by Philipp Blom
To many French men and women the new century was not just uncertain, but threatening. Within a single generation, the country had lost a war to Germany. It had endured the humiliation of seeing, in 1871, its emperor Napoleon III taken prisoner and forced to abdicate, being made to cede the contested territories of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany. To cap it all, the French had witnessed the rise of a new German empire and the coronation of its emperor, Wilhelm I, in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles, the epicentre of French royal glory. In the wake of the lost war, the Paris Commune had risen against a weak and reactionary government that had retreated to the provinces to escape the Germans. Worse still, the rebellion was brutally crushed by the French army which, after retaking the city, court-martialled and executed 20,000 of its own citizens within a single week, the semaine sanglante. More recently, in 1894, in the Dreyfus case, an innocent Jewish officer had been set up, accused of high treason and condemned to life imprisonment in a patently rigged trial, an affair that had split the nation down the middle and had made bitter enemies of former friends and even family members. The division was still festering like an open wound, as the dreyfusards were pressing for a retrial of the honest captain, who was languishing in solitary confinement on Devil’s Island, off French Guyana.
The rift between Dreyfus’s foes and his supporters (mainly socialist or bourgeois and progressive) was carried into the private sphere: once good friends, the Impressionist painters Degas and Pissarro would never speak again because of the affair, and Degas, an impassioned opponent of Dreyfus, even sacked a model because of her sympathies for the Jewish captain. The very air of the capital seemed to be partitioned. As feelings came to boiling point, Emile Zola’s 1898 article ‘J’accuse!’ in L’Aurore summed up the argument for the defence: ‘I have but one passion, that of enlightenment, in the name of humanity, which has suffered so much and has a right to happiness. My impassioned protest is nothing but the cry of my soul. May they dare to put me on trial [for slander] so that the entire affair will come to light!’ He was not put on trial, but after several days of street disturbances and threats he had to seek refuge in England until things cooled off. Four years after his return, Zola was asphyxiated in his house during the night due to a blocked chimney. The death was recorded as an accident. A roofer admitted several years later that he had worked on the house next door and had put a piece of wood over Zola’s chimney to kill the writer as revenge for his defence of the Jewish captain.
Dreyfus and the Spectre of Decline
Dreyfus had become a symbol for France’s malaise. Only a generation earlier, France had been the undisputed centre of the cultural universe, dictating the world’s fashions and the taste in music and literature of ‘civilized’ people everywhere, and in 1870 the French historian Joseph de Maistre could still write with cast-iron and lavishly gilded confidence that artists across the world ‘were condemned to a local reputation until Paris consented to make them famous ... Perhaps nothing is properly understood in Europe until the French have explained it.’
Thirty years later this was no longer true. London had become the world’s financial centre; Germany’s scientists and engineers led the world. France itself had become a nation haunted by the spectre of defeat, of territorial loss, of its decline and decadence under the threat of physical extinction. In contrast to other European populations, the French head-count was stagnant. In 1891, for the first time, more French people had died than were born. If the country’s population had not declined between 1850 and 1900 (it had even risen from 36 to 39 million), that was due to immigration, mainly from Belgium, Italy and Poland. During the same period, the populations of Germany and Britain had risen by 20 per cent despite considerable emigration, while the Habsburg subjects had almost doubled and the number of Russians almost trebled. France’s mothers were no longer bearing enough children and, more terrifyingly still, the men of the nation no longer seemed able to beget them as they used to. France, many authors said, had become sterile; its culture and way of life would simply vanish within a hundred years. ‘Next to this vital question all others disappear,’ wrote the historian Jacques Bertillon in 1911, ‘… the death of France will be one of the crucial facts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.’ France was being left behind, while the ‘hereditary enemy’ to the east, the new German empire, was forging ahead not only in population terms, but also in the sciences (German researchers received more Nobel Prizes in physics and chemistry than any other country), in armaments and in industrial development. France, it seemed, was not only defeated, it was slowly dying off and fading into a shadow of its former grandeur.
