With the outbreak of war, François Coty—who had been placed in the active army reserves following his youthful years of obligatory military service—now rejoined his 19th Infantry Regiment of Ajaccio (Corsica). Like the rest of the French army, he soon found himself in the trenches. Yet by year’s end he managed to extricate himself from this hellhole, on grounds of a worsening eye condition. He promptly returned to his headquarters in Suresnes, just outside of Paris, where he had left affairs in the capable hands of his mother-in-law, Virginie.
Since the war’s outbreak, France’s economy had quickly focused on wartime production, resulting in a scarcity of supplies for nonessentials such as perfume. Still, the prospects for purveyors of luxury goods remained relatively bright—at least for someone like Coty, who even in the midst of war saw opportunities for a “merchant of dreams.”
Despite the dearth of supplies, Coty managed to double his wartime business, largely by packaging high-quality cosmetics, especially his “air-spun” face powder. By late 1914, Coty was selling thirty thousand compacts of this face powder daily to Americans alone—a huge market, and an especially important one now that European markets were suffering. His magnificent Coty Building on Fifth Avenue, with its Lalique-embossed windows, became the anchor for an international empire—one that shrewdly evaded heavy American duties for imported luxury goods by shipping its products in “detached pieces.” This meant that from 1915 on, all Coty boxes, empty bottles, stoppers, and raw materials were shipped separately. A Coty specialist then manufactured Coty perfumes under license. The outcome was an enviable 60 percent profit margin for Coty, even during the height of war.
Coty was not the only Parisian-based businessman who profited during—and from—the war. André Citroën (newly married to the daughter of an Italian banker) entered the war as captain of the 2nd Heavy Artillery Regiment, stationed in the Argonne area on France’s eastern border. There, as both sides dug in along the western front, he witnessed the French army’s severe shortage of artillery and, even more critically, artillery shells. Not only were the French heavily outgunned, but (according to Citroën’s estimates) they were within a few weeks of exhausting their stocks of shells.
The French government had hastily converted factories such as Renault’s automobile firm and Citroën’s gear company to produce munitions, but with the huge mobilization and consequent shortage of workers, these small factories could not produce nearly enough. Early in 1915, Citroën proposed that, given government backing, in four months he would build and equip a new kind of munitions factory, one that would dramatically increase the number of shells produced for the French army.
The government was interested, and—having been granted a leave of absence from the army—Citroën got to work. Funded by a large government contract, he designed and rapidly constructed a massive factory complex on thirty acres of land along the Quai de Javel (now the Quai André-Citroën), at Paris’s southwest extremity. There he applied the scientific methods of production he had so admired at Henry Ford’s plant in Michigan. Using the latest American machines and methods, Citroën followed the path of Ford and Frederick Winslow Taylor in organizing a self-sufficient factory with assembly-line production methods. Within two months the plant was sufficiently finished to begin production, and the entire complex was completed by June. By August, production was soaring, and soon the plant would be producing fifteen thousand shells a day (a total of almost twenty-three million shells by the war’s end).
Although by now many men had been brought back from the front to work in munitions factories, there still was a shortage of manpower. Citroën consequently turned increasingly to women for his labor force, and by 1918, women constituted almost half of his twelve thousand workers. Unlike many of his peers, Citroën also provided significant worker benefits—a major factor in stabilizing production. He particularly grasped the importance of providing a support system for his women workers, covering pregnancy, birth, and paid leave while nursing, as well as providing an on-site nursery and kindergarten.
This, in addition to providing subsidized shops (a butcher, a baker, and a dairy), subsidized canteens, a medical and dental clinic, plus good ventilation and clean restrooms throughout, made Citroën’s factory complex a reasonably attractive place to work, despite the stress of wartime production demands. Factories such as Citroën’s typically went full tilt around the clock, with eleven-hour workdays (including one hour for a meal break) and no rest days or holidays except for Christmas. This was war, and although Citroën was unquestionably progressive and the wages he paid were attractively high, the work was demanding and relentless. It also was tedious. Each worker carried out her task again and again, for as many as five thousand times a day. Their individual tasks may not have been arduous, but the monotony of assembly-line production could quickly become mind-numbing.
