the evolution of theatrical censorship in the second half of the nineteenth-century up until the time of the Great War. A brief historical overview of the institution’s organizational structure and the state’s encounters with a burgeoning entertainment industry in Section One will demonstrate the ways in which theatrical censorship was employed by the state as a safeguard against attacks on public morality or outrages aux bonnes moeurs. How the general public, theater directors, and artists

10 Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass., 1990); idem and Catherine Gallagher, The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth- Century (Berkeley, Calif., 1986); Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Introduction (Paris, 1976); Lynn Abrams, The Making of Modern Women: Europe 1789-1918 (London, 2002); Charles Bernheimer, Decadent Subjects: The Idea of Decadence in Art, Literature, Philosophy and Culture of the Fin-de-Siècle in Europe (Baltimore, M.D., 2002); idem, Figures of Ill Repute (Cambridge, Mass., 1989); Tamar Garb, Bodies of Modernity: Figure and Flesh in Fin-de-Siècle France (Cambridge, 2001).

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interpreted and responded to the state’s policing of moral boundaries is addressed in the

second section, particularly in relation to the increasing exhibition of femmes nues on

Parisian stages. The final section will bring the story full circle, recounting how the arguments for and against theatrical censorship impacted the parliamentary debates that led to theatrical censorship’s demise in 1905.

The Ministry of Public Instruction and Beaux-Arts

The governmental structure responsible for overseeing theatrical entertainment at

the end of the nineteenth-century extended from the Ministry of Public Instruction and

Beaux Arts down to the local prefectures. At the top of this hierarchy resided Georges

Leygues, France’s Minister of Public Instruction and Beaux Arts at the turn of the

twentieth-century. Under his direct supervision was the Director of Beaux Arts, Henri

Roujon, who oversaw the heads of three bureaus, one of which was the Bureau des

Théâtres.11 This institutional body consisted of two divisions, the Service de l’Inspection des théâtres et spectacles, which prepared administrative acts and circulars related to the examination of theatrical works, and the Commission d’examen des ouvrages dramatiques.12

11 The Director of Beaux Arts’ office was located at 3 rue de Valois. The other two bureaus comprising the office of Beaux Arts were the Mobilier National and Conservation des Palais.

12 Arrêté from Minister of Public Instruction and Beaux-Arts G. Leygues, dated April 15, 1901, refers to the decree of November 26, 1897 which outlined the organization and administrative responsibilities of the Administration Centrale de la Ministre de l’Instruction Publique et Beaux-Arts where it concerned the Director of Beaux-Arts. It is important to note that the Service de l’Inspection des théâtres et spectacles and the Commission d’examen des ouvrages dramatiques shared personnel as inspectors sometimes served as members of the Commission and vice versa. Odile Krakovitch notes that those inspectors who were not censors differed from the former in their social background and bourgeois spirit. See her article “La censure des spectacles sous le Second Émpire,” in Pascal Ory, ed., La censure à l’ére democratic (Paris, 1997), 57.

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The Commission d’examen consisted of four censors whose primary responsibilities were to review and either approve or reject manuscripts and programs submitted by theater directors and authors. According to the law of August 1, 1850 re- establishing theatrical censorship, “the first duty of an examiner was to consider morality before social order, politics, or even religion.” Commanding his censors to “put an end” to “the moral disorder which reigns over the theater,” the current Minister of Interior,

Baroche, propagated a Rousseauist vision of the theater as morally corrupting and anti- thetical to civil society. An alternative viewpoint, espoused by Voltaire and his disciples, conceived of the theater as an instrument of moral instruction that left the individual spectator responsible for distinguishing between fact and fiction, proper and improper conduct. Both perspectives, Sally Charnow argues, framed the discursive parleys involving preventive censorship throughout the nineteenth-century “as the theatre continued to be seen as either a vehicle for moral instruction, healthy socialization, and/or indoctrination, or a form of entertainment with dubious moral effects.”13

Initially, the modifications that censors made to plays performed in Paris’ thirty theaters were summarized in reports that recorded relatively diplomatic meetings and relations between the censors and the authors. The amicable rapport between the state and artist community quickly deteriorated after the first half of the century as the practice of authorizing or prohibiting plays without consulting the involved parties, a practice

“begun years earlier for cafés-concerts programs,” was soon applied to works of the

13 To learn more about the Enlightenment debate concerning the theater’s influence over and impact on society, see Sally Charnow’s section “Theater and the public: Voltaire and Rousseau” in Chapter Two of her book Popular Practices/Modern Forms: Theater in Nineteenth-Century France (New York, 2005), 78- 115.

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grand répertoire as a method of expediency.14 With approximately two hundred cafés-

concerts located in the Department of the Seine by 1867, “the principal work and

preoccupation of examiners” centered upon the surveillance of these more popular venues.15 As the production of plays, songs, and revues became too copious to handle,

the censor’s opinions, expressed as a simple “yes” or “no” response, was stamped on the

work’s title page.16

Although denunciations of censorship as an anti-republican institution were

repeatedly placarded in the press by the derisive soubriquet Anastasie, unkindly

references to censors as “theologians of public morality” remained few and far between.17

Exercising fairness and impartiality, the censor retained a reputation for being “an

accommodating person” who was shocked only if a work was “especially saucy.”18 The

public’s high regard for censors was due in large measure to their lack of intervention.

Inspectors Gaune, Pailleron, and Daudet (son of the famous playwright), were all

characterized as distinguished, friendly men who watched the performances with a degree

of detachment and indifference. To paraphrase one individual, “They do not delude themselves into thinking that their roles are important or effective. Within half an hour,

14 Krackovitch, “La Censure des spectacles,” 58, 73.

15 There were approximately 80 cafes-concerts in Paris, and 110 in the suburbs. See Krakovitch, “La censure des spectacles,” 66, 71.

16 A.N. F21 1338: Letter from Prefect responding to the Minister of Beaux-Arts, n.d. The approval of a play by the board of censors was known as a visa.

17 A.N. F21 1339: “La Vie de Paris: Censure,” Le Figaro, June 7, 19?

18 Les Débats, August 10, 1900.

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their work is finished and they leave.”19 Paul Bourdon, honorary inspector of the theaters

from December 1899 to March 1904, was known as “a likeable kind of philosophe” who

“hardly makes critiques” of the more “dangerous passages” practiced at the general

rehearsals. As the most senior member of the Commission, Bourdon wielded a tremendous amount of influence over the aforementioned examiners who were “forced to keep silent” whenever he remained “quiet.” Eventually this tradition of deference created problems for the board as morally questionable passages referenced in the above quote were allowed to slip by because the elderly Bourdon’s deafness prevented him from hearing lyrics and verses half the time.20

Censors usually began their career in another ministry although sometimes they

were appointed without having had any administrative experience because they possessed

a particular specialty, came from a well-respected family, and were of a mature and seasoned age.21 From letters of application and nomination collected within a dossier

deposited in the Archives Nationales, one can get a feel for the kind of background and

types of experiences that qualified individuals for the position of censor. Julien Sermet,

having worked as a journalist for a number of highly circulated Parisian papers such as

Rappel, Justice, Petit Parisien, La Revue Universelle, even the Courrier Francais, served

as inspector from May 1893 to December 1900. His membership in the prestigious

Society of Authors and Dramatic Composers legitimized him as a playwright whose

plays had already been transformed into popular vaudevilles that were performed

19 Santillane, “La Censure à La Cigale,” La Vie Parisienne, n.d.

20 A.N. F21 4633: Administration générale- inspection, théâtre commission, February 19, 1904.

21 Krakovitch, “La Censure des spectacles,” 57-58.

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throughout Paris. Before serving as inspector from July 1889 to March 1906, Marcel

Fouquier held the post of Professor of History and Dramatic Literature at the world- renowned National Conservatory in Paris. As with many others in the Bureau, his expertise in a certain field led to a special appointment as commissaire-adjoint of

Expositions of Beaux-Arts from 1889 to 1892. Georges Ferdinand Lacouloumère obtained the position of inspector after fulfilling the functions of attaché to the

Commissariat of the Universal Exposition of 1900. A year later, the Ministry named

Lacouloumère attaché to the Commission d’examen and then inspector in 1903, a position he held for the next twenty-five years. M. Pailleron and Georges Achille Gaune, whose combined twenty-eight year service to the Ministry spanned most of the Belle

Époque, possessed liberal arts and law degrees and the title of officier d’académie.

Pailleron began his career as an inspector-adjoint in 1898 before being named inspector

of theaters in 1901. Gaune had served in several capacities during his time with the

Bureau from 1881 to 1903. In addition to holding the position of Editor-in-Chief of the

Répertoire général de politique et d’histoire administration, he took a one-year

appointment as under-secretary of the Bureau des Théâtres while Henry Régnier was

executing other functions.22

Typically the most senior member of the Commission assumed the role of

President reporting to the Director of Beaux-Arts the Commission’s opinions concerning

works to be performed in non-state subsidized theaters. In exceptional cases where the

Director of Beaux-Arts was unavailable or absent, the President of the Commission

conferred directly with the Bureau’s Chief who customarily received and archived all of

22 F21 4633: Administration générale- inspection, théâtre commission, February 19, 1904.

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the Commission’s reports. Recommendations related to the authorization of works

performed in the national theaters were made jointly by the Commission and Bureau

Chief and were transmitted to the Director of Beaux-Arts and from the Director to the

Minister who, in theory, held the final decision-making power.23 Ministers, whose

political views had affected the function, direction, and severity of censorship during the

Second Empire, gradually ceded this responsibility to the Director of Beaux Arts under

the Third Republic. Although Ministers continued to pronounce the final decision in

cases where conflicts of interest arose within the Commission d’examen, the Director of

Beaux Arts, as the intermediary between the authors, censors, and ministers, possessed

the power to make last-minute changes.24

The real disadvantage of the Director’s position, however, was that he had very few

employees at his disposal to carry out the day-to-day surveillance and enforcement of

authorized performances. The ability “to see certain scenes or words” presented in the

context of a play made it “easier” for inspectors to judge the character of a performance

than in a review of the manuscript. To facilitate the inspectors’ work, the Minister

required that “a rehearsal, with decors and costumes, be given for the inspection of the

theaters before [emphasis added] the public rehearsal.” Treated to their own private

showing of the play, inspectors could make judgment calls about the artistic nature of a

work without coming under the influence of the artists’ friends and theaters’ patrons who

regularly treated dress rehearsals as “a kind of première.”25 Consequently, the censors’

23 A.N. F21 1330: Arrêté from Minister of Public Instruction and Beaux-Arts Leygues, April 15, 1901.

24 Krakovitch, “La Censure des spectacles,” 66.

25 A.N. F21 1331: Letter from the Minister of Public Instruction and Beaux-Arts to Director, 1893.

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workload increased when they were given the task of reviewing modifications made to

plays both before and after the closed dress rehearsals.26

Alongside the inspectors, the local police served as the Bureau’s eyes and ears,

playing a kind of de facto censorial role in the regulation of theaters. “During the

theatrical season, and more especially at the moment of revues de fin d’année,” the local

prefectures exercised “a special surveillance on the concerts” in order to ensure that the

authorized performances complied with the Bureau’s modifications.27 According to one

police report, if it were not for the unannounced visits made by the local police to the

these entertainment establishments, the inspectors “would have observed nothing or

almost nothing.”28 With their numbers greatly constrained, the police could only attend a

small percentage of the nearly one hundred spectacles being shown in Paris on any given

day. As one prefect complained, “It is very difficult for these officials to exercise, under

the these conditions, an effective control.”29 The agents, who were theoretically required to be present at all the performances, were authorized by the Director of Beaux-Arts to demand evidence of a visa from the theater director before the first public performance.30

26 The Third Republic classified spectacles according to genre as well as the targeted audience’s social composition. Such measures were to ensure that songs, musicals, vaudevilles, and plays that made political allusions, referenced a symbolic or controversial figure (like Victor Hugo), discussed utopias, proudhonism, or social catholicism, incited conflict between classes, or offended public morality would be forbidden. Krakovitch, “La Censure des spectacles,” 72-73.

27 A.N. F21 1338: Undated letter

28 A.N. F21 1331: Report from Prefect, December 1903.

29 A.N. F21 1338: Reports from the Bureau des Théâtres and the Prefecture de Police, Letter from Prefect, undated

30 A.N. F21 1338: A circular from the Minister of Public Instruction and Beaux-Arts dated February 4, 1898 referred prefects to previous ministerial circulars of December 7, 1865, March 30, 1877, February 18, 1887 which addressed this responsibility. Letters exchanged between the Prefect Charles Blanc to the

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The arrival of inspectors and police agents, who were well known to the personnel of the

cafés-concerts, served as a signal for the artists to abstain from performing passages or gestures not authorized in the stamped programs. Having been tipped off by inspectors regarding “irregular situations,” the inspectors and police noted how the songs and “plays performed in the cafés-concerts” were oftentimes “different from those which received the visa from the Commission d’examen.” “The addition of new couplets” to songs or words and gestures to plays that had not appeared in the authorized texts, gave the performances “a licentious character that… they did not have in the beginning.” 31

In cases where a theater director blatantly disregarded the Commission’s suggestions, the scheduled program’s visa was withdrawn and the show cancelled. In extreme circumstances where a café-concert or hall had presented an unauthorized song,

monologue, or act of obscene and immoral character, the police possessed the power to

close, and subsequently re-open, the establishment after a period of two to fifteen days.32

In one particular case, the prefect closed La Cigale for five days after the director “re-

inserted passages suppressed by censorship from the manuscript of a play entitled Ohé!

Venus!”33 The real reason behind the hall’s closing, according to one report, was

“because certain artists made indecent gestures.” Pushing “inappropriateness to its last limits,” one female performer “played on her deformity and monstrosity” to such an

Minister of Public Instruction and Beaux-Arts dated April 17, 1897 and March 7, 1898 reveal that several police superintendents neglected to verify that a theater was in possession of a visa for a currently running play.

31 A.N. F21 1338: Undated letter

32 A.N. F21 1338: Letter from Prefect to Minister of Public Instruction and Beaux-Arts, February 4, 1898.

33 A.N. F21 1338: Letter from Prefect to Minister of Public Instruction and Beaux-Arts, May 3, 1899.

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extent “that the spectators of the place…protested several times.” Questioning whether

one should “call her a woman,” the journalist condoned the prefect’s application of

censorship for transgressions of gender norms.34 Yet for Santillane, writing for the off-

color illustrated magazine La Vie Parisienne, the hall’s closing would have little affect on

those bothered by “the puritan rigors of certain senators” and public officials. In his

opinion, “the enduring rights of the old gaulois gaiety” made preventive measures such as

the one cited above seem “outdated” and reactionary in their efforts “to defend the good

taste” of an overly protective and narrowly-minded bourgeoisie.35

Because of a shortage of police personnel, the government relied on the media and

moral leagues as alternative sources of information about indecent performances.

Theatrical reviews, either promoting or denouncing morally questionable spectacles, provided fodder for the Director of Beaux-Arts who could open “the latest feuilleton by

F. Sarcey” and discover “that at the Divan Japonais there was a duel between women

‘with entirely bare stomachs’!”36 The Minister of Public Instruction and Beaux Arts

maintained regular correspondence with vice crusaders who took it upon themselves to

inform the government of theatrical infractions. With the assistance of “prominent

bourgeois residents and politicians,” the government “gave force to bourgeois

sensibilities by censoring songs and plays that were too politically threatening or too

34 “Anastasie,” Droits de l’Homme, May 9, 190?

35 Santillane, “La Censure à La Cigale,” La Vie Parisienne, n.d.

36 Lest one accuse him or his administration of negligence, Roujon blamed his subordinates for their lack of oversight. “Did the censors see a rehearsal? I do not want to create a scandal, but I take this occasion to reiterate that I have all the confidence in the inspection des théâtres’ vigilance. With regard to the maintenance of bonnes moeurs, we should be very severe.” A.N. F21 1331: Letter to Bureau des theaters from Director of Beaux-Arts Roujon, September 1, 1897.

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racy.”37 On numerous occasions Senator Bérenger, as President of the Ligue contre la

license dans les rues, notified the government of offensive, unauthorized songs, plays,

even the advertisements promoting such spectacles. In a letter to the Minister of Public

Instruction and Beaux-Arts dated January 13, 1903, Bérenger called the government’s

attention to a pamphlet printed by Nice’s Grand Théâtre Français for two of its upcoming

revues Voyageuse and L’Outrage. The Senator regarded the ad, which was openly

distributed through the mail, as “crude” because it openly flouted moral authority. The

statement “Interdit par la Censure” printed in bold letters across the front of the ad was an

audacious act of publicity that capitalized on the public’s interest in banned works.

Incensed by the ways in which censorship could bring greater visibility to public vices,

Bérenger encouraged the Minister to combat departmental “negligence” by taking matters

of license in the theater seriously, ensuring “that not a single immoral spectacle, not a

single exhibition contrary to good morals and susceptible of carrying an attack on the

decency of the crowds be tolerated.”38 “The examination of theatrical works and the

prohibition of all or part of those works,” Bérenger reiterated, were powers assigned to the Ministry of Public Instruction and Beaux-Arts, as well as local prefects, as stated in

the decree of January 6, 1864 concerning the theater industry’s freedom.39

37 Charles Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Époque: Entertainment and Festivity in Turn-of-the-Century France (New Haven, Conn., 1985), 113.

38 “La Censure à l’Exposition,” Le Figaro, May 17, 1901.

39 Article Three of the decree of January 6, 1864 stipulated “Every theatrical work, before being presented, must, according to the terms of the decree of December 30, 1852, be examined and authorized by the Minister for the theaters of Paris, by the Prefects for the theaters of departments.” The circular went on to define the role of the Prefect as follows: “1- They will authorize the performance of new plays, except when referring them to the Minister, if they deem it necessary; 2- They are free to refuse the authorization of plays, even those authorized in Paris; 3- The works forbidden in Paris are the same for all France.” A.N. F21 1332: Letter from Bérenger to the Minister of Public Instruction and Beaux-Arts, January 13, 1903.

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The Minister, conducting his own investigation, found that such a prospectus had

indeed been allowed to circulate because the Prefect of the Alpes-Maritimes had no

reason to suspect wrongdoing. Having not received a copy of the program nor having

been informed as to which plays were forbidden by the national government, the prefect

blamed the local police commissioner for dereliction of responsibility. He, more than

anyone, should have been the most informed about what was taking place on a regular

basis within the local theaters from reports filed by his agents. The departmental Prefect

protested his innocence claiming that he was a victim of miscommunication, or lack

thereof, on the part of the ministry, theater director, and local police.40 The Minister

tactfully referred him back to the ministerial circular of November 9, 1887 that required

each prefect to correspond with the Director of Beaux-Arts about the list of plays that

were to be performed during a theatrical season.41 However in this case, without the director openly declaring his intent to perform a play by submitting a required copy of it with the prefect, the prefect appeared helpless and without fault. Therefore the

effectiveness of censorship in policing tasteless or dangerous spectacles required, above

all, full compliance of the artist and theater director with the law.

This particular exchange of letters highlights the government’s failure to regulate theater pieces on a number of levels. In questioning why the municipal administration alone was “the judge of preventive measures and interdictions of theatrical pieces,” moral leagues alleged that the provincial and uncoordinated nature of theatrical regulation had

40 Ibid., Telegram from the Prefect of the Alpes-Maritimes to the Minister of Public Instruction and Beaux- Arts, January 20, 1903.

41 A.N. F21 1331: Letter from Minister of Public Instruction and Beaux-Arts to Prefect, November 5, 1903.

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created inconsistencies whereby “a spectacle forbidden in Roubaix is played the next day

in Lille.”42 By delegating responsibility for moral policing to the departmental and local

prefects with the promulgation of two laws in 1850 and 1864, the state unknowingly or

subconsciously acknowledged the impracticality of legislating a national code of ethics.43

The closest the French government ever came to standardizing obscenity laws as they applied to the theater was a sort of bureaucratic rule of thumb that stated if a work was forbidden in Paris, it was forbidden for all of France. Even a formula as simplistic as this posed problems for provincial prefects who, living far from the heart and moral pulse of

France, were not kept abreast of changes and prohibitions customarily relayed through ministerial circulars. Prior to the Third Republic, the Minister of Public Instruction and

Beaux Arts sent out an annual list of forbidden plays before the opening of every theatrical season. However a new method of communication had been devised whereby the departmental prefect submitted to the Minister a list of those plays scheduled to be performed in his area for the upcoming year. The Minister, after having reviewed the list, returned it to the prefect indicating whether his ministry had ever heard of such plays, and if so, what measures if any had been taken against them.44

Perhaps the greatest obstacle affecting the government’s ability to exercise theatrical censorship was the ambiguous “line between what functioned as pornography

42 Supplement au Relèvement Social, May 15, 1904, 7.

43 These laws required that every new theatrical work be submitted to the prefect for approval. Moreover, these laws granted the prefect the power to forbid any play authorized and performed in Paris if he had reason to believe that it might potentially offend someone in his department.

44 A.N. F21 1331: Letter to Prefect from the Under-Secretary, Jan 188?

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and what did not.”45 Derived from the Greek word porne meaning “harlot,” pornography

originally referred to “the writing of prostitutes,” a practice which in and of itself was not contrary to public morality.46 Over time, what it meant to write and represent sexually

explicit material changed depending upon the context within which it was produced.

Desirous of a new social contract, political revolutionaries in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth-centuries promoted sexual radicalism as a critique of contemporary society by wedding pornography and natural philosophy together. The relationship between sexuality and politics, Lisa Sigel claims, began to break down by the mid- nineteenth-century as the production of pornography reoriented itself towards the demands of a mass consumer public.47 As pornography underwent a shift from an object

of elite to mass discourse and consumption, the word’s meaning changed to denote a

body of “salacious art and literature.”48 Modern-day understandings of pornography as

an object or act that “explicitly depicts sex organs and sexual practices with the aim of

arousing sexual feeling” was, as Lynn Hunt asserts, a nineteenth-century invention.49 By

45 Lisa Sigel, ed., International Exposure: Perspectives on Modern European Pornography, 1800-2000 (New Brunswick, N.J., 2005), 7.

46 Peter Webb, The Erotic Arts (London, 1983), 2. The term “pornography” first appears in the Oxford English Dictionary in the year 1854, however in France, Restif de la Bretonne is credited for introducing the word in 1769.

47 Sigel, International Exposure, 11.

48 Jane Ussher, Fantasies of Femininity: Reframing the Boundaries of Sex (New Brunswick, N.J., 1997),

148; Sigel, International Exposure, 7. At the turn of the century, the Nouvelle Larousse Illustré defined pornography as “the immorality of certain literary or artistic works.”

49 Lynn Hunt, ed., The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500-1800 (New York, 1993), 11.

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mid-century, better printing techniques and the development of photography helped

spread lewd images and texts which fell under all kinds of legal restrictions, ranging from

prohibitions against producing or displaying them to the interdiction of transmitting them

by postal service. French lawmakers and censors conceptualized pornography as any

artistic or literary work that led to the depravation of public morality. Used

interchangeably with “obscenity” and “erotica” as a derogatory term, pornography became the target of national campaigns throughout Europe and the United States. The identification and labeling of normal and abnormal sexual behavior and thought as well as the restriction of access to erotic material accompanied the rise of disciplinary regimes that were instituted within newly created nation-states to help maintain social order and power.

A number of historians have revealed the ways in which the legal system became one of the primary sources for constructing boundaries of normalcy and deviancy in the nineteenth-century.50 The creation of laws and the meting out of justice in courtroom

trials helped to define and regulate pornography in such a way that anything causing “the

deprivation of public morality” was singled out as an “obscenity” or an “affront to a

commonly accepted standard of behavior.” This definition was so broadly defined that

the target of pursuit and the intensity with which it was prosecuted tended to mirror larger

“changes in the relationship between society and desire” during the late nineteenth and

early twentieth-centuries.51 Objects of an offensive nature, such as postcards, brochures,

50 Foucault, The History of Sexuality; Laqueur, Making Sex; idem. and Gallagher, The Making of the Modern Body; Ruth Harris, Murderers and Madness: Medicine, Law, and Society in the Fin-de-Siècle (Oxford, 1898); Edward Berenson, The Trial of Madame Caillaux (Berkeley, Calif., 1996); Angus McLaren, Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries, 1870-1930 (Chicago, 1997).

51 Nouvelle Larousse Illustré

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paintings, statues, engravings, songs, illustrated journals, photographs, books, advertisements, even personal correspondence, fell under the heading of outrages aux bonnes moeurs whereas physical acts or gestures that violated standards of public decorum and injured the decency of those who had witnessed them were known as outrages public à la pudeur.52 While the former oftentimes applied to matters of the

press and encompassed the bulk of attacks against immorality up to the late nineteenth-

century, the latter were crimes committed in the street and theater.53 The shift from

private to public life engendered a rise in outrages public à la pudeur as more and more

people ventured outside of their homes to experience the thrills and pleasures of

boulevard culture.

Ironically, the Third Republic’s repression of pornography was first spelled out in

Article 28 of the July 29, 1881 law abolishing censorship of the press.54 The new press

law, which freed authors and publishers from having to submit a copy of their work to the

Dépôt Légal prior to publication, simultaneously exacted stiffer penalties for affronts to

public decency in the press that were initially limited to obscene words and one-

52 A.P.P. BA 1567: Statistiques des crimes et delits. Article 330 of the Penal Code punished perpetrators of outrages public à la pudeur with three months to two years of prison and a fine of 16 to 200 francs. Two-thirds of all offenders were sent to prison while the remaining one-third were set free or fled.

53 A significant rise in offenses related to outrages publics à la pudeur, from 42 to 571, occurred between 1891 and 1892. After 1892 the number of outrages remained over 500 until 1897 when it started to taper off.

54 The Chamber of Deputies first debated the proposition de loi to abolish censorship of the press during its meetings of January 24-25, 27, 29, 31, and February 1 and 5. After a second round of deliberations on February 14-15, 17, the Chamber adopted and sent the bill to the Senate on 24 February where it was discussed further on 9, 11, 15-16 July before being modified and resubmitted to the Chamber of Deputies. On 21 July, the Chamber reaccepted the amended legislation, transforming into law on 29 July 1881.

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dimensional images.55 Such protective measures as Article 28 ensured that liberalization

of the press would occur within a set of morally defined parameters guarding the general

public from individuals bent upon abusing “a law of enfranchisement and freedom.”

With the threat of increased fines and longer prison sentences, republican politicians

continued to exercise moral restraint over writers and publishers, enacting what in fact

turned out to be only “a partial freedom of the press.”56

The legislature’s failure to specify the nature of obscenity invariably contributed to

the courts’ erratic application and prosecution of the law.57 “One of the most serious

lacunas of the laws against outrages,” according to Emile Pouresy, was “their silence on

the definition of obscenity.” He went on to say that

if the legislature had subtly indicated the legal character of obscenity, it would have been rather easy, then, for the civil officers of the Parquet, rather than the judges on the bench, to apply the laws with regularity as they do for stealing.

Without a clear legal understanding of what constituted an obscenity, judges were free to

interpret the law as they saw fit, relying upon their own personal moral precepts as a

criteria and measure of appropriateness. The emergence of a dual system of morality,

evidenced by the following scenario where “that which is obscene in Bordeaux,

Marseille, Toulouse is not in Paris,” gave some individuals cause to fear that Parisian

55 Those individuals charged with affronting public decency were prosecuted according to whether they had employed the written word or visual images. Those who had offended public morality in writing possessed the right to a trial by jury. Those who had committed the same crime through the use of visual images were tried before judges in magistrate courts known as Tribunals correctionnels. Republicans considered the latter institution suspect and undemocratic because of its exclusionary and private nature

56 C. Bazille and Charles Constant, Code de la Presse: Commentaire Theorique et Practique de la loi du 29 Juillet 1881 (Paris, 1883), 15. The maximum fine was raised from 500 to 2,000 francs, the minimum prison sentence from 15 days to one month, and maximum prison sentence from 1 to 2 years. See Heather Dawkins, The Nude in French Art and Culture, 1870-1910 (Cambridge, 2002), 28.

57 Ibid., 27-28. Police could confiscate publications and images suspected of affronting public decency but could not destroy them with a court order.

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magistrates were becoming less sensitive to and more tolerant of the commercial vices

circulating in the capital.58 Were Parisians to be held to a different set of moral standards

then the rest of the country?

Assuming that judges had simply been ignoring Article 28, the National Assembly

passed an additional legislative measure a year later in order to shore up the previous law.

Rather than addressing the law’s vague description of obscenity, the National Assembly

erroneously broadened the definitional scope of outrages aux bonnes moeurs to include

writings that “injure the decency and address the licentious and debauched spirit of

certain readers.” Believing “that the law of July 29, 1881 would assure a sufficient

repression with regard to the book,” politicians endorsed the law of August 2, 1882 to

cover all other printed materials.59 It is important to note here that even into the 1880s

French legislators still regarded the written word, and by extension the mass press, as a

more dangerous and harmful threat to public mores than the performative exploits of the theater.

Over the next twenty years, the government modified Article 28 in order to guarantee a “more complete and vigorous repression” of public obscenities.60 Articles

Six, Seven, Eight, and Nine of a March 16, 1898 law reinterpreted outrages aux bonnes moeurs as crimes that could “excite debauchery” in the most innocent of individuals. No longer restricted solely to exchanges taking place between the depraved in the privacy of

58 Emile Pouresy, L’état actuel de la pornographie et les moyens précis de la reprimer (Alencon, n.d.), 7.

59 A.N. C 5604: Outrages aux bonnes moeurs

60 Nouvelle Larousse Illustré. During the Chamber of Deputies’ 1881 discussion pertaining to the abolition of press censorship, legislators decided to reinforce the law against outrages aux bonnes moeurs with stiffer penalties rather than accept the Minister of Justice’s recommendation to integrate it within the French Penal Code’s section dealing with indecent exposure and assault. A.N., C 5669: Outrages aux bonnes moeurs

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one’s home, obscenity was now perceived to circulate out in the open for anyone to see.

