by John Baxter
Forget chestnuts and al fresco cafes. Such sensuous idylls as this celebrate what is truly distinctive about Paris in the spring.
27
Pinups
Near Épernay, region of the Marne. June 18, 1944. The supreme allied commander notices that the sector of the advance controlled by the French is lagging behind the others. An intelligence officer is sent to discover the reason. He finds the entire French high command in a tent, bent over a copy of the Atlas des vins de France. They are planning a route that will take them past every great vineyard in Champagne.
HOW COULD ANYONE HAVE SERIOUSLY BELIEVED THAT FRENCH farmers would understand the Republican calendar, let alone embrace it? All had been brought up within the sound of church bells. Married in the church, they named and raised their children in the church and were buried by the church. Its influence was not to be expunged with the stroke of a pen.
Had the calendar commission included a farmer, merchant, or tradesman, they would have seen immediately that their creation rested on an illusion. Farmers knew from experience the importance of seasons and the weather. The biblical injunction to respect “a time to sow and a time to reap” left dates and times to be interpreted according to a sense of the seasons that needed no calendar except the one the farmer wrote for himself.
Given time, wiser heads within the Convention would have allowed the scheme to languish. But the circumstances that created it also blinded the creators to its faults. For a nation that could in a few years go from a monarchy to a republic by the most direct route, that of exterminating its ruling class, anything was possible. Some of the revolution’s innovations enjoyed surprising success. The metric system would soon be in use across Europe. And the guillotine, only introduced in 1792, became almost overnight an unignorable feature of French political life.
Over the next few years, some parts of the new calendar were enacted, others ignored. At the same time, people were put to work publicizing its merits. One man would do more than anyone to bring Fabre’s creation to life, however briefly.
Louis Lafitte was twenty years younger than Fabre. The two never met. Yet Lafitte would put faces to what were just names in the original calendar, and in doing so, humanize it for an international audience.
In 1791, as a young artist at the end of a punishing four–year course at the École des Beaux–Arts, Lafitte won the prestigious Prix de Rome, entitling him to a year of study, all expenses paid, in the Italian capital. In Rome, he worked at the Villa Medici until deteriorating relations between France and Italy made life uncomfortable for Frenchmen there. In 1793 he moved to Florence, where he waited out the Terror as a teacher before returning to France.
Lafitte won his Prix de Rome with a classic history painting of an incident from the Punic Wars, a canvas crowded with heroic figures, meticulously painted drapery, and painstakingly depicted architecture, a style hopelessly unfashionable in a new and aggressively working–class France. With a wife and daughter to support, Lafitte took work where he could find it, painting murals, decorating private homes, and illustrating books. (There was a special frisson for me to discover that he had lived and worked on rue de l’Odéon, just a few doors away from our home.)
His fortunes changed in 1796, when a publisher issuing a new edition of the Republican calendar commissioned twelve paintings to illustrate the months.
Until the revolution, only religious illustrations had been permitted in almanacs and calendars. Even after 1789, editions of the calendar favored the politically respectable. For a 1794 printing, Philibert–Louis Debucourt provided an austere neoclassical illustration showing Marianne, the spirit of the revolution, paging through the Book of Nature as a cherub takes notes. In the frontispiece for another edition, Marianne descends the steps of a temple at the foot of which lie the corpses of other calendar makers, clutching their discredited creations.
Perhaps seeing an opportunity to re–establish himself on the Paris art scene, Lafitte took a radically different line. From a memory filled with voluptuous images from Italy, he created something entirely new: a panorama of the French countryside and its female inhabitants as no person in the street, let alone any farmer, had ever seen them.
The new Republic rewrites the calendar.
Debucourt, Philibert–Louise. The New Republic Rewrites the Calendar. Author’s collection.
Each of his paintings featured an attractive young woman, lightly dressed, posed with an animal, plant, flower, or implement chosen from those listed by Fabre. A brief poem under each illustration underlined its significance, generally with a double entendre.
