Children of the Revolution

by Robert Gildea

  At the end of the play Paulette decides to leave her husband and goes to find a lawyer who, taking her for a cocotte, or lady of easy virtue, makes a pass at her which, incredulous, she rejects. The sequel, Around Divorce, was staged in 1886, after divorce had become possible again in 1884. Paulette reads up on it herself in law books, conjures up a story of her husband’s shaking her arm at a ball in order to qualify for one of the conditions of divorce – brutality – and goes through with a theatrical trial. The life of a divorced woman, she finds, however, is not all fun. She is besieged by her former male companions who want to become her lovers but who now just annoy her, and she becomes jealous of her former husband flirting with other women. In the end she confesses, ‘perhaps I had happiness to hand and passed it by,’ and goes back to him.3

  Reviewing Around Divorce, Jules Lemaître welcomed Paulette as ‘the most modern feminine type’, feminine in her prettiness, nervousness and illogicality, masculine in her boyish allure, dress and lack of sentimentality. She is irreverent, even ‘a revolutionary’ in her almost unconsidered defiance of ‘certain proprieties and certain prejudices which are still powerful’ in her society, but she never falls from grace in a way that would exclude her from it. She is a coquette without ever being a cocotte. ‘This immoral little creature’, concluded Lemaître, ‘remains virtuous.’4

  Paulette was the creation of Gabrielle de Riqueti de Mirabeau, Comtesse de Martel de Janville, ‘the last of the Mirabeaus’, who wrote under the punchier pen-name Gyp. Like her heroine she too was the product of a highly conventional upbringing whose codes she dared to subvert. Her parents separated the year after she was born and she scarcely knew her father, Arundel-Joseph de Riqueti de Mirabeau, great-nephew of the orator Mirabeau, who died fighting in the Papal zouaves against Italian unification at Castelfidardo in 1860. She was brought up in Nancy by her mother, Marie Le Harivel de Gonneville, and by her grandfather, a colonel who had been a counter-revolutionary, then served in the imperial and royal armies till 1830, who interested Gabrielle in toy soldiers and riding. She married a Norman noble, Roger de Martel de Janville, at the age of twenty, in 1869, but disgraced herself by fraternizing with the Prussians both in Normandy and in Nancy. She came to Paris in 1879, living in the rich suburb of Neuilly, where she began to make a career as a writer, her first books being serialized in La Vie Parisienne and published by Calmann-Lévy. Her pen-name, Gyp, ‘is “gyno” gone wrong’, one historian has suggested, combining both feminine and masculine elements. Her true identity was not revealed until Around Marriage was staged, after which, she wrote, ‘the entire Faubourg [Saint-Germain] side of the family shunned me.’5

  The mixed reception encountered by Paulette suggests that a ‘modern’ woman was emerging but that society was not yet fully ready to embrace her. Marriages were still family alliances centred on property for which under the Civil Code parental consent was needed, even if the intended were over twenty-one. This was relaxed in 1896 by a law sponsored by Abbé Lemire, which required the consent of one parent only, and parental consent for non-minors was no longer required after 1907. Love was much more a factor in marriage, although there was still great pressure at all levels of society to marry within one’s social class, and ‘expectations’ were influential. Thus in 1881 a textile worker of Crémieux (Loire) preferred to abort her pregnancy rather than marry an agricultural labourer ‘for fear of a mésalliance angering the bachelor uncles from whom we were hoping to inherit’.6