The law’s emphasis on the public nature of outrages aux bonnes moeurs as crimes

committed “on public walkways or places” or “through the mail or public

announcements” indicated that the auto-suggestive power of the visual had superceded

print culture as the most influential form of media by the turn-of-the-century.61 Whereas

those engaged in the book trade enjoyed the right to a trial by jury within a court known

for its leniency (Cour d’Assises), individuals producing and trafficking in smaller, less

expensive tracts were tried in magistrates’ courts (tribunals correctionnels). Although

charged with the same crime, the latter’s involvement with mass culture placed them

under greater suspicion for subversive activity than the former, a group who catered to a

“smaller, more educated and discriminating readership” capable of distinguishing

between good and bad influences.62 Regardless of the court in which they were tried,

those found guilty of outrages aux bonnes moeurs faced prison sentences ranging from

one month to two years and a fine from 16 to 3,000 francs. In an effort to protect the

most vulnerable elements of the population, namely women and youth, the courts doubled the punishment for crimes committed in the presence of a minor.63 The law of

1898 remained unmodified until 1908 when the net for those who could be arrested and

tried for outrages aux bonnes moeurs widened. Authors, directors, managers, printers,

accomplices and vendors who attempted, even intended, to sell, offer, display, or

61 Pouresy, La Fédération Francaise, 72.

62 This contradiction in justice continued despite an 1889 proposal to try all affronts against public decency before the tribunals correctionnels. See Dawkins, The Nude in French Art, 29-30.

63 Pouresy, La Fédération Francaise des Sociétés contre l’immoralité publique…son but, son caractère, son programme, ses moyens d’action et de propagande (Bordeaux, 1929), 72.

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distribute obscenity on public roads or in public places were added to the list of

suspects.64 Whereas preceding laws had required the publicity of an offense in order for

a crime to fall under repression of the law, the April 7, 1908 law adapted outrages aux

bonnes moeurs to include acts that occurred outside of la voie publique.65

Although the laws repressing moral crimes became noticeably more severe after

1898, police statistics show that a dramatic decline in the number of cases prosecuted for

outrages aux bonnes moeurs had occurred years prior. In 1898, the government brought to court 21 cases of outrages as opposed to 259 in 1892. During these six years, half of the convicted were sent to prison while the other half were set free.66 If one were to

incorporate the last two decades of the nineteenth-century into the analysis, one would

find that the correctional tribunals accused 1,816 individuals of outrages aux bonnes

moeurs and made over 1200 pursuits between the years 1881 and 1902. On average, the

court handled approximately fifty-seven cases per year, a figure that was not markedly

different from yearly averages prior to 1881. Whereas the number of acquittals and fines

rose after 1881, the number of imprisonments dropped, thereby indicating that

governmental repression was applied less energetically after the law of 1881 establishing

greater freedom of the press. For those same years, the Cour d’Assises pursued twenty-

four cases, involving a total of sixty-one individuals, twenty-six of whom were acquitted,

six condemned, and twenty-six sentenced to prison for at least one year. Statistically, a

64 Bernard Schnapper, “Le Sénateur René Bérenger et Les Progrès de la Répression Pénale en France (1870-1914),” Annales de la Faculté de droit d’Istanbul, no. 42, 1979, 249.

65 Pouresy, L’État Actuel, 12; Pouresy, La Fédération Francaise, fn. 26.

66 A.P.P. BA 1567: Statistiques des crimes et delits

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person charged with outrage aux bonnes moeurs in this court had a forty percent chance of being acquitted. 67 This statistic corroborates a statement, made by then Minister of

Justice Jean Ferrouillat, that a quarter of all affronts to public decency ended in acquittal.

Heather Dawkins, in her study of press censorship remarks that there were two

reasons for this fact. First, judges were reluctant to convict if an allegedly obscene representation touched on politics or art: politics, because freedom of opinion was a democratic right, and art, out of deference to the ideal, the powerful sentiment intended to thwart vulgar instincts. Second, legal discourse distinguished between licentious and obscene representations, although neither category was defined. The distinction was signaled in legal treatises and applied by judges, but it was not a concept articulated in law.68

Inevitably how one distinguished between art and pornography remained a question of conjecture for cultural authorities. Simplistic and ambiguous formulaic statements like

the one given by Senator and Société Centrale president Jules Simon, “Quand l’ordure

parait, l’art disparait,”’ reveals that frequently definitions depended upon individual subjectivity and sensibility rather than what “the law considered as fact.” Realizing that not everything shocking, scandalous, or offensive could be considered obscene, moral reformers defined obscenity as an intentional act of “licentious” behavior that targeted

“the debauched” and the innocent with “subjects, descriptions, and situations that directly awaken evil ideas in the imagination.” Both of those conditions, the character of the

67 Albert Eyquem, De la morale publique et aux bonnes moeurs ou de la pornographie au point de vue histoirque, juridique, legislative et social avec une etude complete de droit comparé (Paris, 1905), 176-178.

68 Dawkins, The Nude in French Art, 43-44.

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work and the intention of the author, were incredibly difficult to discern particularly

when it came to matters of art. The Guide Juridique Dalloz, believing that art lacked the

“single, more powerful feeling” that aroused a viewer’s sexual instinct, adhered to more

modernist definitions of art as a product of emotional detachment and indifference.69 Yet the modernist myth of ‘art for art’s sake’ betrayed what jurist Albert Eyquem saw as a

“dangerous” conflation of license and freedom. The proliferation of pornography was not, as some believed, because of weak laws or their ineffective application, but because art had gradually effected a transformation of social mores. Public morality had, in

Eyquem’s estimation, “disappeared and been replaced by a state of public amorality,” a condition that had been subtly inserted through the introduction of new cultural forms and images “with prudence and moderation.”70

The Politics of Le Déshabillage

The rise of the popular theater, which coincided with and indeed shaped the

meaning of obscenity in the second half of the nineteenth-century, was one case in point.

Offering a range of repertoires, costumes, backdrops and storylines to diverse segments

of the urban populace, the music hall functioned as a gauge for changes in taste as well as

a transmitter of social attitudes. No other cultural institution of the fin-de-siècle could

compete with the boulevard theater as an opiate for the masses. In Dominic Shellard’s

words, “If you wanted to keep control over society” it was the medium of the theater that

one needed to control.71 As we have just seen, arbitrary distinctions between what

69 Pouresy, L’état actuel, 6-8.

70 Eyquem, De la morale publique, 161, 172.

71 Dominic Shellard and Steve Nicholson with Miriam Handley, The Lord Chamberlain Regrets…:A History of British Theatre Censorship (London, 2004), ix.

243

constituted art and pornography became one way in which moral conservatives and the

government sought to manage and manipulate the theater. Although such divisions were

subject to change, the construction of what it meant to be obscene tended to follow a

general pattern that was transnational in scope. An examination of British, American,

and German obscenity laws in the nineteenth-century reveals an underlying concern for

protecting the young and impressionable from potentially harmful spectacles that could undermine the moral and social order.

In the case of Great Britain, the first definition of obscenity appeared in Lord

Campbell’s 1857 Obscene Publications Act. The pretext for this act, as Lynda Nead documents, was a legislative debate on the regulation of the sale of poisons. Lord

Campbell, believing that the sale of obscene publications was far more detrimental to the social order than the misuse of chemicals, established the timeworn metaphor of obscenity as a ‘moral poison.’72 For the next ten years, judges struggled with how to interpret the ‘obscenity’ law until an 1868 court decision established a coherent, albeit

arbitrary, criterion. In the case of Regina vs Hicklin, obscenity became known through the presence of two conditions: a desire on the part of the author to target and corrupt susceptible audiences. When applied to the performative arts, this rule operated differently depending upon the licensing system that evoked it. The Lord Chamberlain’s

Office, which held the power to authorize plays performed in London’s official theaters, censored theatrical pieces that dealt with religious, social, or political matters in a serious manner. Music halls, on the other hand, fell under the jurisdiction of the magistrates’

72 Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets, and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven, Conn., 2005), 157-158.

244

courts, which rarely instigated pursuits unless pressured to do so by the Lord

Chamberlain’s examiners. Because the music hall portrayed what Gavin Weightman

calls “the lighter side of life,” its variety shows were censored for satiric, rather than

realistic, portraits of everyday life. As noted in Chapter Two, musical comedies often

centered on issues of sex that were amusingly presented in song-and-dance numbers by

chorus lines of pretty girls. After the London County Council assumed the role of

censoring revues in 1889, music halls encountered “a much more vigilant and prudish

authority” represented by the figure of Mrs. Laura Ormiston Chant.

As the leading British anti-vice campaigner in the last decade of the nineteenth-

century, Mrs. Chant effectively lobbied and coerced Council members to impose

restrictions on some of London’s largest and most famous halls in the hope that they might literally and figuratively clean up their acts. What Chant and other moral reformers of the time found most disturbing was not so much that a woman’s body was exposed, but the reason for its exposure. Performances that typically presented women in revealing costumes, such as tableaux vivants, ballets, and pantomimes, remained largely immune from moral attacks because artistic pretension allowed them “to get away with

what was [the] blatant sale of sex.”73 Since nude revues did not appear in Britain until

the late 1930s, Victorian and early Edwardian vice crusaders and censors focused their

attention primarily on the context of clothed nudity and the ways in which undergarments

and tights became transformed into fetishistic signs of flesh for male voyeurs. In

objecting to the commercialization of scantily dressed women, moral conservatives

attempted to expunge any hint of nudity outside of an artistic context. In giving rise to

73 Gavin Weightman, Bright Lights, Big City: London Entertained, 1830-1950 (London, 1992), 82-86, 94.

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the notion that “the more women pranced around on stage, the more they had to wear; or

at least the less they could reveal of their bodies,” vice crusaders essentially immobilized women in their nudity, transforming them back into salon art and returning them to the

realm of high cultural aesthetics.74 “By restricting the theater’s desire to trade in sexual

sensation,” Tracy Davis writes, the British government and moral leagues continued to

safeguard bourgeois morality by limiting the public’s access to erotic entertainment.75

Following the example set by Great Britain, the United States relied upon local

licensing systems in the first half of the nineteenth-century to regulate dramatic

performances. Assuming that “whatever outrages decency and is injurious to public

morals” should be prohibited, communities nationwide relied upon and imposed their

own set of religious beliefs and ethics to maintain social order.76 It was not until after the

Civil War that the federal government took a more active stance in prosecuting obscenity

thanks in part to the creation of a national mail service and the formation of moral

leagues in the 1870s. Demands to prevent the carriage of obscene material through the

mail by New York City’s Society for the Suppression of Vice resulted in the first national

piece of obscenity legislation. As spin-offs of the 1873 Comstock Law, “little

Comstock” laws were subsequently passed by individual legislatures as additional measures of moral protection at the state level.77 In the 1879 Supreme Court case US vs

Bennett, the federal court established a standard by which obscenity would be identified

74 Tracy Davis, The Economics of the British Stage, 1800-1914 (Cambridge, 2000), 115-156.

75 Ibid.

76 Friedman, Prurient Interests, 13-17.

77 Ibid.

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that was modeled off of Great Britain’s Hicklin Rule. Defining obscenity as something

“that would have a bad effect on the young and inexperienced,” the Court set a precedent

for prosecuting both visual and written materials. When it came to the music halls’

sexualized displays of female bodies, what mattered most to religious, political, and

cultural critics was that such spectacles conformed to a standard of feminine beauty that

was morally and aesthetically in tune with American culture. According to Angela

Latham, chorus girls of the 1920s participated in a project to “glorify the American girl”

by emphasizing the importance of a woman’s worth through self-exposure, adornment,

visual appeal, and sexual allure.78 “By extravagantly and patriotically framing performances by beautiful women,” Florenz Ziegfeld and other entertainers transformed

burlesque “into a respectable national ritual” and the half-dressed chorus girl into a

cultural icon symbolizing American beauty, healthy, and prosperity.79

Whereas the same “complex interplay of political, socioeconomic, and gender

issues” in American and British discourses on “the public display of women’s bodies”

emerged during the Kaiser Reich, the German government tended to be less concerned with the intention behind or actual exhibition of nudism than with the content of the revue itself.80 Pornography, as defined by Paragraph 184 of the German Criminal Code,

included materials and practices that posed a threat to religious and political authority.

Moral leagues, primarily under the direction of the Lutheran Church, spearheaded anti-

78 Angela Latham, Posing a Threat: Flappers, Chorus Girls, and Other Brazen Performers of the American 1920s (Hanover, N.H., 2000), 110.

79 Ibid.

80 Ibid., 111.

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pornography campaigns that sought the removal of sexually stimulating material. One

campaign, known as Schund and Schmutz, succeeded in getting a law passed against

obscene publications in 1905.81 Concurrently, a proposal floated by Deputy Spahn of the

Reichstag sought to widen the ban on pornography to incorporate theater pieces as well.

Regardless of the venue or medium in and by which it was distributed, an act or object that produced “an exciting sensual impression on a normal man” constituted a form of pornography.82 Nevertheless, early twentieth-century cases concerning femmes nues fell

under the jurisdiction of regional courts which focused on the criminal rather than the

moral effects of the cabaret performances.

Even though efforts to rid society, and especially the theater, of pornography were

not unique to Belle Époque France, its capital acquired an international status as “the

great laboratory of theatrical pornography.” Paris’ major daily newspapers, such as Le

Temps, advertised “numerous” pornographic plays “of all genres” in their theater

sections.83 The “varied” range of commercial obscenities offered up to local and foreign

spectators within Parisian theaters and music halls endangered not just the social body at home and but those abroad.84 The affixation of posters advertising such spectacles in la

voie publique and their exportation to the provinces and beyond via traveling troupes and

postcards, exposed deviancy to a whole range of people. The moral contagion already

81 Chad Ross, Naked Germany: Health, Race, and the Nation (Oxford, 2005), 45-47.

82 Supplement au Relèvement Social, May 15, 1904, 7.

83 Pouresy, L’État Actuel, 3-5.

84 Ibid.

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“in the ascent” and infecting the French capital had to be contained if the western world

was going to avert a moral crisis.85

One of the first measures initiated by the National Assembly that dealt with the

problem of theatrical pornography appeared in Article 97 of an April 5, 1884 law. This legislation provided the government with whatever means necessary to assure the maintenance of good order when it came to spectacles, cafés, and other public places. As in the case of Great Britain, the United States, and Germany, the regulation of theatrical

pornography in France remained first and foremost a local matter that was attended to by

prefects and mayors who retained the power to forbid songs and performances of a pornographic nature and who shared the responsibility and blame if repression failed.86

Situated along the frontline in the war against obscenity, their jobs remained the most difficult to carry out. The problem, as theater critic St. Albin saw it, was not the determination of whether outrage public à la pudeur represented “a punishable crime,” but “where it began?”87

A consensus as to what constituted not only an act of indecency but a public act of

indecency had to be ascertained before the government and courts could implement a fair

and effective censorship of the theaters. St. Albin gives us some idea of how concepts

like “public” and “indecency” were construed during the Belle Époque in an anecdote

concerning the self-exposure of a mad man in the countryside. Although no one appears

to be around, a woman passing-by happens to notice the naked man and takes offense.

85 Ibid.

86 Ibid., 13.

87 St. Albin, “Le nu au théâtre,” 460.

249

According to St. Albin, the term “public,” rather than being defined by a quorum of people, was a space accessible, open, and visible to anyone at anytime. Furthermore, in

order for a public act to be perceived as decent, spectators had to be “consenting.”88 In this particular case, the act of self-exposure was not only characterized as visually insulting to the spectator but as the product of an irrational individual. Regardless of the intent behind the act, St. Albin shared with moral conservatives a more widely held belief that unsuspecting witnesses like the female spectator possessed the right to preserve and protect their gazes from abusive images.

And therein lay the problem. The public sphere, under constant inundation from new actors and visual technologies, had become far too vast a domain to regulate by the fin-de-siècle. The labor required to protect the masses from immoral spectacles depended upon the coordinated efforts of both the government and concerned citizens.

As discussed in Chapter 4, vice crusaders undertook a two-fold mission to educate people in recognizing “bad” art and to protest and warn governmental officials when it occurred.

The French state, after being notified or having conducted its own investigation, could then legally pursue, prosecute, and expurgate obscenities circulating within la voie publique, a domain that belonged under its control.

The theater, having come to be seen as a public space by the late nineteenth- century, became the focus of moral policing as the spectacle of female flesh posed a new menace to spectators. The New Woman, who broke with conventional notions about femininity by exercising a degree of sexual and physical agency, found expression on the

Parisian stage in the form of la femme nue. “Today, even with censorship, these women

88 Ibid., 461.

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of the music halls are decolletées in such a way that, in order to be liberal, they have only

to remove their maillot,” a journalist for Le Matin wrote. “Because they try their hand at doing this…the law attempts to redress them in a less primitive costume.”89 Her open

discussions about sex and overt displays of sexuality recalled acts performed by

individuals noted for their anti-social, deviant behavior, namely Neo-malthusians,

anarchists, and freethinkers. While the “immobile nudity” of femmes nues “covered in

grease” had conferred on them “the appearance of marble or gold statues” sufficient

enough “to protect them from pursuit,” moral conservatives decried how “the women

presented on stage currently take part in the action, even dance, without anything

covering their entire nudity.”90 Self-exhibitionism, regardless of degree or the artistic/

therapeutic intentions behind it, represented a harmful condition that tore family and

nation apart in the eyes of social purists.

In the name of the paterfamilias, leagues members wrote letters decrying the “most

shocking” revues “in which a young person, absolutely naked” could push the limits of

obscenity beyond reason under the purview of government censors and the police. One

such father, a retired Cavalry Captain from Lille, attended a performance at La Scala

where the commère (leading female star), representing a postage stamp, articulated “her

most ardent desire to be pasted.” In front of the entire audience, the compère (leading male star) “pretended to lick from high to low, especially the low,” the actress’s body.91

89 “Contre Elle,” Le Matin, November 14, 1901.

90 Letter from Rene Bérenger to the Republic’s Chief Prosecutor as cited in Paris Théâtre, “Le nu au théâtre,” April 11, 1908.

91 Letter from Auguste Dumont, Retired Calvary Captain from Lille, to the Director of Beaux-Arts, December 10, 1895.

251

What he, other fathers, and league members like him found so troubling was the

“exploitation of women, of human creatures, for the sexual satisfaction of men;” a clear

indictment that these “unhealthy,” “foul” spectacles functioned as pornography and not

art.92 While it was not uncommon to see compères and commères appearing on stage in a semi-nude state for durations up to an hour and a half or more, the simulation of coital

sex between the two generated the bulk of public criticism. “Insanities” such as these

projected “on the concert stages of the Champs-Elysées and the main concert halls in the

center of Paris” were intolerable, particularly when fathers attended such shows with

their sexually naïve and innocent wives and children.93 “A father who drives his children to the Comédie Française or the Opéra-Comique should have the right to complain” when the distinctions between high art and boulevard buffoonery were not respected.94

The question as to la femme nue’s proper place within Parisian entertainment had profound implications for how one defined the meaning of high and low culture, public and private spaces, particularly in relation to the theater. What made the 1894 Alcazar d’Été performance of Le Coucher d’Yvette radically different from other revues, according to Jules Roques, was its presentation of a woman’s bare physique before a

“familial public.” Violating what some believed to be a clear physical separation between establishments offering wholesome and lewd entertainment as well as their respective viewing publics, this nude spectacle should have been solely reserved, Roques

92 Emile Pouresy, Au service de la vie et de la verité sexuelles: Quelques solutions originales et authentiques de la question sexuelle recueillies au cours de quarante années de propagande morale (Saint- Antoine-de-Breuilh, 1939), 192.

93 Letter from André Costé, Jean de Reuchet, P. Mercier, et. al, to the Censorship Board, October 12, 1894.

94 St. Albin, “Le nu au théâtre,” 462.

252 suggested, for a hall like the Ambassadeurs.95 Even though the two cafés-concerts shared the same Champs-Elysées address and resembled each other with their Antique Revival facades, the Ambassadeurs attracted a larger number of tourists and cosmopolitan swells in search of more mature entertainment.96 While la femme nue’s intrusion into socially- mixed, family-oriented entertainment sites was unappreciated, and offensive to some, her presence could be tolerated in spaces where one’s entry was restricted.97

Founded by André Antoine in 1887, the Théâtre libre marked the beginning of modernist theater in France with innovative stage techniques, unconventional marketing strategies, and the presentation of controversial themes. As a crossover between the aristocratic salon and bourgeois cercle, this independent, non-commercial theater operated as a voluntary association that relied upon subscription sales to produce experimental drama. Entry to see the theater’s one-act plays required the purchase of an invitation that gave one access to an entire season of performances rather than the purchase of a single ticket before the show.98 Because the Théâtre Libre entertained

“invited guests and non-paying customers,” it constituted a private theater where

“disturbing images of…modern life” depicting scenes “about sex and sexuality” could be shown without fear of censorship.99

95 Jules Roques, “À l’Alcazar d’Été,” Le Courrier Français, May 20, 1894, 8.

96 Barbara Shapiro, ed., Pleasures of Paris: Daumier to Picasso (Boston, Mass., 1991), 123.

97 Letter from André Costé, Jean de Reuchet, P. Mercier, et. al, to the Censorship Board, October 12, 1894.

98 A.N. F21 1332: Minute de lettre, February 5, 1903.

99 Davis, The Economics of the British Stage, 140.

253

Yet, the Théâtre libre attracted considerable suspicion from those who questioned

the artistic and private nature of the theater. Having given rise to a number of Parisian

avant-garde theaters in the early 1890s, such as Paul Fort’s Théâtre d’Art and Lugné

Poe’s Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, the Théâtre libre, its style, and method for avoiding moral

policing, served as a template for novice theaters in the provinces.100 The growth and success of théâtre libre imitators caused great angst among the local police and moral leagues that believed that the people needed “to be protected from the power of theatrical expression.”101 Referring back to an earlier order dated January 28, 1881, one police prefect elaborated upon the circumstances or conditions that constituted a public performance. In his words,

a society that gives performances in the presence of persons who, though invited in name, are not members of the society, … and are not usually there, … with no line of usual relation [to the society], suffices to give the performances a public character.102

The théâtre libre, according to the Prefect, was less a private space than a social center,

where the audience was not invited but rather admitted through the means of a

subscription.

Calling the Théâtre libre’s “soirée privée’” a “trompe l’oeil,” Bérenger attacked so-

called private theaters as frauds which deluded paying customers into thinking that, in

return for having purchased season tickets, they would receive special privileges that one

100 Boyer, Artists and the Avant-Garde Theater in Paris, 14.

101 Charnow, Popular Practices/Modern Forms, 85.

102 A.N. F21 1332: Letter from Prefecture de Police to Minister, February 14, 1896.

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could not obtain ordinarily in buying a box office ticket. 103 The indiscriminate

circulation of invitations and solicitation of tickets to non-subscribers, facilitated with the

help of hawkers, vendors, and the postal service, debunked the notion that private theaters

were indeed private.104 The bourgeois cercle, in his opinion, was a far more accurate

representation of a private institution where the privileges of social membership required

an endorsement or recommendation based upon one’s personal or professional status.

Events transpiring within “the particular space…of an authorized circle or regularly

approved society” were intended for a small select group as opposed to those of the

theater where one’s ability to pay for a ticket or subscription remained the only

qualification.105

Bérenger’s assertion that a non-monetary criteria, based upon affluence, networks,

and implicitly gender and age, governed definitions of public and private spaces drew

criticism from a growing mass consumer public and expanding citizenry who equated

privacy with the secrecy and corruption of former despotic regimes. “They agitated for

liberal policies that were in step with a Republican form of government and capitalist

enterprise.”106 Having thrown off the manacles of imperial and foreign rule, the French

desired the freedom to make their own choices under the auspices of natural laws that

103 A.N. F21 1332: Letter from Bérenger to the Minister of Public Instruction and Beaux-Arts, January 13, 1903.

104 A.N. F21 1332: Minute de lettre from Minister of Public Instruction and Beaux-Arts to Prefect, February 5, 1903.

105 A.N. F21 1332: Letter from Police Commissioner to Minister of Public Instruction and Beaux-Arts, February 14, 1896.

106 Charnow, Popular Practices/Modern Forms, 78.

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governed and regulated society. The government’s promotion of liberal individualism in

matters concerning divorce, education, religion, and the press embodied more modern

notions of civil society except for its retention of preventive censorship, which “was

increasingly seen as an affront to republican principles.”107

According to writer Pierre Loüys, the recent craze for nude revues was part of a larger, more popular “move” towards freedom that had sprung up some fifteen years earlier from artistic and academic circles.108 Affirming, “It is the public, not the

politicians who should be responsible for keeping a watchful eye on the purity and the

moral cleanliness of theaters,” the leftist press protested against exclusionary bourgeois practices that sought to control public access to certain spaces and types of shows.109 La

Petite République, in claiming that “people who go to the theater are big enough to monitor themselves and stand up to the stick of Bérenger,” supported spectators in their quest to exercise self-governance on the basis of their own discriminatory tastes and moral standards.110 Willette’s observation that audiences showed no signs of discomfort

when confronted with nude spectacles suggests that the average spectator expected to see,

had grown “accustom[ed] to,” and found nothing improper with the performances.111

F.A. Ersky, claiming that he had never heard the least amount of protest regarding nude

107 Ibid., 84.

108 Pierre Louys, Le Journal, April 25, 1908, 224; Georges Normandy, Le nu à l’église au théâtre, et dans la rue (Paris, 1909), 226, 232.

109 A.N. C 5515: Outrages aux bonnes moeurs

110 La Petite République, November 4, 1901.

111 Normandy, Le nu à l’église, 218, 235.

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revues, believed that the audience could judge the appropriateness of nude performances

“better than the censors.” One could rest assured, according to Ersky, that “if these

representations shocked it, it would not have missed [the opportunity] to show its displeasure and to provoke a scandal.”112 Estimating that Paris had hosted over two

thousand performances featuring nudity in recent years, Loüys claimed that not one of

them caused scandal or instigated protests.113

The debate over whether or not a culturally diverse, typically male audience could

regulate and channel its libido into socially acceptable behavioral responses reflected

deeper apprehensions about the rise of mass culture and the potentially harmful and

detrimental effects the music hall revue would have on the most vulnerable segments of

the population. In giving primacy to the female body as an object of fear, fascination,

veneration and sexual excitement, music hall revues incited concerns not only about a

breakdown in traditional social relations but in the psycho-sexual condition of the

individual as well. Late nineteenth-century medical practitioners, by interpreting viewing

subject positions through the lens of class and sex–specific attributes, contributed to a

gendering of visual spectatorship that was deeply informed by the exposure of women’s

bodies.114 According to British sexologist Colin Scott, the working-class male

interpreted la femme nue’s “theatrical performance with reference to the staple motifs of

112 F.A. Ersky, Est-il le nu au théâtre impudique?, (Paris, 1909), 15.

113 Pierre Louys, Le Journal, April 25, 1908, 224.

114 Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, 162. Canadian actress Maud Allan took up the role of Salome at London’s Palace Theatre of Varieties in 1907 after Loie Fuller’s benign and less sensational performance at Paris’ Comedie-Parisienne in March 1895. For further discussion of Allen’s erotic interpretation and subsequent trial, see Judith Walkowitz’s ‘The “Vision of Salome”: Cosmopolitanism and Erotic Dancing in Central London, 1908-1918' American Historical Review 108, no. 2 (April 2003): 337-376; Davinia Caddy, “Variations on the Dance of the Seven Veils,” Cambridge Opera Journal, 17, 1 (March 2005): 37-58.

257

sexual fantasy, pursuit, and pleasure,” while the female spectator took pleasure in her role

as viewing subject and, by association, viewed object.115 Regardless of who was viewing

whom, the category of “Woman” would always be construed as “a creature to be

worshipped or an object to be denigrated.”116 Whereas the medical profession reinforced

conventional understandings of sex by defining one’s ability to see and be seen in terms

of sexual difference, it was less reassuring about the working-classes’ and women’s

ability to differentiate between reality and fiction and to employ reason over instinct.

The male worker’s anchoring of sexual fantasies in and woman’s identification with la

femme nue’s debauched displays suggested to medical experts that certain social groups

suffered from a blurred vision. Lacking the knowledge and sophistication to witness

highly-nuanced forms of visual representation, minorities needed to be protected from,

rather than exposed to, signs of abnormal, deviant female sexuality.

It is interesting to note that the primary consumers of these corporeal exhibitions, a group referred to by Emile Zola and his contemporaries as “Tout-Paris,” were noticeably

absent from the professionals’ prognostications about the effects of erotic entertainment

on its viewers. Representing “the Paris of letters, of finance and of pleasure,” this

“singularly mixed world” of “perverse bourgeois” came “to the theater not to think about

or to see beautiful gestures and forms,” a journalist for L’Écho Dramatique noted, “but to

get an eyeful.”117 Having caught “the same fatigue and the same fever” as their working

115 Tracy Davis, Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture (London: Routledge, 1991), 132; idem, The Economics of the British Stage, 1800-1914 (Cambridge, 2000), 121.

116 Jane Ussher, Fantasies of Femininity: Reframing the Boundaries of Sex (New Brunswick, N.J., 1997), 84-85.

117 Emile Zola, Nana, trans. George Holden (London, 1972), 28; Gerard de Lacaze-Duthiers, “Le nu au théâtre,” L’Écho Dramatique, June 1, 1908.

258 class brothers and sisters, these patrons demonstrated an equally “visible pleasure” for spectacles “where bloomers are most often absent.”118 By virtue of their social station, however, these “good” and “honest” men and women retained a degree of respectability about them when their social inferiors did not.119 Montorgeuil highlighted the hypocrisy whereby a “crowd of gentlemen…complained only in leaving that they had not been offended enough.” One father “screamed scandal and demanded his money back” when, during a spectacle with supposedly nude women, he exclaimed: “‘What! This lady has a bodysuit!’”120 Tout-Paris’ blatant disregard for the very moral principles of propriety and bodily modesty upon which the bourgeoisie prided itself was overlooked, even dismissed, because social class remained the determining factor of one’s moral character, and consequently, one’s appropriation of an active, viewing subject position.

