Children of the Revolution

by Robert Gildea

  MODERNISM AND CLASSICISM

  Princesse Mathilde, Napoleon III’s cousin, returned to Paris from exile in Brussels a fortnight after the suppression of the Commune, assured by head of government Thiers that despite her ties with the fallen Empire she was not a political threat and would be left alone. She reconstituted the Wednesday salon which had been so influential under the Empire and continued to be so under the Third Republic. The older Romantic generation of her faithful, born around 1800 – Sainte-Beuve, Gautier, Mérimée – had died, as had Jules de Goncourt of syphilis at the age of forty in 1870, and the salon was dominated by the generation born around 1830 – Edmond de Goncourt, Taine and Renan, Flaubert, Alexandre Dumas fils, Alphonse Daudet, author of the Lettres de mon moulin, along with the painter Gérôme and the composer Gounod. Zola she could not abide and he was not a regular.1

  Princesse Mathilde’s salon was home to the Realist school of writers, but these also had other venues for meeting. From 1874 Flaubert organized monthly dinners, suceeding those at Magny’s restaurant in the 1860s, for ‘the Five’ whose novels may have been successful but whose plays had been shouted down by theatre audiences. ‘We were all gourmands,’ recalled Alphonse Daudet, ‘with as many gourmandises as temperaments and provinces of origin. Flaubert wanted Normandy butter and Rouen ducks, Zola demanded seafood, Edmond de Goncourt ordered ginger delicacies while Turgenev tasted caviar. Ah! We were not easy to feed and the Paris restaurants remembered us. We often had to change the venue.’2 After Flaubert’s death in 1880 the group was kept together by Daudet who held his own salon on a Thursday in the avenue de l’Observatoire, presided over by his wife Julia, while in 1885 Edmond de Goncourt refurbished the loft at Auteuil where his brother Jules had died, done up with Japanese art, and visited with some trepidation by the Princesse Mathilde the following year. Zola bought a villa at Médan on the Seine in 1878 with the royalties from L’Assommoir and held meetings of his own young protégés such as Guy de Maupassant and Joris-Karl Huysmans, son of a Dutch father and French mother. In 1880 they published a collection of short stories, Les Soirées de Médan, which served as a manifesto for the Naturalist school and included Maupassant’s Boule de suif, a short story set during the war of 1870 about a prostitute who is persuaded by her bourgeois travelling companions to sleep with a Prussian officer so that the coach can move on, and described by Flaubert as a masterpiece.3 Naturalism, depicting humanity as determined by hereditary and environmental laws and reduced almost to bestiality, in fact drove a wedge between Zola and his circle on the one hand and Goncourt and Daudet on the other. In 1887, after the publication of Zola’s La Terre, an attack on his work’s ‘indecency and filthy terminology’ was published in Le Figaro, which Zola believed to have been inspired by Goncourt and Daudet.4

  Close links had been established before this break between the Realists and the Impressionists. Both challenged the literary and artistic establishment with their treatment of modern life, warts and all, and were often marginalized by it. Monet and Degas held court in the Café Guerbois in the Batignolles district, then in the more refined Café de la Nouvelle Athènes, which were also frequented by Zola. Nana, the prostitute who appears in L’Assommoir before having a novel to herself in 1880, was painted by Manet, a picture rejected for the Salon of 1877, while Zola tried to defend Impressionism through his treatment of the struggling artist in L’Oeuvre of 1886. Huysmans was launched as an art critic by Zola, attacking the academic art of the Salon and preaching the virtues of Manet and Degas. ‘A painter of modern life is born,’ said Huysmans of Degas in 1880, painting the flesh of ballet dancers lit by gaslight or the pale glow from courtyards, completely different from the classical school of Bouguereau’s Birth of Venus, a ‘badly pumped-up windbag, without muscles, nerves or blood. A single pinprick in the torso and it would collapse.’5 That said, Zola and Huysmans found other Impressionists such as Monet and Pissarro guilty of ‘indigomania’ and Gauguin argued that Huysmans liked Degas and Manet only because their work was figurative: ‘it is naturalism that gratifies him.’6