Louis Renault had little in common with André Citroën. Renault was fundamentally a mechanic who had become a businessman, while Citroën—although a product of the Ecole Polytechnique—was a businessman with an understanding of mechanics. He also was an attractive man who knew how to use his charm and who thoroughly enjoyed the social whirl. Renault, who was intensely private, abhorred socializing and detested publicity stunts, at which Citroën would prove increasingly adept. Renault also took pride in refusing to borrow even a sou. Citroën, however, borrowed without qualms for his escalating projects, both private and commercial.
Most critically, though, Renault differed from Citroën in his relation to his workers: whereas Citroën had readily introduced widespread social services for his workforce and encouraged group discussions between workers and their employer, Renault staunchly resisted such an approach. “The management of a firm,” he commented, “should have nothing to do with social organizations.”11 Not surprisingly, by this time Renault was finding it difficult to maintain the convivial relations he had enjoyed with his workers during his enterprise’s early days. Regarded as strict, albeit fair, he balked at discussing workers’ grievances and maintained a stern and completely arbitrary order. As one man noted, after leaving Renault’s firm for Citroën’s: “I found I had left an Empire for a Republic.”12
Both men had made their fortunes before the war even began: after all, the six hundred taxis that had raced reinforcement troops to the front during the Battle of the Marne had been Renaults, and Citroën had become wealthy with his management of the Mors auto company as well as with his original gear factory. At the war’s outset, Renault had been supplying the French army with airplane engines for several years. He continued to do this, but by the early weeks of the war, the war ministry asked him to dedicate part of his automobile factory to the production of artillery shells. Other automobile makers were told to follow suit, and soon they formed a syndicate. It was now that Renault found himself working with André Citroën.
Renault later claimed that he paid little attention to Citroën at the time, except to note that Citroën had obtained a substantial government contract and that he produced his shells in large numbers using the Taylor method. Whether or not this was all he noted at the time, Renault certainly would have the opportunity to observe Citroën with considerably more care by the war’s end.
Early in the year, the French Red Cross asked Edith Wharton to report on the needs of military hospitals near the front, and for several months she visited the front lines, her car “laden to the roof with bundles of hospital supplies.” Given permission to visit “the rear of the whole fighting line, all the way from Dunkerque to Belfort,” and even visiting some frontline trenches, she observed conditions, delivered medical supplies, and made it her business to find out what the troops needed.13 At Châlons, where there were nine hundred cases of typhoid, she reported that “everything was lacking,” and after emptying her car of supplies, she promised to return the next week with more. From there, she headed for Verdun, where “they said it was impossible—but the Captain had read one of my boo
ks, so he told the Colonel it was all right.” The colonel replied, “Very well, but make it fast, for there is big fighting going on nearby.” After several close encounters, she concluded that she intended to return in several days “with lots of things, now that I know what is needed.” On subsequent journeys, which took her even closer to the fighting, she reported feeling “in the very gates of Hell.”14
While trench warfare continued to chew up lives at an appalling rate, significantly worsened by the Germans’ introduction of poison gas in April 1915, the fledgling battle in the air was beginning to open up a new dimension in warfare. At first limited to reconnaissance duties, airplanes soon took on a fighting mission with the discovery of a way to fire a machine gun through an airplane propeller—without, of course, shattering the wooden propeller.
During the war’s early days, pilots and observers had armed themselves with rifles and pistols, and they had additionally made use of whatever was at hand, including bricks, darts, grenades, and even grappling hooks. Yet given the odds of hitting a moving target with any of these objects, or even with a rifle or pistol, the most practical approach remained the machine gun. By the end of 1914, machine guns were installed on the noses of French pusher aircraft, such as the Voisin III, where the propeller was safely in the rear. One daring pilot even mounted a machine gun on the top wing of his aircraft (this cool-headed fellow managed to clamber back into the cockpit and right his plane after the gun’s weight flipped his airplane upside down).