Challenging this assumption, some intellectuals, cultural critics, and journalists expressed faith in the common man’s ability to exert self-control and discernment. Even though young workers from the Parisian suburbs could not abstain from vulgar jokes when in the presence of erotica, St. Albin argued that the notion of sexual discipline was

“not a question of education” or class. For while the lady and gentleman looking at a marble académie may project an appearance of composure, “they felt exactly the same intoxicating sensations as our young faubouriens.”121 Having “found a lot more satisfaction in the spectacles of low neck-lines…and bawdy couplets than in the

118 Lacaze-Duthiers, “Le nu au théâtre,” L’Écho Dramatique, June 1, 1908.

119 Zola, Nana, 28; “Propos d’un Parisien,” Le Matin, June 24, 1911.

120 Georges Montorgeuil, L’année féminine, 1895: Les déshabillés au théâtre (Paris, 1896), 10.

121 St. Albin, “Le nu au théâtre,” 460.

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contemplation of human beauty,” bourgeois and working-class spectators alike attended the music hall for the same reasons, sharing “a goal very different from that of artistic research.”122

The realization that ideal beauty did not exist solely in the paintings of Bisson and

Bouguereau but in real life was, on the one hand, an attempt to erase the boundaries of

high and low culture as well as a program of acculturation intended to elevate the general

public’s good taste by instilling in it a deeper appreciation of the human form. 123 Behind a cloak of aestheticism, male spectators hid more prurient interests to see women d’après la nature by equating patronage of le nu au théâtre with the appreciation of feminine beauty. Because nudity “left nothing to the imagination and to dreaming,” supporters of striptease considered it “less obscene” than clothing.124 Rather than hiding the naked

body, garments paradoxically drew attention to it.125 Even the use of antique drapery, which was light, fluid, and oftentimes transparent, facilitated the revelation of one’s bodily form instead of obscuring one’s sight of it. Such “subtleties” whereby a revue would put on display “pretty persons undressed down to the waist” but not allow “their legs to be nude down to the knees” exasperated one critic who felt that, in order “to exalt the beauties of Woman,” ‘les girls’ should wear “nothing but skin.”126 By posing them in

122 Normandy, Le nu à l’église, 218; Arnyvelde, “Les trois nudités,” Le Matin, July 27, 1908, 3.

123 Ibid., 238. It is unclear from his quote as to which Bisson Normandy was referring to: Louis-Auguste or his brother Auguste Rosalie. The latter is more likely as Louis-Auguste was most known for his paintings of horses.

124 Lacaze-Duthiers, “Le nu au théâtre,” L’Echo Dramatique, June 1, 1908.

125 Anne Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes, (New York, 1978), 83; Bernard Rudofsky, The Unfashionable Body (Garden City, N.Y., 1974), 26.

126 Paris Qui Chante, April 7, 1907.

260 a state of semi-undress, directors frustrated, rather than suppressed, one’s desire to see the unadorned female body. In having reached a certain level of maturity where it could detect the slightest hint of immorality, the mass public could experience emotional and physical pleasure, as well as intellectual and spiritual stimulation, from the sight a beautiful undressed girl.127

Moreover, attempts by conservative elements of French society and the state to impose a standard by and through which art was to be produced and represented cast doubt on the intellectual acuity and moral probity of those in charge of the theaters. For its part, “the theater world” remained “very respectful of rules,” not liking “to get mixed up with the police and courts of law.”128 One journalist, remarking how theater directors and managers were uninterested in “producing a scandal in their halls which could cause a serious prejudice,” asked the state why it could “not leave them responsible for their acts?”129 Directors interpreted the government’s application of a condescending, high- minded code of bourgeois ethics to the theater as an act of emasculation upon their manhood. “Leave the directors alone” another paper clamored, for theater directors, like other honest, hard-working men, “have the right to be masters of their own homes; let them be responsible for works that they play, and, if by their chance there is a scandal, let them suffer the consequences; then the impresarios will become more severe than censorship itself.”130 A “culture of consolation” similar to the one that existed in the

127 Shellard et.al., The Lord Chamberlain Regrets, 6.

128 St. Albin, “Le nu au théâtre,” 456.

129 La France, February 5, 1893.

130 Français, December 11, 1901.

261

British theater was envisioned whereby music hall managers would practice self-

censorship as a means of avoiding the revocation of licenses and profit losses.131 By

leaving “the matter entirely up to the manager’s ‘good taste not to outrage public

feeling,’” the French could follow the British example, making censorship more palatable

to its staunchest opponents by involving them rather than alienating them from the

process.132

Artists, theater directors, and spectators alike rejected the bourgeois notion of moral

guardianship inherent in debates concerning artistic representation, spectatorship, and

separate spheres. Sharing the belief that “the stage, including its gestural and

vestimentary components, was to be governed by audiences’ freedom to pay or not to

pay,” opponents of censorship regarded freedom of the theater as a social benefit and an

economic good that connoted and promoted national strength and prosperity.133 The

circulation and exchange of ideas, discourses, practices, and people that converted fin-de- siècle France into a modern industrial society, equally applied to matters concerning art

and the theater, as relations between the individual, social body, and state underwent

further transformation in the twentieth-century.

Arguments For and Against Censorship

The debate over whether or not theatrical censorship should continue to exist in

131 Penelope Summerfield, “The Effingham Arms and the Empire: Deliberate selection in the evolution of music hall in London,” in Eileen Yeo and Stephen Yeo, eds., Popular Culture and Class Conflict, 1590- 1914: Explorations in the History of Labour and Leisure (Brighton, 1981), 209-240.

132 Davis, Economics of the British Stage, 128.

133 Ibid., 134-135.

262

spite of the 1881 law permitting freedom of the press became a major issue by the turn-

of-the century. The debate, which was covered by all the major Parisian dailies, affected

the provinces as much as the capital. Divisions that had grown apparent in places like

Nantes, where ideological battles were fought between “the ones who called for the prohibition of all immoral and anti-social plays, the others demanding that one not institute a special morality,” were said to exist everywhere.134 Meanwhile, the

Commission responsible for carrying out theatrical censorship had developed a reputation

for being “very polite” and agreeable in its dealings “with the authors and the

directors.”135 People in the entertainment industry and media noted how, over time “less

and less corrections were made to manuscripts.”136 A journalist for the paper Français

wrote in 1901 that Anastasie “does not bother anyone and its examinations have become

inoffensive. The famous scissors or the blue or red pencils, so long the bugbear of

playwrights, remains in the drawers. In the corners of the manuscript’s pages, are some

timid scribbles in order to show that one has read it. And that is it.”137 So why then was

theatrical censorship, an institution which apparently only existed in name, such a volatile

subject in the closing decades of the Belle Époque?

Those opposed to theatrical censorship made several claims as to why it should be

abolished, none of which had to do with the Commission per say but with the practical

and ideological aspects pertaining to and underpinning the bureaucratic institution.

134 “La Censure est rétablie,” Paris Théâtre, January 11, 1908.

135 “Encore la censure,” Francais, December 11, 1901.

136 Krakovitch, “La Censure des spectacles,” 71.

137 “Encore la censure,” Francais, December 11, 1901.

263

Among these was the obstacle it posed to artists in obtaining a decent living. The submission of three manuscript copies required for examination of a work was deemed

“excessive” when one considered that “the visa does not offer a single guarantee to the author with regard to artistic copyright or the execution of the work.”138 The amount of

time involved in completing this examination, which usually took fifteen days, was

believed to be “too long,” and did not even include “the time lost beforehand by the

author” who went in search of a director willing to perform his work. Moreover, the

modifications demanded by censors rendered “the song, play, or act almost meaningless.”

Since an artwork’s “true character” derived from those individuals “truly responsible” for

its interpretation, that is to say the authors, directors, and comedians, the government

could not execute an “exact account of the effect of a work.”139 Such alterations to a

work appeared even more suspect when one witnessed how “certain complaints” and

“unjustified appreciations” by League members were expressed vis à vis censors, a

practice which called into question the Commission’s role as an objective and neutral

arbiter of taste and morals.140

Before a work had even passed through the censors’ hands, playwrights and songwriters were forced to make a considerable financial investment, one that collectively amounted to 10,000 to 12,000 francs of annual state revenue.141 Arguing that

138Artists deposited manuscript copies with the Ministry of Public Instruction and Beaux-Arts, the Dépôt légal, and the Commission d’examen.

139 A.N. F21 1330: Proposition de loi #1167 presented by Antonin Proust on the freedom of the theaters with regard to the repeal of the Law of July 30, 1850.

140 A.N. F21 1331: “La Censure,” September 13, 1905.

141 “Encore la censure,” Francais, December 11, 1901.

264 these proceeds helped to support the cost of theatrical censorship, the state requested additional personnel to oversee the artists, their works, and the theaters. Such bureaucratic growth, it was believed, would only “aggravate the responsibilities of the government” and lead to an increasingly interventionist state.142 According to critics, the problem with preventive censorship was that it functioned as “a substitute” for “giving to the government a role which does not belong to it.”143 One journalist questioned the role and function of the Commission as an extraneous, unnecessary extension of the French civil service. “Has one need of a commission in order to avoid bureaucratic complication? Not in the least bit as two inspectors attending rehearsals would amply suffice in order to demand the suppression of dangerous passages.” In essence, the

Commission d’examen operated as part of an archaic patronage system where individuals loyal to the government were rewarded with honorific titles and vacuous positions that not only cut into taxpayers’ pockets but robbed the censors themselves of using their talents elsewhere. “The suppression of censorship would be welcomed by all citizens, maybe even by the censors themselves who could find employment” in more socially useful institutes like the National Conservatory.144 In brief, censorship created a labyrinthine web that was bureaucratic, costly, and professionally limiting for the individuals involved.

Despite their obsession with the day-to-day minutiae of governmental censorship, critics pointed out that censorship was entirely inconsonant with and contrary to

142 A.N. C 5515: Théâtres

143 Proposition de loi #1167

144 “Encore la censure,” Francais, December 11, 1901.

265

republican ideals established under and protected by the Third Republic. The fact that

France’s neighbor to the north, Belgium, had abolished all forms of censorship in 1830

while maintaining a constitutional monarchy highlighted this incongruity. “Must it exist

in a country where one lives under a republic?” opponents asked.145 “Republicans under

every regime,” Le Matin declared, risked and lost their lives for “the suppression of this

institution.”146 Nothing was more repugnant to the ideals of the Revolution and the

memory of its heroes than the preservation of despotic, monarchical practices under a

seemingly democratic government.

Convinced that they were living “in a period of repression,” the French people

deplored the state’s attempt to retain guardianship over its subjects. “What singular way to understand freedom than to put restrictive laws everywhere, to hold everyone in guardianship? Never, under a single regime, was there less freedom; never was there as

much vexation.”147 Roujon, as the “High Priest of Social Hypocrisy,” kept the citizens of

France in darkness, giving them the pretense of maturity while scrutinizing what they could and could not see. Dismissing his claim that the theater operated as a school of indecency, critics argued that the application of “droit commun (common law)” should be afforded to “all manifestations of thought and human action.” Implicit in this statement was the assertion that the public could exercise the same degree of discernment in the theater as with “the novel, the arts, painting, sculpture.”148 Censorship’s disregard for the

145 Ibid.

146 “Contre Elle,” Le Matin, November 14, 1901.

147 “La Censure,” Le Matin, October 6, 1888.

148 “Contre Elle,” Le Matin, November 14, 1901.

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principles of freedom and liberty violated the Republic’s pledge to liberal individualism

especially where “the repertoire of the theaters and those for of the café-concert” were

concerned.149

Others argued that contrary to what one might think, the maintenance and continuation of censorship would actually worsen, rather than ameliorate, the perceived tidal wave of pornography flooding onto Parisian stages. One bureaucrat’s admission

that “the overflow of obscenities only began with the re-establishment of censorship,”

confirms that the banning of a work only made it more visible and attractive to a public in

search of novelty.150

Inconsistencies in the ways in which the police and censors judged pieces created

another source of tension for the state and artists.151 Some agents showed a greater

degree of tolerance than others when it came to policing the ambiguously defined concept

of obscenity. Censors, as well as the police, had an equally hard time determining what

was morally acceptable in verse, gesture, and song. Senator and league member

d’Estournelles de Constant complained of how some censors took a firmer position

against certain kinds of performances than others. D’Estournelles questioned why the

censors chose to “attack only songs and not theater pieces and all the other pornographic

performances which organize themselves in plain view under the watch of censorship.”152

149 Theodore Cahu, “Anastasie,” La France, February 5, 1893.

150 A.N. C 5515: Théâtres

151 This was not the case in Great Britain where censorship was “exercised with consistency.” According to Tracy Davis, British censors were much more concerned with facilitating the public’s interest rather than regulating it. See Davis, Economics of the British Stage, 115.

152 Eyquem, De la morale publique, 163.

267

Although songs had long been considered a subversive form of communication, the

difficulty for censors in examining theatrical performances centered on where to draw the

line between humor and sarcasm. 153 Leo Marches, journalist for L’Événement, brought

this point to light when he asked why censors tolerated in a revue the very things they

disapproved of in a comedy?154 Paradoxically, a comedy performed at the Palais Royal

“could not be permitted as a revue on the floor of a café-concert” because the mass public

possessed “vulnerabilities” that audiences of the official theaters did not.155 The

insinuation being made here was two-fold: first, that there were different expectations of

what one would see when one visited a theater as opposed to a music hall and second,

that the audiences of the two differed in their knowledge and sophistication. The

presumption of bourgeois moralists that one form of art was more sanitized than another

because of its locale and target audience, no longer seemed appropriate in a period where

the blurring of class distinctions was made possible with the emergence of consumer

culture, increased social mobility, and greater discretionary income.

Despite the compelling arguments made against the retention of theatrical censorship, there were individuals who promoted its usefulness within society.

Proponents countered that the state of censorship was far less severe than in the past. In a document intended for the Minister of Public Instruction, a government official noted that the Inspection des théâtres had received, since the establishment of theatrical censorship in August 1850, over 25,748 works to be reviewed. However, in the short span of time

153 TJ Clark, Painting and Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (New York, 1985) ?.

154 Leo Marches, L’Événement, March 10, 190?

155 A.N. F21 1330: Report to Minister of Public Instruction and Beaux-Arts, December 14, 1891.

268

that separated the abolition of censorship and its re-establishment, from March 1848 to

August 1850, the number of plays forbidden prior to 1848 was considerably greater than

those plays forbidden during the forty-one years of preventive censorship.156 Rather than

restricting the freedom of artistic expression, the establishment of theatrical censorship

had ushered in a “regime of absolute freedom,” having given “birth to innumerable cafés-

concerts in Paris and to infinite spectacles of which the repertoire, if it was not expunged

from a moral point of view, surpassed all the licentiousness that one could imagine.”

Republican ministers relied on censorship, “not for political reasons,” but to “protect

people” from plays and songs “considered dangerous from the point of view of public

order.”157

Even if one tried, the belief that one could “not suppress censorship in suppressing censors” implied that censorship would continue to exist in varying degrees and form because the public lacked the powers necessary to regulate moral obscenities on its own.

Henri des Houx, a journalist for Le Figaro, reaffirmed this last point in stating that “The

protest of young people with taste” would “not suffice to prevent these exhibitions.”158

What was needed was for the government’s role in such matters to be strengthened, “to

improve rather than to suppress” censorship which “sins by insufficiency and not by

excess.”159 With the passage of a “special bill,” the old imperial blueprint for censorship

could be replaced with a more modern, republican, and therefore legitimate, version.

156 A.N. F21 1331: Note for the Minister of Public Instruction and Beaux-Arts

157 A.N. F21 1330: Note on Censorship from 1791 on.

158 “Plus de Censure,” Le Figaro, October 6, 1901?

159 Ibid.

269

Amending some of censorship’s antiquated powers would make it more responsible,

responsive, and less repressive.160

One commonly held reason for censorship’s failure was that the growth of the

entertainment industry had exceeded the number of governmental officials allocated and

responsible for its oversight. Camille Doucet, President of the Societé des Auteurs

Dramatique and former Head of the Bureau des théâtres under the Second Empire,

expressed his desire to see censorship maintained by proposing that the number of

personnel be increased to give it more authority and comprehensiveness. Before a

legislative commission called to investigate the efficacy of censorship, Doucet described

the scenario in which the Head of the Bureau des théâtres would be find if the budgetary

allocations for censors were not renewed.

Not having censors, I would be condemned to read every theater piece and three hundred cafés-concerts songs that one submits each day for our approval. In these conditions, I would not even have the time to defend my budget before the commission. I would no longer be able to fill the functions of the censor.161

A debate over whether or not the government should continue to appropriate funds for an entity which provided a poor return on the state’s money transpired throughout the

1880s, 1890s, and early 1900s, particularly during the legislature’s annual budgetary sessions. Despite his own admission that he was an opponent of the institution, then

Minister of Public Instruction Edouard Lockroy argued for the continued monetary apportionment for inspectors. For as long as the law of July 30, 1851 remained unchanged, Lockroy asserted, “it will be necessary for censors to apply it” and for him

160 Ibid.

161 A.N. C 5515: Théâtres

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“to ensure its application and respect it.”162 One could not eliminate the post of censor or the Commission d’examen legally without amending provisions within the law first.

E. Bouillou of the Societé anonyme du Nouveau Repertoire des concerts de Paris,

in articulating a position that while tangential to Lockroy’s was diametrically opposed to

that of Doucet’s, provided further evidence that various viewpoints and strategies were proffered for theatrical censorship’s reform. Rather than maintain or increase the number of governmental personnel responsible for censoring theatrical works, he claimed that a reduction in bureaucrats was needed. In a letter to the Minister of Finance requesting that censorship “not be suppressed, especially for the café-concert,” he proposed that a new system be devised whereby “all authors of words or song, monologues, etc. can address his work himself to the administration of Beaux Arts.” This practice, by preventing an artist’s work from passing “through the hands of a concert director,” would eliminate third parties and streamline the censoring process. If the government were then to charge

“two francs for each visa given,” it would be able to raise the revenue to pay its few employees. If Bouillou’s estimate of the average number of songs ranging between 8-

9,000 per year was correct, then the small cadre of censors and inspectors could be paid

“without costing a centime to the state.”163 This system would be of benefit to the

government financially and defuse arguments by those who resented governmental

expenditures on censorship.

162 “La Censure: Conversation avec M. Le Ministre de l’Instruction Publique,” Le Matin, October 6, 1888.

163 A.N. F21 1330: Letter dated January 30, 1892 from Société Anonyme du Nouveau Répertoire des concerts de Paris, to the Minister of Finance.

271

In response to critics’ protests that censorship infringed upon an individual’s

natural rights to life, liberty, and property, advocates of the institution sowed seeds of

doubt as to whether every individual had the moral sensibilities, restraint, and knowledge

to discriminate between good and bad art. “My God I understand this ardent thirst for

freedom, this desire to say anything without constraint, especially within the home of a man who has always wanted to affirm what he thinks,” stated one member of the press.

“However, it is necessary to maintain censorship. It is necessary in the interest of public

morality. One must render it more...absolute authority, yet without the control.”164

Theatrical expression, according to proponents, differed from other forms of media for its live, unmediated quality and ability to reach mass audiences. The creation of new modes of perception at the end of the century shared “a desire to convey the immediacy and specificity of the material world as people experienced it.”165 The naturalism that

infiltrated representations of modern life in novels by writers like Zola acquired a whole

new level of intensity and influence when performed in the theater. The Minister of

Public Instruction and Beaux-Arts argued that the effect of a book, “read individually,

can not be compared to that of a play represented in front of numerous audiences.”166

Without actively engaged, critical spectators, the government felt a responsibility to

protect “society against the all too lively attacks of the theater.”167 Believing that

“censorship should only forbid pornographic works,” supporters claimed that the

164 “La Censure,” journal unknown, 1901?

165 Charles Sowerwine, France Since 1870: Culture, Politics, and Society (New York, 2001), 47.

166 Letter dated June 1, 1891 from the Minister of Public Instruction and Beaux Arts to the Chamber

167 La Petite République, September 17, 1901.

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institution simply prohibited those “things good to prohibit,” namely representations of social issues that might incite political upheaval, jeopardize diplomatic relations with foreign nations, or challenge conventional wisdom.168 Unlike the army or established

religion, which as institutions of social control teetered like seesaws between opposing

views, theatrical censorship steadfastly served French families as their unwavering moral

protector. This service, proponents recognized, “has its price when it informs [the public]

of…noisy protests against plays insulting to respectable beliefs or exhibiting those too little dressed.” And yet, the price of censorship was worth paying when one considered that censorship was “not social hypocrisy” as some charged, but “justice and truth, with a capital ‘J’ and ‘T.’”169

A middle position expressed in this debate asserted that public order, authority, and

the law, while sheltering the public “from attacks from the stage,” needed to recognize

that “at the same time, freedom must not be too restrictive” for authors had “the right to

proclaim truth” as well.170 One journalist exclaimed that in order to be fair, “It is the

commission’s duty to hear not only the censors and their general-in-chief, the Director of

Beaux-Arts, but also the condemned authors” whose grievances needed to be taken into

account.171 “There is no other remedy than to proclaim the freedom of the theaters,” one

individual wrote, “and to bestow theater directors and the entrepreneurs of spectacles, as

168 La France, the writer goes on to say, “still I do not speak of the nudities which are of art or crude nudities which are only of beetle powder which the sale is forbidden with the doctor’s prescription.”

169 Gaston Jollivet, “Notes Parisiennes,” Le Gaulois, November 22, 1901.

170 A.N. F21 1330: Note on Censorship, n.d.

171 “Censeurs d’autrefois,” La Libre Parole May 29, 1901.

273 well as those who assist them, the responsibilities of preventive censorship which up until now has neglected to be given to them.” Since an artwork’s “true character” derived from those “truly responsible” for its interpretation, that is to say the authors, directors, and comedians, the government could not expect a censor to “render an exact account of the effect of a work.” By abolishing censorship, the government was making those individuals more, not less, responsible for their actions.172

There was little disagreement between the two sides that the experiment in theatrical censorship had failed. “Entrepreneurs of scandalous spectacles abuse the freedom that is left to them to say everything,” stated one cultural critic, and yet

“censorship functions without tact and without care.”173 The government’s inability or unwillingness to enforce theatrical censorship, evidenced by the Congress of Bordeaux’s observation that administrators, prefects, and mayors no longer forbad illicit theatrical performances, by default left the public as the sole authority “to exercise this moral control abandoned by the government.” Even though advocates on both sides of the censorship debate disagreed on the utility of the institution and who should have the power to administrate it, they shared a common aspiration to see “an enlightened censorship” implemented. Guided by the invisible hand of the marketplace and the principles of a modern republic, this new form of censorship would be allowed to

“distinguish between gauloiserie and grivoiserie” and regulate itself.174

172 Proposition de loi #1167

173 Paris Théâtre, May 2, 1908, 3.

174 Ibid.; Eyquem, De la morale publique, 162-163.

274

Proposals to suppress theatrical censorship had been put before Commissions d’initiative or investigative committees of the Chamber several times after its establishment on July 30, 1850. This law, which was never supposed to have been permanent, was formulated and adopted as a temporary measure until a law creating a separate policing mechanism for the theaters had been formulated and passed. Since the adoption of such a law never took place, the old law stayed on the legal books and received added credibility when it was transformed into an imperial decree on December

30, 1852. Throughout the Second Empire and the Third Republic, the French government continued to register this law, maintaining what was politely referred to as preventive censorship.

The first major challenge to the 1850 law occurred with the outbreak of the Franco-

Prussian war when Jules Simon put before the Chamber a proposition for its suppression on September 30, 1870. This proposition, signed by the Government of National

Defense, temporarily abolished censorship as it applied to the theaters. Less than three years later on February 1, 1874, Marshal MacMahon re-established the 1850 law, which remained in effect without interruption until the twentieth-century. Demands to end theatrical censorship, however, continued unabated until they reached a climax in the early 1890s when Deputies Charles Le Senne and Antonin Proust proposed bills would have eliminated censors’ salaries and repealed the 1850 law respectively.175 A committee

under the leadership of Deputy Guillemet conducted hearings on the matter, interviewing

some of France’s most celebrated writers and foremost authorities on the theater.

Arguments made for and against theatrical censorship, echoing those discussed in the

175 See Propositions des lois #1166 and 1167 of January 1891.

275

previous section, were taken into account before the commission recommended the

temporary suspension of the 1850 law for a three-year trial period.

Having introduced the report at the end of one of its parliamentary sessions, the

Chamber essentially killed the Commission’s findings by neglecting to take a final vote on the matter. From that point forward, preventive censorship became a political hot potato that fell into the hands of conservative Republicans fearful of the socialist threats that were flaring up in the 1890s. Not until 1901 did preventive censorship face its second major challenge when artists, wanting to produce Eugene Brieux’s controversial

play about prostitution and venereal disease Les Avariés, lobbied the government for a

visa. Shortly thereafter, a shift in political power from Centrists to Radical Republicans

enabled the first of the four censors’ salaries to be eliminated in 1904, followed by the

remaining three a year later. 176

As efforts “to curtail the music halls’ defiance of moral values” lessened, attempts

to produce the most outrageous acts on stage escalated.177 In the years leading up to

1914, a government-sanctioned experiment characterized the moral climate of the theater

as directors used their own moral discretion in matters of aesthetic production. With free reign as to how and what one presented on stage, directors tested the different effects of

lighting, costumes, acting, and scenery on their audiences. Central to the rise of modernist theater was that the body surpassed the spoken word as the primary form of expression in performance.178 The popularity of pantomime and nude dancing in the first

176 Charnow, Popular Practices/Modern Forms, 103-105.

177 Davis, Economics of the British Stage, 67.

178 Charnow, Popular Practices/Modern Forms, 134; Judy Burns, “The Culture of Nobility/ The Nobility of Self-Cultivation,” in Gay Morris, ed., Moving Words/Rewriting Dance (London, 1996), 203.

276

decade of the twentieth-century attested to the importance of naturalism in the theater as the

body-in-performance became a site of spectacle and identity formation. Nothing was more

neutralizing and unifying to cross-culturally mixed audiences than the nude body, a point of

convergence for high and low cultural practices such as pantomime, tableaux vivants, and

nude dancing. Directors felt that they had been given a creative license to display the body

in whatever manner once the legal punishments and religious invectives that had regulated

the amount of clothing a woman wore on stage were removed completely after the

separation of Church and State and the abolition of preventive censorship in 1905.179 La

femme nue, so they assumed, could now enjoy “the honor of public admiration” without fear of moral or legal censure.180

And yet as the number of plays featuring strip-tease acts and veiled dancers

multiplied, Bérenger’s judiciary pursuits against la femme nue intensified.181 To say, as

Charles Rearick does, that the “shit hit the ceiling” between preventive censorship’s

abolition and re-establishment, would be an understatement if one only examined the

literary and lyrical insults that ensued in the interim.182 But by taking into account the

performative arts, Chapter Five demonstrates that the consequences of suppressing

theatrical censorship for the state, theater directors, and femmes nues were indeed severe.

In the nine-year period that Parisians experienced freedom of the theaters, a series of

trials involving the indecent exposure of femmes nues in Parisian music halls and

179 Abel Maillefaud, “De l’outrage à la pudeur,” Faculté de droit de Lyon, 1896.

180 Normandy, Le nu à l’église, 287.

181 Schnapper, “Le Sénateur René Bérenger,” Annales de la Faculté de droit d’Istanbul, no. 42, 1979, 249.

182 Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Époque.

277

restaurants mapped out the boundaries by which a woman could express herself

physically.

In short, the emergence of the femme nue within Belle Époque entertainment

provides the historian with a useful lens for understanding how body culture shaped

debates concerning public morality and theatrical censorship—two issues of paramount

importance on the eve of the Great War. The struggle to redefine previously stable

definitions of art and pornography and public and private spheres involved the

performative female nude as a site of contestation. Her debut on Paris music-hall stages

gave occasion for two very distinct visions of French society to be articulated. On the

one hand, an older paternalist model sought to empower traditional social structures (i.e.

the government and social elites) with the right to exercise moral authority by restricting

the public’s access to potentially harmful spectacles. On the other hand, a more

individualist model, one that favored choice and agency over social privilege and

custodianship, offered the average French person an alternative standard by which s/he

could interact with society at large.183 Consequently, the social, political, and legal

turmoil engendered by femme nue performances led to a reconfiguration of social

relations and values that gave new meaning to the body and its place in modernity.

183 Leora Auslander, Taste and Power: Furnishing in Modern France (Berkeley, Calif., 1996) and “The Gendering of Consumer Practices in Nineteenth-Century France,” in Victoria de Grazia and Ellen Furlough, eds., The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective (Berkeley, Calif., 1996), 79-112.

CHAPTER 6 PHYRNÉ BEFORE HER JUDGES

In the 1897 ballet-pantomime Phryné, the Folies-Bergère represented the legendary

story of an artist’s model whose impeccable beauty made her the toast of ancient Athens.

Best remembered for the bronze statue cast in her image by the famous sculptor

Praxiteles, Phryné moved among the highest echelons of Greek society, enjoying

celebrity status and fame until a malicious accusation of impropriety launched by a

jealous lover tragically led to her arrest and eventual trial. Based on the advice of

counsel, Phryné’s presentation before the court as “celle qui se souvient de la vertu”

entailed the removal of her veils so that jurors could attest to her irresistible yet chaste

figuration of living art.1 Overwhelmed by her “soft, tender, almost mystical” movement,

not to mention feminine beauty, the jury “praised the admirable heroine, the divine woman, the triumphant Beauty” as irreproachable and blameless.2 (See Figure 1.)

In the ten-year period following her appearance on the Folies-Bergère stage,

Phryné’s popularity as a cultural representation spread. As mentioned in Chapter 3,

Phryné became a recognizable figure of the advertising world, selling Russian cigarettes along with sundry other exotic and foreign products. However by 1908, her cultural representation had acquired a tinge of reality as the press evoked her name to show its distaste for the recent arrests, trials, and condemnations of France’s own contemporary

1 Paul Girard, “La Veritable Phyrné: Les légendes qui se transforment,” Fantasio, August 1, 1911, 24.

2 A.N. F18 1045: Folies-Bergère program.

278 279

femmes nues. Having attained new meaning, the renowned story of Phryné resonated

with and symbolically represented the debate over nude spectacles in Belle Époque

France.3

Figure 6-15: Phryné devant ses juges

In telling this story, journalists made allusion to contemporary femmes nues who,

like their ancient predecessor, had come to the capital city with the hope of making “a

quick fortune.” With their veils “carefully draped” over their bodies, they too had

advanced “the art of dressing oneself,” only to be criticized by “suspect witnesses” who

had “never attended the charming spectacle” featuring the lovely ladies.4 In defense of these innocent victims, the cultural critic Georges Normandy contested that these women did not possess a “scorn for the laws” oftentimes expressed by poets and writers who

3 L’Écho Dramatique, May 1, 1908, 2-3.

4 Girard, “La Veritable Phryné,” Fantasio, August 1, 1911, 24.

280 intentionally challenged and awaited persecution for their outrages. Modern Phrynés’

“are courageous before the public, but pusillanimous before the commissioner” when it came to exposing themselves both literally and figuratively.5 “If the current pursuits do not terminate themselves, as one presumes, by an acquittal pure and simple,” Normandy warned, “the nude spectacles will begin again.”6 However this time, instead of being honored by posterity like the classical Phryné, modern femmes nues would be degraded.

