The recorded history of homosexuality in France can be traced back to the twelfth century. Remember Conon de Béthune’s story about the chevalier who spurns the love of an aging lady and is then accused by that lady of preferring “the hugs and kisses of a beautiful young boy” to those of women. Writing this some time after the marriage of King Philippe Auguste in 1180, Conon would have been sensitive to the condemnation of homosexual acts by the ecumenical church council of 1179, known as Lateran III. One didn’t take lightly the punishment of burning or beheading.
Throughout the Middle Ages, gays were persecuted by the church, sometimes in conjunction with other crimes, such as embezzlement or misappropriation of funds. A good way to get rid of an enemy or a rival was to accuse him of sodomy. But from the sixteenth century onward, the French generally tolerated same-sex activities by men, especially if the men were aristocrats. After all, some prominent members of the royal family were known to be bisexual or homosexual. For example, it was no secret that Henri II had his male favorites, and that Louis XIV’s younger brother, Philippe d’Orléans, was patently gay.
A few French writers presented male friendship, homoerotic or not, as superior to the love of women. In the sixteenth century, Michel de Montaigne’s attachment to Étienne de La Boétie, immortalized in Montaigne’s essay “On Friendship,” became the prototype for what the French call une amitié amoureuse—a loving friendship. Montaigne contrasted heterosexual passion, described as “active, sharp and keen” but also as “fickle, fluctuating and variable,” to the love between male friends, which he saw as constant, temperate, and smooth.
In the friendship which I am talking about, souls are mingled and confounded in so universal a blending that they efface the seam which joins them together so that it cannot be found. If you press me to say why I loved him, I feel that it cannot be expressed: Because it was him, because it was me.2
In the lexicon of love, “Parce que c’était lui, parce que c’était moi” (“Because it was he, because it was me”) can stand proudly beside the medieval formula “Ni vous sans moi, ni moi sans vous” (“Neither you without me, neither I without you”). Both expressions emphasize the uniqueness of the individuals and posit the belief that he and she, or he and he, are the only persons suitable for one another. Such lovers or friends were, in current lingo, made for each other. In Montaigne’s age, the idea of the “one true love” or the “one true friend” still had credence.
Montaigne, who lost La Boétie when the latter was only thirty-seven, continued to extol their loving friendship above all his other attachments, including his marriage, long after La Boétie’s death. Given Montaigne’s masculinist bias, it didn’t occur to him that women could share the same bonds of friendship as male friends.
A century later, the original Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–1655) made no secret of his homosexuality. A much vaunted soldier and minor writer, he was also an atheist and a libertine, which should have gotten him into trouble with the church, but during the relatively permissive reign of Louis XIII—also suspected of homosexuality—he got away with his heretical beliefs and practices. He was even bold enough to write admiringly of an imaginary planet where men openly pair off with men. When read today, his novel, Histoire comique des états et empires du soleil (Comical History of the States and Empires of the Sun), first published in 1662, comes across as science fiction way ahead of its time.
By the early eighteenth century, a community of male homosexuals from all social classes had emerged in Paris.3 Men with similar tastes knew how to find each other in specific cabarets, bars, and taverns or in outdoor areas like the banks of the Seine, the Tuileries, the gardens of the Palais-Royal or the Luxembourg. They had to avoid the attention of the police, who continued to arrest homosexuals when they were caught cruising or in flagrante delicto, though most got off with light sentences. That was not true of two unfortunate homosexuals, burned alive at the Place de Grève on July 5, 1750. Their executions were recorded in the Encyclopédie of 1765, and in an observer’s diary, which noted: “The execution was carried out in order to make an example, all the more because it is said that this crime is becoming very common.”4 It seems to have been the last execution for homosexuality in Paris.
Eighteenth-century philosophers, like Voltaire and Diderot (both heterosexuals), were generally on the side of homosexuals as members of a marginalized group harassed by religious authorities. But they also accused the clergy of practicing sodomy among themselves, a practice they attributed to the absence of women in their lives. Was sodomy, they asked, any more unnatural than chastity?
