Twilight of the Belle Epoque

by Mary McAuliffe

  Ravel also prepared once again for the Prix de Rome. This time he was considered a serious contender, but the Conservatoire director, Théodore Dubois, was on the jury, and given Dubois’ disparagement of Ravel’s previous compositions, this did not bode well. Ravel ultimately ended up with third prize, and although he confessed to a friend that his orchestration had been hastily done, he added that “almost everyone here would have given me the first prize. (Massenet himself voted for me every time.)”6 Saint-Saëns was also on the jury and had been especially impressed with Ravel’s cantata: he observed to a friend that “the third prize winner, whose name is Ravel, appears to me to be destined for an important career.”7

  Saint-Saëns would soon change his mind. Eight months after the Prix de Rome competition, Ravel published his extraordinary, and extraordinarily demanding, work for the piano, Jeux d’eau (Fountains, or Water Games), which he dedicated to Fauré. Saint-Saëns took a look at the published music and was not pleased with Ravel’s achievement. He promptly declared that Jeux d’eau was an unlovely piece of music, completely cacophonous. Given Saint-Saëns’s importance in the music world, this was not a good omen for a young composer like Ravel.

  In May, Debussy received the news that every struggling composer longs for—the commitment from a major producer to present his work. In this case the word came from Albert Carré, director of the Opéra-Comique, and the work that Carré promised to produce was Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande.

  Throughout the long years of the 1890s, Debussy had frequently despaired about Pelléas’s future as he endlessly worked on the opera and performed it for friends. Now Carré’s approval meant that Pelléas would indeed receive a staging with a major Paris opera company.8

  André Messager was the influential person who had helped bring this miracle about. Messager, who had admired Debussy’s music ever since first hearing La Damoiselle élue in 1893, was the recently appointed chief conductor and music director of the Opéra-Comique. In 1898, soon after his appointment, he had encouraged Carré to visit Debussy and listen to extracts from Pelléas.

  Disappointingly, nothing came of Carré’s first visit, and Debussy had to wait three more years before Carré committed himself—a difficult time, during which Debussy felt that he was being kept “on a string indefinitely.”9 But in April 1901, Messager encouraged Carré to come again, and this time things clicked. Carré made his offer, and a thrilled Debussy wrote his good friend Pierre Louÿs (the italics are his): “I have a written guarantee from M. A. Carré that he will put on Pelléas et Mélisande next season.”10

  Pelléas et Mélisande, Debussy’s operatic adaptation of the popular 1893 Symbolist play by Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck, is a story of forbidden love and doomed lovers. Prince Golaud discovers the lovely but enigmatic Mélisande in the forest and immediately falls in love with and marries her. Then, as is often the case in these stories, she proceeds to fall in love with Golaud’s brother, Pelléas. Golaud suspects the lovers and in the end kills Pelléas and wounds Mélisande, who in turn dies.

  Unlike the wildly popular Wagnerian operas or the fashionable Italian and French operas of the day, Pelléas takes place in a dreamy and eerily tranquil setting, shadowed and draped in gauze, with towers by the sea and the sounds of trickling water. For Maeterlinck and other Symbolists, landscape was a reflection of the human state, mirroring the drama’s psychological development. Shrouded in mystery, these characters move in a world of hesitation and dread, “because they know that nothing is certain in the world or in their own hearts.”11

  Debussy, whose literary and artistic preferences leaned decisively toward Symbolism, was quite taken with Maeterlinck’s play, which showed the influence of a range of muses that Debussy admired, from the Pre-Raphaelites to Edgar Allan Poe. Debussy especially admired Maeterlinck’s belief that “art should explore mystery,” and several years earlier had described his ideal poet as “one who states only half of what is to be said, and allows me to graft my dream on to his.”12

  A number of other young Frenchmen entertained dreams of their own at this time, although many—including Louis Renault—held quite different ones from those of Claude Debussy. Renault was still an intrepid auto mechanic, but he was also rapidly evolving into a dashing figure in the daring new sport of auto racing. In the 1901 Paris–Berlin race, he came in first in the light-car class and seventh in overall classification—a significant achievement, proving that his small Renault autos could combine speed with toughness and dependability, especially in cornering and on hills. The orders were picking up, and the Renault brothers had to double the size of their Billancourt factory just to keep up with demand.