  In the 1880s a breach opened up between Realists and Impressionists on the one hand, who were committed to the representation of modern life, and other artists whose ambition was to flee it, to search for meaning in some essence or ideal that lay behind the mask presented by reality, and were inspired by the primitive or the exotic, by myths and legends, by the spiritual and religious, symbols which seemed to permit access to an inner or unconscious world. Their art was modernist in form but was a critique of modernity – the mat erialistic world of urbanization, industrialization, science, secularization and mass education.7 It was avant-garde, grouping like-minded intellectuals seeking new literary forms and sometimes challenging bourgeois conventions by a bohemian lifestyle. One of their early haunts was the salon of Nina de Callais, who had been painted by Manet in 1874 as The Woman with the Fan. The poet Paul Verlaine, who had been a clerk in the Hôtel de Ville before the Paris Commune, met the sixteen-year-old Mathilde Mauté there in 1869 and married her in order to escape military service. She later admitted that she was ‘overcome by pity for a poor being with disgraceful appearance and who seemed sad’.8 In fact he was a spoiled child, alcoholic and violent. Obsessed by the brilliant young poet Arthur Rimbaud who arrived in Paris in the autumn of 1871, he tried to strangle his wife, threw his three-month-old baby against the wall and ran away to Brussels with Rimbaud. In 1873 he shot Rimbaud in the hand during another row and spent two years in a Belgian prison, after which his wife separated from him and Rimbaud went to Africa to trade in ivory or guns, according to the rumour. Briefly reforming himself, he published a collection of his own work and that of Rimbaud and Mallarmé, Les Poètes maudits, in 1883, which for the first time put this new generation of Symbolist poets on the map. He was then jailed again for an attack on his mother and spent much of the last years of his life in hospital.

  For Symbolists the most important meeting-place was the salon of Stéphane Mallarmé. Mallarmé, who made a living teaching English in a succession of lycées in the provinces and Paris, organized his own literary salon on Tuesdays at his house in the rue de Rome. From 1885 it became the focal point for young writers of a new generation born around 1860 who experimented with elegant but opaque and suggestive forms of language. Where Verlaine destroyed bourgeois domesticity, Mallarmé incarnated it, although as poets they had the same ambitions. ‘The wife and daughter embroider under a dim lamp,’ wrote one of his disciples, Paul Valéry. ‘He smokes a pipe in a rocking-chair, eyes half closed, voice very low. Then suddenly his eyes are wide open and he raises his voice, panting. He becomes a savant in a moment, now epic, now tragic.’9 Other disciples of this rarefied salon were Jules Laforgue, who died of tuberculosis aged twenty-seven in 1887, Henri de Régnier, Félix Fénéon, Maurice Barrès, the musician Claude Debussy, the novelist André Gide, the German poet Stefan George and ‘the execrable Oscar Wilde who should have grasped from our mute reprobation’, said another disciple, ‘that one did not come to Mallarmé’s to make speeches’.10

  One of the greatest advocates and interpreters of the Symbolist movement was Huysmans, whose novel of 1884, rebours or Against the Grain, documented the life and obsessions of a decadent, aristocratic artist, Des Esseintes. Withdrawing from the urban, industrial, materialistic and mechanistic contemporary world, seeking meaning in narcotically inspired dreams, erotic fantasies and memories of lost civilizations, he discovers Mallarmé, ‘that poet who in a century of universal suffrage and lucre lived apart from the world of letters, sheltered from surrounding stupidity by his disdain, dedicated to the surprises of the intellect and the visions of his mind, which he grafted with Byzantine finesse, fixing them with the lightest touches that an invisible thread scarcely linked’.11 The book was an attack on the Naturalism of his former master Zola, which he thought squeezed all psychological complexity out of his characters and made them mere puppets of instinct and environment. Huysmans was taken to task by Zola in a country lane nea
r Médan in the summer of 1884, and the rupture was complete.

  Disciples of the new school who followed Huysmans from decadence to religion attracted the name of Decadents, but they preferred to call themselves Symbolists and had a powerful publicity machine working for them. Jean Moréas, a writer of Greek origin, published a Symbolist manifesto in Le Figaro in 1886 which announced that ‘symbolist poetry seeks to clothe the Idea in sensible form.’ They regarded the external, material world as merely a veil over the ideal or spiritual world. They trusted in emotions rather than sensations, in what would soon be called the unconscious, and they sought to release deeper meanings by exploring myths and legends, primitive cultures and different manifestations of mysticism and religion. The review La Plume, which published much of their work, sponsored Symbolist evenings on a Saturday night at the Soleil d’Or café on the place Saint-Michel, at which Verlaine would arrive late, already the worse for wear. Maurice Barrès set the tone in the Latin Quarter by reinventing the decadent dandy that Baudelaire was supposed to have been, adopting ‘several souls’, well dressed and polite on the outside, sensuous and immoral in his inner life.12