Rousseau, in book 2 of his Confessions (1770), recounted a personal incident during his conversion to Catholicism, when he was propositioned by a Moor. Disgusted by the offer, Rousseau turned to one of the priests and was surprised to find tolerance of the practice rather than censure. With a wink to his readers, he concluded that “such things were no doubt general practice in the world.” 5
The late nineteenth-century French poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud became iconic figures in the history of same-sex love. No educated French person today would be unfamiliar with their poetry or with their short, passionate affair. By all accounts, Rimbaud had a demonic character hidden under an angelic face. His precocious poetry had brought him to Paris from the Ardennes in 1870 when he was only sixteen. Disheveled and dissolute, he proceeded to wreak havoc in the lives of all who tried to protect him, most notably Verlaine, a married man ten years his senior, a new father, a respected poet, and a habitual drunk. Rimbaud insisted, as he would write in his prose poem Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell), that “love has to be reinvented.” With help from alcohol and hashish, he hoped to arrive at “a disordering of all the senses” that would lead to some kind of mystical union. Instead, Verlaine and Rimbaud ended up in mutual violence.
In 1873, when they were traveling together in Belgium, Verlaine was arrested for having shot Rimbaud in the wrist after one of their violent quarrels. The police report noted that Verlaine carried “marks of active and passive pederasty”—whatever that might mean. Like Wilde, Verlaine had considerable time in prison to reflect upon his unfortunate love affair.
Later, when he returned to Paris, Verlaine lived on pitifully as a drunk dependent on the goodwill of his many admirers. He would continue to write poetry, much of it frankly pornographic, until his death in 1896. His sometime lover, Rimbaud, wrenching himself from poetry and from France, went off to establish his legend as an adventurer in Ethiopa. He would die from bone cancer at the age of thirty-seven.
But despite the well-known relationship of this drôle de ménage (Rimbaud’s term meaning “a weird couple”), it was the Englishman Wilde who proved to be more crucial for bringing homosexuals out of the closet in France. His trial and imprisonment inspired sympathetic defenders, as well as outraged detractors, on both sides of the Channel. Wilde’s notorious history opened the gates for a steady stream of French books dealing with gay themes—for example, Pierre Louÿs’ Aphrodite (1896); André Gide’s Les nourritures terrestres (The Fruits of the Earth, 1897), and L’immoraliste (The Immoralist, 1902); Colette’s Claudine à l’école (Claudine at School, 1900), Claudine à Paris (Claudine in Paris, 1901), and Claudine en ménage (Claudine Married, 1902); Natalie Barney’s Quelques Portraits-Sonnets de Femmes (Some Portrait-Sonnets of Women, 1900); Liane de Pougy’s Idylle Saphique (Sapphic Idyll, 1901); and Jean Lorrain’s La Maison Philibert (The House of Philibert, 1904). In 1908, Proust would begin his obsessive portrayal of homosexual characters for his multivolume masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past), and in 1911, Gide would privately circulate Corydon, his treatise on homosexuality.
Allthough most of these works dealt with men, this does not mean that homosexuality among women was unknown. During the incendiary revolutionary period, Marie-Antoinette was accused not only of having male lovers, but also of lesbian activities with her female favorites. She was also accused of incest with her eig
ht-year-old son—a charge so preposterous that even her accusers abandoned it at her trial. Fifty years later, George Sand was mocked as a lesbian because she often wore male trousers, smoked, and was more successful as a writer than all her contemporaries, save Victor Hugo. While she had many male lovers, there is some reason to believe that she was, for a time, sexually intimate with the actress Marie Dorval. Certainly the Sand-Dorval correspondence can be used as evidence of a deep love between them, whether or not it was acted on sexually. Of the Frenchwomen who began to write about female homosexuality around 1900, the one destined to become the most famous was Colette, whom we shall consider in chapter 13 with other lesbian and bisexual women.