In March 1915, Roland Garros, who had made a name for himself by flying across the Mediterranean and subsequently escaping from Berlin, got to work on the problem with Raymond Saulnier, and ended by attaching wedge-shaped metal deflectors on the propeller blades. Although this did not entirely eradicate the problem (deflected bullets could damage the plane or the pilot), Garros returned to the front in late March 1915 with a machine gun attached to his monoplane. During the next three weeks he proved a terror in the skies to opposing Germans, downing three German planes and achieving legendary status.
Then on April 18, German ground fire forced Garros down behind enemy lines. The Germans rushed his propeller to Anthony Fokker’s factory, where the Dutch aircraft designer looked it over and improved on it, adding synchronization to the machine gun to prevent bullets from hitting the propeller blades.15 The introduction of Fokker’s Eindecker monoplane in July 1915 changed air combat, as German pilots began to shoot down Allied planes in what quickly became known as the “Fokker Scourge.” By late in the year, the Germans had achieved air superiority, and the first German ace pilots, most notably the “Red Baron” (Manfred von Richthofen), now took to the skies.
Maurice Ravel wanted to fly. The romance of flight had captured his imagination, and although he harbored no hopes of becoming a pilot, it had become his dearest wish to serve his country by becoming a bombardier. In the spring of 1915, he managed to enlist in the 13th Artillery Regiment, and he promptly requested a bombardier appointment. Much to his disappointment, it was not granted. When, many months later, he received his assignment, it was as a truck driver—a far cry from what he had dreamed of. Still, Ravel was extremely proud of his new duties, signing his correspondence to friends, “Conducteur [Driver] Ravel,” and naming his truck Adélaïde.16
In the meantime, a surreal calm had fallen over Paris. The French government returned from Bordeaux late in 1914, and a small portion of the city’s social and artistic life correspondingly revived, but with marked restraint. The city was under blackout by night, as a precaution against air raids, and everyone kept one eye on the war—or at least on what they could learn of it from rumors, gossip, and heavily censured news reports.
Gertrude Stein and Alice returned from England in October 1914, where they tried to pick up where they had left off. Gertrude later claimed that she enjoyed wandering around the half-empty city, mostly because it was “wonderfully nice” simply to be in Paris.17 And then one night in March 1915, Gertrude awakened Alice and whispered for her to come downstairs. Alarmed, Alice wanted to know what was happening, but all Gertrude could tell her was that she had been working in her studio (she usually wrote at night) and had heard an alarm. When Alice started to turn on a light, Gertrude stopped her. After all, Paris’s military governor had issued strict orders requiring blackouts at night. “Give me your hand,” she told Alice, “and I will get you down and you can go to sleep down stairs on the couch.” Petrified, Alice followed, and just as she was settling down, they heard “a loud boom, then several more.” After a bit, horns sounded, “and then we knew it was all over” and went to bed.18
Not long afterward, Gertrude and Alice experienced another bombing alarm, this time while Picasso and Eva were dining with them. By now the two women had learned that their small atelier offered no more protection than the little building where their bedroom was located, and so they all joined the concierge in her room, where they had six stout stories above them. It seemed a reasonable precaution, but soon they all got bored and went back to the atelier, where they lit a candle under the table so that it would not make much light. Eva and Alice tried to sleep, while Gertrude and Picasso talked until two in the morning, when the all clear sounded and the guests went home.
“It was not a very cheerful winter,” Gertrude Stein concluded, and by spring she and Alice were ready to go away and “forget the war a little.”19 They left for Majorca, which pleased them so much that they remained there through the following winter. To raise funds for the journey, Gertrude sold her only remaining Matisse—the glorious Woman in a Hat—to her brother Michael for four thousand dollars.
