There was no let-up. Once more led by Picasso, who by now was constantly administering shocks to the Paris art world, after Fauvism there arrived Cubism, pioneered by Cézanne in his last years. By 1911, the Cubists, having achieved recognition, had perhaps reached their pinnacle. That year a terrible, unthinkable blow struck: somebody stole the Mona Lisa off its wall in the Louvre. At first, Apollinaire was under suspicion; imprisoned briefly, he was plunged into deep depression, but the painting was found two years later, safe and sound in Florence, the theft having been carried out by a glazier working in the museum. It was a happy ending that lightened an increasingly gloomy scene. The greatest period of artistic creativity possibly since the Renaissance had passed its peak in Paris. It was somehow symptomatic of what was about to happen to Europe, to the world at large. Cubism, arm in arm with the dissonant themes of Stravinsky, would be succeeded by the violent nihilism of Italian Futurism, and by English Vorticism, its very name symbolic of the disaster just a year or two away.
In marked contrast to the Paris of a century previously, when Napoleon had contrived to whittle down the number of Paris theatres to a handful, there were now once again some forty-odd. Theatre life was as lively, and disputatious, as it ever had been. For those who, like Marcel Proust, didn’t want to venture out, there was even an electrical device called the Théâtrophone, a subscriber service that enabled you to hear live music or a play. Listening to Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, Proust found that “the scent of roses in the score is so strong that I have asthma whenever I hear it.”
In 1905 there was another efflorescence of drama in Paris. At the summit, Sarah Bernhardt reigned sublime, still after several decades at centre stage undistracted by her plethora of unsatisfactory love affairs—which critics would denounce from time to time. To confound them, in later years she would appear on stage recumbent in her famous coffin. Opening in time for Expo 1900, Bernhardt had managed to squeeze her fifty-five-year-old frame into a corseted uniform to appear as Rostand’s tragic twenty-two-year-old hero in L’Aiglon, and, despite the absurdity of the casting, Paris loved every minute of its four hours. Her courage was boundless. While in Rio, playing Tosca, she bounced out of the net which was supposed to catch her in her death-plunge off the battlements, causing such damage to her right knee that she limped for the rest of her life. (Eventually, in 1915, the leg had to be amputated, and, ghoulishly, Barnum’s circus offered $10,000 for the limb and the right to exhibit it.) But Bernhardt never gave up. Aged sixty-five, she was playing a nineteen-year-old Jeanne d’Arc. Eventually she was awarded the Légion d’Honneur (like Dreyfus)—though not for acting, because an independent actress was still not considered “respectable” in Paris.
During the Belle Epoque, opera and ballet audiences were as excitable as ever: the first night of Pelléas et Mélisande provoked something like a riot. One wag dubbed it Pédéraste et Médisance; another critic complained of waiting for “a tune that never came. A succession of notes like the noise of the wind … I prefer the wind.” Nevertheless, by Christmas 1906 Pelléas would reach its fiftieth performance—every one of which had been attended by Maurice Ravel, while Romain Rolland rated it the most original opera ever written.
Two years later Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet arrived, one of the most exciting and provocative events on the cultural scene of pre-war Paris, and a second major spin-off from the fateful Alliance sealed in 1894. Since then everything Russian was the rage in Paris, and from 1908 the ballet would return every year until 1914 put an end to it all. But, in a wonderfully Russian way, the Moscow bankers financing this important asset of the Alliance swiftly ran out of funds (or they disappeared into Grand Ducal pockets), a process accelerated by the incredible extravagance of the thirty-five-year-old Diaghilev’s productions. As a result Parisian “angels” found themselves picking up the tab.
At first Parisians were lukewarm in response to the Russian onslaught. Then suddenly they became seized by Fokine and Bakst, by the brilliantly exotic stage settings and by Nijinsky’s acrobatics. Of Schéhérazade in the 1910–11 season, Proust—quite overcome—admitted, “I never saw anything so beautiful.” Outrage and unbeatable publicity followed in the 1912 season when in L’Après-midi d’un faune Nijinsky chose to dance without a jockstrap. Shocked, Gaston Calmette, editor of Le Figaro—taking over the role of critic himself—condemned “Gestures smacking of erotic bestiality and heavy shamelessness … an ill-made beast, hideous from the front, even more hideous in profile.” Still more offensive to Parisian sensibilities was when Nijinsky in a Terpsichorean frenzy affected to masturbate into a nymph’s abandoned scarf: “a lecherous faun,” thundered the soon-to-be assassinated Calmette, “whose movements are filthy and bestial in their eroticism and his gestures as crude as they are indecent. That is all … greeted by the boos it deserved.” The offending gesture was expunged, but audiences still flocked to the theatre.