  Still, there was a distinct downside to these races that was beginning to offset the favorable publicity they bestowed on both the victors and their machines. The number of accidents was increasing, right along with the automobiles’ speed. Not only competitors but also eager onlookers (who typically crowded along the most dangerous curves) were falling victim to this new craze. In the 1901 Paris–Berlin race, a small boy was knocked down at a corner and later died, leading newspapers in both Germany and France to come out forcefully against racing. “At this moment,” fulminated La Petite Républicaine, “seventy-one dangerous madmen are driving over open country at speeds of express trains. These maniacs,” it continued, drive at fifty miles per hour and “knock down . . . anything in their path.”13

  Not surprisingly, the racers themselves were undeterred. “The enthusiasm of the crowd was terrific,” reported one elated driver. He reported that he and his fellow drivers were “absolutely smothered with flowers thrown by the villagers in both countries,” and champagne, food, and cigars greeted them at the various control points along the route.14

  It may have been a heady experience for those who successfully completed the race, but the specter of danger loomed over the coming year’s Paris–Vienna race, which would take the drivers across the difficult and dangerous Alpine passes of Switzerland and Bavaria.

  More placidly, back in Paris, a young man by the name of André Citroën had recently graduated from Paris’s prestigious Ecole Polytechnique and, in 1901, began his required year of military service in an artillery regiment of the French army. Although demonstrably intelligent, Citroën had yet to show special flair in any direction. He had never been consumed with a desire to tinker with engines or to race automobiles, like his future rival Louis Renault. It is not even completely clear exactly when he made his discovery of double helical gearwheels, whether immediately before or during his army career. In any case, all agree that this significant event took place in Poland, when Citroën visited Polish relatives. And all agree that it was a discovery that would change his life.

  André Citroën was born in 1878, the fifth and youngest child of a prosperous diamond merchant. Like Louis Renault, his senior by only one year, young Citroën was raised in Parisian middle-class comfort. Unlike Renault, though, Citroën was Jewish—a distinction that still figured large in turn-of-the-century Paris, where despite the cooling of national passions surrounding the Dreyfus Affair, anti-Semitism most certainly had not disappeared.

  Citroën’s father, Levie, the eighth in a family of fourteen, was originally from Amsterdam, where his forebears had been fruit merchants—thus giving the family its original patronym: Limoenman, or Lemon-man. Arriving in Paris in 1871, after the Franco-Prussian War, Levie changed his family name to Citroen—an unusual name, but one that was based on the French word for lemon, citron. The family prospered, and André grew up in a large and pleasant apartment on Rue de Châteaudun, in the heart of the ninth arrondissement. There life continued agreeably until André was six, when his father uncharacteristically speculated in a diamond-mining venture that turned out to be a swindle. Faced with financial ruin, Levie Citroen committed suicide.

  Told only that their father had left on a journey and would not return for a long time, the children did not di
scover the truth for many years. In the meantime, although the family had to move to a smaller apartment, André’s mother took over her husband’s business and managed it well. It was now, at the age of seven, that André began his formal schooling. It was also now, in his school admission records, that his name appeared for the first time as “Citroën”—the accent tréma indicating that the two vowels of the last syllable were to be pronounced separately.

  Confident, genial, and attractive, André Citroën eventually proceeded in his academic career to the Ecole Polytechnique, and from there into his required service in the army. It may have been following his mother’s untimely death in the spring of 1900, or certainly by the end of his army service in 1902, that he visited his mother’s relations in Poland. Here, in a foundry belonging to a distant relation, he spotted a set of gearwheels with a design unlike anything he had ever seen before. Instead of having straight, cross-cut teeth, these had an arrangement of V-shaped teeth set around the outer rim of both wheels that could be set to bring the teeth together at an angle. These helical gears were quieter, more efficient, and capable of handling far greater loads and of changing the direction of the power load—an enormous advantage over their traditional counterparts. But this small company had not yet found a way to manufacture these gears with sufficient precision.