Undermined by fear and shaken by an atmosphere of anxious pessimism, the French wanted a jolly, unthreatening World Exhibition, and most of all they had wanted a success. Boldness of vision was not what was required by the organizers: retrospective splendour and entertainment ruled. Everybody should be impressed by the status quo, everybody would enjoy themselves - even if the papier mâché turrets of Vieux France looked more like a gaudy parody of national greatness than actual proof.
Not everybody was fooled by the glorious façade: ‘It remains to be seen,’ wrote the French essayist Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé after the exhibition gates had closed for the last time, ‘what this Exhibition has given us that is new…In 1889, steel [the Eiffel Tower] offered itself up bravely to our eyes, alone and bare; it made us appreciate its virtues as an architectural element. Since then, one has the impression that it has felt the shame of man after committing Original Sin, and has felt the need to cover itself up. Today, steel wraps itself in plaster.’
The original sin was the ever-divisive Dreyfus affair. The Jewish officer was simply the ideal bogeyman for a nation that appeared to have lost its way. Ever since Edouard Drumont (1844-1917) had published his bestselling La France juive in 1886 (it had reached 200 editions by 1914), antisemitism had been commonplace among the nationalist right and became a rallying cry that united both Catholics and Republican atheists under one banner. Dreyfus was ideally suited for fables about conspiracies, foreigners and international capital. As a Jew, he was identified with international capital and the end of France’s traditionally rural way of life; as a native of Alsace, historically disputed between Germany and France, he was suspected of divided loyalties, of being a traitor selling his country to the proliferating Germans and their innumerable children in navy uniforms. As an officer he also represented manly virtues and an army keen to cleanse itself of the whiff of defeat as history itself was threatening to overwhelm the French. If the nation’s men were no longer man enough to father children in sufficient numbers, perhaps the rot had reached the very core of France’s historical greatness and virility, the military caste - in his Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1899, Freud, who had done medical research in Paris, had taken the nexus between officers and exaggerated masculinity for granted. The captain simply had the grotesque bad luck of being everything his country feared and wanted to hate. ‘For me, the Frenchmen of today - a recent crisis has made that all too clear - may live side by side, do the same jobs, partake of the same disappointments, the same pleasures, but they no longer do it with the same soul,’ a character in the novel L’Etape by the anti-Dreyfus writer Paul Bourget recounts.
The mantra of the nationalists was la terre et les morts, the soil and the dead, the French equivalent to the German Blut und Boden. It had been formulated by Maurice Barrès (1862-1923), a bona fide immortel because of his membership in that most exclusive of old men’s clubs, the Académie française. Barrès had started his writing career as a typical fin-de-siècle hedonist, whose programmatic novel Le culte de moi propagated total, solipsistic selfishness and gained him a considerable literary reputation. Later on, the professional egoist got bored with his own company and involved himself in the politics of national community.
Some of Europe’s most dangerous demagogues on the political right have regarded their political role as essentially aesthetic, in the service of a highe
r beauty and purity, and Barrès was no exception. Like so many converts, he detested nothing more than his own past, and in particular the decadence that he had once preached. Catholic France, he believed, had been corrupted by a conspiracy of Protestants, Jews and Freemasons, destroyers of the ‘organic solidarity’ that should reign between members of one nation united by ‘our dead and the produce of our soil’. ‘Every act that distorts our soil and our dead drives us deeper into the lie that sterilizes us.’ The spectre of infertility rose up again, this time in the shape of a rustic Catholic castrated by Ahasver, the Wandering Jew. ‘Everything comes from the Jew, and everything comes back to the Jew,’ wrote Edouard Drumont in his La France juive.