By not exhibiting the same “sincere admiration” for the living beauty found in “more liberal societies,” France jeopardized its standing as one of the world’s most advanced and civilized nations.7

This next chapter analyzes the French state’s attempts to navigate through the legal morass of issues raised by la femme nue. Central to the state’s role in regulating Parisian nightlife was the attribution of responsibility and guilt for obscene exhibitions, the determination of appropriate theatrical display, dress, and behavior for actresses, the delineation of ethical and legal obligations within contract law, and the resolution of who would be the primary arbiter of taste and morals in modern France—the state, the public, the theater or some combination of the three.

Section One sets the backdrop for the following two sections, illustrating the way in which fears of degeneration were specifically linked to la femme nue and the consumption of her bodily spectacle by socially mixed audiences. Arguments made for and against public access to erotic entertainment cited the importance of class and sex in

5 Normandy, Le nu à l’église, 232.

6 Ibid.

7 Girard, “La Veritable Phryné,” Fantasio, August 1, 1911, 24.

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determining spectators’ responses. Whereas cultural elites relied on a medical discourse

that infantalized the working classes and female sex as easily aroused, impressionable spectators, proponents of mass culture relied on a language of individual autonomy, good judgment, and discretion to legitimize the public’s spectatorship of nude revues. A logical extension of the assumption that the French public had a right to see anything it wanted included the assertion that an actress possessed the right to appear on stage anyway she wanted. Through an examination of press articles and court transcripts,

Sections Two and Three show how the views of actresses, spectators, critics, litigants, the state and judges towards nudity in Parisian theaters shifted dramatically in the time just before and right after the abolition of censorship in the theater. By focusing upon a series of sensational court cases that occurred in the decade prior to World War One involving le nu au théâtre, this chapter demonstrates that a relaxation of attitudes with regard to the spectacle of la femme nue were coupled with what Elaine Showalter calls “strict border controls” around definitions of decency, art, public and private spheres, and notions of femininity.8

Fears of Degeneration

The elimination of popular associations of the naked body with shame was due in

large measure to an expansion in visual culture that enabled the female nude to be

appreciated by a broader audience through a number of different mediums and venues.

For writer F.A. Ersky, the performative nude represented the offspring and modern

incarnation of artistic nudes first painted by Gustave Courbet and successive realist-

impressionist painters. Having “entered into our mores” via museums, galleries, and

8 Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin-de-Siècle (New York, 1990), 4.

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Salons, performances featuring the ‘living’ female nude should, in his opinion, be

accorded the same honors and status as any other piece of art. His 1909 pamphlet,

entitled Is the Nude in the Theater Indecent? essentially argued for the dissolution of

deeply-entrenched tenets of bourgeois morality that separated high from low culture,

private from public spheres.9

The debate over whether or not audiences were mentally competent and

emotionally mature enough to handle exposure to such luscious visions reflected deeper apprehensions about the rise of mass culture and the potentially harmful and detrimental effects the music hall would have on the most vulnerable segments of the population.

More often than not, those tied to the status quo viewed the music hall’s ability to spread information, shape public opinion, and change social mores in a negative light.10 The proliferation of these new entertainment establishments throughout the country, in tandem with the extension of their repertoire to a wider public, troubled certain individuals who blamed music halls for introducing “base shows that spread and sell poison.”11 In giving primacy to the female body as an object of fear, fascination,

veneration and sexual excitement, music hall revues elicited concerns as to whether a

culturally diverse, typically male audience could regulate and channel its libido into

socially acceptable behavioral responses.

9 F.A. Ersky, Est-il le nu au théâtre impudique? (Paris, 1909), 15.

10 Regina Sweeney, Singing to Victory: French Cultural Politics and Music during the Great War (Middletown, Conn., 2001), 138.

11 Jules Simon as quoted in Charles Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Époque: Entertainment and Festivity in Turn-of-the-Century France, (New Haven, Conn., 1985), 101.

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That la femme nue’s body could “light up dormant perversion in men,” as well as

women, meant that the problem of “men about town drinking in the music hall

promenade, being stimulated by the performance of the girls on stage and solicited by the

prostitutes who patrolled the bars,” was more than just a societal problem as intimated by

Roques.12

The scope of la femme nue’s pathological effects on traditional social relations such as the family widened to include the individual spectator who became a subject of

fin-de-siècle psycho-sexual discourse. Late nineteenth-century medical practitioners

contributed to a gendering of visual spectatorship by interpreting viewing subject

positions through the lens of class and sex–specific attributes.13 According to British

sexologist Colin Scott, the working-class male interpreted la femme nue’s “theatrical

performance with reference to the staple motifs of sexual fantasy, pursuit, and pleasure,”

while the female spectator took pleasure in her role as viewing subject and, by

association, viewed object.14 Regardless of who was viewing whom, the category of

“Woman” would always be construed as “a creature to be worshipped or an object to be denigrated.”15 Whereas the medical profession reinforced conventional understandings

12 Gavin Weightman, Big Lights, Big City London Entertained, 1830-1950 (London, 1992), 81.

13 Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, 162. Canadian actress Maud Allan took up the role of Salome at London’s Palace Theatre of Varieties in 1907 after Loie Fuller’s benign and less sensational performance at Paris’ Comedie-Parisienne in March 1895. For further discussion of Allen’s erotic interpretation and subsequent trial, see Judith Walkowitz’s ‘The “Vision of Salome”: Cosmopolitanism and Erotic Dancing in Central London, 1908-1918' American Historical Review 108, no. 2 (April 2003): 337-376; Davinia Caddy, ‘Variations on the Dance of the Seven Veils,’ Cambridge Opera Journal, 17, 1 (March 2005): 37-58.

14 Tracy Davis, Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture (London: Routledge, 1991), 132; idem, The Economics of the British Stage, 1800-1914 (Cambridge, 2000), 121.

15 Jane Ussher, Fantasies of Femininity: Reframing the Boundaries of Sex (New Brunswick, N.J., 1997), 84-85.

284 of sex by defining one’s ability to see and be seen in terms of sexual difference, it was less reassuring about the working-classes’ and women’s ability to differentiate between reality and fiction and to employ reason over instinct. The male worker’s anchoring of sexual fantasies in and woman’s identification with la femme nue’s debauched displays suggested to medical experts that certain social groups suffered from a blurred vision.

Lacking the knowledge and sophistication to witness highly-nuanced forms of visual representation, minorities needed to be protected from, rather than exposed to, signs of abnormal, deviant female sexuality.

It is interesting to note that the primary consumers of these corporeal exhibitions, a group referred to by Emile Zola and his contemporaries as Tout-Paris, were noticeably absent from the professionals’ prognostications about the effects of erotic entertainment on its viewers. Representing “the Paris of letters, of finance and of pleasure,” this

“singularly mixed world” of “perverse bourgeois” came “to the theater not to think about or to see beautiful gestures and forms,” a journalist for L’Écho Dramatique noted, “but to get an eyeful.”16 Having caught “the same fatigue and the same fever” as their working class brothers and sisters, these patrons demonstrated an equally “visible pleasure” for spectacles “where bloomers are most often absent.”17 By virtue of their social station, however, these “good” and “honest” men and women retained a degree of respectability about them when their social inferiors did not.18 Montorgeuil highlighted the hypocrisy

16 Emile Zola, Nana, trans. George Holden (London, 1972), 28; Gerard de Lacaze-Duthiers, “Le Nu au Théâtre,” L’Écho Dramatique, June 1, 1908.

17 Lacaze-Duthiers, “Le Nu au Théâtre,” L’Écho Dramatique, June 1, 1908.

18 Zola, Nana, 28; “Propos d’un Parisien,” Le Matin, June 24, 1911.

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whereby a “crowd of gentlemen…complained only in leaving that they had not been

offended enough.” One father “screamed scandal and demanded his money back” when,

during a spectacle with supposedly nude women, he exclaimed: “‘What! This lady has a

bodysuit!’”19 Tout-Paris’ blatant disregard for the very moral principles of propriety and

bodily modesty upon which the bourgeoisie prided itself was overlooked, even dismissed,

because social class remained the determining factor of one’s moral character, and

consequently, one’s appropriation of an active, viewing subject position.

Challenging this assumption, some intellectuals, cultural critics, and journalists

expressed faith in the common man’s ability to exert self-control and discernment. Even

though young workers from the Parisian suburbs could not abstain from vulgar jokes

when in the presence of erotica, St. Albin argued that the notion of sexual discipline was

“not a question of education” or class. For while the lady and gentleman looking at a

marble académie may project an appearance of composure, “they felt exactly the same

intoxicating sensations as our young faubouriens.”20 Having “found a lot more

satisfaction in the spectacles of low neck-lines…and bawdy couplets than in the contemplation of human beauty,” bourgeois and working-class spectators alike attended the music hall for the same reasons, sharing “a goal very different from that of artistic research.”21

The realization that ideal beauty did not exist solely in the paintings of Bisson and

Bouguereau but in real life was, on the one hand, an attempt to erase the boundaries of

19 Georges Montorgeuil, L’année féminine, 1895: Les déshabillés au théâtre (Paris, 1896), 10.

20 St. Albin, “Le nu au théâtre,” Mercure de France, vol. 1-4 (1911), 460.

21 Normandy, Le nu à l’église, 218; Arnyvelde, “Les Trois Nudités,” Le Matin, July 27, 1908, 3.

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high and low culture as well as a program of acculturation intended to elevate the general

public’s good taste by instilling in it a deeper appreciation of the human form. 22 Behind a cloak of aestheticism, male spectators hid more prurient interests to see women d’après la nature by equating patronage of le nu au théâtre with the appreciation of feminine beauty. Because nudity “left nothing to the imagination and to dreaming,” supporters of striptease considered it “less obscene” than clothing.23 Rather than hiding the naked body, garments paradoxically drew attention to it.24 Even the use of antique drapery,

which was light, fluid, and oftentimes transparent, facilitated the revelation of one’s bodily form instead of obscuring one’s sight of it. Such “subtleties” whereby a revue would put on display “pretty persons undressed down to the waist” but not allow “their legs to be nude down to the knees” exasperated one critic who felt that, in order “to exalt the beauties of Woman,” les girls should wear “nothing but skin.”25 By posing them in a

state of semi-undress, directors frustrated, rather than suppressed, one’s desire to see the unadorned female body.

In having reached a certain level of maturity where it could detect the slightest hint of immorality, the mass public could experience emotional and physical pleasure, as well

22 Ibid., 238. It is unclear from his quote as to which Bisson Normandy was referring to: Louis-Auguste or his brother Auguste Rosalie. The latter is more likely as Louis-Auguste was most known for his paintings of horses.

23 Lacaze-Duthiers, “Le Nu au Théâtre,” L’Echo Dramatique, June 1, 1908.

24 Anne Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes, 83; Bernard Rudofsky, The Unfashionable Body (Garden City, N.Y., 1974), 26.

25 Paris Qui Chante, April 7, 1907.

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as intellectual and spiritual stimulation, from the sight a beautiful undressed girl.26

Willette’s observation that audiences showed no signs of discomfort when confronted

with nude spectacles suggests that the average spectator expected to see, had grown

“accustom[ed] to,” and found nothing improper with the performances.27 F.A. Ersky,

claiming that he had never heard the least amount of protest regarding nude revues,

believed that the audience could judge the appropriateness of nude performances “better

than the censors.” One could rest assured, according to Ersky, that “if these

representations shocked it, it would not have missed [the opportunity] to show its displeasure and to provoke a scandal.”28

Despite “heightened fears among nationalists and conservatives of disreputable,

profligate, sexually corrupting social influences” circulating in the capital’s musical, theatrical, and drinking establishments, the public supported the belief “that a young woman of the theater currently has the right, if her role demands it, to show a little more than the base of her throat.” That “an artist can show just about everything on stage” without fear of public reprisal revealed that Parisians of the Belle Époque were “no longer scandalized by the state of the actress” when it came to her undressing in front of hundreds of spectators. 29 The theater operated as a site from which femmes nues could

claim exceptional status— allowing them the creative freedom within their performances

26 Dominic Shellard and Steve Nicholson with Miriam Handley, The Lord Chamberlain Regrets…A History of British Theater Censorship (London, 2004), 6.

27 Normandy, Le nu à l’église, 218, 235.

28 F.A. Ersky, Est-il le nu au théâtre impudique?, (Paris, 1909), 15.

29 St. Albin, “Le Nu au Théâtre,” 457.

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to meld the sexual and aesthetic realms together while dismissing their acts as products of

professional exigencies that required them to act and dress in ways that were counter to

dominant social mores and notions of femininity.30 Rather than interpreting risqué

presentations of the female body as scandalous and proof of one’s moral depravity, Erksy

suggested that critics “realize this fact: that a dancer today can have the right to

consideration, to respect, owed to any ‘decent’ woman.”31 If an actress decided “to

perform without a costume,” the famous playwright Pierre Loüys wrote, it was “a matter

between her and her confessor” and “not a matter between her and the judge.” After the abolition of preventive censorship, “the notion that a nude woman offends the decency of citizens who pay one hundred sous to see her” seemed irrelevant, and at best, absurd.

However the latest accusations and trials involving le nu au théâtre revealed that the policing of morality in the theater remained strong despite the fact that “not a single article of our laws is applicable in this circumstance.”32

Nevertheless when such performances were turned into succès de scandales, les

femmes nues demanded a degree of professional immunity by relying upon an artistic

discourse that distinguished “between ostensible intention and perceived effect.” The

1918 libel suit instigated by Maud Allan against the conservative parliamentarian Noel

Pemberton-Billing for his article “The Cult of Clitoris” is one example of how performers

protected their personal reputations from accusations of sexual perversions and social

30 As Bruce Seymour explains “Women of the theatre generally had exceptional status in society, but it was frequently that of a half-caste, of someone who did not deserve to be shamed by all decent persons but at the same time could not be received freely in their homes.” See his book about the mid-nineteeneth- century dancer Lola Montez, (New Haven, Conn., 1995).

31 Normandy, Le nu à l’église, 183.

32 Pierre Loüys, Le Journal, April 15, 1908, 224.

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transgressions.33 Conversely, these same femmes nues forwarded their careers by using these scandals to construct a cult of personality for themselves- living their private lives in very public ways while arguing that what one did on stage was not to be conflated with who one was.34

But what if an actress resisted the public’s demand and the theater’s request for

more déshabillage? What kinds of reactions would her decision not to undress elicit from spectators, moral reformers, journalists, directors, and others? Section Two illuminates a

situation that exemplifies the desire of certain Belle Époque actresses’ to prevent their

“repertoire from being reduced to a few obscene words or their costume to a pair of

gloves and a Louis XV cane.”35 Occurring just before the abolition of preventive

censorship in 1905, the 1904 trial of Madeleine Carlier vs Théâtre des Mathurins serves

as a baseline from which one can measure and compare changing attitudes towards

femininity and fashion, morality and the theater.

Le Déshabillage Obligatoire!

On January 21, 1904 Judge Lefevre-Devaux presided over the Tribunal de la

Seine’s Third Chamber to hear the case of Madeleine Carlier vs. Théâtre des Mathurins.

Carlier, a native Parisian born in 1882, made her debut at the age of sixteen as an actress

33 Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin-de-Siècle (New York, 1990), 162. Canadian actress Maud Allan took up the role of Salome at London’s Palace Theatre of Varieties in 1907 after Loie Fuller’s benign and less sensational performance at Paris’ Comedie-Parisienne in March 1895. For further discussion of Allen’s erotic interpretation and subsequent trial, see Judith Walkowitz’s ‘The “Vision of Salome”: Cosmopolitanism and Erotic Dancing in Central London, 1908-1918' American Historical Review 108, no. 2 (April 2003): 337-376; Davinia Caddy, ‘Variations on the Dance of the Seven Veils,’ Cambridge Opera Journal, 17, 1 (March 2005): 37-58.

34 Rhonda Gharelick, Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender, and Performance in the Fin-de-Siècle (Princeton, N.J., 1998), 125.

35 “Propos d’un Parisien,” Le Matin, June 24, 1911.

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on the Châtelet stage. By her twentieth birthday, Carlier was considered to be one of the

boulevardier’s most preferred “pétites étoiles (little stars).” Like Marguerite Durand who

established a career in journalism with the help of her classical “blond beauty,” Carlier

likewise enjoyed her reputation as a modern-day “Helen who would animate herself for

the eyes’ pleasure” on stages throughout Paris.36

In addition to her good looks, Carlier proved to be a “skillful and sensible actress”

who represented everything that was spiritual, respectable, and wholesome about French

culture, and in particular, its women of the theater. As the embodiment of white

bourgeois femininity, this “pretty flower of Paris art” did “not need to take out her birth

certificate in order for one to ascertain that she is Parisian down to the tip of her pink

nails.”37 That this quintessentially Parisian actress’s moral constitution would be called

into question in a dispute over le costume au théâtre touched upon the precarious and

ambiguous relationship between art and morality in Belle Époque France. The conflict,

pitting the public’s taste and the theater’s commercial interests against the actress’

personal values and need to make a living, highlighted the way in which the interests of capitalism and art created challenging predicaments for women in the entertainment industry.

Under the direction of Jules Berny, the Théâtre des Mathurins was one of Paris’ more popular music halls specializing in programs that offered “les spectacles des varietés,” defined as piano pieces, songs, monologues and poetry readings followed by a

36 Bibliothèque Arsenal, Newspaper clipping, obituary, n.d. although most likely June 1935.

37 Ibid.

291 main act which was usually a comedy, operette, or opéra burlesque.38 The hall’s shows tended to fall on the bawdy side of theatrical presentations as suggested by an 1898 program announcing that the theater’s “very eclectic” matinées were reserved

“sometimes for young girls, and sometimes for persons who do not fear a spectacle un peu plus libre.” As a tactic of self-promotion, the hall’s program cover played up its reputation as a morally questionable place by depicting a row of beady-eyed men in black tuxedos sitting mesmerized in front of a stage where a showgirl, standing in the wings, peeks from behind the stage curtain that separates her from the all-male audience. The caption underneath the program’s illustration advised customers to “Leave your concerns in the street before entering” as well as any “awkward” or “surly” expressions--a warning that piqued rather than deterred spectators’ curiosity of the hall’s edgy and erotic performances.39

It was in this setting that Berny retained Carlier to play the leading role in Madame

Michel Carée’s Fleur d’Annam. The actress, having agreed to perform the part on the condition that her costume be “decent,” later refused to execute her contract on the grounds that her costume was “too light.”40 According to her lawyer Charles Philippe,

38 After 1900, Les Mathurins’ repertoire changed to four one act plays in the genre of comedies, fantaisies, and vaudevilles.

39 Program covers depicted the titillating thrill of bourgeois males, dressed in their black tuxedos, catching a glimpse of female flesh in a style similar to popular impressionist and pointillist paintings. Like Seurat’s 1889-1890 painting Chahut, a program for the 1904-1905 Ambassadeurs revue, Aux Ambassadeurs, par une soirée fraiche…portrayed two older gentlemen looking up the skirts of showgirls as they sat in front of the stage behind the conductor’s baton.

40 Le Temps, January 23, 1904; Les Annales Théâtrales, numéro exceptionnel (January-March), “Le…déshabillage obligatoire,” 1904, 32. Unfortunately a description of the outfit was not included in the court transcript or in any of the major newspapers covering the trial. One can only surmise that the costume was similar to those worn in other performances of the same play such as the one given by the famous female author and music-hall pantomime Colette whose wardrobe consisted of….

292 the actress was determined “not to lend her beauty to a nude exhibition.” Left without a star for the opening of his new show, Berny responded by filing for damages against the actress.41

By failing to produce the costume in question, Berny and his lawyer left the court little upon which to base its decision. The emotional pleadings of a renowned actress struggling to preserve her moral stature and social standing, two attributes intimately tied to both her talent and livelihood, supplanted any conjecture as to what or how offensive the missing piece of evidence might have been. After hearing both sides of the case, the court decided in favor of Carlier citing the vulnerability that an actress opened herself up to when performing “certain roles in which the artistic exhibition” called into question her own standard of conduct. In essence, the court upheld and protected “the right of all women to preserve feelings of decency” by allowing them to disengage from a contract

“which would have for its purpose the sacrifice of such feelings.”42 The court demanded that Berny not only pay the actress one thousand francs for the cost of her defense but the court’s expenses as well.43

Articles that appeared in the daily press the following day showed strong support for Carlier in praising the verdict’s maintenance of virtue and decency. “It is obvious that an artist of great talent like Mlle. Carlier has a moral obligation exclusively to herself in role and reputation,” one journalist wrote, “and her success can not be compromised in a

41 Le Temps, January 23, 1904.

42 Gazette des Tribunaux, January 22, 1904.

43 Le Temps, January 23, 1904; Les Annales Théâtrales, (Jan-Mar) 1904, 32.

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more or less risqué décolletage.”44 Berny, the villain of the story, was described as an

“audacious director who wanted to show more of his resident actress than to what she

herself consented.”45 Obsessed with profits, impresarios cared little about the social

ramifications actresses’ faced when undertaking sexually daring roles. On behalf of La

Ligue contre la licence dans les rues, Bérenger attributed a decline in French mores and

taste to the appeal of new leisure pursuits that catered to impressionistic masses for

purely economic reasons. Consequently Parisians, and all of France, had been made to

witness the victimization of one of the country’s most renowned and highly esteemed

actresses who had been “dragged before the court by the director of her theater because

that poor child refused to wear the costume that one tried to impose on her that she found

too indecent.”46

What made this court case so significant is that contemporaries realized and acknowledged the “epoch-making” importance of the trial for the precedents it set and the weight and magnitude that the judgment itself carried.47 Its treatment of costumes, or

lack thereof, in the Parisian theater touched upon a number of issues that had far-reaching

effects and implications for society, marking it as a transitional moment in the history of

French theater, fashion, mores, and the professionalization of actresses.

First, the case demonstrated the amount of cultural capital an actress of the early

twentieth-century possessed in determining how she would appear on stage. As Lenard

44 Les annales théâtrales, (Jan-Mar) 1904, 32.

45 “Le Costume au théâtre,” Le Gaulois, January 23, 1904.

46 Le Rélevement Social, May 15, 1904.

47 “Le Costume au théâtre,” Le Gaulois, January 23, 1904.

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Berlanstein has shown, actresses acquired a degree of professional and moral legitimacy that coincided with and resulted from attempts by the Third Republic to colonize and domesticate the stereotypical unruly female performer. In return for a greater share of the public sphere and increased visibility,

stage women emerged as a source of French national identity. Fame now conferred on actresses the power and even the responsibility to instruct bourgeois women...Women’s achievement and femininity ceased to be inevitable opposites and became compatible to a significant degree...The rhetoric about moral actresses helped reconcile women as individuals in the public sphere with their roles as wives and mothers, thereby opening a pathway into the public sphere for all women.48

Their appropriation of and conformity to a womanly model of respectable

bourgeois femininity demonstrated the extent to which actresses not only manipulated

and subverted proscribed gender roles and identities but also assumed added

responsibility for their professional and personal reputations. Tantamount to an actress’s

success was her attitude and appearance on stage, two externalities that had become

“synonymous with the performers themselves, their morals, their patriotism, and their

psychology.”49

Carlier’s refusal to succumb to the erotic culture of the theater, which had become

increasingly “dependent on the sexualized body,” indicates that not every actress

embraced the trend to bare more on stage despite the promise of big box office returns.50

An emblematic figure who held on to traditional bourgeois values at a time when there

48 Lenard Berlanstein, Daughters of Eve: A Cultural History of French Theater Women from the Old Regime to the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 241.

49 Davis, Economics, 118.

50 Berlanstein, Daughters of Eve, 112, 110.

295 was immense pressure to give them up, Carlier thwarted the French theater’s attempt to satiate the public’s appetite for novelty with spectacular set designs, outrageous acts, and chic costumes worn by the most beautiful and desirable women.

Operating under the aegis of a free market, the boulevard theater performed an uneasy balancing act between conservative and liberal value systems in order to attract the largest crowds. When such balancing acts failed, the moral fissures within French society rose to the surface and became evident in highly publicized scandals. The 1904 trial regarding le costume au théâtre can be regarded as one of many scandals dating back to the earlier half of the century when the Opéra’s ballet costumes had once pushed the boundaries of bourgeois propriety. These scandals, which helped to propel the fortunes of certain theaters and actresses, were driven by the assumption that “a suggestive play means crowded houses and a mint of money to the parties concerned.”51

If Carlier’s trial endowed an actress (whose social origin was always suspect) with a degree of self-autonomy and control over how her person was to be presented, then how did the abolition of preventive censorship alter the nature of the actress’s relationship with her impresario? The case of Angèle Gril, a lyric artist who refused to appear in La

Cigale’s revue Ohé! Milord! because, as she put it “one wanted to make me fulfill an obscene role,” might provide some clues. With the demise of state intervention in theatrical matters after 1905, performance artists and spectators had little way of protecting themselves from unseemly performances except through “public action.” It was upon her own initiative that Gril came before the Tribunal de la Seine’s Fifth

Chamber in 1911 after having chosen Carlier’s former attorney to defend her. Employing

51 Davis, Economics, 141.

296

the same line of defense used for Carlier’s trial, Philippe attempted to persuade the

magistrates to negate Gril’s contract on the basis that Cigale’s director forced his

pensionnaires “to play certain roles which injure their modesty.” The court

acknowledged that the performer’s motives for refusing her role were justified

considering that “the attitude demanded of the actress and the undressing of her costume”

were of “a clearly obscene character.” And yet like Carlier, Gril was fully aware of the

kind of revues staged at La Cigale since she herself had previously performed in some of

its more saucy shows, most notably La femme et le pantin. The fact that Gril had signed

another contractual agreement with the hall threw into question her reasons for getting

out of it. Despite this, the court, in its efforts to discourage actresses from accepting such

morally compromising roles, conceded to the termination of the contract but denied her

request for the 6,000 francs she would have received for the engagement.52

While it was never established as to whether Carlier had or had not performed at

Mathurins previously, there is no doubt that she knew of the hall’s seedy reputation.

What had changed in the seven years that had elapsed between her trial and Gril’s was that the courts now held actresses to a greater degree of accountability. Because of her newfound independence and cultural cache, an actress after 1905 could no longer play the role of an innocent victim. Outside the state’s protection, she had become an independent player entering into business relationships with directors for which she would be responsible. Therefore as a means of personal and professional safety, actresses employed bourgeois models of feminine virtue and propriety to fend off slanderous attacks targeted at women who chose careers in the theater.

52 A.P.P., “Tribunaux: L’immoralité s’étale sur certaines scènes,” unknown newspaper, n.d.

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Nevertheless gender played a significant role in the court’s decision-making

processes. “Eager to establish the moral and political capacity of the people, republicans

wanted to believe again in the womanliness of actresses and the self-discipline of men.”53

As an extension of the state, the judiciary attempted to uphold a standard of bourgeois

femininity in the theaters by allowing actresses to bend the rules. Despite actresses’ poor

judgments regarding the procurement of certain roles, the government permitted them to

break their contracts when the malign interests of theater directors and owners threatened

their femininity. The controversy surrounding le costume au théâtre reveals the degree to

which the courts were willing to strengthen an already tenuous gender order by allowing actresses to take advantage of social fears centering on the image of a sexually aggressive

New Woman.

Le nu au théâtre

Within four years of Carlier’s trial, le costume au théâtre had grown so risqué that a

succession of court cases pertaining specifically to le nu au théâtre revealed that the issue

being presented before the courts no longer concerned an actress being forced to wear a

scanty costume but those rather individuals who chose to wear no costume at all. While

the government had provided a way for actresses to resist the escalating eroticisation of

the theater, there was no control valve in place to prevent them from doing otherwise.

The year 1908 served as a defining moment when the contestation over nudity in

the theater reached a feverish pitch. In that year, le nu au théâtre took front and center

stage on the legal scene, producing what Normandy called “a crisis in prudery.”54 On

53 Berlanstein, Daughters of Eve, 238.

54 Normandy, Le nu à l’église, 216.

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July 20, 1908, the Ninth Chamber of the Tribunal Correctionnel de la Seine listened as

the bailiff read statements accusing three Parisian music-hall directors and six of their

employees of outrages public à la pudeur. The charges, having been made at the behest

of Bérenger and La Ligue contre la licence dans les rues, were intended “to protect

citizens, especially women and children from the vile effects of immoral songs, dances,

and jokes.”55 As “charged ludic sites,” theaters, and more specifically music halls,

functioned both as agents and reflections of social change simultaneously reinforcing and

tearing down societal barriers and traditional conventions. 56 The Parisian theater

projected certain images and transmitted particular cultural codes that informed and

shaped people’s perceptions of themselves and others with regards to sex, class, race, and

gender. Expectedly, “official morality rebelled” when nudity, a social taboo subject and practice, penetrated the nucleus of social change, the modern theater.57 Although the

following three stage productions differed in their presentations of le nu au théâtre, the exhibition of la femme nue nevertheless “raised troubling questions about how a woman should be allowed to act on stage, about how femininity should and could be represented, and about the relationship of women onstage to women in the outside, real world.”58

Folies Royales

On April 5, 1908, an actor on the stage of the Folies Royales announced to a crowd exhibiting an “eagerness for new things” that the evening’s final performance would

55 Sweeney, Singing to Victory, 76.

56 Davis, Economics of the British Stage, 121.

57 Normandy, Le nu à l’église, 216.

58 Ann Corio with Joseph DiMona, This Was Burlesque (New York, 1968), 21.

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conclude with an exhibition of nude women.59 Spectators intently watched as figurantes

Aimée Thierry, Suzanne Duhault, and Germaine Laisney, appeared in a series of three

tableaux vivants whose titles, L’Amour et Psyché, La Femme au Masque, and Les Trois

Graces, recalled well-known classical and mythological themes of art and literature. In order to “give an illusion of artistic groups of painting or sculpture,” the three professional models stood transfixed for several minutes in a “complete state of nudity.”

Their only covering consisted of a skin-colored fabric placed over their “sexual parts” and a light gauze scarf hung with invisible thread across the middle part of the body. The placement of their arms and hands close to their breasts helped to deflect any charges of impropriety.60

Although “the material act” of posing semi-nude incriminated the accused, the courts conceded that in order to fully assess the situation; it must “take into account the place where it [the material act] was produced, the circumstances that accompanied it and the goal pursued.”61 Since little to no mention of the venue was made, one can surmise that tableaux vivants within the setting of a music-hall offered no serious threat to public

order or to the state of French morality. As mentioned earlier, tableaux vivants had been

normalized as a theatrical practice by the 1880s due to their imitation of high art and

connection to elite culture as a parlor pastime.62 As a result of their immobile, passive

59 Archives de Paris, Court Record from the Ninth Chamber of the Tribunal de la Seine, July 27, 1908. Alternately referred to as “Princess Théâtre” by St. Albin, the Folies-Royales was located at 6 rue Fontaine.