Lafitte’s images were bold. Doves cuddle up to the dark–haired beauty of Germinal, spreading their wings across her breasts. The pensive brunette representing Prairial fingers two more of these birds nestling on her pubic area.
Thermidor, the month of heat, is accorded the most frank image of all. In an unsubtle evocation of the legend of Leda, ravished by Zeus disguised as a swan, it shows such a bird, one webbed foot planted in the woman’s crotch, extending its sinuously phallic neck at full length over the young woman’s naked breasts. To one side, a watching satyr, part of a bronze cup, appears to be engaged in some uncomfortable act of self–abuse.
After having the images engraved on copper by Salvatore Tresca and the reproductions colored by hand, the publisher, scenting a bestseller, printed a second deluxe version “for art lovers and connoisseurs.” Printed on transparent oiled paper, it allowed Lafitte’s images to be displayed backlit in the style of a stained–glass window.
In effect, Lafitte had created the first pinup calendar. His work foreshadowed countless peekaboo beauties in skimpy clothing, or none at all, who would decorate locker rooms and workshops for the next two hundred years.
Thermidor. Leda and the swan, reinterpreted by Louis Lafitte.
Lafitte, Louis. Thermidor. Author’s collection.
28
Drunk in Charge
Pont Alexandre III, Paris. February. 0°C. As an icy dust of snow swirls along the sidewalks, Japanese couples pose for wedding photographs with a background of the seventeenth–century Hôtel des Invalides. Grooms in dove–gray cutaways and brides in off–the–shoulder gowns of white tulle grin ecstatically even as their teeth chatter. Above them, unseen, the giant gilded figures of Law and the State struggle to restrain the rearing winged horses representing aspects of Fame, but the newlyweds are too cold to care.
ONE MORNING IN 2010, WALKING DOWN RUE FÉROU, A FEW MINUTES away from our apartment, I found a man balanced precariously on a ladder three meters in the air. He was painting words on the high stone wall around the former seminary, now the Centre des Finances Publiques (the tax office).
Rue Férou, a short, narrow lane running from Place Saint–Sulpice to the Luxembourg Gardens, has more artistic significance than most Paris thoroughfares. When the American surrealist Man Ray returned to Paris from the United States in 1951 with his new wife, Juliet, they shared a tiny apartment there. Next door, Ernest Hemingway lived for a few years with his second wife, Pauline, before they moved to Key West in 1929.
Distracted by these other associations, I looked back at the painter and realized for the first time what he was painting. It was a poem: Arthur Rimbaud’s “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”).
In 1871, in a city battered by the Franco–Prussian War and the anarchist uprising of the Commune, seventeen–year–old runaway Arthur Rimbaud—delinquent, petty thief, absinthe drinker, hashish smoker, and sometime lover of fellow poet Paul Verlaine—recited his poem in public for the first time, in a room above the café on the other side of the square.
In the poet’s imagining, he isn’t a passenger on the boat but the boat itself, drifting in alien seas and beaching on islands of a strangeness unimaginable in Europe.
I’ve struck Floridas, you know, beyond belief,
Where eyes of panthers in human skins
Merge with the flowers! Rainbow bridles, beneath
The se
as’ horizon, stretched out to shadowy fins!
Soon after writing it, Rimbaud left for Africa, abandoning poetry for the life of a merchant. His poems, in particular “Le Bateau ivre,” are glimpses of that portion of the national soul that the French hesitate to acknowledge, since its irrationality offends their belief in order and logic. No surprise that Rimbaud would be embraced by those intellectual smash–and–grab men, the surrealists.
Climbing down, the painter introduced himself as Jan Willem Bruins. He intended, he said, to paint all one hundred lines of Rimbaud’s text on this wall. His painstaking workmanship and the grid of pencil lines on the stone signaled that he was no mere graffiti artist. Though like most taggers he worked in words, not pictures, he didn’t spray his paint. (The best–known French tagger calls himself “Jef Aérosol.”) Instead, he used materials that were old even when illustrators were laboriously illuminating manuscripts in the building on the other side of the wall.