  It was an exciting discovery, and Citroën was determined to make the most of it. He was not an inventor nor a designer, but he was about to become a pioneer in manufacturing.

  In 1901 young Georges Braque also served his required military service, after his parents had looked into ways to reduce his time of service to one year. Having discovered that this was possible if he qualified as an artist or artist-craftsman, they had sent him from their home in Le Havre to Paris (a lengthy trip that he managed by bicycle), where he apprenticed with a decorator.

  Born and raised in a reasonably well-to-do family of house-painters, Braque at the age of twelve decided that he wanted to paint something besides houses and had invested in a box of paints. He began attending night classes at Le Havre’s Ecole des Beaux-Arts, but he was bored by what he found there. Then, at the age of eighteen, he faced the prospect of military service. Paris, and apprenticeship to a former employee of his father, appeared to be the answer.

  Arriving in Paris at about the same time as Picasso, Braque proceeded in quite a different manner, learning to paint imitation marble, mosaics, and rosewood panels, as well as an array of other simulations, all requiring a great deal of skill and impeccable workmanship. Soon he won his artist-craftsman’s certificate and served his year of military service, where he was made a noncommissioned officer.

  By this time Braque had decided that he was going to be an artist—a real one, not a house-painter and decorator.

  Madame Zola was unhappy. Her husband, the esteemed author Emile Zola, had previously ended his many years of fidelity and taken a mistress, by whom he fathered two children. Madame Zola was childless, which made the insult even more unbearable—especially when her husband invited his mistress to join him during his exile in England, at the height of the Dreyfus Affair. Madame Zola, who was not issued a similar invitation, began what would become her regular jaunts to Italy, alone. It was there that she found relief from her depression as well as from her asthma.

  Zola, meanwhile, finished up the century by starting a new series of novels—having wrapped up his massive and magnificent twenty-volume Rougon-Macquart series and memorably pounded the opposition during the Dreyfus Affair. Churning out his customary thousand words a day, written each and every day following breakfast, he began a series of four novels that he envisioned as four new gospels—a secular epic in which the heroes (or Evangelists) he created would reinvent the world. Dropping his refusal to moralize, he now moralized to the skies. As Zola told his good friend Octave Mirbeau, his justification for this complete change was “the endowment of the new century of progress and universal peace with a faith in moral ideas.”15

  Alarmed by France’s declining birthrate, especially in comparison with Germany’s bumper crop of babies, Zola turned the first book in this series, Fecundity (1899), into a sermon on the necessity for unrestricted procreation. Having magnified the history of his own family life into universal truths, he now became an avid opponent of birth control and consequently, for the first time in his career, found himself allied with the Catholic Church.

  Zola published the second book in his series, Labor, in 1901, and then immediately began work on the third, Truth, in which he revisited (in minimal disguise) his own celebrated role in the Dreyfus Affair. He did not live to complete his last book, Justice.

  Throughout his long career, Zola had been a proud secularist, one who (with the exception of Fecundity, late in his career) was regularly at odds with the Church. By the turn of the century, he was far from alone. French opinion—especially in Paris—strongly supported secularism and anticlericalism, whose roots stretched back to the Revolution.

  Early in 1900, Prime Minister Waldeck-Rousseau stage-managed the dissolution of the Assumptionist order, whose newspaper, La Croix, had widely spread rabble-rousing anti-Semitic polemics during the Dreyfus Affair. A year later Waldeck-Rousseau introduced legislation aimed at laicizing French education by preventing unauthorized French monastic orders from teaching. The legislation that passed was even more hostile to the religious orders than the bill Waldeck-Rousseau had introduced; subsequently, 120 of these religious communities were closed, and Parliament would staunchly reject requests for further authorization. These measures received widespread popular support, laying the groundwork for the separation of Church and state to come.