60 Ersky, Est-il le ne au théâtre impudique? 10.

61 Archives de Paris, Court Record from the 9th Chamber of the Tribunal de la Seine, July 27, 1908.

62 Corio, This Was Burlesque, 92.

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stances within a classical or mythological setting devoid of contemporaneous references,

the models’ “purely artistic poses” were noticeably “free of all detail producing a

lascivious inspiration” since “each wore a cache-sexe intended to mask the most intimate

part of their being.”63 Moreover, the director’s positioning of the models towards the

back of the stage, some distance away from the audience, equally demonstrated a

“concern to eliminate anything that might have given the tableaux an obscene and

lascivious allure.” In wanting “to leave the spectators with only an impression of art

deriving from natural and artistic beauty,” the court reasoned that the accused director had established a criteria whereby distance, immobility, and covering had sanitized and

thereby sanctioned his presentation of living nudes as an appropriate form of art. The

judge, finding the charges without merit, concluded that Cohen and his three models, “in

publicly performing these tableaux and…in assisting with their reproduction…did not

commit a single immoral or licentious act of a nature to cause scandal or injure the

decency of those who were witnesses to it.”64

Folies Pigalle

Twelve days after the Folies Royales incidence, a “luxurious little hall” known as

the Folies-Pigalle entertained an audience of four hundred spectators with Leon

Chassigneux’s Dans un Rêve.65 Directed by Michel Georges Parcelier, this pantomime

told the story of a Parisian sculptor who aspires to produce a masterpiece as beautiful as

the Greek statue of Tanagras. After searching unsuccessfully to find his muse in the

63 Ersky, Est-il le ne au théâtre impudique? 12.

64 Archives de Paris, Court Record from the Ninth Chamber of the Tribunal de la Seine, July 27, 1908.

65 Normandy, Le nu à l’église, 173. The Folies-Pigalle was located at 17 Place Pigalle.

301 perfect model, he seeks inspiration from a photographic album of classical statuary.

Discouraged with what he finds, the sculptor consumes a few glasses of liquor before passing out on a couch. At that moment that the Greek dancer Myrtho, performed by the twenty-one year old artist Germaine Renée Louise Aymos, appears to him in a dream.

As a “marvel of grace and beauty,” Myrtho discards her light gauze veils one by one to reveal “her body and its contours” to the sculptor who, after awakening from his slumber, sets back to work with a new zeal and passion inspired by her apparition.66

The presentation of a dancer adorned in “some gold bracelets and a gold-plated belt held together by a string hanging along the fold of the groin” created quite a sensation as

“the evening’s main attraction.”67 In comparing Aymos’ pose plastique as “more academic” than the “perverse” dances performed just before the main act, critics underscored how Aymos’ gradual evolution from a stationary statue to a thing of living beauty was in keeping with current moral imperatives informing, governing, and sanctioning artistic representations of female sexuality.68 The court, in taking into consideration the testimony of expert witnesses whose authority “in artistic and theatrical matters” was unquestioned, heard from Jules Claretie, a member of the Académie

Française, director of the Comédie Française, and one of the Belle Époque’s most distinguished playwrights.69 In a statement to the court, Claretie attested to the fact that

66 BHVP Rondel Collection: Folies Pigalle Inaugural program.

67 St. Albin, “Le nu au théâtre,” Mercure de France (1911), 455.

68 Jean d’Amaury, Paris Théâtre, April 11, 1908, 10.

69 St Albin, “Le nu au théâtre,” Mercure de France (1911), 455; Ersky, Est-il le ne au théâtre impudique? 24.

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“there was nothing in the piece by Parcelier, at the Folies-Pigalle, which could arouse

harmful thoughts.” “The dancer’s appearance had no resemblance to a dirty exhibition,”

Claretie explained, having only left the kind of “artistic” impression that “one would have

in the presence of a real animate statue.”70 Aymos’ “impeccable académie” reportedly

left her spectators “blinded” despite the fact that she had been relegated to the back of the

stage and separated from the audience by an illumination of lights and a curtain covered

with faux clouds, all of which left her pose “imprecise.”71 And yet audience members,

the press, even the conspicuously absent Bérenger were conscious of the performance’s

“crass materiality.” Even though the dance had taken place some thirty meters away from the first row of orchestra seats, the police commissioner responsible for overseeing

the show could discern that Aymos’ armpits and pubic area had been shaven.72

Furthermore, small pieces of pink silk and taffeta tulle pasted onto her body underscored

the director’s intention to render Aymos “completely nude” through the dissimulation of

sexual parts.73

The court, after carefully weighing the character of the exhibition and its publicity

in light of remarks made by the police commissioner, audience members, expert

witnesses and the accused, deliberated for some time before deciding that Parcelier,

70 Ersky, Est-il le ne au théâtre impudique? 24.

71 Paris Théâtre, March 14, 1908; Ersky, Est-il le ne au théâtre impudique? 12.

72 Erksy noted that the pink silk cache-sexe strapped to her belt was at least fifteen centimeters wide and long. Ersky, Est-il le ne au théâtre impudique? 12.

73 Paris Théâtre, March 14, 1908.

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having been “inspired by an aesthetic sentiment devoid ‘of all obscene or licentious

intention,’” had taken the necessary precautions “to lessen its licentious character.”

The play of lights, the artistically prepared and developed gauzes, the distance of the artist evolving in the space at the base of the stage behind a curtain of tulle, the artistic charm which emanated from the grace of her movements and the elegance of her attitudes, and the makeup of which she was covered

had eliminated any allusion of sexual suggestiveness on the part of artist, director, and within the play itself.74 In his sentencing, President Pacton concluded that the

charges against Aymos and Parcelier for committing outrages public à la pudeur were not

well-founded. In acquitting Aymos and Parcelier of any wrongdoing after taking into

account the artistic effects and conditions surrounding the performance, Pacton rendered

what the press called an “equitable judgment,” that is to say a decision where not “a

single concession to unfortunate prudishness” had been made.75

In their review of the two cases, the courts had effectively “established a distinction

between the artistic and the obscene nude” by considering location, presentation, and the

state of society’s mores as criterion for assessments regarding public nudity. 76 Generally

speaking, if the performer remained covered (with a bodysuit, makeup, etc), immobile, at

a distance from the audience, and artistic in her pose, her figuration or performance was

considered to be a demonstration of natural and artistic beauty. The act of performing undressed or presenting a nude performance did not in itself constitute an offense. The state’s greatest concern involved protecting individuals not so much from the performer’s

74 Normandy, Le nu à l’église 220.

75 Ibid.; Archives de Paris, Ninth Chamber of the Tribunal de la Seine, July 27, 1908.

76 Normandy, Le nu à l’église, 180; Paris Théâtre, December 19, 1908, 11.

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immodest acts but from the publicity of such acts that innocent eyes might encounter.

The offense occurred when minors, socially inferior groups, or people who did not wish

to see ‘nude’ spectacles, were either voluntarily or involuntarily exposed to visions of the unclothed body.77 The element of surprise loomed large as a determining factor in whether or not one’s sight had been involuntary violated. “A member of the league

would not have the right to complain of the offered spectacle if he had been clearly

warned at the door of the spectacle’s nature” since “there is no scandal when the

spectators accept and ask for a spectacle,” observed St. Albin. When it came to pursuing

nudity in the streets, public walkways, within posters, photographs, even with regard to

classical statuary in public gardens, “one can be as rigorous as one wants.” But as for the

music halls, where one finds “spectators who come knowing what they are about to see,”

he argued, “freedom reigns!”78

Little Palace

Understandings of what was or was not “artistic” nudity depended upon and were co-terminus with how one defined the “obscene.” The last case heard by the courts that

day concerned a pantomime by Henry Gauthier-Villars, nicknamed “Willy,” entitled

Griserie d’Ether performed at Paris’s Little Palace.79 On the evening of May 12th,

Sergine Bouzon and Blanche Lepelley mounted the stage and interpreted “a scene of drunkenness and lesbian passion” where Lepelley, “revealing her nude torso and breasts,” aroused the “erotic excitation” of spectators through a series of “fondlings” with her

77 Cour de Cassation, Arrêt, June 16, 1906.

78 St. Albin, “Le nu au théâtre,” Mercure de France (1911), 461, 464.

79 The Little Palace was located at 42 rue de Douai,

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counterpart.80 Not surprisingly, word of the actresses’ sexually transgressive acts spread like wildfire causing quite a reaction among conservatives and moral reformers. The debauched spectacle prompted Jules Delahaye, deputy from Maine-et-Loire, to demand a government inquiry as well as the journal L’Autorité to launch its campaign against pornography the following day.81 Ultimately, it was “the exhibition of the nude, accompanied by these attitudes, these entanglements, these caresses and kisses or their simulacra” which led Bérenger to file charges against another music-hall director and his pensionnaires.

The prosecution argued that the scene’s “brutal realism” fell “under the domain of pornography” since it was devoid of any redeeming spiritual significance, intellectual merit, and was “foreign to all artistic sentiments.” The director’s intent “to display perverse passions” signified “a call to the most uncouth, troubling and dangerous lustfulness” that one could witness.82 The defense, rather than debate the issue of

pornography, asserted that the performance had been “private.” Individuals who had

come to the theater earlier that night, had been given, along with their ticket, an invitation

permitting them to attend a pantomime that was not a continuation of the performance for

which they had paid. While there was no additional cost for the pantomime, spectators

were instructed at the manager’s request to leave the theater hall and re-enter with the

invitation distributed to them at arrival following the conclusion of the main act. The

80 “Chronique Judiciaire,” Le Rappel, July 22, 1908; Ersky, Est-il le ne au théâtre impudique? 8. The play’s plot revolved around a pearl necklace stolen from an opera singer who had been led into a private drawing room and intoxicated with strawberries dipped in ether.

81 “Chronique Judiciaire,” Le Rappel, July 22, 1908.

82 Gazette des Tribunaux, July 27, 1908.

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prosecution countered that this attempt to “give the appearance of a private meeting” was

“a purely illusory precaution” to avoid incrimination. Moreover, the show’s exclusivity

and secretiveness functioned as a publicity stunt “awakening unhealthy curiosities…to

attract the public” into the establishment.83

Horace Louis Maurice de Chatillon, director of the Little Palace, was rendered an accomplice to the crime not only for having helped to prepare, facilitate, and consummate

the acts committed by the offenders, but also for having had a monetary interest in the

venture. According to Articles 59 and 60 of the Penal Code, an accomplice to a crime of

outrage public à la pudeur could receive the same penalties as those who had actually

committed the offense. Because Chatillon occupied a position of managerial authority,

and knowingly assisted his employees in presenting a morally questionable sketch, he

incurred the heaviest responsibility of the three, receiving three months in prison and a

two hundred franc fine.84 In order to avoid the establishment’s closing, Chatillon had to suppress the production and refrain from showing analogous performances in the future.85

Although Bouzon and Lepelley “only acted under the influence and authority of their director,” the judge deemed their corporeal exhibitions morally offensive and as a result condemned each of them to fifteen days of imprisonment and a fifty franc fine.86

83 Ibid.

84 Gazette des Tribunaux, 27 July 1908.

85 Ersky, Est-il le ne au théâtre impudique? 8.

86 “Le Nu devant la loi,” Le Matin, July 28, 1908, 2. This verdict was based on Article 463 of the Penal Code. To give the reader some idea of how these penalties compared with other offenses of outrage public à la pudeur, I have included the following illustration. At ten o’clock on the evening of July 7, 1908, in the suburb of Paris known as Neuilly-sur-Seine, fifty-nine year old Heloise Ernestine Lepron intentionally exposed her private parts on the public thoroughfare. In the eyes of the law, Mlle. Lepron had committed an outrage public à la pudeur, a crime punishable under Article 330 of the Penal Code.86 Most likely a

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The defense pleaded for the court’s application of la loi de sursis asserting that Bouzon and Lepelley had never committed or been condemned of an outrage public à la pudeur.87

Ironically, the architect of the March 21, 1891 law which granted Bouzon and Lepelley suspensions for their acts of indecent exposure and lesbian liaisons was the very Père la

Pudeur who had built a reputation for bringing such acts to justice.88

Folies-Pigall’

The freedom experienced by the Belle Époque theater after the abolition of theatrical censorship and before the Great War clearly climaxed with “the defeat of the obscene and the triumph of the nude” following the femme nues trials of the summer of

1908. However the court’s verdicts, having “seemed insufficient to Senator Bérenger” and other moral conservatives, were appealed by the government and revisited in a subsequent trial six months later.89 The Court of Appeal’s review of the July 1908 cases involving le nu au théâtre would be influenced by a more recent trial that took place on prostitute, Lepron was condemned to one month of prison and a fine of five francs. That same night, another women arrested for vagabondage, was fined the same amount and given a lesser sentence of fifteen days in jail.86 Both women were social derelicts, most likely prostitutes without a stable home environment or a steady source of income that prevented them from having to pay heavy fines (as evidenced by the amount of money exacted from both individuals). The arrests and condemnations of the two women were almost identical with the exception that Lepron’s sentence was slightly more severe with an additional fifteen days of incarceration. Although the police desired to keep marginalized individuals like prostitutes off the streets, Lepron’s act of indecent exposure was considered to be far more dangerous and threatening to the social order than the simple solicitation of one’s body or an individual’s sans domicile status.

87 This law states that in the case of condemnations for imprisonment or fine, if the accused has not been subjected to a previous condemnation of prison for a crime and offense de droit commun, the courts can order by the same judgment and decision, that it will be suspended upon execution of the sentence. If during the delay of five years to the date of judgment or arrest, the condemned has not a single pursuit followed by condemnation of imprisonment or a penalty for a more serious crime, the condemnation will be void. In the contrary case, the first will be executed so that it can be merged with the second. The defense neglected to mention that the two actresses had appeared earlier that year as nude Egyptian dancers in the spectacle ‘Isis.’

88 Archives de Paris, Court record from the Ninth Chamber of the Tribunal de la Seine, July 27, 1908.

89 Normandy, Le nu à l’église, 223; St Albin, “Le nu au théâtre,” 456.

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November 24, 1908. The same chamber as before, this time presided over by the

Honorable Gibou, convened to hear another case concerning outrage public à la pudeur.

Recalling the pursuits made months earlier against music hall directors and artists for the exhibition of women wearing too suggestive of a costume, the court listened as the almost exact same affair was replayed. The only difference this time was that the crime had taken place in a restaurant, not in a theater. According to reports and depositions filed by Inspector Joly in May of that year, Pigall’s Restaurant functioned as a dinner- theater or restaurant de nuit “which spiced up its meals with tableaux vivants” every

Tuesday evening. For the sum of twenty francs, a patron received a paltry meal followed

by the piéce de resistance-a spectacle of women in various stages of undress and

movement. While some danced around the tables, others carried out poses plastiques.90

Seven women, whose names remained anonymously encrypted in the trial

transcript as Mlles L, L, B, B, W, B, and S, were arrested and charged for having

committed outrages publics à la pudeur, and more specifically, for having shown

themselves undressed in a public place.91 The manager of the establishment, having assisted in and had prior knowledge of the defendants’ actions, was accused of

“speculating on human passions.” Considering the director’s crime “the most serious of

all” since it was “he who organized the spectacle and drew a profit,” the court found the

90 St. Albin, “Le nu au théâtre,” 456; Gazette des Tribunaux, November 25, 1908.

91 The pursuit made of the director and dancers of Pigall’ Restaurant must have been instigated at the request of Berenger since St. Albin referred to the hypocrisy of Bérenger’s League for having pursued a restaurant de nuit and its personnel. Critics blamed the League for having gone too far and “abused its victory” by going after these and similar tableaux vivants, as well as authors of a poster produced for a revue entitled ‘À Nu les femmes,’ but not the revue itself. See Ibid.

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defense’s strategy “to speak of art” ridiculous since the affair could “only be a question

of pecuniary interests.”92

All seven defendants were charged with wearing unseemly costumes consisting only of a jeweled belt five to ten centimeters in length and a “pink scarf” or taffeta

triangle that served as a cache-sexe over their pubic area. One of the women, Mlle B,

rejected the charge that she had presented herself “nude” in public arguing that she had

bared only her torso and that a skirt had veiled the rest of her body from the hips down.

All seven defendants claimed that they had been “surrounded by light” and placed some

distance away from the public from whom they were separated by transparent curtains

and gauze veils. Police commissioner Tanguy confirmed the defense’s argument that not a single form of obscenity or act of pornography had transpired stating that he had

witnessed a display of veils, not nudities. Moreover, the performance was intended for

private consumption since customers had to have in their possession an invitation in order

to attend the spectacle. In allowing a passer-by “to obtain [an invitation] by simply

asking for one at the entrance, and that a lot of people received one who did not ask for

it,” Prosecutor Granie argued that the music hall had undertaken a “clear” sign of

publicity. Furthermore, theaters and restaurants represented “public places” since “the

host [director, manager, or owner] does not know the guests” and therefore could not

discriminate as to who could or could not see the show. The private, in this case

synonymous with intimacy, recognition, and knowledge of one’s predisposition,

contrasted with popular associations of what “public” meant, namely anonymity and

alienation. In a slight departure from previous prosecutorial strategies, Granie contended

92 Gazette des Tribunaux, November 25, 1908.

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that even if the restaurant represented a private space, the offense to public decency

would still stand. He reasoned that because the invitations had deceptively publicized

“tableaux vivants,” a theatrical performance that customarily implied the wearing of a

bodysuit, spectators had involuntarily witnessed a pornographic show where “maillots

had been suppressed.”

Likening Pigall’s display of scantily-clad bodies to the show of “legs that one sees

at the Opéra,” witnesses asserted that the “poses plastiques presented nothing

reprehensible, that not a single obscene gesture had appeared to them and that the

spectacle offered was of an essentially artistic character.” In fact, several written and oral

testimonies complained that the spectacle was “too little spicy” for what they had paid, an

impression that even the prosecutor acknowledged when he stated that “these women

could have been more nude than they were.” Responses such as these suggest that clients

knew well what they were coming to see and were somewhat disappointed with the

evening’s final course because the boundaries governing visual spectatorship of the

female body had not been transgressed to their fullest. 93

In its condemnation of Pigall’s personnel, the court drew a middle-line between the

“artistic” and “obscene” nude. Similar to the punishment handed down in the case of

Folies-Pigalle, each dancer received a fifty franc fine while the restaurant manager,

Monsieur M., was given a one month prison sentence and fined two hundred francs.

Compared with Little Palace’s lesbian love scene, Pigall’s public display of beautiful nudities seemed more tame as it aimed to arouse the normative heterosexual male through voyeuristic desire. Little Palace’s denial of male sexuality through the inverted

93 Ibid.

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homoerotic of love of two women trumped all previous cases involving le nu au théâtre

as the ultimate transgression of sexual mores.

Even more significant than the degree to which the court distinguished and

penalized various acts or displays of nudity, was the reversal of its previous criteria for

assessing the artistic character of le nu au théâtre. According to the judgment of July 27, the living nude did not constitute by itself, nor in its display, an outrage public à la pudeur if the artists and directors intended and attempted to procure an impression of art and beauty for spectators through the use of stage effects and settings. Conversely, those performances where women figured completely nude, that is to say bare-breasted from the torso to the thighs and wearing only a simple jeweled belt and cache-sexe, and performed acts that were of a nature to cause scandal, thereby classified as obscene, were indictable by law. Less than five months after this initial judgment, the court declared,

“The living nude, by itself, and outside of all manifestation of obscenity, constitutes, by its exhibition, an outrage public à la pudeur.” No longer would props, lighting effects, the staging of performers, or their miniscule coverings be used to aestheticize, sanitize, or neutralize the morally corrupting sight of the performative female body. In essence, corporeal nudity, in and of itself, represented an offense to French morality. Moreover because it had occurred within a public place where, as in the case of Pigall’ restaurant, entry was essentially open and unrestricted, the exposure of female flesh was interpreted as being even more threatening and dangerous to society.94

94 Five years earlier the Cour de Cassation had concluded in its review of Article 330 of the Penal Code that the witnessing of obscene acts by a number of people within a private place was not enough to characterize the act as public since the individuals had consented to being witnesses through their presence and participation.

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The “Obscene” Nude

Fifteen days following the court’s redefinition of female public nudity as obscene,

President Landry of the Chamber of Correctional Appeal overturned the July verdicts by replacing the acquittals with condemnations. Chatillon received an additional month of prison to the three already imposed upon him by the first judge. Mlle Bouzon’s sentence of fifteen days in prison was doubled and Mlle Lepelley’s prison reprieve was revoked in favor of a fifteen-day prison sentence. Similar punishments were handed down to those acquitted in the Folies-Royales trial where the director received three months in prison as opposed to the three models, Laisney, Deslys, and Thierry, who were each given fifteen days in prison. Announcing that “the stage is henceforth removed of obscenity,” the magazine Paris Théâtre left it upon the reader to discern whether or not la femme nue’s return and confinement to a more appropriate milieu should be considered a step forward or a step back in France’s march towards a more progressive modernity.95

Tolerance of public nudity operated a double-edged sword, endowing it with a reputation for enlightenment and light-heartedness while threatening to rip apart its moral fabric. The French government appears to have walked the middle ground, exercising

“energetic repression” when presented with flagrant violations even as it turned a blind eye to the numerous nude spectacles featured nightly in the capital’s cafés-concerts and music-halls. For almost four years, the courts remained silent on the matter until le nu au théâtre re-emerged within the Ninth Chamber of the Tribunal correctionnel de la Seine.

On May 5, 1913 President Hugot listened as accusations of outrage public à la pudeur were leveled against the twenty-one year old Hungarian dancer Adorée (a.k.a. ‘Ado’)

95 Paris Théâtre, December 19, 1908, 11.

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Villany. Although the daily paper Le Matin remarked that it had been “a longtime since

one has spoken” of nude dancers, Villany had reportedly incited a revolution in the art of

dance during that time (1911-1913), proving to be “too advanced for her time” as she

transgressed all conventions, including those of the costume.96

Echoing Duncan’s invective that “like the face, the body can become an instrument of expression,” Villany selected the simplest attire, her naked body, in which to perform.97 The trial, which centered upon the question of whether or not the artist’s

intentions had been purely artistic when she gave two performances on the stage of the

Comédie Royale on February 21 and 22 of that year, evoked arguments presented

previously on the behalf of other femmes nues.98 Like before, Villany and her lawyer

pleaded that the spectacle had been private on account that “one could only gain entrance

to the spectacle upon presentation of a personal invitation.”99 However in its

commentary on the trial, the Gazette des Tribunaux noted that “in reality, these cards

carrying the word ‘invitation’ were distributed at the ticket booth to anyone who

presented themselves and paid.” It was in this way that an inspecteur de Surêté, armed

with five francs, entered the theater to conduct his surveillance of the performance in

question.100 Having denied any wrongdoing, Villany blamed the ticket office for having

ignored her “order to allow only artists and men of letters into the hall.” “I was on stage.

96 Jean-Pierre Pastori, À Corps Perdu: La Danse nue au XX siècle (Paris, 1983), 18.

97 “Une danseuse nue,” Le Matin, May 6, 1913.

98 Comédie Royale was located on the rue Caumartin.

99 “Une danseuse nue,” Le Matin, May 6, 1913.

100 Gazette des Tribunaux, May 4-5, 1913, 915.

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I could not supervise,” she added defensively. The fact that Villany had rented the hall

for five hundred francs seemed irrelevant to her although the prosecution used this as evidence to argue that she must have exercised some degree of control over who was being admitted. Villany, who professed a desire to “lay her soul bare” through nudity, received support from a German professor, who having seen a performance in Munich,

“left the theater with a profound respect for the Creator.” Conveying a disbelief that “this living nude lost all effect of sensual excitation” on its spectators, Granie, doubted whether the “gros public (mass public)” would have had the same appreciation of or reaction to Villany’s nude spectacle. His reservation over the audience’s “public character” stemmed from the crowd’s sheer numbers as well as its lack of a “pre-existing connection” like the ones found among members “of a circle or mutual aid society.”101

In order “to demonstrate that the impressions felt by the spectators were uniquely impressions of art,” the accused presented two letters to the court, one from a painter, the other from a sculptor. While the authors and contents of these letters are unknown, the prosecution used them to discredit the defense by highlighting some of the more absurd observations found within them. Declarations such as the one given by the artist who thought it “a pity she is so skinny!” underscored the way in which spectators, regardless of their credentials, interpreted her performance through the lens of corporeality rather than spirituality.102 In order to discredit the prosecution’s attempt to turn the statements

101 “Une danseuse nue,” Le Matin, May 6, 1913.

102 Gazette des Tribunaux, May 4-5, 1913, 915.

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of her expert witnesses’ against her, Villany simply declared “Ce spectateur ne

comprenait rien à l’art.”103

Despite the defense’s argument that Villany had not “committed, in dancing

completely nude, a reprehensible act, but an “act of art,” the court upheld the December

1908 judgment that rendered the living nude obscene. Supporting the prosecution’s

supposition that “the nude is an article of the atelier or the alcove, and not the theater,”

the court found Villany guilty of outrage public à la pudeur. This time the actress, who

had also functioned in the capacity of director and choreographer, was hit with a two

hundred franc fine for having exposed herself publicly in a state of undress and for

having possessed a “a monetary interest” in seeking to capitalize off of her lewd

action.104

To gain some perspective of the seriousness with which the French government

prosecuted nude dancing, the trial of Adorada Via serves as a comparative case study for

the state of mores in general, and attitudes towards nakedness more specifically, in

Germany. Via, a dancer of unknown nationality (but most likely French as the Gazette

des Tribunaux showed an interest in her trial by reporting it), gave a series of

performances where she danced entirely nude in Munich in November 1911. Her attempt

to reform dance, through a revival of historical dances from Ancient Babylon, Egypt,

Greece, and Rome, troubled local authorities who ordered the police to arrest the dancer

and escort her down to the station. Charged with outrages aux bonnes moeurs, she and

103 “La danseuse nue,” Le Matin, May 6, 1913.

104 Pastori, À corps perdu, 18.

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her impresarios were given the right to a trial by jury—a right denied to those accused of the same crime in France who appeared before magistrate’s courts.105

For Via, nude dancing symbolized the truth and “triumph of the human body,” which in its most natural state, denied modern man’s more prurient desires to see what

lay beneath one’s clothing.106 Like Montorgeuil, she asserted that the le nu au théâtre

was a purely aesthetic tradition extending back to Ancient times. Several eminent

German painters, professors, sculptors, and writers, who had attended the performance, mounted the witness stand claiming that she had expressed only “the highest interests” of

art. Having derived moral and aesthetic satisfaction from a performance that “was

essentially artistic and respectable,” these prominent individuals lent credence to the fact

that nothing shocking had transpired. As proof of this, they mentioned that that they had even taken their wives to see the “chaste performance.” Professor Petersen, President of

the Society of Munich Artists, implying that such spectacles were a rarity in Germany,

suggested that performances similar to Via’s “should be given to the people instead of

being reserved to a public restricted to artists.” Such performances, he argued, would

have a “beneficial” effect on “the general education” of the masses by giving them “the

opportunity to admire the beauty of human figures.”107

The testimony provided by academics and artists, alongside Via’s own statements,

must have influenced the jurors’ final decision. Rather than adopt the public prosecutor’s

suggestion of imposing a ten pound fine and twenty day prison sentence, the jury

105 Gazette des Tribunaux, May 4, 1912, 404.

106 Ibid.

107 Ibid.

317 acquitted Via in the following spring of 1912. The Gazette’s highly suspicious conclusion that Via, in obtaining a sympathetic verdict, had some how manipulated jurors with her hypnotic beauty and “troubling charm” attested to government intolerance of les femmes nues on the eve of World War.108

While it is unclear as to exactly how many court cases involving les femmes nues were brought before the magistrates’ courts between the years 1889 and 1914, those cited within this chapter give us at least a framework for understanding how issues involving access to sexual pleasure and the assertion of desire were treated. By 1904, the flimsy costumes traditionally reserved for les femmes de revues were increasingly being imposed on the ‘star’ of the show. While a state undress for les femmes nues was accepted as a corollary of their dubious character and talent, it was not considered appropriate for premier dancers, singers, and actresses who theoretically embodied ideals of Frenchness and bourgeois femininity. As suggested by the trial of Carlier vs.

Mathurins, a star’s reputation hung in the balance when her need to make a living ran up against the theater’s need to satisfy its customers with provocative displays of the female form. The question as to whether or not a female performer should be able to break a

108 Ibid. While the Gazette may have attributed the verdict more to Via’s seductive appeal than the differing state of mores extant in Germany, another trial a year and a half later, demonstrates that the latter rather than the former was more plausible. In another similar, but completely separate case, a Bavarian jury returned after deliberations and condemned a male dancer, charged with outrages aux bonnes moeurs for having danced “too suggestively” the tango with a married woman, to six months of prison and a fifty mark fine. His partner, receiving the lesser sentence of the two, was fined the same amount but condemned to only six days. See Gazette des Tribunaux, May 23, 1913, 957. In this instance the tango, and not nude dancing, was seen as more of a threat and danger to national mores because the dance involved members of the opposite sex in close physical proximity to one another. This trial also illustrates that there were different levels of tolerance when it came not only to exposing the contours and shape of the male and female body, but also to the sex of the performer. The 1911 scandal involving the famous Russian dancer Vaslav Nijinski is a case in point. During a production of Diaghlev’s ‘Giselle,’ presented before the dowager empress, Nijinski’s choice of a flowing short skirt rather than the traditional culottes to cover his tights shocked spectators who thought that his private parts were overexposed! See Pastori, À corps perdu, 15.

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contract on the basis of her attire impacted the degree to which she could exercise a degree of artistic control over her performances as well as the theater’s capacity to undergo risky business ventures. As evidenced by the trial and its verdict, the state’s regulation of the theater extended far beyond the realm of censorship to include matters of gender and fashion. Ultimately, the court system sided with the plaintiff whose adherence to sexual propriety and womanly modesty was in keeping with the state’s desire to maintain bourgeois moral values.