Nineteen-thirteen brought to Paris Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring and more sensation. At the première, Gertrude Stein observed Apollinaire “industriously kissing various important looking ladies’ hands.” But “No sooner did the music begin and the dancing than they began to hiss. The defendants began to applaud. We could hear nothing.” One young man became so excited that he beat rhythmically with his fists on the head of an American in the row in front of him, whose own emotion was so great that he claimed, “I did not feel the blows for some time.” The conductor, Pierre Monteux, recalled that “Everything available was tossed in our direction, but we continued to play on.” Amid the hubbub even the Théâtrophone broke down. Insults were exchanged. Ravel was called a “sale Juif.” Eventually the row escalated into a full-scale riot, with the gendarmes forced to intervene—as in the days of Louis XIV. As much as anything what had, apparently, provoked the uproar was the “barbarian” exaggeration of Stravinsky’s music. Did the harsh clangour of Stravinsky seem to presage the violence that was about to engulf civilization?
More in tune with the happier mood of the Belle Epoque was the comic theatre of Georges Feydeau, that dashing figure of the boulevards. Speed—the speed of the era of electricity, telephone and motor car—was the essence of Feydeau’s hilarious farces. Drawing on rich material from his own life, Feydeau’s favourite prop was the bed, with people in it, hidden under it or behind it, his central figure the cocu husband. The backdrop to the contemporary Parisian scene was perhaps that, in the words of the young playwright Sacha Guitry, “The burdens of marriage were too heavy to be borne by two people alone.” Meanwhile, there was Lumière’s new-fangled Kino, still silent though accompanied by stirring music, but expanding its entertainment possibilities at ever increasing speed. With it would arrive the young Charlie Chaplin, starting aged twenty at the Folies Bergère in 1909, who, always deeply influenced by his early experience in Paris as Charlot, would delight Parisian audiences for many decades to come. By 1913 Paris already boasted thirty-seven cinemas; one of them, the Pathé, near the Invalides, ran to an orchestra of sixty and claimed to have the world’s largest screen.
THE APPROACH OF WAR
Whether on stage or screen or in the cabarets, the message of that first decade and a half of the new century before the deluge was one of relentless optimism. Perhaps that was why Parisians had booed Stravinsky. Like Queen Victoria Paris was not interested in gloomy talk, and looked back at the men of the 1890s with something akin to pity, thinking how naive and lacking in subtlety they had been. Yet, for all the evidence of the march of technical progress, of perfectibility, there were occasional reminders that mankind had not yet tamed Nature—let alone himself. In January 1910 Paris was stricken with the worst floods in 150 years. Waters of the Seine came up to the famous Zouave’s beard on the Pont de l’Alma, the standard flood measurement, and floating debris threatened to carry away the older bridges. Photographs of the time show a sailor sculling along Boulevard Haussmann towards Gare Saint-Lazare. By 28 January, not a single pavement could be seen in the Ile de la Cité, while the Ile Sai
nt-Louis was totally submerged. Bursting its banks, the Seine filled the courtyard of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and was five metres deep in the Quai d’Orsay station. Inhabitants near the Zoo were fearful that crocodiles would swim out of their pools and devour them. Sewers burst, looters appeared on the scene and 50,000 inhabitants fled their homes.
Even so, the prevailing mood—in Paris and nationally—was one of contentment. The Republic, writes André Maurois, “was still Athenian.” It had “no reason to be envious of Louis XIV’s France, or of the France of the Renaissance; never had the country had greater renown or a more justifiable prestige …” A nostalgia for les neiges d’antan would be summed up in 1913 with the appearance of the first instalment of Proust’s monumental À la recherche du temps perdu. Yet, if ever there was a sign of the fragility, and hubris, inherent in human endeavours the previous year, 1912, was the year that the unsinkable Titanic sank. And in Europe there was the rumble, though seemingly distant, of wars in the Balkans.