Bruins differed in another way from Aérosol and the rest of the taggers: he had permission. The Tegen–Beeld Foundation began in Leiden. After it funded the painting of 110 poems in public places around the town, it extended its program outside the Netherlands, starting with Paris and “Le Bateau ivre.”
“Well, you chose the right place,” I said.
Across the square, we could see the red awning of the Café de la Mairie, where Rimbaud read the poem for the first time and where, later, Djuna Barnes and Henry Miller hung out and Man Ray sometimes ate breakfast.
Over the next few weeks, I often dropped in on Bruins to check on his progress.
The fact that the poem dealt with the sea and the seasons made perfect sense. There could hardly be a better illustration of that national preoccupation, and the degree to which France differed from Anglo–Saxons in its view of the elements.
Was there a poem in English that viewed the sea with anything like the imagination of “Le Bateau ivre”? I could think of only one: G. K. Chesterton’s “Lepanto.” It celebrated the 1571 battle off Greece in which a coalition led by Don John of Austria defeated the Ottoman Turks. Both sides sailed galleys rowed by slaves—in the case of the Turkish ships, mostly Christians captured during the Crusades.
Drumming this poem into us, the nuns and monks of our school were more concerned with its historical subtext, a classic case of the good guys—i.e., Catholics—defeating the heathens. About that, I could not have cared less. What exhilarated me was its imagery. Errol Flynn in Technicolor didn’t even come close.
Don John pounding from the slaughter–painted poop,
Purpling all the ocean like a bloody pirate’s sloop,
Scarlet running over on the silvers and the golds,
Breaking of the hatches up and bursting of the holds,
Thronging of the thousands up that labour under sea
White for bliss and blind for sun and stunned for liberty.
Vivat Hispania!
Domino Gloria!
Don John of Austria
Has set his people free!
Chesterton wrote this in 1911, exactly forty years after “Le Bateau ivre,” but for all the differences in style and form, the poems share a family resemblance. Rarely for the time among British poets, Chesterton was a Catholic, and militant. Whether he and Rimbaud liked it or not, they had fed on the same fruit, drunk at the same well, as had I.
Watching Bruins became my obsession. If I was anywhere near Saint–Sulpice, I detoured to follow his progression. On one of these visits, I noted an oddity.
“You’re painting the stanzas from right to left,” I said. “Shouldn’t you be working from left to right, the way you would read it in a book?”
Bruins put down his brush.
“I thought of that. But, you know . . .” He looked back to Place Saint–Sulpice, then up toward the Luxembourg Gardens. “ . . . I felt the poem blew . . .” He made a swoosh motion. “ . . . away from where Rimbaud read it, and along this little street. So that’s how I painted it.”
After completing his work, he added a PS to explain his thinking. It wasn’t necessary. Poetry, like the weather, is its own reason.
A footnote: In all the years since Bruins completed his work, the wall and its poem—in a city where taggers strike largely unchallenged—has never once been defaced by graffiti. It’s not only churches that stand on hallowed ground.
29
Exit Fabre
Place de la Révolution, Paris. July 17, 1793. 19°C. Condemned to death for murdering Jean–Paul Marat, Charlotte Corday goes to the guillotine. A carpenter working on the scaffold, believing consciousness may survive in a severed body part, grabs her head by its hair and slaps the cheeks. Witnesses gasp when the dead face, some swear, blushes and shows “unequivocal indignation.” Convicted of abusing a corpse, the carpenter spends three months in prison.
IT’S AN IRONY OF THE REPUBLICAN CALENDAR THAT BY THE TIME the average Frenchman became aware of it, Fabre d’Églantine, the man who helped create it and championed its use, was dead.
From June 1793 through July 1794, 16,594 people were executed by guillotine in France, 2,639 of them in Paris. On October 16, it was Marie Antoinette’s turn. Though she never denied leaking military secrets to her native country, Austria, the prosecutors added trumped–up charges that she had organized orgies at Versailles and even had sex with her young son.