Despite the abolition of preventive censorship the following year, the French government continued to conduct surveillance of Parisian theaters via local police inspectors who signaled immoral presentations to the attention of higher authorities. For reasons that are not quite clear, a governmental crackdown on music hall performances involving scantily-dressed women occurred. Interestingly, the individuals found most culpable for these indiscretions were not the performers themselves, but the directors who were both financially liable and morally responsible for what transpired sur scène. This is supported by the statements of female artists who repeatedly claimed that they were only carrying out orders, an indication that they had little to no say in chorographical decisions. Therefore, concerted efforts were made on the part of directors to project an appearance of art within their erotic shows. Theater critics, artists, audience members, even police inspectors played an important role in attesting to the performance’s artistic merit, citing the special lighting, the covering of genitalia, and the placement of femmes nues at a distance in immobile poses or slowly evolving dance moves. Based on eyewitness testimony, the judges, acting independently of the state, found little reason to condemn the accused for outrages public à la pudeur. Perceived as relatively harmless,

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these performances legitimized and normalized la femme nue as a performance artist of

the Parisian theater.

However the decisions handed down by the courts’ in July of 1908 ran counter to

the government’s campaign to eradicate all forms of pornography. Just months after the

first International Congress of Public Morality was convened and the Fédération’s

Bulletin anti-pornographique published, the judiciary found itself torn between the state

and public’s definition of obscenity. It is reasonable to assume that Senator Bérenger was the force behind the government’s appeal of the Folies-Pigalle, Folies-Royale, and

Little Palace verdicts although he is not named specifically in any of the court or press

reports. The trial of the Folies-Pigall’ restaurant served as the perfect pretext for

overturning these verdicts just days later. Having extended the parameters of la femme

nue’s performance beyond the music hall to the dinner theater, as well as beyond the stage into the audience’s seating area, the Folies-Pigall’ restaurant demonstrated the inherent danger of leaving skin shows, artistic or not, unchecked. The severe punishment conferred upon the restaurant was likewise matched in the Cour de Cassation’s reversal of the previous le nu au théâtre judgments. Regardless of artistic intentions or effects, public performances featuring female nudity were offensive, criminal acts.

And yet despite the state’s prosecution of simulated or real female nudity in the

theater, Parisian music halls continued to hold semi-private performances of la femme

nue between the years 1908 and 1914. The case of Adorée Villany indicates that the

striptease artist, rather than the director, undertook the financial and legal risk of staging

such spectacles. By 1913, la femme nue was no longer the opening act to or supporting cast member in the revue, she was the show. In addition to choreographing how she

320 presented herself, she also decided who entered the hall and saw her routine. When critics made unfavorable comments about her performance, she dismissed their opinions as useless, asserting that as an artist she knew more about Art than anyone else.

The next and final chapter gives a voice and corporeal presence to these women who, in contributing to pre-existing anxieties surrounding the decline in French art and morality, signaled the advent of the New Woman on pre-World War One Parisian stages.

The socio-moral-aesthetic debate over whether or not la femme nue was an acceptable object for consumption, model of femininity, and should be accorded the same distinction and reverence as painted and sculpted nudes coincided with and indeed paralleled contemporary dialogues and debates concerning the New Woman. The claim that women of the theater, regardless of their role and appearance in attitude, gesture, and costume, could demand and obtain a level of respect never before seen coincided with the growing popularity of music-halls and cafés-concerts in the last quarter of the nineteenth- century. A public obsession with the public and private lives, as well as moral and physical characteristics, of performers simultaneously jeopardized their careers as much as built them.

CHAPTER 7 LA FEMME NUE: IN HER OWN WORDS

Originating in the 1890s, the term “New Woman” represented a crucial transitional

female figure that challenged the patriarchical order in her attempts to achieve social, economic, and political power. Recent scholarship has shown how women of nineteenth- century Europe, in taking advantage of new technologies, a changing workforce, and revolutionary discourses on the rights of the individual, whittled away at the age-old

stereotype of females as the weaker sex.1 By the mid-1890s, the New Woman connoted a

diverse group of women who, while differing in approach and degree to which women

should claim a greater share of the public sphere, evinced a dramatic shift in female

consciousness characterized by a heightened awareness about themselves as active

participants on the social stage.

A large part of this self-realization had to do with women rediscovering their

corporeal self as a source of identity, self-pleasure, and empowerment.2 “The story of

women’s sexuality in the nineteenth-century,” as Lynn Abrams states, “is the story of

1 Mary Louise Roberts, Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-Siècle France (Chicago, 2002); Elinor Accampo, Mary Lynn Stewart, and Rachel Fuchs, eds., Gender and the Politics of Social Reform, 1870- 1914 (Baltimore, M.D., 1995); Bonnie Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (Cambridge, Mass., 1998); Joan Scott, Connecting Spheres: Women in the Western World, 1500 to the Present (New York, 1987); idem, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1999); idem, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, Mass., 1996); Karen Offen, European Feminisms, 1700-1950: A Political History (Stanford, Calif., 2000); idem, Leslie Hume, and Erna Hellerstein, eds., Victorian Women: A Documentary Account of Women’s Lives in England, France, and the United States (Stanford, Calif., 1981); Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization Without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Post-war France, 1917-1927 (Chicago, 1994).

2 James McMillan, France and Women, 1789-1914 (London, 2000), 144.

321 322 women reclaiming their bodies for themselves. From sex being something assigned to women by others, and given meaning by others, sex became something that women owned.”3 One way in which women situated themselves within Third Republic body culture was through an engagement with the nude. Those individuals most clearly connected with the body, such as the artists’ model, prostitute, courtesan, and stage New

Woman.4 Demands for greater sexual freedom and individual self-expression, two

“forms of cultural blasphemy” that historian Nancy Cott associates with modern feminism, were most visibly manifest in la femme nue’s disavowal of clothing within the bal public and popular theater.5 By “making public spectacles of themselves,” the models of the Bal des Quat’z-Arts and les femmes nues of the music hall defied the

traditional boundaries of normative bourgeois femininity represented by separate spheres,

physical modesty, and self-abnegation. In doing so, these professional outsiders exposed

the very nature and condition of women’s oppression and facilitated the construction of a

new and oppositional womanhood.6

3 Lynn Abrams, The Making of Modern Women: Europe 1789-1918 (London, 2002), 172-173.

4 Roberts, Disruptive Acts, 23. The following art historians have shed light on a small cadre of women in nineteenth-century France who, as artists, models, and writers, engaged with the female nude professionally. Heather Dawkins, The Nude in French Art and Culture, 1870-1910 (Cambridge, 2002); Marie Lathers, Bodies of Art: French Literary Realism and the Artist’s Model (Lincoln, Neb., 2001); Tamar Garb, Bodies of Modernity: Figure and Flesh in Fin-de-Siècle France (Cambridge, 2001); Eunice Lipton, Alias Olympia: A Woman’s Search for Manet’s Notorious Model and Her Own Desire (New York, 1992); Otto Friedrich, Olympia: Paris in the Age of Manet (New York, 1992); Elizabeth Anne McCauley AAE Disderi and the Carte-de-Visite Portrait Photograph (New Haven, Conn., 1985).

5 Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, Conn., 1987), 36-39.

6 Roberts, Disruptive Acts, 9; Susan Glenn, Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism (Cambridge, 2000), 7; Lenard Berlanstein, Daughters of Eve: A Cultural History of French Theater Women from the Old Regime to the Fin-de-Siècle (Cambridge, 2001); Hollis Clayson, Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era (New Haven, Conn., 1991); idem, Paris in Despair: Art and Everyday Life under Siege, 1870-1871 (Chicago, 2002); Alain Corbin, Les Filles des Noces (Paris, 1978); Jann Matlock, Scenes of Seduction: Prostitution, Hysteria, and Reading Difference in Nineteenth-Century

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This last chapter demonstrates that the emergence of the performative female nude

coincided with and contributed to the formation of an alternative femininity embodied by

the New Woman. Her experimentation with nudity and themes of undressing “produced a public image that was transgressive yet culturally agreeable,” an image that was indicative of what Mary Louise Roberts calls a “feminist aesthetics.”7 To better

understand what a “feminist aesthetics” in turn-of-the-century Paris might have looked like, this chapter examines la femme nue not as others saw her but as she saw herself.

Realizing that self-representations are not fabricated in a vacuum but evolve out of and are shaped by various discourses circulating in society, Section One shows how a social

scientific discourse pertaining to sexual dimorphism assuaged fears of degeneration by

highlighting the value of the nudity in reconfiguring modern society. In particular, it

illuminates the way in which weightlifting and modern dance reinforced gender norms by

projecting hyper-sexual, hyper-masculine and feminine images of “Man” and “Woman”

through la culture physique. Section Two then goes on to show that in choosing to

represent herself, her profession, her audience, and her engagement with nudity in terms

of innocence, chastity, and transparency, la femme nue positioned herself not as the cause

but as the solution to decadence and degeneration. Ultimately, this chapter argues that la

femme nue, while typifying the New Woman as a modern self-determining subject,

remained circumscribed within the traditional gender order. Through tactics such as self-

absorption, disguise, role-play, and performativity, she “reinforced conventional gender

France (New York, 1994); Claire Goldberg Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth-Century (Albany, N.Y., 1984).

7 Roberts, Disruptive Acts, 70.

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norms, in this case, woman as ornamental objet d’art” while simultaneously creating a

space for alterity and a means for subverting rigidly proscribed roles for women.8

Degeneration, La Culture Physique, and Sexual Dimorphism

The debilitating effects that industrialization had inflicted on French society in the

decades leading up to the twentieth-century culminated with what sociologist Georg

Simmel and many other cultural observers of the time called neurasthenia. The price of

modernization had been paid for, experts argued, by individuals complaining of mental

exhaustion and an over-stimulation of the senses, symptoms of the nervous disorder that

were attributable to the sedentary lifestyle of urban living. If left unchecked, they warned, the atrophying of one’s mind, body, and spirit could have a destructive effect on the entire nation and race. Whereas several historians have explored French fears of degeneration from the standpoint of social reform movements, sports, the mobilization and politicization of women, the professionalization of medicine, and the commercialization of fitness programs and beauty products, this section will try to understand how these anxieties were projected onto and worked out within the French theater.9

As social responses to a medicalized discourse on degeneracy, crazes in

bodybuilding, physical education, and dance constituted part of a nation-wide cult in self-

improvement, beauty, and hygiene that promised to restore the modern, industrial,

neurasthenic man and woman. Having emerged in Germany, France, and Great Britain

8 Ibid., 67.

9 Jean Elisabeth Pedersen, Legislating the French Family: Feminism, Theater, and Republican Politics, 1870-1920 (New Brunswick, N.J., 2004); Roberts, Disruptive Acts.

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during the 1890s and early twentieth-century, the Life Reform movement believed that

the rehabilitation of the modern man and woman should begin first and foremost with the

body, which had been alienated from nature and neglected in the process of mechanization. While a number of different solutions from vegetarianism to therapeutic

baths and nudism were proposed to accomplish this one goal, the common bond linking

them all together was a belief that a normal, physically healthy, and morally sound body

held the key to social regeneration.10

A growing interest in the body as a means to developing a vigorous, fecund race encouraged Parisians to moderate their increasingly regimented, rationally ordered lifestyles by getting “back-to-nature.” Having become a slave to the machine, the quality of an individual’s life had declined in proportion to the quantity of his or her own work.

In his book on the effects of modern science, the modern state, and industrialization on perceptions of the human body, Anson Rabinbach argues that the origins of modernity were rooted in “the metaphor of the human motor--a body whose experience was equated with that of a machine.”11 This shift in human self-perception, from the individual as a

unique, living, and breathing organism to a replaceable, interchangeable part

synchronized and located within an elaborate industrial complex, could be observed in

just about every aspect of life.

10 For a discussion of life reform movements in Germany, see Karl Toepfer, Empire and Ectasty: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910-1935 (Berkeley, Calif., 1997); Paul Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics Between National Unification and Nazism, 1870-1945 (Cambridge, 1989); Michael Hau, The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany: A Social History, 1890-1930 (Chicago, 2003); Chad Ross, Naked Germany: Health, Race, and the Nation (Oxford, 2005). For France, see Arnaud Bauberot, Histoire du naturisme: Le mythe du retour à la nature (Rennes, 2004). For Great Britain, Peter Fryer, Mrs. Grundy: Studies in Sexual Prudery (London, 1963).

11 Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley, Calif., 1990), 18.

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Women, and in particular women’s fashion, was no exception as the marketing and

sale of beautification devices created a system of physical dependency that, in addition to

new modes of transportation and the introduction of modern appliances, “restricted her

freedom and weakened her strength.” The connection between a woman and her external armor was no more evident than the role corsets played in nineteenth-century France.

The sporting of hourglass-shaped figures first and foremost reaffirmed the belief that women were supposed to look diametrically different from men. Perceived as the physically weaker sex, women were believed incapable of functioning as cultural beings without such regulatory devices. One’s discomfort from and dependency on the corset was overlooked in favor of

the idea that the female body was structurally unsound and needed to be supported by artificial contraptions at strategic points. A woman of the nineteenth-century believed she was born with a clumsy waist, and that a stiff foundation would compensate for the inability of her spine and musculature to support the weight of her breasts and stomach. 12

Moreover, the “containerizing of breasts” through tight lacing and metal wires, in

denying women “a source of female pride and sexual identification,” ironically became

the defining mark of womanhood. By impeding and suppressing the natural form and

movement of the female body, the corset displaced a woman’s character onto an

inanimate metal frame that externalized what supposedly existed in one’s soul. Any

effort to discard the corset was interpreted as “a sign of loose, licentious behavior” most

often associated with prostitutes. Therefore the removal of rigid undergarments by

female performers during the Naughty Nineties violated what many saw as “a moral

12 Brownmiller contends that any discussion of the female body in the Western world must address the corset, which played a central role in the history of the body. See Femininity (New York, 1984), 35. Normandy called the corset an “evil engine” which he hoped would soon be suppressed. Normandy, Le nu à l’église, au théâtre, et dans les rues (Paris, 1909), 191.

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requisite for correct behavior.” Considered “a titillating gesture of naughty, provocative

promise,” the public appearance of women without outer or undergarments on the stages

of Paris was of special concern to those most apprehensive about a decline in morality

and a blurring of gender.13

Nonetheless, attempts to “unencumber the body” through the discarding of clothes

was also an assertion that the “modern identity did not depend upon surrounding oneself

with modern objects” but on being comfortable in one’s own skin.14 Whether one chose to eschew fashion as a critique of modernity or to employ it as part of one’s self- presentation, the body became the primary means through which men and women

“contested, affirmed, mitigated, and revolutionized” gender norms.15 Although various

bodies were put forward as possible solutions to the problem of degeneration, the one that

addressed modern man and woman’s need to assert an individual identity while

conforming to gender-specific standards of beauty was the classical nude. “For a nation

haunted by recent military defeat, economic instability, threats of depopulation, and late

but rapid modernization,” art historian Tamar Garb writes, “the canonical Greek body

seemed to stand for a timeless beauty and strength which could redeem France from its

current social and political impasse.”16 The translation and assimilation of an artistic

ideal into everyday life involved the public performances of la femme nue and the

13 Brownmiller, Femininity, 37; Anne Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes (New York, 1978), 213.

14 Toepfer, Empire and Ecstasy, 49.

15 Angela Latham, Posing a Threat: Flappers, Chorus Girls, and Other Brazen Performers of the American 1920s (Hanover, N.H., 2000), 5.

16 Garb, Bodies of Modernity, 78.

328 weightlifter, or l’haltérophile, who, as two of the most popular classically posed figures in modern France, effected a reappraisal of the undressed body that in turn shaped constructions of masculinity and femininity.

As artists who worked from the medium of the body, la femme nue and l’haltérophile shared a common heritage and employment history. Their training as models in the life-drawing classes of the École des Beaux-Arts served as a springboard for finding alternative venues and means of employment where their skills could be similarly emulated and appreciated. As the epitome of virile masculinity, the French body builder flexed his hyper-masculine musculature in the homo-social space of the gym, while his hyper-feminine counterpart, la femme nue, resided in the theater, a place characterized traditionally by the feminine attributes of artifice, display, and duplicity.

Outside the studio’s walls, la femme nue and l’halterophile went from being a body studied, painted, and sculpted by a third party to a self-creating subject who exercised and disciplined his or her own body. Their representation and idealization of male and female bodies according to classical aesthetic norms could be found all over Paris, from photographs d’après la nature circulating in magazines like La Culture Physique and Le

Nu Ésthetique or in posters placarded on gymnasium walls, to music hall presentations and concours de beauté plastique (beauty contests).17 Considered “the standard by which modern bodies could be appraised and consumed,” la femme nue and l’halterophile marked the boundaries of sexual difference at a time when a blurring of genders roles was coming under attack as the origin of France’s social, political, demographic, and

17 According to Garb, La Culture Physique was founded in 1904 with the purpose of “reforming the body for aesthetic reasons.” Taking the classical male nude as its ideal, the magazine advocated the importance of health, beauty, and strength for an individual’s well being and as a “means of safeguarding the race and the fatherland, widely perceived as threatened and degenerate.” See Bodies of Modernity, 57-58.

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economic malaise.18 The juxtaposition of the two figures’ traits, discursively and visually mapped out as binary opposites (strength/ grace, robustness/ softness, solidity/weightlessness, sturdiness/ flexibility, virility/ chastity), helped to normalize potentially dangerous undressed bodies into sexually distinct, de-eroticized physiognomic types.

The overlap and yet dichotomization of la femme nue and l’haltérophile’s careers, in terms of their professional origins, the nature and location of their work, and their physiognomic approach to the body illustrates how some men and women responded to, and perhaps felt pressure to conform to, a nationalistic discourse bent on social and political regeneration through bodily reform. La femme nue and l’haltérophile skillfully interpreted the modern body within the frameworks of classicism and la culture physique in order to deflect a growing criticism of the unclothed body as a source of sin, shame, and sexual temptation for the individual and body politic. Through their efforts, the modern body “lost its erotic content” and instead connoted purer thoughts of moral virtue,

regeneration, and vitality.19

The adoption of a more “contemplative stance” towards nudity, as Judith

Walkowitz and Karl Toepfer have suggested, was best exemplified by the latest vogue in

nude dancing. As “a manifestation of cosmopolitanism,” nude dancing represented “a

system of distinction and taste” that disrupted and reaffirmed traditional social

18 Ibid., 73-77.

19 Ibid., 75.

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stratifications through the introduction of foreign elements within a consumer culture.20

Dressed in light, fluid, transparent, and sometimes short antique togas, ‘modern’ dancers capitalized on a Belle Époque fascination with Hellenism by imbuing their barefoot dances and nude poses with allusions to high art. Through the reincarnation of classical figures taken from a Greek vase or a Renaissance painting, dancers like Isadora Duncan claimed to be creating a kind of refined visceral art form that distinguished them from music hall entertainers.21

Appearing in various states of undress between 1902 and 1913, Duncan reserved her recitations for more formal, theater-like settings in order to ensure that her revival of

“the lost art of dancing” would be accorded the status of “beaux-arts.”22 Her vehement

rejection of offers to perform in music halls was an effort to differentiate modern dance

from what she considered the gross commercialization and sexualization of recent dance

crazes like the Cake Walk.23 With the help of a referential system of bodily expression pioneered by Francois Delsarte in the 1880s, Duncan and other Delsartian disciples emphasized “grace, poise, flexibility, relaxation, and organic succession” through bodily

20 Toepfer, Empire and Ecstasy, 51-52; Judith Walkowitz, “The ‘Vision of Salome’: Cosmopolitanism and Erotic Dancing in Central London, 1908-1918,” American Historical Review 108, no. 2 (April 2003): 338- 339.

21 Amy Koritz, Gendering Bodies/Performing Art: Dance and Literature in Early Twentieth-Century British Culture (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1995), 48; Deborah Jowitt, Time and the Dancing Image (New York, 1988), 78-81.

22 Isadora Duncan, My Life (New York, 1955), 220.

23 Jody Blake, Le Tumulte Noir (University Park, Penn.,1999). The Cake Walk originated in Ante-bellum South as parody of Master’s dances by slaves. A more eccentric form of this dance, which was later imitated by those very individuals who were being parodied, appeared in France during the 1890s. Blake argues that it was the first of the prewar dance phenomena that prepared the way for the advent of primitivism in modern art.

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motion all the while believing that a state of undress was the best way to channel and

convey these mental, spiritual, and physical states.24 The abstract and unscripted nature

of Duncan’s performances, stemming from the intellectual and spiritual impulses of her

innermost being, differed from the fleshy skin shows performed by her imitators in the

music hall. Through her conception of dance, Duncan presented audiences with an

alternative model of femininity, one that complemented current depictions of the human

body by framing the dancer as a living model of classical art and yet diverged from

culturally sanctioned prescriptions of gender by configuring the dancer as physically,

socially, and emotionally uninhibited.25

Duncan’s interpretation of a modern femininity that was anchored in an aesthetics

of the classical body was just one of many interpretive frameworks through which

femmes nues redefined their corporeal self. Colette, who debuted in “the original bodice-

ripper” La Chair (The Flesh) at the Apollo in the fall of 1907, chose to emphasize aspects

of la culture physique over classicism, the sculpted body over the graceful body.26

Whereas Duncan made a qualitative distinction, both moral and aesthetic, between nudity and nakedness on the basis of a spectacle’s site or location, Colette conceived of feminine beauty in terms of shape and bodily form, not in terms of context. Having performed in a

“very undressed” state on a music hall stage, Colette denied having "appeared naked” on

the grounds that she “was very well built” and “never played anything which was

24 Judy Burns, “The Culture of Nobility/ The Nobility of Self-Cultivation,” in Gary Morris, ed., Moving Words: Rewriting Dance (London, 1996), 209.

25 Jowitt, Time, 86.

26 Judith Thurman, Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette (New York, 1999), 182.

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immoral.”27 In rendering the physically fit, sexually attractive performative female nude an appropriate exhibition for both the theater and music hall, Colette broadened the boundaries by which one understood nudity and modern femininity. The unadorned female body, unlike her fully clad Victorian counterpart, posed, moved, and danced with a dignity and charm, a strength and self-assurance that reframed conventional femininity outside the strictures of a whalebone corset.

As we have just seen in the following two examples, the modern femme nue claimed legitimacy as an artist “by drawing on the highly valued tradition of the visual arts, particularly Greek sculpture, and…by deploying aspects of the dominant gender ideology” entrenched in a French body culture that celebrated sexual dimorphism and physical health.28 By interpreting femininity as a referential sign physically inscribed on the body, however, la femme nue re-essentialized what it meant to be a “Woman.” With

form-fitting maillots, transparent veils, netting, and jeweled body ornamentation, la

femme nue signaled a break with women’s fashion in an inconspicuously, aesthetic guise

while reducing herself to an object of sexual delectation in order to advance a non-

threatening alternative to Victorian womanhood.

Nowhere was the maintenance of a gender status quo more evident than in

performances given by les femmes nues. With a growing number of women going to

college, entering the work force, and venturing into the city, nude spectacles represented

“a reassuring response to several contemporary challenges to male domination and sexual

27 Colette, Mes Vérités (Paris, 1996). “Je n’ai jamais parue nue, mais j’ai pu paraître très dévêtue; pourquoi aurais-je eu honte? J’étais très bien bâtie et je ne jouais jamais rien qui fût immoral—immoral à mon sens à moi—pas à celui de public.”

28 Koritz, Gendering Bodies/Performing Art, 51.

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identity.” Since domestic ideology’s morally righteous, passionless Victorian woman no

longer served as a viable construct for fin-de-siècle gender relations, the nude revue helped to imagine alternative roles for women that spoke “specifically to male desires”

and valorized “male pleasures.” Peter Bailey, in his study of London music halls, noted

how music hall revues established an “eroticised urban fairy-tale” where female

performers were cast “as object of the male gaze, as star, and secular goddess.”29 The projection of male sexual fantasies onto la femme nue emphasized “the irrevocable connection between “Woman” and “Sex.”30 In his review of the Alcazar d’Été’s 1894

production of Le Coucher d’Yvette, Jules Roques drew attention to the way in which the

eroticisation of women’s bodies in public spectacles could be harnessed by pro-natalist

forces to correct France’s declining population.31 An individual’s prurient interest in

titillating voyeuristic pleasures, either as actor or spectator, could regenerate the social body through the promotion of a normative, properly channeled, procreative heterosexuality. The exposure of the female body within the quintessentially feminine spectacle of striptease made men feel more powerful and assertive. Moreover, la femme nue’s adherence to “a value system of niceness, a code of thoughtfulness and sensitivity”

negated any hint of individual autonomy, transforming her into nothing more than a

29 Peter Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City (Cambridge, 1998), 173, 192. Similarly, Regina Sweeney notes how music hall programs specialized in portraying the erotic in “common, everyday scenarios.” See Singing to Victory: French Cultural Politics and Music during the Great War (Middletown, Conn., 2001), 100.

30 Jane Ussher, Fantasies of Femininity: Reframing the Boundaries of Sex (New Brunswick, N.J., 1997), 91.

31 Jules Roques, “À l’Alcazar d’Été,” Courrier Français, May 20, 1894, 8.

334 sexual being, physically and emotionally laid bare for men’s enjoyment and valorization.32

While on the one hand such pleasurable spectacles dovetailed with a national mission to fashion a physically robust, sexually attractive, virile citizenry, they also assuaged men’s reservations about the New Woman by transforming la femme nue into the self-destructive figure known as la femme fatale. Intrinsically, the masculine gaze was not one of worship only “but a reflection of unconscious anxiety, envy and fear” that accompanied a change in gender relations. In their attempts to reconcile “the sensual materialism of the naked flesh and the abstractness of bodily form,” male critics and spectators reduced la femme nue to a sexual object that, while fantasized about and feared, could ultimately be controlled.33

Mata Hari, one of the first exotic nude dancers to perform in Paris, illustrates how the seductive yet threatening allure of la femme nue was contained both in representation and real life.34 In a review for the magazine Paris Illustré, a journalist describes one of

Mata Hari’s dances in militaristic terms as a battle fought between the Occident and

Orient, sexual resistance and temptation, the forces of good and evil. Wielding her scarf as a weapon before an implacable Aryan god, the exotic dancer seductively exposes her shoulders before prostrating in front of the object of her obsession. Like one of Jean-

32 Brownmiller, Femininity.

33 Ussher, Fantasies of Femininity, 88.

34 Mata Hari’s name has become synonymous with exchanging sex for national top secrets. She was arrested, charged, convicted, and executed for committing espionage in 1917. See Russell Warren Howe’s Mata Hari: The True Story (New York, 1986); Julie Wheelwright’s The Fatal Lover: Mata Hari and The Myth of Women in Espionage (London, 1992), Margaret Darrow’s French Women and the First World War: War Stories of the Homefront (New York, 2000).

335

Marie Charcot’s hysteric patients, Mata Hari “no longer possesses herself” as she with

one “brutal gesture, suddenly tears off her ornaments, rips her veils altogether.” Rising

off the cold floor as an “enormously taller and white” nude body, the love-stricken dancer

commits the ultimate act of a thwarted lover by throwing “herself straight into the

flames!”35 In this dance, Mata Hari’s attempts to entice the god fail, causing her to lose

her self-control and take her own life metaphorically. Such performances were typical of

contemporary pictorial and literary representations of femmes fatales whose fictional

death signaled sexual disempowerment. Mata Hari’s own death before a firing squad for

allegedly committing treason against the French state, served as a cautionary tale for

women who sought the irrational excesses of ecstasy and gave added force to the notion that sexually liberated women would inevitably follow a path of self-destruction.

La Femme Nue Speaks

In order to explain why a particular subset of the female population in Belle

Époque France would choose to dance, pose, act, and sing publicly in scandalously

undressed states, one must interrogate not only the performers themselves in terms of

their motives, family background, and life experiences, but also how they positioned

themselves within a set of social parameters that included assumptions about gender, art,

and beauty. It is important to note that the real femme nue did not see her actions as part

of a collective project or as publicly feminist in nature, but rather in terms of interiority,

self-improvement, self-sufficiency, and mobility. Writing in her memoirs, Colette

reflected back to the days when, as a music hall performer, she exposed her breasts and

performed without a bodysuit. “It has seemed to me that I was exercising my body in the

35 Paris Illustré, March 11, 1905, 14-15.

336

way that those prisoners who aren’t concretely planning a breakout still braid a sheet, sew

gold pieces into a lining, and hide chocolate under their mattresses.”36 Colette’s plans

and preparations to break free from the suffocating isolation and loneliness of the

bourgeois home was an act intended for her and her alone. And yet she recognized that

her flight would serve as an example for others who desired the same freedoms.

Biographer Judith Thurman notes that while Colette led an unconventional lifestyle for

her time, the writer-actress always found herself “flexing a will that aspired to, but wasn’t

yet fit for, the rigors of freedom.”37 Colette, like her fellow femmes nues, believed that

progress in terms of women’s roles, French body culture, and morality would have to

happen one performance and one person at a time.

In addition to Colette’s autobiographical account of her career as a pantomime,

Isadora Duncan’s My Life was written from the perspective of an American dancer in pre-

war France. Colette and Duncan’s selection of pantomime and dance as mediums

through which they could viscerally express their feelings and desires was indicative of a

deeper transformation taking place in the hearts and minds of women across France.

Aside from their autobiographies, very few documents exist recounting the lives of such

brazen young women who discarded their clothes on the stages of Paris at the turn of the

twentieth-century. In spite of this, some court transcripts record the performers’

testimonies, and the saucy journal of theater life, Fantasio, featured interviews of these famous, but now-forgotten, femmes nues in its column “Leurs Confidences.” These intimate confessions broaden our understanding of the ways in which these women

36 Gabrielle Sidonie Colette, Mes Apprentisages (London, 1957), 195.

37 Thurman, Secrets, 144.

337

presented themselves to others, specifically with regard to art, fashion, nudism, feminism,

“and the theater they helped to create.”38

Even though the subjects under review form a disparate group of women, differing

in age, socio-economic status, occupation, and motives, they all participated in and

contributed to an increasing eroticisation of music hall attractions through bodily-

exposure and shared a common set of conditions that were historically specific to Belle

Époque France and culturally determined by conventions governing their sex. As French

women, they were expected to adhere to certain rigidly proscribed gender roles as

elaborated by Jules Simon in his La femme au vingtième siècle. “What is man’s

vocation? It is to be a good citizen. And woman’s? To be a good wife and a good

mother. One is in some way called to the outside world: the other is retained for the

interior.”39 An idealized model of womanhood based upon a bourgeois ideology of separate spheres applied theoretically to all women regardless of class. The notion of respectable femininity, balancing itself precariously between definitions of denial and pleasure, was not only “socially significant and personally gratifying, it was also designated normal and healthy.”40 As domestic moral guardians, they undertook for

family and nation childrearing and consumption as acts of self-abnegation. Each duty,

imposing its own set of physical limitations, kept housewives close to the home absorbed

in the managerial and maternal responsibilities of running efficient households.