  Virginity was a precondition for marriage, because a man had to be quite sure his inheritance was going to his own blood, and young women were brought up to be ignorant of sexual matters before they married.7 The catastrophe of premarital sex was highlighted by Paul Bourget’s novel of 1883, Irreparable, in which the rich and beautiful Noémie de Hurtrel, who has just come out into society, is raped by a playboy. This renders her unfit to marry the man of her dreams, Sir Richard Wadham. She agrees to marry a man who is ‘perfectly educated and perfectly insignificant’, but shoots herself immediately after the wedding.8 Twenty-five years later Léon Blum, who had made a mark for himself during the Dreyfus Affair, wrote a treatise On Marriage, in which he argued that the obligation on women to marry, as virgins, men who had been allowed to experiment sexually and had arrived at the ‘monogamous period’ of their lives was at the root of marital unhappiness and infidelity. Women were now marrying at the age of twenty-five rather than eighteen or twenty, as at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but he advised that they should marry at thirty, after a period of sexual experimentation, and that the double standard should cease.9 This view did not, naturally, command universal approval, and Blum conceded that his argument was aimed only at the rich or middle class. There is indeed evidence of a growth in premarital sex, particularly in the large cities, in northern France, and among the working class.10 The risk, however, was always that pregnancy would lead to the relationship being broken off, leaving the girl abandoned and under pressure to abort, kill or abandon the child. Prospects were, it is true, becoming gradually easier for women in this condition: after 1900 midwives accused of abortion were treated more leniently by the courts, half the women brought to trial for infanticide were acquitted, and shelters for poor and pregnant women or single mothers were set up in Paris by the Catholic Church (1866) and the municipal council (1886).11

  Even within marriage, there were plenty of taboos against sexual pleasure, whether from the Church, from the medical profession or from the fear of unwanted pregnancy. Undressing before one’s partner was rare – when in Zola’s novel Nana the Comte de Muffat sees Nana in her dressing room Zola comments that ‘He, who had never even seen the countess put on her suspenders, was observing the intimate details of a woman’s toilette’ – and kissing on the mouth did not become accepted until the ‘American kiss’ became fashionable between the wars.12 Yet in some ways marriage was becoming eroticized. The Church fought a long war against what it called ‘conjugal fraud’, by which it meant contraception, since it admitted sex only in the service of procreation. The most common form of contraception, coitus interruptus, was denounced by a former naval doctor, J.-P. Dartigues, who argued in his 1887 Experimental Love or the Causes of Female Adultery that withdrawal left the woman dissatisfied and could drive her to nymphomania and infidelity. ‘The husband’, he warned, ‘must never forget that his wife has just as much right as he to the voluptuous sensations of love, and that it is in this way that the chastity of the home is preserved.’13 For Dartigues the guarantee of a happy marriage was the female orgasm. Contraception was promoted on a much wider front, although not only in the interest of sexual pleasure. The League for Human Regeneration founded by the socialist teacher Paul Robin in 1896 thought birth control the solution to working-class misery, although other socialist leaders argued that the workers needed to breed fighters for the future proletarian revolution. In 1898 the demographer Arsène Dumont registered the spread of birth control among the middle classes, although he linked it to the desire for social mobility – the need for ambitious families to travel light.14

  The orthodoxy of the virginal bride and chaste wife was in part a defence against female sexuality, which was feared as a threat to marriage and the family. This was well illustrated in 1872 by the Dubourg affair. Convent-educated Denise MacLeod, aged nineteen, though in love with M. de Précorbin, a clerk at the Prefecture of the Seine, was obliged for family reasons to marry Arthur Dubourg, twenty-nine, whose father had a château in Normandy. Miserable and suicidal, she was briefly confined to a mental hospital. She then tried to instigate separation proceedings, which Dubourg resisted. She resumed her relationship with Précorbin until in April 1872 Dubourg followed her to the flat where they met and attacked her with a sword-cane and dagger; she died three days later. The court rejected the accusation of premeditated murder and Dubourg was sentenced to five years in prison, but there was much public feeling in favour of his acquittal. Alexandre Dumas fils sold 50,000 copies of a tract entitled The Ma
n-Woman, in which he played on fears of the bestiality lying under the skin of women, as evidenced by the pétroleuses of the Paris Commune and the tribe of adulteresses.

  Every day in the street we pass redskins tinted pink, negresses with plump, white hands, real cannibals who, unable to eat man raw, prepare to gnaw him alive, as civilized women should, with marriage or pleasure sauce, plates, serviettes, forks, mouth-washes, sacraments and legal protection.