  “What does it come down to, actually, the life of the Church in France?” mused Abbé Arthur Mugnier, in an August 30, 1901, entry to his journal.16 Mugnier, who was vicar of the fashionable church of Sainte-Clotilde in the heart of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, had achieved a degree of fame by having most surprisingly converted Joris-Karl Huysmans, author of A rebours (Against Nature), which in 1884 created a scandal by its daring depiction of homosexuality. Mugnier was a charming cleric—one with a gentle manner but a sharp wit, who harmonized well with the sophisticated and literate members of his parish. They in turn found him a sympathetic confessor and a welcome guest at their dinner parties, which (to their delight) he attended in his shabby garb, his hair always fluttering in a tuft that he took no pains to tame. An open-minded modernist who admitted to a yearning for the Ancien Régime, and an advocate of French control of the French Catholic Church who nonetheless refrained from fervent nationalism, Mugnier admittedly was an unusual mixture. “How to reconcile the disparate forces of my soul?” he had written only a few days earlier.17

  Yet instead of self-analysis, Mugnier’s August 30 entry revealed his deep concern about the French Church and what its religious leaders were—and were not—doing. Their actions, he wrote, amounted to little more than “a series of ineffectual protests against republican annoyances.” Beyond that, “these poor bishops” occupy themselves in pilgrimages to Lourdes, to Paray-le-Monial, or to Sacré-Coeur in Paris, in a sad imitation of the Middle Ages. This “abuse of prayer,” he wrote, would only end in a loss of all prestige and in self-destruction. “I would like to know,” he concluded, “if these perpetual comings and goings produce, in their souls, any more justice, sincerity, goodness, or devotion.”18

  Separation of Church and state had been a major battle cry of the left-of-center radical republicans since the beginning of the Third Republic, and Georges Clemenceau had vociferously pushed for this cause since the early days of his career, when he was mayor of Montmartre.19 During the years that followed, Clemenceau rose in politics to become an eloquent and feared leader in the Chamber of Deputies, where he soon became known as “the Tiger,” on account of his ferocity on behalf of the poor and the downtrodden. During the 1890s Clemenceau encountered a tidal wave of conservative forces that booted him out of politics. He then return
ed to journalism, most memorably during the Dreyfus Affair, when he hammered out a series of remarkable articles on behalf of Dreyfus and helped Zola publish his own earth-shaking pro-Dreyfus denunciation, “J’accuse” (Clemenceau’s title) in Clemenceau’s newspaper, L’Aurore.

  By 1901 Clemenceau had left L’Aurore for Le Bloc, a weekly newspaper of his own that had a small circulation but large influence among political circles. Here he continued to campaign against the combined forces of monarchism and the Church, which he held responsible for exploiting the nationalist and anti-Semitic fervor surrounding the Dreyfus Affair, with the aim of overthrowing the Republic. Soon his political career would rise from the ashes, and his voice would become one of the most prominent in the Third Republic.

  French politicians during the first three decades of the Third Republic (1871–1900) had not organized into parties but instead joined in loose coalitions of interests ranging from monarchists and arch-conservative Catholics on the far right to radical republicans on the left, with a variety of moderates in between. Yet both radicals and moderates during these years were republicans, and they shared their staunch belief in and support of the Third Republic.

  Clemenceau was a major figure among the radical republicans throughout these years, during which the threat from the monarchist right subsided and the moderates rose in power. Extremists at times threatened, such as the 1880s Boulanger crisis, during which a popular general threatened to overthrow the Republic, and the 1890s Dreyfus Affair, during which the riptides of nationalism, anti-Semitism, right-wing Catholicism, and fervent support of the army almost tore the nation apart. Nevertheless, throughout these difficult years, political moderates managed to maintain their sometimes precarious hold. It was in the interest of moderation and in defense of the tranquility of the Republic that Prime Minister Waldeck-Rousseau in 1899 had so firmly acted to bring the Dreyfus Affair to a peaceful if not satisfactory conclusion.20