As Europe hastened like lemmings towards a cliff, there is the sense of the inevitability of the forthcoming contest as when children pick sides at school. On the western side, most of the picking of teams had taken place in Paris. First, and perhaps most dangerous of all, in 1894 the Foreign Minister, Théophile Delcassé—ever mindful of the loss of Alsace, and of how France had so foolishly gone to war in 1870 without a friend—had pioneered the “defensive” Franco-Russian pact. From then till 1914 had grown the increasing popularity of all things Russian, from Diaghilev to Stravinsky. Germany, alarmed at potential enemies combining to west and east, lined up Austria, Bulgaria and later Turkey. Then, in 1903, the francophile Edward VII came over to charm a city still instinctively anti-England; the following year the entente cordiale, unnatural though it may have seemed to many a Frenchman and to many an Englishman, was signed. When fun-loving Edward died, Paris was draped in black, and cab-drivers tied crêpe bows on their whips. But on the international scene, to borrow the sombre words of Philip Guedalla,
A dark resentment replaced the milder flavour of the old diplomatic rivalries, and a new bitterness was born of German inability to win a war with civilized restraint. But the great palace was still standing at Versailles; and in the Galerie des Glaces the mirrors waited on.
In 1905, and again in 1911, the Kaiser blundered into Morocco, stretching nerves in the Chancelleries of Europe and providing grist to the mill of Paris’s Hun-eating nationalist press. In the Sorbonne, German experts like Charles Andler and Romain Rolland, striving for peace with kindred spirits across the Rhine, were progressively outgunned by the Echo de Paris, where Maurice Barrès damned Andler as a “humanitarian anarchist,” ready to “betray” Alsace-Lorraine. One of Europe’s best hopes of peace, the Socialist leader Jean Jaurès, son of a road-mender from the Tarn, bitterly opposed France’s pact with a reactionary, feudal and unstable Russia, but hoped to defeat jingoism with an accord between French and German Socialists never to make war on each other. He firmly believed that, in the unspeakable event of war, German Socialists would tear up the railway lines rather than allow their brothers to go to war.
Events defeated him. Agadir, 1911, was the last straw, and the joie de vivre of the Belle Epoque gave way to deep distrust of Germany and her intentions. Three days before the outbreak of war, Jaurès himself was shot down in a café by a deranged young zealot, Raoul Villain. Even Proust began to deploy the label of the “ugly German.” Among Parisians, there was a sudden last-minute attachment to the army, fanned by the jingoist press. In 1912, the restoration of military service to three years was greeted with remarkably good humour. In Paris—as opposed to the calmer provinces—war fever mounted, to the point where, after Agadir, even some sensible writers began to feel that war was not only thinkable, but perhaps actually desirable, in preference to the continuing tension—like a thunderstorm clearing away oppressively sultry weather. Declared Abel Bonnard, in Le Figaro, “War refashions everything anew … We must embrace it in all its savage poetry.” Even Apollinaire could write, apocalyptically, “You are weary of this old world at last.”
SEVENTEEN
* * *
The Great War
Is Paris ready to withstand a siege?
ADOLPHE MESSIMY, MINISTER OF WAR, AUGUST 1914
AUGUST 1914
On 3 August 1914, Paris found herself at war again—in what men of that time, happily unable to see what lay ahead, would optimistically call the Great War, the War to End All Wars. Historians of the next generation would recognize it merely as the First World War, though their successors in future might well, imbued with all the powers of hindsight, come to see it more realistically as simply the first act in a second Thirty Years War.
The war would sweep away the age of prosperity and hope that all Europe had begun to enjoy, including backward Russia. Europe was about to enter a new Dark Age of unknowable duration, and for the next four years it was as if violence and destruction had become the sole arbiters in the world, with human leaders—so powerful and optimistic at the turn of the century—rendered impotent in the face of historical forces greater than anything they could have foreseen. On both sides there were many—and not just among the Kaiser’s entourage in Berlin, or the sword-rattling revanchists of Paul Déroulède in Paris—who greeted the outbreak of war almost with relief, such had been the stresses and strains leading up to it in recent years.