Truth ceased to matter in that climate of suspicion and hatred. Inquisitors asked all suspects the same questions: “What were you worth before the revolution? What are you worth now?” Those who could not prove poverty were automatically condemned.
Robespierre led the witch hunt. “What we need is a single will,” he announced. “It must be either Republican or royalist. If it is to be Republican, we must have Republican ministers, Republican papers, Republican deputies, a Republican government.” It went without saying that the “single will” must be his.
When too few deputies sided with him, he accused his opponents of treason and had them condemned to death in what became known as the Terror. He explained his policy in terms of the seasons, a comparison the country would instinctively understand. “If virtue be the spring of a popular government in times of peace,” he ranted, “the spring of that government during a revolution is virtue combined with terror: virtue, without which terror is destructive; terror, without which virtue is impotent.”
The Terror would forever stain the reputation of the revolution, threatening to overshadow its achievements. For the next two centuries, writers outside France—from Charles Dickens in his novel A Tale of Two Cities to Baroness Orczy in her stories of the Scarlet Pimpernel—demonized the revolutionaries and glamorized the aristocracy. Danton, the shady aspects of his character conveniently forgotten, emerged in the popular imagination as the people’s champion, betrayed and murdered by Robespierre and his young henchman Louis de Saint–Just.
Many who survived the Terror had stories that rivaled fiction. Thomas Paine, British–born author of Rights of Man, was imprisoned and condemned. When the guard who chalked the number of the guillotine to which a prisoner would be sent passed by, the door of Paine’s cell happened to be open. His number, written by chance on the inside, wasn’t visible with the door closed, so he survived.
The survival of the Marquis de Sade was even more miraculous. In 1789, he was already confined to the Bastille at the instigation of his mother–in–law, who persuaded the king to issue a lettre de cachet, a document whereby he could imprison someone indefinitely without trial. Released in 1790, when the Bastille was destroyed and lettres de cachet abolished, Sade sided with the revolution and, now calling himself Citizen Sade, even became a member of the Convention, meanwhile continuing his celebrations of sexual cruelty that inspired the word “sadist.” Finally convicted, he spent the rest of his life in mental institutions writing plays, which he staged with other inmates playing the roles. Some dealt with the revolution, most famously the murder of Marat.
The luck that saved Paine and Sa
de failed for Danton and his supporters. Fabre, as calculating and self–serving as Danton was visionary and patriotic, contributed to his mentor’s downfall. As news spread of the East India Company scandal and people called for the directors, including Fabre, to be executed out of hand, Danton went before the Convention to ask that the accused at least be given a fair trial. “Let them be judged before all the people,” he asked, “so that the people can know which of them still deserve their trust.” To his astonishment, he was shouted down. “You are Fabre’s dupe, Danton!” one member yelled. “He has sat by your side. He has cheated the most patriotic of us.”
Throughout the winter of 1793–94, Robespierre and Saint–Just picked off Danton’s associates. Hoping to retrieve his reputation, Danton supported the purges. In his final speech to the Convention, he drew on the common experience of country people, using wine as a metaphor for revolution. “Frenchmen! Do not take fright at the effervescence of this first stage of liberty,” he said. “It is like a strong new wine that ferments until purged of all its froth.”
But it was too late. In March 1794, Robespierre sprung his trap. The Committee of Public Safety swore out a warrant for Danton’s arrest and those of thirteen others, including Fabre. Danton pinned his hopes on a trial, at which he could employ his oratorical skill to exonerate himself and discredit his accusers. But Robespierre, fearing that Danton’s thundering baritone might sway the jury, invoked a new law allowing a court to exclude anyone, even the accused, if they threatened to disrupt the proceedings. As Danton fumed in prison, all fourteen were condemned to death.
To Camille Desmoulins, the rigged trial was symptomatic of everything that had gone wrong with the revolution. Execution had replaced reason and debate “I shall die in the belief,” he wrote to his wife from prison, “that, to make France free, republican and prosperous, a little ink would have sufficed, and only one guillotine.”