While antisemitism was an obvious motivation in the Dreyfus case, the population debate also played a major role. Critics such as the sociologist René Gonnard were quick to pounce on the supposed reasons for the national decline: life in the city, lack of faith, general pessimism, a decadent over-refinement among the middle classes, and other hallmarks of modern life visible especially in the big ‘man-eating’ cities. France, the most cultivated of nations, was particularly badly hit by this: ‘it happens to be the case that our French civilization with its laws and customs exaggerates this effect, forcing one to fear a depopulation in the literal sense of the term,’ Gonnard warned. France was becoming impotent, unmanly, and weak despite all measures taken to the contrary, notably a ban on abortion (which would become a capital crime during the Vichy regime) and even on advertising contraceptives - the ‘Gentlemen’s rubber goods’ appearing in the papers of the day in other countries.
Even Dreyfus’s champion Emile Zola was moved to write a novel entitled Fécondité (1899), in which he contrasted the fate of two couples: egotistical, rich city-dwellers who invest everything in their only son (who dies, of course), while the heroic husband and wife at the heart of the story choose the simple life and a wealth of children, resulting in love and fulfilment. Zola had been brooding on the novel for some years. As early as 1896 he had written in Le Figaro: ‘My novel…will be an immense fresco showing how a city like Paris kills germs, devours living beings, consumes abortions to become what it is, the very place of the life of tomorrow.’
The image of the city-ogre - eyes glaring with electric light, a body of stone and steel, annihilating parasites and life alike and swallowing its inhabitants with insatiable hunger - goes right back to the crazed god Saturn making a feast of his own children: the creator who destroys, the metropolis as an evil place, sucking the blood of those drawn to it - the vampire capitalism in full flight.
This political attitude had a strong influence on the arts and their presentation at the 1900 World Fair. The Grand Palais and Petit Palais, two truly palatial exhibition halls (two vestiges of the exhibition that can still be seen in Paris) were built in order to demonstrate la gloire de la France by hosting displays of works of art. Most of the works shown here during the exhibition obeyed the official aesthetics of turn-of-the-century French art: heavily academic fare - heroic nudity, sentimental grandeur and chaste beauty in plaster and marble, bronze and oil. A flanking display contained a retrospective of French artists of the past. Only one smaller collection struck a different note, so different that when President Loubert attempted to enter it, a conservative art critic barred his way, crying: ‘Don’t enter, monsieur le Président, the shame of France is in there!’ It was an exhibit of ‘radicals’, curated by the art collector Roger Marx. The shameful secret was the work of Gauguin, Seurat, Cézanne, Pissarro, Picasso, Manet and Monet, degenerate art avant la lettre.
Much of French art was animated by a sense of stock-taking and remembrance. Most famously, this introspective private reconstruction of a past world is embodied in A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust, a writer at the centre of the elegant Paris scene. Far removed from the brutality of working-class life and the anxious selfishness of the petite bourgeoisie, Proust and his circle led a life of enchanted, languid luxury amid a succession of elegant salons, balls, and outings to the nearby Bois de Boulogne, a universe of true sophistication (in the minds of its denizens at least), spanning only a few square kilometres between the Bois, the Place de la Concorde, the great and ostentatious Opéra and the Parc Monceau on the capital’s right bank.
Another artistic project, hugely ambitious in scale, chimed with the mood of the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle and its retrospective presentation. Eugène Atget (1857-1927), a photographer with a patient and lyrical eye, devoted his entire working life to the city he loved and its magic, which, he was convinced, would vanish soon, submerged by the building sites of a loud new world. Having spent three decades roaming the streets of the city with a huge camera and tripod, Atget created a magical, silent world of deserted streets, mute buildings and empty interiors, a huge, minutely detailed inventory like that of some nameless official dutifully listing every chair and every last silver spoon left behind by a dying duchess. Atget’s Paris is infinitely evocative, but almost always dead, devoid of human presence, or rather of a human present, for the presence of innumerable past inhabitants can still be read in the worn steps and faded walls and in the very air around them.