Paul Claudel, Catholic mystic, diplomat and playwright, currently French consul in enemy Hamburg, was one of many young Europeans who saw war bringing adventure, even a kind of freedom: “Freedom from one’s job, from one’s wife, from one’s children, from a fixed place; adventure.” When Austria set the machine in motion by declaring war on Serbia, Louis Gillet, a brilliant young art historian, formerly a pacifist but now a lieutenant in an infantry regiment, saw an adventure of high altruism where it was “beautiful to fight with pure hands and an innocent heart, to give one’s life for divine justice.” To his mentor Romain Rolland, who had dedicated himself in vain to an understanding with Germany, he wrote, “what an awakening … Today we witness France’s resurrection. Always the same: victory over Otho at Bouvines, Crusades, Cathedrals, Revolution, always we’re the world’s knights, God’s paladins.” Within a matter of weeks half his battalion would be dead or wounded.
André Gide hastened back to Paris by the last available civilian train (as it went by he heard a railwayman shout, “All aboard for Berlin! And what fun we’ll have there!”), but, not being subject to conscription, three days into the war he anticipated adventure of a higher level: “The wonderful behaviour of the government, of everyone, and of all France … leaves room for every hope. One foresees the beginning of a new era: the United States of Europe bound by a treaty limiting their armaments.” Naturally, as to all Frenchmen now, the sine qua non of such a rosy future had to be the return of Alsace-Lorraine. Marcel Proust, however, right to the end, refused to believe in the prospect of war; it would be simply “too frightful,” he thought. He was much more concerned with finding a publisher for his very long novel, À la recherche du temps perdu. His chronic asthma disqualified him from military service. Instead he daydreamed of male bordels—having found himself pleasurably in one which he had mistaken for an air-raid shelter.
Outside Paris, in the provinces, reactions to the coming of war were distinctly more sombre. Yet even in brainwashed Paris there was little repetition of the wild, clamouring cries of “A Berlin!” in that July of forty-four years previously. On 28 July 1914, the British Ambassador, Lord Bertie, recorded in his diary, “There is much nervous excitement, but no popular demonstrations for war …” Parisians, he noted, hoped that Britain would be the “deciding factor” in keeping Germany out of the war. He told the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, that if Britain should “declare herself solidaire with France and Russia there will be no war.” Grey and the Asquith government—“a house divided against itself, and they change their attitude day by day” in the opinion of Bertie—dith
ered. In execution of the Schlieffen Plan, Germany marched into and through Belgium, and on 4 August war became general. “It will be a savage war,” Bertie noted prophetically from the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Two days later, he recorded that Paris was rather “like London would be on a Sunday in August. Very many shops are closed par cause de mobilisation.”
Parisians, including many artists, were swift to join the colours. Braque and Derain rejoined their regiments and fought bravely at the front. Matisse came back to Paris from the south and did everything he could to enlist—but, at forty-five, was declared too old and was sent home. Raoul Dufy went to drive a van for the army postal service; Jean Cocteau, though classified unfit, became an ambulance driver for the Red Cross. Apollinaire, despite his Polish-Italian extraction, grateful for all that his adopted France had done for him, enlisted at thirty-four and, in the earliest days of the war, received a severe head wound from which he never properly recovered. Lieutenant Charles Péguy, aged forty-one, died in the very first days of the Marne, leading his company across an exposed beetroot field, to become almost beatified by his generation of artists. The twenty-eight-year-old Henri Alain-Fournier, whom peace had allowed time to write only his one great, mystical novel Le Grand Meaulnes, also fell in the early months of the war. Referring chiefly to the gratin and the privileged of Paris, Apollinaire complained that “nearly everybody is running away.” Rodin and Debussy left for the provinces (but they were over-age anyway); Picasso, who was of course Spanish, drove his friends into Avignon station to join their regiments, and claimed, “I never saw them again.” Romain Rolland remained in Switzerland, to continue to fight for peace; staying on in Paris, Marie Curie offered her medals to be melted down, and bought war bonds with her Nobel Prize money.
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