In the early twentieth century, two gay writers, André Gide and Marcel Proust, put male homosexuality on the French literary map as never before. No, they were not lovers. They were distinguished authors who knew each other and understood that what they were doing was revolutionary. Gide’s books were the most important apologies for love between men since the time of Plato. His influence in addressing this subject openly and in identifying himself as a pederast cannot be overestimated. On the other hand, Proust—who will be discussed separately in the following chapter—never used the first person in writing about homosexuality. Instead, he presented a variety of homosexual characters, both male and female, in Remembrance of Things Past. It is no accident that these two men, Gide and Proust, produced their remarkable texts when Wilde’s tragic history was still fresh and rankling.
To begin with, consider the direct connections between Gide and Wilde. Gide’s first encounters with Wilde took place in fashionable Parisian circles at the end of 1891. Wilde was thirty-seven and enjoying the scandal surrounding his recently published novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. His play, Lady Windermere’s Fan, was being rehearsed in London and would become the first of several theatrical successes (including my favorite, The Importance of Being Earnest). His Irish genes may have contributed to his deft use of the English language and to his remarkable command of French, which he spoke with a strong accent. Moreover, he was tall, good-looking, rich, witty, deliberately provocative, and entirely immoral. Gide was barely twenty-two and carried with him the austere Protestant baggage of his provincial upbringing in Normandy under the tutelage of a protective mother. He was overwhelmed by Wilde’s personality and hedonistic doctrine. Gide wrote to the poet Paul Valéry on December 4: “Wilde is religiously contriving to kill what is left of my soul.” And again on December 24: “Please excuse my silence: since Wilde, I hardly exist any more.” 6 Gide later denied that he knew of Wilde’s sexual orientation at this time, but what can’t be denied is the intellectual and aesthetic influence the older writer had upon him. From this point on, Gide began to turn away from the strict Christian morality of his youth and surrendered himself, fitfully, to a sensualist lifestyle.
Gide met Wilde again, with his lover Alfred Douglas, in Florence in 1894, and then again in North Africa in January 1895. The January meeting would prove decisive in Gide’s homosexual history, for it was Wilde who took him to a café in Blida, Algeria, and acted as a procurer for a young Arab boy. As recounted in Gide’s memoir, Si le grain ne meurt (If It Die, 1926), Wilde asked: “Dear, do you want the little musician?” and Gide, in a choked voice, answered yes. Gide’s experience with the boy called Mohammed left an indelible memory of sheer jubilation, the template for future encounters with boys in the days and years to come.
Wilde is the source for the character named Menalcas, who appears in Gide’s Fruits of the Earth and again in his breakthrough novel, The Immoralist. Menalcas is a subversive mentor teaching freedom, sensuous delight, satisfaction of desire, amoral pleasure. He offers the ethic of the “new man,” released from constraining conventions and free to follow his own nature. Rereading Fruits of the Earth, I felt echoes of Rimbaud, Nietzsche, Wilde, and Sartre (though the latter was not yet born) in this terribly earnest tract. I put it down with disappointment. But The Immoralist, which treats the same theme as a fully developed piece of fiction, held my interest to the end, even though I knew the plot by heart.7
Between 1895, when Wilde had procured for Gide his first homosexual encounter in North Africa, and 1897, when Gide published Fruits of the Earth, Wilde served out his harrowing prison term. Immediately after his release, he went to France and settled in the town of Berneval-sur-Mer near Dieppe. Gide was one of the rare writers who went to visit him there. He was shocked to find Wilde affaibli, défait—weakened and undone—a shadow of the man he had once been. Both of their situations had changed dramatically: Wilde had undergone a religious conversion and Gide had married. Yes, despite Gide’s discovery of his homosexual nature, in 1895 he married his slightly older cousin, Madeleine Rondeaux, whom he had loved tenderly for seven years. Theirs was what the French call un marriage blanc—an unconsummated marriage. By most standards it was a strange union, filled with unspoken tensions, but it also represented for Gide continuity with his Norman childhood and a deep emotional attachment.