38 Latham, Posing a Threat, 3.

39 Jules Simon, La femme au vingtième siecle (Paris, 1892), 67.

40 Lynda Nead, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (New York, 1988), 24- 25.

338

It is not surprising that the ange au foyer’s (domestic housewife’s) lifestyle lacked

appeal for many self-supporting, independently-minded female performers who, like

Edmonde Guy, the self-proclaimed “queen of nude women,” found such a “cloistered

life” intolerable.41 The alternative, “to obtain a brevet and become a teacher,” failed to appeal to the actress Marcelle Yrven. Despite her mother’s wishes and expectations,

Yrven rejected “the exclusive right of a monotonous life” to which a bluestocking was

condemned.42 What Guy, Yrven, and even Colette’s statements shared was a

determination to escape the austere, prison-like conditions of women’s lives in early

twentieth-century France. They sought excitement, change, an outlet for self-expression

and a freedom that traditional womanhood did not, and could not, offer them.43

While opportunities opened up gradually to women in the fields of education, law,

medicine, and clerical work, the theater remained the quintessential space where women

could both imagine and create alternative subjectivities and roles for themselves.

Rejecting her elders’ advice “to only ever play the roles of mothers and irreproachable

spouses,” Yrven cast herself as the antithesis of bourgeois femininity and morality by

appearing in more private, intimate scenes of the bedroom or bath rather than the socially

acceptable foyer. Expressing the belief that “the perfect beauty has as much right to

reveal herself to everyone as the ordinary woman has reason to veil herself,” Yrven and

her fellow femmes nues promoted an alternative female identity constructed around the

41 Reboux, “Le nu,” 9-10.

42 Fantasio, February 15, 1907, 57.

43 As Toepfer has noted, women of the fin-de-siècle “associated modernity with expanded opportunities for freedom of identity and action.” See Empire and Ecstasy, 10.

339

new theatrical practice of déshabillage. 44 During the 1890s, Parisian theaters witnessed a

surge in demand for cubicular plays, such as Woman Putting On Her Corset, where “the

act of dressing and undressing before a male client” made allusion to the prostitute’s

métier.45 Yrven announced proudly her decision to appear in such scenes that wetted the

bourgeoisie’s appetite for and interest in sex.

I performed theater without an evening dress, sometimes without even a dress at all, because one day my mother, left me free to act just as I pleased and, in a moment of anger, sent me to the bath. I am still and have been for a longtime in the bath. One can see me there, lately, dabbling in my bathtub on the stage of Folies Dramatiques.46

Yrven’s statement does not mean to imply that the idea of a woman performing as an eroticized nude came easily for those early striptease artists who deviated from

conventional expectations of female behavior, dress, and display. As Eveline Janney of

Little-Palace recalled, “I was far from thinking that one day I would be in the Palais-

Royal playing perverse maids or even in revues, in which everything is showing from my

legs up to the waist.” She went on to say, “My chaste ears ignored the light remarks

made about the Palais-Royal and I did not imagine that a woman could, in a music hall,

show her forms almost without a veil.”47 Janney expressed astonishment that such things

44 St. Albin, “Le nu au théâtre,” Mercure de France, vols. 1-4 (1911): 462. “Mais autant la femme ordinaire a raison de se voiler, autant la beauté parfaite a le droit de se révéler a tous.”

45 Christophe Prochasson, Les Années Électriques, 1880-1910 (Paris, 1991); Shapiro, Pleasures of Paris, 164.

46 Fantasio, February 15, 1907, 57. “J’ai fait du théâtre sans robe à traine, parfois même sans robe du tout, car un jour ma mère, lasse de ma résistance, me laissa libre d’agir à ma guise et même, dans un mouvement de colère, m’envoya au bain. J’y suis encore et pour longtemps au bain. L’on put même m’y voir, dernièrement, barboter dans ma baignoire sur la scène des Folies-Dramatiques.”

47 Ibid., May 1, 1907, 26. “J’étais donc bien loin de penser qu’un jour je serais dans ce Palais-Royal à jouer des soubrettes perverses ou bien des revues, dans lesquelles tout en montrant mes jambes jusqu’à la ceinture.” “Mes chastes oreilles ignoraient les propos légers du Palais-Royal et je n’imaginais pas qu’une femme puisse, dans un music-hall, montrer ses formes presque sans voiles.”

340 were possible for her sex and that she personally would be doing undertaking such acts publicly. Her statements, and indeed her actions, indicated that a shift in moral values had taken place during her lifetime. Her juxtaposition of the adjectives “chaste” and

“perverse” to refer to herself in the past and present respectively supported this notion.

Rather than pointing to the corruption of her moral character, however, her comparison underlined the importance of performativity in permitting her to role-play sexually reprobate characters while preserving her ‘true’ moral fiber.

This same perspective underpins the experience of Edmonde Guy who, not long after her arrival at Ba-ta-clan, was commanded by the music hall’s director, Madame

Rasimi, to appear on stage without veils. With a kick in the pants and an energetic “Get out there you fool!” Guy reluctantly made her debut as a femme nue despite the moral and social invectives that caused her to instinctively cover her breasts. Her initial performance as a nude dancer, marked by both “shock and exhortation” eventually gave way to a revelation that she could be comfortable in her own skin without feeling shame.

From that point on, the writer of this account concludes, “she found herself nude in the presence of the public, she lost all impression of malaise.”48

By the turn-of-the-century people were finding that the absence of clothes, just as much as their presence, could be used in the fabrication of one’s identity. Because fashion had become so intricately linked with a woman’s moral character, the acceptance or rejection of clothes signified what it meant to be (or not be) a “Woman” in a specific cultural sphere.49 According to Alain Corbin when Duncan performed in Paris, “What

48 Reboux, “Le nu,” 9-10. “Vas-y donc, chameau…Faudra garder ce-geste là, Guy!”

49 Ussher, Fantasies of Femininity, 48.

341 her dancing really symbolized was the freedom to experience the body as something no longer external to the self,” no longer simply a covering to don or adorn.50 The body became an intrinsically personal and introspective medium through which the female artist defined herself as an autonomous individual. As Colette declared, “I’ve had enough!...I want to do what I want!…I want to go on the stage, to become a mime, even an actress. I want to dance naked if I feel that a leotard...cramps my style [emphasis added].”51

La femme nue became the natural spokesperson for a younger generation intent on freeing the body from the unhealthy physical constraints of modern industrial life. In her advice to Fantasio readers on beauty, fashion, and personal hygiene, Jane Delyane promoted a return to a more simplistic, natural way of living.

Women who are so concerned about caring for their body, who fight the invasion of fat and wrinkles are so surprised to learn that a woman of the theater, and a model for Henner, Faivre, Cheret before that—only follows the prescription of never wearing a corset or clothes and stockings which are too tight--breathing at ease is important--who takes baths that are of human body temperature, places cold applications and rubs eau de cologne on the breasts. Nothing else…no massages, beauty creams, only regular sleep, long walks, some horseback riding and sea baths in the summer, solid food, no beer or tobacco, and don’t be angry with the nude in the theater if she is artistic and embellishes the body’s forms with some fishnet stockings and stones, in classical fashion, and if she maintains a chaste and smiling comportment.52

50 Philippe Aries and Georges Duby, eds., Private Life: Fires from the Revolution to the Great War, vol. 4, (London, 1990), 667.

51 Colette, Dialogues de Bêtes (Paris, 1998).

52 Fantasio, March 1, 1911, 510. “Les femmes si soucieuses des soins de leur corps, qui combattent par tant de moyens l’envahissement de la graisse ou le relâchement des tissues, qui trouvent dans la vie moderne mille obstacles à la conservation de leur beauté, s’étonneront peut-etre en apprenant qu’une femme qui, depuis cinq ans, se montre tout à fait ou à peu pres nue au théâtre, après avoir été cinq ans modèle chez Henner, chez Abel Faivre, chez Cheret, ne suit—mais rigoreusement—que les prescriptions suivants: Jamais de corset, en aucun cas, en aucune circonstance; jamais de vêtements qui enserrent ou de souliers étroits. Il faut avant tout que la respiration soit à l’aise. Des bains quotidiens à la température du corps, des applications froides sur les seins et des frictions d’eau de Cologne. Rien de plus. Pas de

342

Similarly Andrée Spinelly, when asked why she launched the fashionable trend of

appearing in public without stockings, replied that it was more comfortable, more

“convenient,” and that there was nothing “more beautiful than the color of ‘flesh.’”53

Colette Andris, a popular striptease artist of the 1930s, expressed the intrinsic beauty of

the unadorned body best when she encouraged women to:

try to live as nude as possible and, over the long term, to become, to create a harmonious being, that grace dominates and directs. Grass, that the wind bends, is nude, and perfect in its movement. Then, why should the body—this marvelous plant, not be simplified, and stripped of useless finery or deceptions? Why should it not be, as well, a reflection of harmony, the living enchantment that, petrified, represents a beautiful statue?54

Her rejection of clothing expressed not only a self-awareness about the physical body but

conveyed an image of bodily movement that was rooted in and sanctioned by nature

itself. It was nudity, alongside the ability to move and act on one’s accord that marked la

femme nue as a modern, and by default, threatening body.

Like Jules-Etienne Marey’s photographic studies of human locomotion, active

nudes in motion “signified a liberated body free of external (social) constraints (clothing

massages, pas de crèmes de beauté d’aucune sorte. Un sommeil régulier. Une vie calme, avec beaucoup de promenades à pied, de temps en temps de l’équitation et le plus possible de bains de mer l’été. Une alimentation solide, mais peu de boisson. Jamais de bière surtout et jamais de tabac. Voila, n’est-il pas vrai, un petit manuel très simple pour garder le nu tel qu’il doit être. Usez-en, Mesdames, en vous fiant mon expérience. Et soyez sans colre contre le nu au théâtre s’il sait demeurer artistique, s’il sait agrémenter les formes du corps de quelques resilles et de quelques pierreries, à la mode antique, et s’il conserve des attitudes souriantes et chastes.”

53 Michel Georges-Michel, Actrices de nuit (Paris, 1933), 129-130. “Pourquoi je ne porte pas de bas? Parce que la marche les fusille mieux que dans les fosses de Vincennes, parce que c’est plus commode, parce que rien n’est si beau que la couleur ‘chair,’ et, la vrai raison, parce que cette fois-la, j’ai oublié de les mettre. Alors, tu comprends, mon vieux, à present je m’habille comme ça me va. Et si ça ne plaît pas aux vieilles dames, ça plaît au moins aux vieux messieurs.”

54 Reboux, “Le nu,” 15.

343

being the most obvious sign).”55 Performers like Delyane, “the princess of the nude in the

theater,” trumpeted the benefits of moving across stage “without the constraint of a single

article of clothing.”56 Movement, as Fuller found in waving some gauze veils before the

multi-colored stage lights and projectors of the Folies-Bergère, “has been the point of

departure of all expression and is the most loyal to nature.” Unlike speech, “which is not

truth,” dance instilled la femme nue with an impulse to “express all the sensations and

emotions which it [the human body] feels.” Having been raised under a bourgeois gender

order that defined women as passive and passionless, les femmes nues utilized dance as a

uniquely passionate and purposeful feminine activity. “What is dance? Movement. What is movement? The expression of a sensation. What is a sensation? The result that produces on the body an impression or idea that the spirit perceives. The sensation is the repercussion that the body receives, when an impression hits the spirit.”57 By positioning

themselves as active recipients of sensations and the source of internal stimuli, these

women bridged the divide within western philosophical tradition that separated their sex

from spiritual and intellectual exercises by giving outward expression to interior

emotions and thought. “Just like the face,” the body operated as “an instrument of

expression” which allowed la femme nue to communicate, “her entire being through the

rhythm of her spirit.”58

55 Toepfer, Empire and Ecstasy, 28.

56 Fantasio, March 1, 1911, 510.

57 Loie Fuller, Quinze ans de ma vie (Paris, 1908), 68-70.

58 Adorée Villany quoted in Le Matin, May 6, 1913. “Qu’en matière de danse, le rythme de l’esprit ainsi que le prétend Mlle Villany, se communiqué au corps, et qu’à l’égal du visage, le corps tout entire puisse devenir un instrument d’expression nul n’y contredira.”

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Acting, dancing, and singing in the nude provided la femme nue with an emotional

escape valve through which she could experience joy, happiness, and self-worth.59

Delyane articulated this sentiment best when she stated, “I have personally found in the

boldness of nudity a selfish joy.”60 The intent of performing nude was not to satiate the

visual appetite of spectators, but to find a psychological release for coping with “the

demands of modern life;” demands which again for women involved acts of self-denial.61

Before joining a second generation of femmes nues who achieved stardom in the 1920s

and 1930s, Colette Andris reaped the rewards of an earlier feminist movement that had

opened up professional careers for women outside of the home. As one of the very few women who practiced law in the first quarter of the twentieth-century, Andris renounced an unfulfilling life of the mind for a life that harmoniously balanced mind and body, work and pleasure. In undertaking a reform of the body, these women took pride in the nude as both beautiful and unapologetically narcissistic. “Why not be proud of one’s body, that which one has received from the Creator and for which one is responsible?” queried

Delyane. This corporeal pride and sense of self took root in and found expression in an

alternative career for women where they could naturally be themselves rather than an

idealized figure like Yrven’s dowdy schoolteacher or Andris’ cerebral lawyer. In a

59 In a critique of the operetta Vert Vert, the British journal Vanity Fair characterized the play’s femmes- nues in the following manner: “All of them appeared to be on excellent terms with themselves, and in spite of their ante-diluvian costume, non of them seemed to be affected by the chilliness of an almost wintry night. On the contrary, they all jiggled playfully…Some of them indulged in a smiling recognition of an acquaintance in the stalls or side-boxes, while all stood or frisked about the stage in attitudes more or less ungraceful. Indeed, notwithstanding their want of cultivation, they were able to make it quite evident they thought the whole business very good fun.” As quoted in Davis, Economics of British Stage, 137.

60 Fantasio, March 1, 1911, 510.

61 Ibid.

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confessional moment, Delyane admitted that she was “proud” to be considered “the first

nude woman on a Parisian stage.” In stating that she was “hardly the last” female performer to dance “without veils,” Delyane acknowledged and confidently took

ownership of the legacy that she had helped forge for others.62

The professional career of la femme nue emerged in part and was deeply connected

with personal manifestations and agendas. Some of these convictions were simply about

acting on one’s volition, as in the case of Spinelly who retorted, “I dress myself as I

please. And if it does not please the old ladies, it at least pleases the old men.”63

However others took their art more seriously, giving rise to the notion that the personal

was political, or at least in their case, professional. As a counter to Edgar Degas’

infamous remark that he “painted with his prick,” la femme nue proved that the female artist could create and inscribe art with her body too. In other words, the female performer and her performance were to be interpreted as one in the same. Duncan recalled how…

in the first performance of Tannhauser my transparent tunic, showing every part of my dancing body, had created some stir amongst the pink colored legs of the Ballet and at the last moment even poor Frau Cosima lost her courage. She sent one of her daughters to my loge, with a long white chemise, which she begged me to wear under the filmy scarf which served me for a costume. But I was adamant. I would dress and dance exactly my way, or not at all.64

62 Ibid. “Car pourquoi ne pas être fière de soi, de son corps, que l’on a recu ainsi du Créateur et don’t on n’est pas responsible?” “J’ai été—et j’en suis fière—la première femme nue sur une scène parisienne. Je suis un peu la dernière, car beaucoup n’ont fait que passer, cherchant la seulement l’éphémère succès d’un engouement.”

63 Georges-Michel, Actrices de nuit, 129-130. “Pourquoi je ne porte pas de bas? Parce que la marche les fusille mieux que dans les fosses de Vincennes, parce que c’est plus commode, parce que rien n’est si beau que la couleur ‘chair,’ et, la vrai raison, parce que cette fois-la, j’ai oublié de les mettre. Alors, tu comprends, mon vieux, à present je m’habille comme ça me va. Et si ça ne plaît pas aux vieilles dames, ça plaît au moins aux vieux messieurs.”

64 Duncan, My Life, 157.

346

To request an alteration in the costuming where the body as an extension of the self was

covered up, was to deny la femme nue a voice and a means of self-expression. In the

words of Deborah Jowitt, Duncan interpreted the body as something that “ought to reflect

the creator’s private response to the world.”65 Rather than uphold expectations of how a

woman was to appear, act and/or dance, Duncan and other femmes nues submitted to

their own physical and emotional instincts in writing their bodies into a performance.

Simultaneous to early twentieth-century discourses by race theorists, eugenicists,

health gurus, and sexologists linking nudity “to the recovery of an atavistic state of

freedom,” performance artists spoke of this “unfettered experience” of the body in

conjunction with a pre-lapsarian state of innocence.66 Lise Brevannes, who had appeared

in Apollo’s Her Majesty the Nude, declared that she had recovered earthly paradise in

following “the tradition of Eve.” “Heavens, yes, I show myself every night in front of the

Apollo’s public, just as the Creator judged appropriate to make me do. Beautiful souls

have nothing to hide.”67 In response to a traditional association between the female body

and original sin within Judeo-Christian thought, these women emphasized the redemptive quality of their natural physical beauty and connectedness of body and soul. Nakedness, by removing the sin (i.e. materialism) that aroused bodily shame, bridged the spiritual separation between la femme nue and God. Many of the female artists, including

Duncan, referred to their naked state as a religious experience where baring one’s body

65 Jowitt, Time, 70.

66 Toepfer, Empire and Ecstasy, 68; Private Life, 667.

67 Fantasio, February 1, 1908, 659. “Ma foi oui, je me montre tous les soirs devant le public de l’Apollo, telle que le Créateur a jugé à propos de me faire. Les belles âmes n’ont rien à cacher.”

347

was equated with baring one’s soul. In her 1913 trial for outrages public à la pudeur,

Adorée Villany justified her act of bodily disclosure stating: “When I remove my shirt, it

is in order to bare my soul.”68 An emphasis on openness, transparency, and legibility

functioned as a counter to the notion of women as artifice. Duncan explained that at her

dance school for young girls “we have no costumes, no ornaments—just the beauty that

flows from the inspired human soul, and the body that is its symbol.”69 The performative

nude’s simplicity of dress, consisting of a veil, jeweled belt, and cache-sexe, “scorned

decoration and ornament, it was (consciously or unconsciously) to challenge an aesthetic

economy that historically had trivialized them” as frivolous, superficial, easily placated,

and unenlightened.70

Reaching this spiritual state or communion with the Creator, typically associated in

Aristotelian philosophy with the masculine realm or in Christian iconography with ‘the feminine,’ was difficult in environments or venues where the animalistic, material aspects of humanity predominated. Les femmes nues felt discomfort when groped over and leered at as sex objects by their prurient bourgeois male clientele. A correlation between the spiritual and the material with the performer as subject and object was a recurrent theme in their writings. By embarking upon her journey from America to France,

Duncan sought “to bring about a great renaissance of religion through the Dance, to bring the knowledge of the Beauty and Holiness of the human body through its expression of

68 L’Intransigeant, May 6, 1913, 2. “Quand j’ôte ma chemise, c’est pour mettre mon âme à nu.”

69 Duncan, My Life, 253.

70 Roberts, Disruptive Acts, 61.

348

movements, and not to dance for the amusement of overfed Bourgeoisie after dinner.”71

The seriousness with which she took her body project contrasted with its trivialization by those whose earthly, physical concerns for food, wealth, and sex limited their understanding of her metaphysical revival. Brevannes, in acknowledging that the ideal was sometimes difficult to find in a place where “men, these little devils, are looking for something else” admitted to experiencing “moments where I need to save myself.”72 La femme nue’s need to “save,” remove, or distance herself from sexual objectification was accomplished through two mechanisms, one psychological, the other physical: self- absorption and disguise.

Self-absorption as a mental veil enclosed and encapsulated the body, allowing it to undergo a process of spiritual transformation. In their reviews of shows, theater critics commented repeatedly on how “a serenity surrounds these women as a sort of protection.” This self-imposed meditative stance, shielding them from disruptive crowds, enabled female performers to assert, “From the stage, one can not distinguish the room.

The faces are one in the same.”73 Their capacity to block out the individual spectators

and to focus on the audience, as a whole, demanded an intense degree of concentration

and introspection. By possessing a keen sense of themselves as self-absorbed, sentient

beings, these women embarked upon more than just an act or performance but a creative

process of self-transformation as well.

71 Duncan, My Life, 85.

72 Fantasio, February 1, 1908, 659. “Les hommes, ces polissons, cherchent autre chose. Et il y a des moments où j’ai envie de me sauver.”

73 Reboux, “Le nu,” 10.

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In addition to the mental veil that separated the performer-as-subject from the

performer-as-object of the gaze, there was the physical veil of nudity. Although it

seemed like a contradiction in terms, the nude body could act simultaneously as a mirror

of the soul and as a disguise. Andris spoke of nudity as a veil that hid the unknown.

“Can one dream of a more perfect disguise? But yes: disguise, that which, of the most

absolute manner, transforms, renews, masks, poetizes the personality, the clearing of

conventions of all that mass produces itself, like fashion.”74 Building on French theorist

Roland Barthes’ assertion that the act of striptease “re-veils rather than reveals,” Elaine

Showalter has suggested that the contradiction of ‘nudity as disguise’ functions as a

mechanism “to protect the spectator from a confrontation with a terrifying female sexual

power.”75 Paradoxically while the diaphanous and opaque veil seeks to hide female

genitalia, it simultaneously titillates the spectator with bodily disclosure, acting as “a kind

of veil that conceals the real identity of the body, no matter how naked.”76

Performing nude demanded a degree of professionalism that not everyone

possessed. “A nude dancer? Oh well, that is a dancer who shows her breasts. At least

such is the current definition; because to dance and to show one’s breasts does not imply

that one knows how to dance nude.”77 Spectators, critics, and performers reiterated that

not all women were intended by the Creator to appear on stage nude, suggesting that the

74 Ibid., 15.

75 Roland Barthes, “Striptease” in Mythologies (New York, 1972), 85; Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin-de-Siècle (New York, 1990), 164.

76 Toepfer, Empire and Ecstasy, 1.

77 Colette Andris, Une danseuse nue (Paris, 1933), 7.

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exclusion might be as much “a question of physiology” as it was of talent.78 La femme

nue’s success as a staple of early twentieth-century Parisian entertainment resulted in a

discriminating taste for physically fit, beautiful female performers. Like all the latest

fads and crazes, la femme nue had her imitators who were characterized by their physical

deformities and amateurishness. One critic decried how “Now one sees it even on the

smallest stages, poor girls with sad nipples, tortured stomachs, contorting themselves

with difficulty,” these “sad exhibitions where flesh alone replaces charm!”79 The writer’s

emphasis on the girl’s corporeal deficiencies left little doubt in the reader’s mind that such displays were for and by the working-class. The shameless le nu canaille, or “nude of the rabble,” had developed a reputation as one “who ignores all veil, poetry, presents herself like meat on a meat stall, pretty meat sometimes, but meat nonetheless.”80

Having witnessed “the success of certain barefoot dancers” like Duncan and Fuller,

theater directors tried to imitate their tasteful art by removing “the stockings and socks of

these poor chorus girls.” The resulting spectacle was, according to observers, a “pitiful”

vision of women who with “knock-kneed kneecaps and deformed feet” would have benefited from “the protective and idealizing maillot, the maillot which fills in the holes, eases the curves, and rejuvenates the figure.” As the antithesis of la femme nue, le nu canaille disregarded certain standards of beauty and comportment that were intended to keep the performative nude an object of elite consumption. Theater directors who took

78 Reboux, “Le nu,” 10.

79 Fantasio, May 1, 1908, 884. “Des tristes exhibitions où la ‘chair’ seule remplace le charme!”

80 Ibid., April 1, 1908, 809. “Celui qui ignore tout voile, toute poésie, qui se présente comme la viande sur l’étal, de la belle viande quelquefois, mais de la viande tout de même.”; St. Albin, “Le nu au théâtre,” 454.

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advantage of artistic freedom by speculating on human passions jeopardized la femme

nue’s reputation as a legitimate artist in places of mass entertainment. To ensure that quality rather than quantity governed the conditions surrounding her display, two solutions were proposed. The first recommended that the genre be banned from the larger stages altogether and reserved for the théâtres à coté (second-rate theaters) which were far less numerous. Proponents of the latter believed that la femme nue should be prohibited from minors and reserved for an elite clientele. Since this line of argument ran counter to the notion of liberal individualism popular under the Third Republic, the second, advising directors to be selective in the hiring process by choosing women who were “well-made,” “perfect in body,” with lines “finely and neatly molded,” received greater support.81

In order not to appear vulgar or crude, professional femmes nues needed to

demonstrate that they exercised self-discipline, civility, and sophistication. The ideal

performative body should proceed in slow, calm, rhythmic moves demonstrating a

“flexibility of movements, gestural eurythmics, and a truth about the perfect

correspondence of music and beauty.”82 Too many “jolts and collisions” would create a

“vibrant, lascivious or agitated” nude dance reminiscent of the hysterical or hyper- sexualized bodies of the New Woman or the exotic Other, the belly dancer.83 For several

81 St. Albin, “Le nu au théâtre,” 464.

82 Fantasio, March 1, 1911, 510.

83 In recent years, literary critics, art and cultural historians have corroborated Elaine Showalter’s suggestion that “The New Woman was a nervous woman” See Sexual Anarchy 40. See Gordon Why the French Love Jerry Lewis; Matlock, Scenes of Seduction; Emily Apter Feminizing the Fetish: Psychoanalysis and Narrative Discourse in Turn-of-the-Century France (Ithaca, N.Y., 1991). Louis-Leon Martin described the foreign chorus-line dance group, the Gertrude Hoffmann Girls, as hysterical,

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years, dancers pleaded the cause of tasteful, artistic nudity in fin-de-siècle spectacles.

Lise Fleuron made the contrast between boxers who, “all covered in sweat, claw at each

other, scratching for the applause of a delirious crowd,” and the living nude who “must

simply present herself to the public and remain a little immobile.”84 Echoing Loie Fuller

and Isadora Duncan who claimed that “there was nothing immodest in dancing, breasts

and garter-free, to the rhythms of Gluck and Beethoven,” one artist asserted, “I take great

care not to risk a single harsh movement: no swaying of the hips, no jerks in the small of the back. Just of suppleness, slowness, and rhythm.”85 Such statements imply that the

body, rather than being viewed as an object, was seen as a “vital, kinetic energy” or force

that the dancer and actress produced, contained, and controlled.86

As a harmonious being, the nude performer acted as both composer and conductor,

overseeing the entire creative process and ensuring that everything worked in tandem.

“One is only concerned with having a beautiful attitude…to look supple, relaxed,

harmonious.”87 By surveying the slightest movement of the appendages, even to the

point of ensuring that the breasts “remain intangible,” the performative nude

demonstrated possession of its own morality.88 Such evocations of weightlessness,

spasmodic demons who danced in a state of frenzy with their anguished, agitated, perverse, hallucinating and violent movements. See Le Music-Hall et Ses Figures (Paris, 1928), 199-201.

84 Ersky, Est-il le nu au théâtre impudique? 31.

85 St. Albin, “Le nu au théâtre,” 454; Fantasio, May 1, 1908, 895.

86 Duncan, My Life, 190.

87 Reboux, “Le nu,” 10.

88 Fantasio, March 1, 1911, 510.

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gracefulness, and softness made allusion to an earlier eighteenth-century discourse on the

disciplining of the aristocratic body and more recent Delsartian principles.89 However in

the modern era, these historical actors were not demonstrating a mastery over their

environment in terms of navigating through small spaces with cumbersome clothes but a

mastery over their physical bodies instead. The work involved in transforming oneself into a harmonious being had to appear both natural and enjoyable as expressed in the

dictum that “the nude must be appealing.” In fact the two most important requirements in

a woman’s figuration of pure plastique (beauty) was “above all to remain chaste and then to be smiling.” However the facial expression need not show the “inviting smile” of a prostitute-courtesan, but the “smile of a woman in bloom.”90

What all of these performance artists of the early twentieth century seemed to articulate was that their nudity had an asexual poetics to it which elevated their artistic form to the status of high culture. Harmony of the body with music created a corporeal poetry. In agreeing with those who declared, “there was nothing more chaste than nudity itself,” Brevannes inquired, “Why shouldn’t the theatre, like the museums, have its works of art?”91 La femme nue took her role as an oeuvre d’art seriously, perceiving

herself as the realization of a timeless beauty to be admired, an ideal to be immortalized,

not an object of erotic consumption and desire. On the one hand, la femme nue

89 See Mimi Hellman’s article “Furniture, Sociability, and the Work of Leisure in Eighteenth-Century France,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 22:4 (1999): 415-445 and Sarah Cohen’s Art, Dance, and the Body in French Culture of the Ancien Regime (Cambridge, Mass., 2000).

90 Fantasio, March 1, 1911, 510.

91 Similarly, Mlle Maguera stated “I understand the nude from an aesthetic point of view, from art. The nude exists in the Salon, why should one not see it in the theater? Is there something more beautiful than a pretty girl?” See Ersky, Est-il le nu au théâtre impudique? 31.