  If the law would not protect a man from his wife, Dumas concluded, he had only one piece of advice for husbands: ‘Kill her.’15

  This fear of female sexuality was exploited by Zola in his Nana of 1880, in which the prostitute–actress, set up as a courtesan by a general’s son and practising Catholic the Comte de Muffat, takes her revenge on him and Paris high society, devouring inheritances, destroying reputations and spreading syphilis. Alongside the main plot, however, is the story of the count’s straitlaced wife Sabine. She was seventeen when he married her nineteen years previously, but was rejuvenated by an affair she had with one of the young bloods, Fauchery, before, ‘in a supreme fit of madness, she ran off with a manager of a great department store, a scandal which soon gripped Paris’.16 In the world of prostitution, in fact, the bogstandard brothel gave way to maisons de débauche offering all sorts of attractions to a male clientele in search of ever more refined erotic pleasures. Meanwhile inadequately kept married women made themselves available, alongside widows, divorcees, out-of-work actresses and shop assistants, in maisons de rendez-vous. Very popular after 1890, these were set up like bourgeois apartments, conveniently close to the department stores, and the hostesses were permitted to choose their own clients. When the Bazar de la Charité burned down in 1897 many husbands were delighted and yet bemused to see their wives, who they thought had been shopping there, return from the dead.17

  In fact only 4 per cent of women who came before the courts as adulteresses were bourgeois ladies, while a quarter of male adulterers were bourgeois. This did not prevent a veritable obsession at the turn of the century with the question of female adultery.18 In his 1891 Physiology of Modern Love Paul Bourget, reworking Balzac, suggested that ‘out of every hundred virtuous women there are only five or six honest ones.’ He ventured a typology of three basic types of adulteress: first, women of ‘temperament’, who behaved with a masculine sensuality in love; second, women of the heart, for whom romantic love alone counted; and lastly, women of the head, the ‘true modern mistress’. These were driven by curiosity, by the desire to play a role, as in a novel, by vanity and social-climbing, by rivalry and the need for social domination.19 In novels and the theatre there appeared a new character, la déserteuse, the married woman who abandons the family home. Maman Colibri, in Henri Bataille’s play first staged at the Vaudeville in 1904, deals with the boredom of Irène, long ago subjected to the ‘Zulu ceremony’ of an arranged marriage with a Belgian industrialist, the Baron de Rysbergue, and falling at the age of forty for a friend of her son Richard, who talks to her about Balzac. ‘I have accomplished my duty to you,’ she tells her son, ‘my task as a mother is finished… life is so short. I am a spring late.’ Although de Rysbergue had had a few affairs of his own, he declares, with a nod to Dumas, ‘I am not the kind of husband who kills his wife,’ and simply says, ‘be gone, then!’ She goes with her lover to Algiers and the Côte d’Azur, until her money runs out. Then she wishes to come home but her husband will not have her, confessing that his ideas are simply not modern enough. ‘Our religious past, prejudices, old and much loved customs cannot erase from our memory this conception of the pure and chaste wife, of the one love, faithful to the family home.’20

  Unhappy marriage might lead to adultery, but with or without adultery an exit from marriage was once again provided by the reintroduction of divorce in 1884. Divorce was one of the main demands of the new wave of bourgeois feminism led by a generation born around 1830, contemporary with the founders of the Third Republic, notably Maria Desraimes and her political partner Léon Richer. The divorce bill was sponsored by Alfred Naquet, a radical republican of Jewish origin, who separated from his wife when she insisted on baptizing their son. While the conservative republican senator Jules Simon argued that indissoluble marriage protected women from abandonment, Naquet replied that there were nearly 3,000 legal separations a year, of partners who could not remarry, and who therefore multiplied the number of illegitimate children. The law of 19 July 1884 was a compromise measure: it stopped short of divorce by mutual consent, which had been possible between 1792 and 1804, and reverted to the regime of 1804, making divorce available on the grounds of adultery, violence or criminal conviction. The marriage of adulterous couples was finally legalized in 1904, while divorce after three years’ separation at the request of one of the partners became legal in 1907.21

  The divorce rate more than tripled from 3,880 per year in 1885–8, representing 52 in every 100,000 couples, to 13,655 per year in 1909–13, representing 164 in every 100,000 couples.22 Women initiated 63 per cent of divorce suits in 1886–95, and 86 per cent of separation proceedings. In 1897 women sued on the grounds of their husband’s adultery in 683 cases, while husbands divorced their wives for adultery in 1,344. Women tended to cite brutality, which provided grounds for 8,014 or 77 per cent of divorces in that year. About 30 per cent of divorced women remarried, as against 35 per cent of men, but the author of a 1905 law thesis on this subject concluded very positively that ‘divorce benefits women.’23