This nostalgia was not innocent; it was poisoned by the knowledge that an era had passed by, while a new one had not yet shown its face. Change was everywhere, but the speed of evolution obscured the immutable values and principles many sought. Novelists chronicling the lives of gilded youth could not help but notice that they had lost their parents’ robust drive and principles and that the heroic period of construction was drawing to a close. This idea of decline in literature was not limited to Paris, or to France. Novels published throughout Europe between 1900 and the beginning of the War analysed the demise of a world full of energy (manliness, again) and confidence. For almost two decades European and American bookshops were piled with elegiac or satirical stories of ruined families: the sophisticated play with lost youth in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s librettos, and the ironic analysis in Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities (published later but started during and dealing with the period), while Rainer Maria Rilke’s nightmarish The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) and Karel-Matej Capek-Chod’s The Turbine (published 1916) from the Czech crown lands of the moribund Habsburg empire mark out central Europe as the richest vein of doom.
In the German Reich, Thomas Mann’s implacably detached Buddenbrooks (1901) and The Magic Mountain (begun 1913, published 1924) traced the undoing of the grande bourgeoisie while, in a pleasing inversion, his brother Heinrich chronicled the irrepressible rise of Germany in the shape of a nasty nationalist petit bourgeois in The Loyal Subject (1919). The novel The Flax Field (1907) by the Belgian Flemish writer Stijn Streuvels situates the conflict in a rural context, in which a young man no longer wants to lead the life of his ancestors. Even if the young farmer comes to his senses at his father’s deathbed, it is clear that this is only a temporary reprieve. In an existentialist version of the theme, the exasperated protagonist of the Spaniard Miguel de Unamuno’s novel Mist (1914) turns on his author to demand an answer to the riddle of his existence. When he finds that the author is planning to kill him, he commits suicide as a last and futile assertion of independence. In Trieste, still part of Austria-Hungary but Italian-speaking, the young Italo Svevo’s Senilità (1898) showed its young protagonist stricken with premature senility while falling hopelessly in love - a nightmarish image of infertility and lost self-confidence.
It is not difficult to see a social, societal parallel in these accounts of once-great families stumbling to their graves, of old nobility corrupted and men paralysed by thought or infirmity while a new generation of nasty social climbers is taking their place. Chekhov’s plays are pervaded by this imagery. In Maksim Gorky’s 1902 play The Philistines the ageing tradesman Vassily looks at his son’s revolutionary sympathies with contempt, and into the future with naked fear: ‘What’s in store? I look around and everything is breaking up. Everything’s in pieces. These times we l
ive in? What if something really happened? Who would look after us? Your mother and I are getting older and it seems everything could ... destroy us ... People want to destroy our family. Beware of them, they want to destroy us all. And I feel it, all so close. This terrible ... terrible disaster.’ Death was in the air. Emile Durkheim, one of the first modern social scientists, chose for one of his major studies (published in 1897) a subject he thought symptomatic of society: suicide.
This was a nervous generation which had lost the sure footing and sturdy gait of the pioneer. The decadent aestheticism of the fin de siècle, of a Wilde or Huysmans or of the young Barrès, had been based on the boredom of the sons of wealth and security who amuse themselves by rebelling against the ethos of puritan morality and public service: a wicked, world-weary elegance. The new wave of writing was different. Growing out of the speed of change and the misgivings about progress and liberal ideals, it was existential and marked by fear and decline, not decadence. It saw no way out and offered none. Whereas the nerves of the artists around 1890 had been attuned to the vibrating wings of a butterfly and wanted to rise into the air themselves, those of their successors were laid bare by the incessant rattle of factories and trains. As we will see later, neurosis became a leading idea not only in fiction (‘I am a neurasthenic. That’s my profession and my fate,’ declares a character in a novella by Heinrich Mann) but also in medicine. The young Sigmund Freud had travelled to Etienne Charcot’s Paris practice to study this phenomenon and the new scientific attention lavished upon it, and sanatoriums across Europe made a tidy living out of treating nervous disorders and mental breakdowns not only of ‘hysterical’ women, but increasingly of men who felt overwhelmed and undermined.