Along with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Matisse returned that October to Paris, where he found his house occupied by French soldiers, along with signs of German shelling all around his Left Bank studio on the Quai St-Michel. He had left his family in the south of France, along with Juan Gris, who as a Spanish national had not been mobilized but whose income had vanished with the war. Gris’s art dealer, the German Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, had departed for Switzerland, and without the small monthly income that Kahnweiler provided, Gris was destitute. Matisse offered to find sponsors in Paris and persuaded Gertrude Stein (who in the past had bought several Gris paintings) to make a small monthly allowance to Gris. Matisse later learned that she went back on her agreement—a possible misunderstanding on his part, but a disappointment that added one more ice cube to the already-chilling relations between Matisse and Gertrude Stein.
October also brought Marcel Proust back to Paris, where he received news of his brother’s heroism: Robert had managed to keep his field hospital in full operation while under enemy fire. He “goes out of his way to seek danger,” Proust wrote a friend, and “is now in the Argonne, and gives me great concern.”20
Proust returned to his writing, but now without a publisher; his publisher, along with many others, had ceased publication for the war’s duration. It would be several more years before the second volume of Proust’s novel (titled A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, or In the Shadow of Young Girls in Bloom) would appear,21 and by then Proust had taken the opportunity to move to a more prestigious publisher.
He also had taken the opportunity to rethink his great work and greatly enlarge its central part, adding yet a fourth volume (Sodom and Gomorrah). There, he expanded his characters of Albertine and the Baron de Charlus (the former based in part on his maddening affair with Agostinelli, and the latter modeled largely on Count Robert de Montesquiou), and directly addressed the themes of male and female homosexuality. Virtually placing his vast cast of characters under a microscope, Proust carefully observed the social milieu into which he had so ardently worked to gain admission. “Listen, Céleste,” he told his housekeeper on one occasion, as he read aloud a letter he had received from Montesquiou: “Listen for the hatred he breathes out between each word. He is terrific!” And then he laughed “as hard as he could.”22 Sweetly relentless in his own manipulation of fr
iends and family, Proust’s charm and invalidism now proved a convincing cover for his even more relentless—and lengthy—analysis of the connection between sex, status, and power among those he knew best.
Among Proust’s acquaintances was young Jean Cocteau, whom he incorporated into Search as Octave, a young dandy holidaying at the seaside resort of Balbec (Cabourg, by another name). Proust’s Narrator later discovers—much to his surprise—that this young idler is in fact a playwright of some significance and renown; indeed, Octave eventually becomes a star of Madame Verdurin’s salon.
Of course, by the time Proust worked Octave’s character development into the later volumes of Search (in The Fugitive and Time Regained), Cocteau’s talents had become more evident, and his role in the avant-garde ballet Parade may well have provided impetus for Octave’s fictional development. In addition, Cocteau’s association with two of Proust’s close friends, Lucien Daudet and Reynaldo Hahn, made friendship inevitable, at least on a certain level.23 Yet Proust continued to be put off by Cocteau’s theatrics and “showing off,”24 and perhaps the fictional Octave’s rise in esteem was tied, in Proustian fashion, to a joke: after all, Madame Verdurin’s salon, in which Octave shone, was embarrassingly shallow.
Nonetheless, the war had a sobering influence on Cocteau, who at the fighting’s outset embarked on a series of volunteer stints with ambulance units, from the Red Cross to Misia Edwards’s private endeavor. These trips to the front brought the young man into direct contact with the horrors of war. The shelled cathedral of Reims, he wrote, “was a mountain of old lace,” and the city around it a virtual desert of ruins, occupied primarily by the wounded. There was little food to be had in wartime Reims, and even less in the way of medical aid. He witnessed the deaths (by shelling) of two medical assistants just as they were about to amputate—without chloroform—the gangrenous leg of a wounded artilleryman. He saw 150 wounded men being cared for by nuns who had only “a cup of rancid milk apiece and a half a salami for all.” He observed a priest going from pallet to pallet to administer the sacraments, sometimes having to “pry mouths open with a knife blade in order to insert the host.”25
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