  Women were now empowered to get rid of their adulterous husbands, as the aristocratic playboy Boni de Castellane found when he married America’s richest heiress Anna Gould in 1895 and assumed that he could continue his affairs. To Boni’s dismay he lost his wife, children and fortune in 1906 while she married his bachelor cousin and became a princess.24 On the other hand the possibility of divorce and remarriage did not always get the better of social conventions. Henriette Rainouard, who divorced her theatre-critic husband and married the leading Radical politician Joseph Caillaux in 1911, found that revelations about her affair with Caillaux before their marriage could threaten not only his career but her own social standing. She feared that being ‘dishonoured’ as an adulteress would result in her father cutting off her inheritance, the impossibility of her marrying off her nineteen-year-old daughter by her first marriage, and in her exclusion from Paris society.25 Although she behaved in a virile way by shooting dead the editor of Le Figaro, which was about to publish these revelations, her defence in July 1914 was based on the old prejudice of the irrationality of women, now dressed up in the language of the unconscious. ‘The case of Madame Caillaux’, explained her lawyer, Maître Labori, who had defended Dreyfus, ‘is a typical case of subconscious impulse, together with a complete splitting of the personality as a result of an intense and continuous emotional state during which the patient has neither rational control of her acts nor a clear notion of their implications and consequences.’26 Henriette was duly acquitted, and her marriage survived, but at the price of a murder portrayed as the act of a hysterical woman.

  THE GENDERING OF WORK

  The prospects of women were shaped, of course, not only by questions of love and marriage, but by educational possibilities and the labour market. The presence of women in the workforce became even more marked as the century progressed – 25 per cent of women were in paid work in 1866, but 39 per cent in 1911. Marriage was not a bar to paid employment: on the contrary, 40 per cent of married women were in work in 1866, but 49 per cent in 1911.27 This was to a large extent a response to global economic competition which sharpened incentives to reduce costs by mechanization, employing less skilled labour and paying lower wages to a workforce that was ‘docile’ and not organized into unions. In all these respects women fitted the bill as the ideal worker. This ‘feminization of labour’ did not escape the notice of contemporaries, whether social reformers or labour leaders.28 It threatened traditional models of motherhood at precisely the time when the demographic deficit, in com
parison to countries like Germany, increased anxieties about women producing too much, and reproducing not enough.29 Social reformers brought forward legislation in order to increase protection for women in work. Ironically, however, the main effect was simply to move working women out of the factory or workshop back into the home, beyond the reach of factory inspectors, where they were simply exploited more.

  Female industrial workers remained confined to labour ghettos where the conditions of work and pay were poorest. After a law of 1874 banned women and girls from working underground in mines, the proportion of women employed in mining fell from 9 per cent in 1866 to 2 per cent in 1911, while at the same time the proportion of women employed in textiles rose from 45 to 56 per cent, in clothing from 78 to 89 per cent, in the food industry from 11 to 19 per cent and in agriculture from 26 to 38 per cent.30 Working women who married miners or metalworkers in towns like Saint-Étienne were fairly comfortable, as the heavy work was left to the man, while they ran a quarter of the shops in the quartier du Soleil around 1900 – not as butchers or bakers, which were family affairs, but as café-owners, grocers and haberdashers, enterprises which women managed on their own.31 At Roubaix, by contrast, two wages from the textile industry were required to provide the 22–24 francs a week required to sustain a family of five in the 1870s, and 83 per cent of female textile workers were married to semi-skilled workers or labourers.32 Within the textile and clothing industries work was sharply gendered. Thus at Troyes, the centre of the hosiery industry, bonnetiers were skilled male stocking-knitters, the aristocrats of the trade, while bonnetières were employed in the workshop doing tasks to service them, such as bobbin-winding, hooking the fabric on to the machines or repairing flawed goods; their reputations gained nothing from association with men in the workplace.33