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conformed to the traditional gender alignment of woman as nature and body and man as

culture and spirit. And yet it was also her attempts to blur such boundaries between

nature/ culture, body/ spirit, and objet d’art/ performative subject that made her a victim

of censorship and moral attacks. Ignoring those who considered her work “a detestable

job,” she dismissed her critics as being “people who do not understand the beauty of the

nude, of the chaste nude” or who know “anything about art.”92

A common sentiment among female artists was that they felt out of place or were

misunderstood in French society. Brevannes regretted not having been born in the cradle of Western civilization, ancient Greece, “where I would have been more appreciated.”93

Duncan, Mata Hari, Adorada Via and others’ own self-discovery through the body resulted indirectly from their attempts “to revive the historical forms of truly artistic dance of the Egyptians, Israelites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks and Romans.” In the process of unpacking the genealogy of modern dance, they uncovered “the unknown will of the ancients” by experiencing “the indescribable pleasure of discovering by thought that which the costume hides.”94 As Ernest La Jeunesse noted, these women, in performing nude, were practicing “a lost art” and experiencing “a lost spirit” in ways that

“modern women” could not. 95 Their allusion to or association with the past worked as a

double foil, allowing la femme nue to position herself as a part of high culture while psychologically and culturally distancing herself from the morals and social conventions

92 Fantasio, February 1, 1908, 659; Le Matin, May 6, 1913.

93 Fantasio, February 1, 1908, 659.

94 Gazette des Tribunaux, May 4, 1912, 404.

95 Ernest La Jeunesse, Le Journal, May 3, 1908.

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of contemporary society. The tableaux vivants and revues in which she performed drew

upon a series of historical and mythological narratives, as well as classical images, where

nude women were revered rather than reviled. Some of the more popular theatrical

presentations of classical nudity to grace Parisian stages at the turn-of-the-century

included Three Graces, Phyrné, and Eglé. Such storylines, operating as social critiques

and commentaries on contemporary French morality, translated easily into modern times

as the main characters of artists, models, and senators were readily identifiable as

nineteenth-century social types.96

The appeal to classicism, as a strategy of self-preservation, implicitly denied claims

that la femme nue’s performances functioned as a form of pornography. According to the

author of a small book entitled Art and Pornographie, appreciation of the nude body

required the knowledge and ability to deny one’s sexual urges, both of which the masses

were believed to lack.97 As a subject of high art, la femme nue’s clients consisted of the

same respectable bourgeois males who, as Leora Auslander has noted, spent their leisure

time admiring and appreciating antiquity’s treasures. These upper-class aesthetes shared

a discriminating taste for art and in particular the nude. Duncan, like so many others,

expressed reservations about performing for people other than art connoisseurs when she

stated, “My dancing is for the elite, for the artists, sculptors, painters, musicians, but not

96 St. Albin, “Le nu au théâtre,” 454;

97 Yet it is important to note here that simultaneous to defining themselves as practitioners of high art, femmes nues also saw themselves as missionaires civilatrices who, as part and parcel of a democratizing process, entertained, exposed, and educated the masses in an appreciation of high culture. Duncan herself would state: “Give art to the people who need it. Great music should no longer be kept for the delight of a few cultured people, it should be given free to the masses: it is as necessary for them as air and bread, for it is the Spiritual Wine of Humanity” See Duncan, My Life, 253.

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for the general public.”98 La femme nue’s initial performances before limited audiences

within private parlors where “one saw, for the first time, young women abdicating the

troublesome cloth,” tended to exclude the uneducated and uninvited eyes of the public as

an additional layer of protection. 99 When Judge Hugot inquired as to whether or not the

art of her dance necessitated nudity to achieve its artistic ends, Adorée Villany replied

unequivocally in the affirmative. Rejecting the accusation that she had committed an

outrage public à la pudeur, Villany claimed that her “performances were completely

private. One could only enter into the hall by personal invitation.” Moreover, she herself

had given the order to allow artists and men of letters only to enter the room while she

was on stage. The presence of such men who traditionally consumed images of nude

women in the privacy of their cabinets de curiosités, private smoking rooms and clubs,

bestowed a degree of legitimacy to her performance. The audience in attendance at dress

rehearsals,

composed of friends of the house, their friends, and their friends’ friends, serious lovers of the principal artists and their gigolos, journalists specializing in the music hall and those who were not, friends of the decorator, author, journalists, music-hall or theatrical actors, and people that one sees everywhere,

certified to the rest of the world that “the attitudes of the dancer ‘were essentially artistic

and respectable.”100 However with the rise of mass consumer and leisure culture, the

question as to whether the theater accounted for a public or private space raised doubts

about la femme nue’s professional status as an artist and object of elite consumption. The

98 Ibid., 98.

99 St Albin, “Le nu au théâtre,” 450.

100 Charles Quinel and A. de Montgon, La Cité des Femmes Nues (Paris, 1936), 75; Testimony taken from Professor Kaubach, Gazette des Tribunaux, May 4, 1912, 404.

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projection of her body for carnal, as opposed to intellectual, pleasure tarnished her

association with high art.101

To ensure against such a loss or besmearing of her reputation, la femme nue

employed conventional motifs which represented the nude as chaste. This mode of

representation played upon a dominant sexual discourse circulating in late-nineteenth

century France that “produced and intensified stereotypes of female sexlessness and purity.”102 La femme nue’s self-presentation as a sexually modest artist was one of the most effective means in avoiding censorship and criticism. Initially, pink, white, and ochre maillots made it possible for women to “show their charms to the public” without fear of retribution.103 Such flesh-colored body suits left the impression of nudity while

protecting the wearer’s moral character and reputation. “The men who are in the room

find themselves ecstatic, and also some ladies…And these thousands of indiscreet eyes

fixed on me does not bother me.”104 The absence of embarrassment or shame either on

the part of la femme nue or the spectator implied that such acts conformed to artistic,

moral and sexual standards of propriety. “Never, for the five years I have been in the

theater, is one shocked by my role. Not a single complaint! Not a single critique from

above or below. I have been la femme nue without reproach as much as without fear.”105

101 St. Albin, “Le nu au théâtre,” 462.

102 Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, 45.

103 Romi, Le Nu (Paris, 1982), 95-96.

104 Fantasio, February 1, 1908. “Les messieurs qui sont dans la salle s’en trouvent ravis, et aussi quelques dames qui ne sont point sottes et preferent a l’exhibition d’un maillot qui ne cache rien mais abime tout de ses villains plis, la simplicite...”

105 Ibid., March 1, 1911, 510.

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If the performance called for complete nudity, directors sanitized such displays by keeping them only to a few seconds and surrounding them with special effects of

“soothing cello music,” dimmed lighting, and a cloud of smoke.106 “It was the dancer abandoning one after the other muslin veils in an obscure bluish light which made her appear more vaporous and immaterial.”107 Moreover, les femme nues conveyed their innate impulse towards modesty by instinctively keeping some gauzes, garlands, and jewelry around their nudity.108 “That which one calls a nude dancer, is a body already protected, defended, dressed, by a cake of grease and powder; then some flowers, a jewel or some lace would constitute that obligatory triangle.”109 In addition to these accessories, some avoided frontal nudity completely. In an interview with an Italian journalist, Liliane, described her evasion of the “most severe censors” when she performed as Salomé Margherita at Barcelona’s Eldorado and Marseilles’ Crystal Palace.

To retain her reputation as a “star without controversy,” she presented herself ‘in profile’ nude. Stating that there was nothing immoral or “naughty” about the real nude in and of itself, Liliane suggested that it was simply what “one puts around it…the way in which one presents it” that created scandal and rumors of impropriety. “I never stand still in a frontal or posterior pose before the public: always three quarters of the way, at least. And especially in profile, a lot of profile, nothing but profile, I would say, if the demands of

106 Ibid., April 1, 1908, 804.

107 St. Albin, “Le nu au théâtre,” 453.

108 Fantasio, April 1, 1908, 804.

109 Andris, Une Danseuse Nue, 8.

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the pantomime did not require me to pose sometimes frontal, or posterior…But in these attitudes…I never immobilize myself: I evolve, I turn.”110

La femme nue had both shaped and reformed the way people experienced and thought about the body and art, not as a visual experience but as a metaphysical transformation. While the physical assertion of herself as a self-creating, independent

subject blazed the trail towards sexual liberation, as James McMillan has observed,

“French society was still a long way from the sexual revolution of the late twentieth

century.”111 By the twentieth century, the widespread use of contraception, innovations

in abortion techniques, the increasing acceptance and popularity of female sports, as well

as the advent of the bicycle, brassiere, and bathing suit, had made it possible for women

to contemplate their bodies as extensions of their identities. However a greater

physiological awareness of women’s bodies was met with attempts by physicians,

politicians, publicists, feminists, lawyers, and artists to purge, project, or contain female

sexuality.112

What this chapter has tried to show is that a small minority of women spoke on and

acted out the importance of female sexual expression, contending that nudity lay at the

root of women’s intellectual creativity and emotional/spiritual well-being. These New

Women participated in and promoted a “feminist aesthetics” where their use of theatrical techniques and artistic motifs undermined rather than reified the boundaries of bourgeois

110 Fantasio, May 1, 1908, 895. “Jamais je ne m’immobilise face—ni pile—au public: toujours de trios quarts au moins. Et puis, je m’applique a ne risquer aucun geste brutal: pas de dehanchement, pas de sursaut de reins. De la souplesse, de la lenteur et du rythme. Et surtout, surtout du profil, beaucoup de profil, rien que du profil, dirais-je, si les exigencies de la pantomime ne m’obligeaient parfois a faire face.”

111 McMillan, France and Women, 156-157.

112 Thurman, Secrets, 112

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morality.113 In conquering their personal inhibitions, transcending bourgeois modesty,

and reinterpreting the nude as a healthy, regenerated form, femmes nues broke with moral dictates, sartorial rules, and gender conventions that designated the female sex as

an enervated, passive body protected by layers of fabric and steel braces. Their

subversive acts of opposition to dress codes, and gender norms in general, suggests that

what had once defined a members of the female sex as a “Woman” was being challenged

and undergoing change. Empowered by the assumption that women’s “natural social

function is to exhibit themselves, in order to be pleasing to the eye,” la femme nue

positioned herself in such a way that she would not be perceived as threatening-that is to

say, visually as object of the male gaze while corporeally expressing her feminine wiles and innocence, her desire for mobility and legibility.114 At a time when “a gender order

based on sexual difference rather than on sex equality was still widely considered to be

fundamental to the well-being of society,” French women capitalized upon their

womanliness to carve out a space from which they could redefine and critique gender

norms.115

While the exhibitionist aspects of la femme nue can be traced back to the studio

and certain bals publics of the last quarter of the century, the music hall represented a

nexus where high and low aesthetic practices and public and private spheres converged.

A growing resemblance between painting and posing, stage acting and the staging of

modern life, reality and representation facilitated the eventual transition of the

113 Roberts, Disruptive Acts, 70.

114 Jules Lemaître, “La Décoration des comédiens,” 309.

115 McMillan, France and Women, 154.

361 performative female nude from the studio and salon to the salle.116 With its growing emphasis on the erotic through bodily self-display, the music hall revue brought the spectacle of female nudity to the French theater, making the undressed female body a visible, legible, and material sign of women’s increasing presence in the public sphere and their assertion of a sexual self. And yet, the consumption, circulation, and real and imagined possession of female bodies within the context of the Belle Époque Parisian music hall strengthened a republican state ideologically-informed by patriarchy and visually-oriented towards the commanding gaze of the male artist and spectator.

116 Shapiro documents a compositional shift in the Parisian theater-going public by the fin-de-siècle. She refers to cafes, cafes-concerts, and cabarets as ‘democratic pleasure institutions’ elements of from every class of Parisian society, male and female, gathered under one roof to enjoy circus acts, musical performances, and dancing. See her chapters on “Theatrical Entertainments” and “Cafes, Cafes-concerts, and Cabarets” in Pleasures of Paris. Likewise, Patricia Eckert Boyer notes that a shift in the content of theatrical repertoire occurred sometime around 1887, inaugurating “an era of experimentation of change.” No longer “controlled by the taste of the bourgeoisie,” the Parisian stage became subject to a “naturalist impulse,” already evident in contemporary literature and art, which “exposed society’s hypocritical pretensions, used the language of the uneducated working class, provided a candid treatment of sexual matters.” See Artists and the Avant-Garde Theater in Paris, 1887-1900 (Washington, D.C., 1998), 13-14.

CHAPTER 8 CONCLUSION

The big step was passing from the skirt to the bodysuit and not from the bodysuit to simple rice powder. Whereas the first came about without any obstacles, the second continues to raise lively protests…The march ahead is most interesting to follow. Maybe one day a competent historian will retrace the steps of this conquest for theatrical freedom with some supporting plates and photos.1

While many weeds and underbrush still cover the path first forged by la femme nue over one hundred years ago, I hope that I have at least illuminated what for years has been a poorly marked trail. That the birth of a modern body culture predicated on a greater acceptance of showing female flesh has been sidestepped and overlooked in favor of other historical moments is an odd and curious subject in itself. Perhaps a history about women and their bodies does not need special mention since our western philosophical tradition assumes that the two are unequivocally bound together as a timeless and unchanging universal truth.

Yet I have contended that this is not so, citing an example where the assumed connection between ‘Woman’ and ‘Sex’ broke down even while it was being reaffirmed.

The fact that women today can now unabashedly reveal more of their bodies in public than at any other time before is directly attributable to the “disruptive acts” undertaken by a small group of women in Parisian bal publics, theaters, and music halls at the turn-of- the-twentieth-century. The underlying questions driving this dissertation have been three-fold. Why did certain women expose their bodies publicly at a time when a

1 St. Albin, “Le Nu au théâtre,” Mercure de France, vols. 1-4 (1911): 450.

362 363 woman’s moral virtue was measured by the length of her hemline? In what ways did their actions deviate from, conform to, or complicate a normative bourgeois femininity and aesthetic of the female body? And lastly, how were those performances interpreted in light of larger cultural shifts taking place?

In seeking to answer the first of these three matters, I quickly realized that a vast discrepancy among the women who performed in a state of undress existed. Variables such as motive, venue, degree of self-exposure, and presentational styles made it extremely difficult to speak of a representative femme nue. Furthermore, a lack of published memoirs and interviews made the task of recovering this historical subject all the more difficult. In many cases, these women were anonymous actresses on the historical scene who did not feel it necessary to record their experiences. Those that did, did so because they had achieved a level of stardom rare for performers of this type and were abnormally conscious of that fame and the place it held in the annals of history.

Admittedly, the voices that spoke on behalf of la femme nue were at times incongruous with one another. Whereas Colette, Duncan, and other famous celebrities translated their performances in terms of current understandings of the body as an instrument of health or a work of art, the more typical Parisian ‘showgirl,’ like Jane de

Lyane, was more open and less apologetic about her bodily displays. Based on interviews taken mostly from Fantasio, these lesser-known femmes des revues candidly expressed feelings of personal freedom, selfish joy, and pride about their exhibitionist acts. With its dubious reputation for manufacturing juicy gossip, Fantasio may have influenced the respondents’ statements, encouraging them to adopt a position that may or may not have been in sync with how they truly felt. Because of their suspect credibility,

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the autobiographical sources pertaining to la femme nue must be scrutinized for the way in which these atypical women self-fashioned a certain personae for themselves. Taken together, their statements provided the raw material for a rough, yet viable framework for making basic generalizations about la femme nue in spite of disparate motives, outlooks, and experiences. However a broader sampling and a deeper excavation of these women’s lives in terms of social and economic backgrounds, education, professional training are needed in order to discern precisely where these women’s lives departed from and converged with one another and how their personal experiences intersected with and contributed to a new form of entertainment and modern femininity.

Although they were not recognized as such, St. Albin, Georges Normandy, Georges

Montorgeuil, Louis Morin, and F.A. Ersky served as my main guides, staking out the boundaries to la femme nue’s shadowy past and signaling my attention to the key moments in her life. Although not all of them seemed to agree on the same starting, turning, and ending points, they provided a crude road map for retracing la femme nue’s steps, shaping the path I was uncovering and its trajectory. At times, one could discern them borrowing names, dates, and facts from one another, while in other instances, they were building upon what had already been said or were presenting entirely new information of their own. Although it is uncertain what the history or politics behind these individual men was, they shared a particular reverence for la femme nue that no doubt colored my perception of the subject as she evolved.

Their writings, having come in two waves, reflected and confirmed the importance of the mid-1890s and mid-to-late 1910s as significant points on a continuum in the history of striptease. In both cases, these cultural commentators were responding to trials

365 where the exhibition of scantily dressed women had disrupted traditional forms of spectating, presentational styles of the female body, and rules governing female behavior.

Theirs’ was a discourse of liberal individualism that supported the artist and the director, the consumer and the spectator as arbiters of taste when it came to art, the marketplace, and morality. In challenging the vestiges of an old order where the state and church dictated the parameters of a person’s life, they rallied around la femme nue as a symbol and literal embodiment of greater personal and social freedom.

Their panoramic descriptions of Parisian life suggested that a convergence of high and low cultural practices emanating from artistic milieus was responsible for the genesis of the performative female nude artist. With very few exceptions, almost all of them referenced the 1893 Bal des Quat’z-Arts as a watershed moment when artists, as the standard bearers of liberal individualism, promoted an agenda of radical reform for art and society. Montorgeuil, Morin, and St. Albin affirmed the special role that artists played as social critics who, in representing the oppressed, the marginalized, and the grotesque, preserved a spirit and tradition of anti-institutionalism in France. Challenging the formulaic, rigid, and stagnant prescriptions of bourgeois culture and its institutions, fin-de-siècle artists chose the female nude model as the subject of a new social aesthetics that utilized an alternative medium through which they could pose social challenges.

An appropriation of the bal public enabled artists to represent their work outside the studio in the form of live entertainment. Like the annual Carnival festival from which it was modeled, the Bal des Quat’z-Arts relied heavily upon a Rabelaisian spirit of mimicking social elites, mocking the status quo, bending gender, and celebrating excess.

Its temporary suspension of reality for a world of fantasy enabled students of the École to

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“caricature their most cherished beliefs” through the adoption of a “self-conscious pose.”2

Their affirmation of the artist’s right to freely express himself as he saw fit manifest itself in the visualization of the nude-in-motion, an act that called into question the very meaning of ‘Art’ by collapsing the canonical nude/naked binary.

In the process of putting forth a new vision of modern spectatorship and representation, the artists’ ball had the unintended consequence of subverting an already unstable gender order by offering the female nude model a space in which she could assert an autonomous sexual self and celebrate not only her sexual difference from men but also the exposed body as a source of empowerment. Motionless female nudes, once affixed to the model’s platform, received new life as they “expanded the performative parameters of the historic stereotype by moving their larger-than-life thespian personas into the choreography of everyday life.”3 By stepping out of the studio into the semi-

public space of the bal public, models could imagine themselves as self-actualizing

subjects who, free of the artistic and social conventions that impeded their movement, could enjoy a sense of agency heretofore unknown.

In serving as an educational tool as well as a source of entertainment, the artists’ model shored up contemporary notions of masculinity and femininity by reinforcing the objectified status of the undressed female body as a sexually available object and spectacle. The act of undressing before a select gathering of male voyeurs not only strengthened a man’s sense of power by de-mystifying the female body but also

2 Eugenia Herbert, The Artist and Social Reform: France and Belgium, 1885-1898 (New Haven, Conn., 1961), 82-84.

3 Emily Apter, “Acting Out Orientalism,” L’Esprit Createur 24, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 109.

367 supported the notion of a professional ‘male gaze’ that was integral to the artist’s professional legitimacy. An obsession with transforming the human body into an unadulterated piece of living art perpetuated the cultural myth of the artist as a heroic, virile, innocent genius at the same time that the artist-model relationship was being called into question. Although artists had enjoyed a degree of immunity from moral attacks regarding their contact with undressed women, their representation of the female nude-in- motion in the semi-public space of the bal public violated strict protocols regulating the production and display of her image and consequently undermined their claims to masculinity and professional propriety.

While the chronology could have started in 1893, I believed it was important to go back a few years in order to demonstrate that the Bal des Quat’z-Arts did not occur in a vacuum but was the accumulation of cultural undercurrents already at work. The emergence of la femme nue did not adhere to one simple trajectory but was a multi- layered and complex merger of performative practices that brought together artifice and naturalism, the abstract and the real, the past and the present in an effort to redefine the terms by which female bodies could be viewed, represented, and enjoyed. While the revelation of women’s flesh in street fair wrestling matches and in can-can dances could be looked at more closely, the illustrated press’ collaboration with artists to oppose bourgeois mores through pictorial and live representations of the female anatomy seemed more compelling.

Throughout the 1880s, the avant-garde press played a pivotal role in challenging bourgeois moral precepts through the eroticization of academic art’s female nude. One of these illustrated papers, the Courrier Français, revealed how diverse and multifaceted

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this challenge really was by hosting a series of balls that fused art and life together in a

comical yet satirical way. Through its incorporation of a legs contest, the Courrier

Français’ 1889 Fête de Nu transformed the female nude from a figure of flat print media

to one of live performance. Like the later Bal des Quat’z-Arts, the Fête de Nu’s experimentation with images of the female body played upon academic art’s artificial distinction between ‘nude’ and ‘naked’ and suggested an alternative way of exhibiting the female body. Through highly descriptive accounts and salacious images, the Courrier

Français was instrumental in promoting a freedom of expression consistent with the art students’ position. By publicizing and transforming the nude theatrics of artists’ models

into popular spectacle, the illustrated press also shared a common desire to oppose

bourgeois social hypocrisy. Yet the nature of the relationship between the students of the

École and the graphic artists of the illustrated press remains unclear. To what extent was

the Courrier Français’ editor Jules Roques and art students united in a campaign to

rethink a new social or aesthetic order on the eve of the twentieth-century? And how did

their efforts compare to analogous balls sponsored by other newspapers and student

bodies?

A broadening in visual culture where the art of gazing upon unclothed female

bodies was transformed from a privilege into a public ritual was due in large measure to

the music hall, a site that played host to and then later restaged these bals publics within

its revues d’années. While the sight of women wearing revealing costumes in fixed

poses already existed as a form of music hall entertainment, the presentation of the

performative female nude-in-motion appears to have been a relatively new feat

undertaken in or around the time of the Bal des Quat’z-Arts. The incorporation of artists’

369 models in tableaux vivants as well as a stock character in revues centering on the atelier helped to facilitate the model’s jump from the studio and bal public to the theater.

Looking for overlaps in both style and personnel could further strengthen this connection between the world of art and entertainment. A comparative analysis between the staging of artists’ models in bal publics and revues would reveal the degree to which art influenced popular understandings and presentations of the female body. Moreover, an examination of the theater as an alternative source of employment for models would reinforce the artistic origins of this new social actress who, like her predecessor, was known as la femme nue.

In addition to revealing a deeper desire across social groups and classes to contemplate the female form for reasons of plastic beauty and pleasure, the music hall played a key role in shaping the audience’s reception of her, posing and staging la femme nue in the context of elite cultural practices and privileged spaces that demystified the exposed female body as a normal and acceptable representational subject of popular entertainment. My examination of la femme nue as a figure of the music hall revealed that her identity was nevertheless underpinned by the erotic. The music hall’s marketing of sex, extending beyond the revue to include other sources of mass suggestion, deeply affected contemporary attitudes about the performative female nude artist. A decontainment of la femme nue’s image through commercial advertisements, photographs, and literature opened up a range of viewing perspectives through which one could interpret her. My findings suggest that these various framing devices helped to humanize la femme nue by presenting her as a complex and multi-faceted person whose identity was not bound to any particular locale or kind of performance. Having become a highly

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visible figure within the fashion press and advertising world by the early twentieth-

century, la femme nue no longer represented a fictional aberration of the music hall stage

but embodied an authentic model of femininity within Parisian life. Her transformation from Nana to one of the characters in La Cité des femmes nues needs to be further complicated if one is to understand how this process of normalization occurred. A closer reading of these textual and visual documents would better situate la femme nue and her performances within the cultural imaginary of Belle Époque France and elucidate the way in which she either measured up to, embodied, or contested conventional norms of femininity.

A second critique of la femme nue, based on the writings of journalists, theater

critics, and censors, situated her within the context of social norms and the regulation of public morality. Their respective views on who could assert sexual desire and/or access sexual material in public places implicated le nu au théâtre in a series of public debates on the role and utility of censorship in a republican society, the nature of public versus private spheres, and the appropriate roles for women. By portraying la femme nue as a

desirable yet dangerous, transcendental yet transgressive, pretty yet perverse

physiognomic type, these sources evoked fears of an unregulated female sexuality on public display at the same time that they expressed a faith in the public’s ability to morally govern itself. Their comments not only gave expression to the cultural tensions underlying the Belle Époque as a period when conflicting traditions, values, and practices merged, sometimes easily, and sometimes less so, but they also placed the issue of female public nudity in the forefront of discussions about modernity. The actual conflicts that ensued between the state and students in the days before, during, and after the trial of the

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Bal des Quat’z-Arts represented one of many cases where la femme nue’s body served as

a site of contestation for the deep struggles of the subject as citizen.

La femme nue acted as a lightening rod for those who had the most to lose, namely

the men and women most closely associated with institutions of social control.

Bureaucrats, moral activists, public prosecutors, and politicians, the same forces that

brought the artists and their models to trial, also fought against theater directors, working

class spectators, and female performers who made claims to certain freedoms, namely the

right of expression and choice, on the basis of their participation in mass culture and a

market economy. Their dissonant voices testified to the way in which the unveiling of the “reality of ‘Woman’ herself” had become a metaphor for fin-de-siècle apprehensions

about modernity.4 Their comments reveal that not everyone embraced the notion of

liberal individualism as it applied to mass consumer culture and that many blamed it for a

host of social problems, from a weakening of familial ties, to depopulation and degeneracy. Their reinforcement of public and private spheres, a distinction upon which bourgeois culture rested, constituted a reaction to deep structural changes taking place within society.

We would know very little about these individuals if it were not for René Bérenger who represented in the public’s mind the anti-thesis of liberal individualism. He

articulated a particular perspective held within French society that equated a growing

acceptance of women appearing in public, acting on their own, speaking for themselves,

and daring to bare less with a decline in morality commonly attributed to the larger

4 Linda Nochlin, “Courbet’s L’Origine du monde: The Origin without an Original,” Margaret Cohen and Christopher Prendergast eds., Spectacles of Realism: Body, Gender, and Genre (Minneapolis, Minn., 1995), 339.

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process of degeneration. The creation of La Société Centrale contre le protestation de

licence des rues and La Ligue française de la Moralité Publique, which he and Louis

Comte founded respectively, formed a network of anti-vice societies that protested the

evils of consuming nude spectacles in various forms. The extent and composition of their

social bases, as well as their effectiveness in regulating and preventing the spread of

pornography in Belle Époque France, is still however hard to discern. In the first decade

of their existence, chapters and societies affiliated with these leagues suffered from a lack

of cohesion, coordination, and communication which was made manifest in their weak

and slow reaction to localized violations of public decency.5 In the few instances where

committees protested against immoral provocations in a timely manner, their protests

remained ineffective because of their isolated nature. If the leagues intended to affect a

moral change in France, they had to not only expand their membership base and facilitate

collective action more effectively by uniting anti-vice groups into a single line of defense,

but also to obtain the legal, judicial, and administrative backing of the state. While the

consolidation of moral reform groups under one federation worked towards this end, the

moral leagues remained a disparate group of associations comprised of social and

intellectual elites who articulated “an ambiguous discourse between progressivism and

reaction against the evolution of mores.”6

The government’s inability to formulate and administer a coherent policy regarding

le nu au théâtre was thus affected by the moral leagues’ own confusion in addition to a

5 Emile Pouresy, La Fédération Française des sociétés contre l’immoralité publique: Son but, son caractère, son programme, ses moyens d’action et de propagande (1929), 19.

6 Jean-Yves Le Naour, “Un mouvement anti-pornographique: la Ligue pour le relèvement de la moralité publique, 1883-1946,” Histoire Economie et Société (2003): 285-294.

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lack of manpower and an absence of communication between public officials and anti-

vice activists. Its increasing dependency on and delegation of authority to moral leagues and local prefects for the surveillance of theaters resulted in the promulgation of a vague standard and uncoordinated set of procedures for judging and prosecuting obscenity. The government’s efforts to crackdown on pornography became inherently problematic as it continued to sanction nude spectacles in the state-supported École des Beaux Arts and so- called ‘private’ theaters. Furthermore, the government’s buttressing of a system whereby la femme nue was reserved for the gaze of men belonging to a certain class, profession, or society created deep social divisions since it implied a degree of guardianship which the lower classes resented. Although censorship of the press and the theaters had been lifted theoretically under the Third Republic, the government continued its campaign against certain inappropriate publications and artistic productions.

The year 1908 represented a moment of crisis when there was a concerted effort on the part of the government to prosecute la femme nue. Although it is unclear why these particular trials involving les femmes nues were emphasized more in the primary source documents than those of previous or later years, I am not the only historian to underscore

1908 as a significant breaking point in French history. While further research is required to completely understand how la femme nue factored into the social, political, and economical events of that year, I suspect that the leagues’ efforts to effect change over the previous two decades were beginning to pay off, particularly as France was experiencing a number of challenges both at home and abroad. The hosting of national and international congresses against pornography and public morality by La Fédération

Française des Sociétés contre l’immoralité publique in March 1905 and again in May

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1908 may provide supporting evidence for this supposition. Then again, an examination

of earlier trials involving les femmes nues prior to 1908 in terms of the charges,

arguments, and rulings made for and against female nudity in the theater would provide a

more expansive case history with which to understand the state’s pursuit of la femme nue.

One must wonder to what extent the moral leagues’ played a role in the bringing these

cases to court, and with respect to the trials of July 1908, in getting their verdicts

reversed. Based on a review of the moral leagues’ bulletins and correspondence in the

first decade of the twentieth-century, one can reasonably assume that because nudity in

the theater was becoming a major concern of the leagues, a combination of letter writing

and protests forced the judicial and legislative branches to coordinate with one another

when it came to legislating bourgeois morality. What kinds of reactions did the 1908

trials provoke within the moral leagues and how did they seek to address their concerns?

And how did the courts reconcile the abolition of preventive censorship with the

regulation of nudity in the theater? And lastly, how did the struggle between the official

court and the court of public opinion finally result in the former’s favor?

Regardless of who, or where, or when the act occurred, the exhibition of female flesh was intimately connected to one’s perception of the female sex. Theater critic

Ernest La Jeunesse’s comment that women did not know how to be nude implied that the women of his day did not know how to live a free and uninhibited existence. Nudity, as a function of and metaphor for liberty, had become “a lost science” and he was content that it remain so. While Jeunesse may have been representing a majority opinion at the time, there existed a small yet growing group of dissenters who would eventually overtake and

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transform the way in which people perceived the exposed female body. One of these

individuals, George Normandy, replied,

Must we allow ourselves to lose this ‘lost science’ this ‘lost spirit’? Must we claim that modern life does nothing for beauty and declare ourselves satisfied? Is it because we are still intoxicated with a certain traditionalism that we must continue to consider human nudity in general as immoral and woman in particular as an impure being just as in the Middle Ages?7

The fact that women were “relearning” how to be nude as part of a larger reaction to the

“unjustifiable prejudices and stupidities” that kept them inside the home and covered from head to toe indicates that a shift away from an outdated bourgeois morality towards

a more self-aware, cosmopolitan sexuality was taking place in Belle Époque France.8 To

the extent that this was so, la femme nue acted as a code name for the anxieties, hopes,

aspirations, and tensions surrounding the New Woman and her struggle to break from “a

certain traditionalism” that had defined womanhood for over a century.

7 Georges Normandy, Le Nu à l’Église, au Théâtre, et dans la rue (Paris, 1909), 235.

8 Ibid, 236.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Lela Lovett Felter-Kerley earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Florida

State University in 1995 and 1997 respectively. After teaching high school for three years, she returned to higher education to pursue her love of history and of French culture.

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