Gide’s marriage to Madeleine and his homosexual longings provide the underpinnings for The Immoralist. Its narrator, Michel, marries Marceline “sans amour” to satisfy his dying father. (In life, it was Gide’s mother’s death that hastened his marriage.) Michel had grown up in Normandy with a rigorous religious upbringing by his Protestant mother and with an education in ancient languages and archeology from his father. At twenty-five, he had become, like his father, a respected scholar. The newly married couple’s honeymoon in Italy and North Africa jolts Michel out of his cerebral existence and propels him into an intoxicating life of the senses.
What precipitates this change is Michel’s near encounter with death. Weakened by his trip and the surprisingly cold North African winds, Michel starts coughing blood and is forced to recuperate for the winter in Tunisia, under the loving care of his wife. In the words of the novel: “What matters is that death had brushed me . . . with its wing. What matters is that merely being alive became quite amazing for me.”
Michel’s recovery coincides with his discovery of the local Arab boys, whose simplicity, physical beauty, and playfulness help bring him back to life. From the start, there are suggestions that he is sexually attracted to them: he is intrigued by their nude feet, their lovely ankles and wrists, their delicate shoulders. He wants to spend all his time with them, first with Bachir, brought to his room by Marceline, then with the group of children he finds outside in the park. Enlivened by these boys, he wills himself to get better. For the first time in his life, he takes an interest in his body. He must eat more, he must breathe the fresh air. He forces himself to forget his fatigue and take walks “in a kind of ecstasy, a silent gaiety, an exaltation of the senses and the flesh.”
Moktir, one of Marceline’s favorite adolescent boys, is responsible for revealing a hidden side of Michel’s personality. Michel observes the boy stealing a pair of Marceline’s sewing scissors and says nothing. Instead of moral indignation, he feels only amusement. Henceforth, Moktir becomes Michel’s favorite. Michel is well on his way to becoming the immoralist of the book’s title.
What does it mean to be an immoralist? Michel comes to believe that his only duty is to regain his health and that health is an affair of the will. Morality is reduced to a simple formula: “I must judge Good everything that was salutory for me; I must forget everything, repulse everything that did not cure me.” Such will be Michel’s doctrine till the end of his story, abetted by his growing fascination with boys and young men.
Gide might have allowed his surrogate self to come out of the closet entirely, but he did not. After the surprising turn of events in the second half of the novel—which I shall leave for the reader to discover—Michel admits only that he is probably drawn more to boys than to girls. While he has gotten into the habit of sleeping with an Arab girl, she claims that it is her little brother who is the real attraction. Michel concedes that “there may be some truth in what she is saying.” In 1902, when The Immoralist was fi
rst published, that was daring enough. More explicit revelations would come later.
Michel’s attraction to boys may have appeared less offensive to French readers because the boys were Arabs. During the colonial period, when both Tunisia and Algeria were under French rule, pederasty with Arab children did not incite the outrage it might have incited had the children been continental French, which says a great deal about French racist attitudes. Even today, the French don’t seem to make much of a fuss about male relations with boys when they transpire outside the country. For example, there was no public outcry when President Sarkozy named Frédéric Mitterand, the nephew of former president François Mitterrand, as minister of culture, even though he had written a memoir describing in graphic detail how he had paid for sex with boys in Thailand. Certainly in the United States, no public figure would have published such a memoir, wherever the activity took place. Sexual relations between an adult and an underage male are generally considered not only reprehensible but also criminal. The legal age of sexual consent in the United States is eighteen, as contrasted to sixteen in England, and fifteen in France—statistics that speak for themselves.
The Immoralist maintains a distinction between pleasure and love that is as old as French literature. Pleasure is what Michel experiences with the Arab boys, love what he feels for Marceline. Beneath the figure of Marceline (and the figure of Alissa in his novel La porte étroite, translated as Strait Is the Gate) is the figure of Madeleine, Gide’s saintly wife, whom he identified with his mother. The maternal wife remained in the permanent realm of pure love, whereas boys offered fleeting physical satisfaction.
How the French Invented Love: Nine Hundred Years of Passion and Romance Page 22