  Symbolism, or the search for a more spiritual art, shaped not only the poetry and literature of the fin de siècle but also painting, drama and music. As a reaction against the contemporary world, it could end up either in retreat from the world or in criticism of it. The death of Manet in 1883 dealt a blow to Impressionism, which embraced modern life and fixed the impressions it made, and artists took new directions. In 1886 Gauguin discovered Brittany, with its heaths and rocky coves, little chapels and traditional costumes. ‘There I find the savage and primitive,’ he wrote, and by 1888 he had gathered a group of artists of the 1860 generation at the fishing village of Pont-Aven. These included Émile Bernard, who perfected the cloisonné method of painting, with blocks of colour divided by black lines, as in stained glass, and Paul Sérusier, whose rendering of a landscape on the lid of Gauguin’s cigar box became the talisman of the group.13 Linked to them was Maurice Denis, who took an oath on All Saints’ Day 1884 to remain always a Christian and announced in 1886 that ‘even the purest realism and naturalism cannot satisfy… we must make an effort, a great effort, to bring Art back to its great master, who is God.’14 After Gauguin sailed to Tahiti in 1891 in search of more primitive societies, this group became the core of the Nabis, including Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard. For them Denis wrote a manifesto stating that ‘before it becomes a war-horse, a nude woman or some anecdote, a painting is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.’15 The Nabis were keen to apply their techniques to other decorative arts, such as tapestries and stage sets, and Denis had been at the Lycée Condorcet with avant-garde theatre director Aurélien Lugné-Poë. Lugné-Poë and the Nabis shared a studio in the rue Pigalle and after 1893 the Nabis designed sets and programmes for the north European idealist drama at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, notably Pelléas et Mélisande by the Belgian Symbolist Maeterlinck and a string of Ibsen plays from Rosmers-holm and An Enemy of the People to The Master Builder in 1893, with not a single French play until 1894.16

  The search for a more spiritual art could lead squarely to religion. Huysmans only flirted with Decadence after his break with Naturalism. He was embraced by the Catholic writer Léon Bloy who argued that everyone had to decide ‘whether to guzzle like the beasts of the field or to look upon the face of God’, and dined frequently with the Abbé Mugnier, ‘confessor of duchesses’. Attracted by the aesthetic dimension of Catholicism he went on pilgrimages to La Salette and Lourdes, undertook a retreat with the Trappists and died in 1907 in the robes of a Benedictine oblate.17 Maurice Denis had always been devoted to the Italian Primitivist Fra Angelico, ‘the only really Catholic painter’, and in 1898 went on a pilgrimage to Rome with André Gide, where he discovered Raphael and ‘the theory of ideal, absolute beauty’. He broke with Nabis like Vuillard who espoused dreyfusism, reverted to painting the Virgin Mary and Joan of Arc and decorated the Chapel of the Holy Virgin at Le Vésinet. In his search for classicism and order he even joined Action Française.18

  Modernist criticism of the modern world was, however, as likely to end up on the extreme left of the political spectrum as on the extreme right. Just as the Pont-Aven group gathered around Gauguin, so another cohort of the 1860 generation, the painters Georges Seurat and Paul Signac and the critic Félix Fénéon, gathered after 1886 around Pissarro. Seurat and Signac introduced Pissarro to the new technique of pointillisme, which involved dividing tones into dots from which new forms and colours were built. They painted scenes from modern life, such as circus artists and bathers, notably Seurat’s 1885 Sunday at La Grande Jatte, but also bleak industrial suburbs on the outskirts of Paris and peasants toiling in the fields. They considered the Pont-Aven school to be reactionary and Pissarro denounced Symbolism as part of a conspiracy to ‘restore to the people their superstitious beliefs’. ‘Impressionists have the true position,’ he said, ‘they stand for a robust art based on sensation, and that is an honest stand.’19 He attacked the Exhibition of 1889 as a capitalist extravaganza, produced a print of the sun of revolution rising behind the Eiffel Tower in his Turpitudes sociales series, and joined forces with Louise Michel, Benoît Malon and the antimilitarist Lucien Descaves in the Club of Social Art. In 1891 Seurat died aged thirty-one while Signac wrote an article on ‘impressionists and revolutionaries’ in La Révolte, published by the anarchist Jean Grave. Félix Fénéon, who defended their cause both artistically and politically, finished up in the dock alongside Jean Grave during the infamous trial of anarchists, the Procès des Trente, in 1894, while Pissarro fled to Brussels to avoid arrest.20

  These Symbolist and modernist experiments were a reaction against the classical art of the bourgeois world, which was also that of the political mainstream. One of its platforms was the salon of Juliette Adam, which had been home to Gambetta and the republican opposition under the Empire, before she broke with the great man over his policy of rapprochement with Germany. From 1879 she published a Nouvelle Revue in which she promoted the work of aspiring writers, notably the Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard by Anatole France in 1881, the poetry of Jules Lemaître, and Pêcheur d’islande by the naval officer Pierre Loti in 1886, a poignant story of the impossible love between a Parisian girl and a Breton fisherman divided by class, culture and the long voyages of the seafarers to the Icelandic fishing banks. ‘I can still hear’, recalled Julie Daudet, ‘the old Count Beust [former Austrian chancellor] playing an outdated waltz, Gounod singing a dramatic Breton legend, the poetry readings of that ardent poet and admirable patriot Paul Déroulède. The salon was active and lively, the Nouvelle Revue was published not far away, Paul Bourget was brought in, Pierre Loti was discovered and Léon Daudet [Alphonse’s son] published his first timid volume there.’21

  Juliette Adam secured the election of Pierre Loti to the Académie Française in 1891, while other protégés of hers moved on to even more influential salon hostesses, both artistically and amorously. When Madame Léontine Caillavet first invited Anatole France to her salon in 1883 she found him shy and stammering, but within five years they had become lovers. France divorced his wife and Madame Caillavet overcame his diffidence by shutting him up on her rural estate of the Gironde until he had finished Le Lys rouge, a study of contemporary jealousy, in 1894.22 France had attacked both Zola’s La Terre as ‘a scurrilous Georgics’ and the Symbolists for torturing the French language.23 Now Léon Blum declared that ‘M. Anatole France is the principal writer of our time. One rediscovers in him the classical beauties of the language; he united the richest currents of the French spirit: the fluidity of Renan, the sure and difficult taste of the Parnassians, the courageous freedom and natural sensibility of Diderot, the precise and delicate elegance of Fénelon or Racine, always the abundant and sustained irony of Montaigne or Rabelais.’24 Anatole France was duly elected in his turn to the Académie Française in 1896.

  In 1885 Jules
Lemaître went on to the salon of the Comtesse de Loynes, which included the aged Taine and Renan, Dumas fils, Maupassant and Georges Clemenceau. Lemaître and the countess soon became lovers, he thirty-two, she fifty. Both had risen from humble origins. Lemaître was the son of an instituteur from near Orléans, while the countess was an illegitimate textile worker from Reims who became a courtesan under the Empire and numbered Prince Jérôme-Napoléon or Plon-Plon among her clients. She was educated in the ways of society by Dumas fils and Sainte-Beuve and had an unsuccessful career as an actress, but inherited a fortune from the son of a minister of the Empire who was killed in 1870 and acquired a title from marrying the Comte de Loynes, who soon disappeared. The countess lunched theatre directors until she found one, that of the Odéon, to stage Lemaître’s first play, Révoltée, in 1889.25 With these connections Lemaître was elected to the Académie Française in 1895, and defended classical French art through his theatre criticism. He welcomed Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, which opened at the Porte Saint-Martin in 1897 and ran throughout the Dreyfus Affair, as ‘a recapitulation, or if you prefer it, a culminating efflorescence of a form of art which dates back three centuries’. Taking a sideswipe at the Symbolists he attributed the success of Cyrano to ‘the degree to which the public has been wearied and surfeited with so many studies of psychology, so many trifling tales of Parisian adultery, so many productions by feminists, socialists and Scandinavians… [It has] set on foot a revival of nationalism in France.’26 ‘The symbolist nightmare is fading,’ echoed another critic, ‘the northern fog has been holed and dissipated by this glorious flambée of Provençal sunshine which has restored France to herself, to her genius.’27