by Luc Sante
The audience is divided into two categories that brush against one another but do not merge. Above are the people, in silk caps or American caps with straight bills, a few hatless women, children on laps, and clay pipes and chaws. Below is the petite bourgeoisie of shopkeepers, spotless families in their Sunday best, bowlers, and black frock coats so free of creases they might as well be made of wood, with collars that go up to the ears, that all but advertise their department store origins. The clay pipes have given way to briar pipes and meerschaums, if not quite to cigars.
But even if the mingling of classes extended only as far as “an agreement to listen to the same songs,” there were many who were alarmed by the sheer existence of contact, such as the reliably reactionary Goncourt brothers, here describing the Eldorado in 1865:
A big circular room with two rows of loges, gilded and marbled; blindingly bright chandeliers; a café on the premises black with men’s hats, the bonnets of women from the slums, military headgear, military caps on children, a few hats belonging to whores on the arms of shop clerks, a few pink ribbons on the women in the loges; the visible breath of the whole crowd, a cloud dusty with smoke.
In the rear, a theater with footlights; there I saw a comedian in a black suit. He sang incoherently, with clucking sounds, barnyard noises, epileptic gesticulations—a St. Vitus’ dance of idiocy. The crowd was delirious with enthusiasm. I don’t know, but I feel as though we are on the verge of revolution. The people have been corrupted by stupidity, their laughter so unhealthy that we need a great upheaval, a bloodletting, to clear the air and cleanse even comedy.
The most successful performers were indeed those who spoke most directly to the people, who interpolated argot into their lyrics, who gestured to the crowd and addressed them in asides and alternated lyrical swoops with bursts of patter. Thérésa (née Emma Valladon, 1837–1913) was such a star that she may have been the first in France to endorse commercial products. She got her start burlesquing popular songs, and made her mark with low comedy and the broadest sort of wordplay. She was also among the very first diseuses, which is to say that her singing was interleaved with spoken monologues; it was a style that was to dominate the fin de siècle. Paulus (Jean-Paulin Habard, 1845–1908) was her male counterpart, a performer in continual motion who employed the whole breadth of the stage and made endlessly inventive use of his hat and cane as props. He toured as far as Russia and the United States, but he also hitched his wagon to the cult of the protofascist conspirator General Boulanger, and never quite recovered from the collapse of that enterprise.
An unidentified singer in a boulevard café, 1920s
The Moulin de la Galette in Montmartre, circa 1910
Thérésa, caricatured by André Gill in La Lune, 1867
Paulus and Thérésa were hardly subversive, but many others tested the limits of the permissible. The pioneer was in fact the very first star attraction of the café-concert, Joseph Darcier (Joseph Lemaire), who as early as 1848 wrote and sang his “Song of Bread” (“You cannot quell the grumbling / Of the crowd when it says, ‘I’m hungry’”), which may not sound very radical today but nevertheless was rapidly shut down by the censors; he also wrote the music to Rosa Bordas’s epochal “La canaille.” There were also those singers, both during the Empire and after the Commune, who evaded censure by playing on words—for example, enjambing an end rhyme so that the first syllable of a word sounded like one thing whereas the completed word meant something quite different.* And make no mistake: there were many in Paris who considered censorship a necessity; for example, Maxime du Camp, writing in 1879:
After every revolution, censorship collapses, and the reigning power thinks it can win popularity by eliminating it. But you only need to see what happens then to understand that it is far from useless: the stage immediately becomes a platform on which smut, to say the least, is impudently displayed. When it comes to government, everything is linked: to permit God to be insulted is to jeopardize the gamekeeper … Theatrical works heard by the masses, who in the process are subjected to something like electric shocks, have a rapid and contagious influence far more profound than any book or newspaper, which can only ever act on the individual reader.
Indeed, in 1872 the minister of education had blamed the Commune at least in part on popular songs. And du Camp, to drive home his point, took the measure of the entertainment industry in Paris in 1879: 41 theaters, 180 cafés-concerts, 238 dance halls, and (he alleged) 25,000 drinking establishments. Anyway, the laws governing cafés-concerts were hardly limited to censoring song lyrics. A law of 1859, for instance, established a conventional pitch, which was enforced at all musical performances. And the theater lobby, wary of competition, saw to it that the café-concert was limited to a single stage set at all times, with no costumes, no props, no effects, and no renditions of opera or comic opera airs.
Sheet music for “Folichon-Polka” by Paulus, 1880s
“The censor.” Illustration by J. J. Grandville, from Oeuvres complètes de P.-J. de Béranger, 1835
Despite it all, songs led lives of their own, passing from mouth to ear behind the backs of the authorities. There was indeed smut; Gustave Habrekorn, who for a time owned the celebrated Divan Japonais in Montmartre, was known for his “sensual” songs, which included “Your Rump,” “I’ll Drink Your Saliva,” “I’ll Have You Whole,” and “Your Feet in My Mouth.” These were sung by Flavy d’Orange and illustrated onstage (by now we’re in the looser 1890s) by a chorus line of young women in body stockings. By then there was also a full repertory of anarchist ditties. There was the “Mad Cow Tango”—(long before the phrase denoted bovine spongiform encephalopathy, to eat one, hypothetically, indicated starvation): “There’s no bread at our house! / There’s some at the neighbor’s! / But it isn’t for us!” After the execution of the anarchist Ravachol, who set off two bombs that injured no one, people sang: “Let’s do the Ravachole / Hooray for the sound, hooray for the sound / Let’s do the Ravachole / Hooray for the sound of explosion.” There were many verses to the saga of Père la Purge (Father Enema), the “Pharmacist of Humanity,” and his daughter, Equality, who in their shop kept everything needed to “marinate” the oppressors. And Carco recalled:
“The other day at La Roquette / They were up early guillotining,” croons a singer in his most foppish manner, “When suddenly I notice a head…” This head reminds him of someone, some person whose name he can’t quite call to mind. He’s perturbed, gestures to the executioner to wait, to give him time to put a name to this not-unfamiliar face. But “Chop! The blade comes down.” And the chorus goes off with a “tralala.”
For some thirty years, beginning in the early 1880s, the undisputed king of popular song was Aristide Bruant (1851–1925). He began at the Chat Noir, and when its owner, Rodolphe Salis, moved it to the boulevards, he took over the Montmartre location and renamed it Le Mirliton. One night early on, when he found his audience consisted of just three people, he began to insult them individually. Word spread, and soon people were lining up to be insulted by Bruant. He had a particular genius for publicity. He insisted on being referred to as Le Chansonnier Populaire, as if he were the only one, and his chutzpah was such that the title actually stuck. The posters he commissioned from Toulouse-Lautrec cemented Bruant’s fame, and indeed they remain ubiquitous to this day in reproduction, so that many people who have never heard Bruant sing can instantly call to mind his wide-brimmed black hat, his red scarf, his enormous head, his flowing hair. He published an irregular newspaper named after his cabaret, and an argot dictionary in installments, several serial novels, a number of plays in collaboration, and five volumes of his song lyrics and monologues—many of these appeared under his own imprint. And he recorded the majority of his songs late enough in the development of gramophone technology (1909–10) that they have survived in reasonably vivid shape, every number introduced by him in the manner of the time, giving the title and his name: “‘À Batignolles,’ chanté par Aristide Bruant.”
Les bas-fonds de Paris, an installment of a serial novel by Aristide Bruant, 1902
He had a particular line in songs about the people’s neighborhoods, all of them simply titled by those names preceded by à: Batignolles, Bastille, La Villette, La Chapelle, La Glacière, Place Maubert, Goutte-d’Or, Saint-Ouen, Montparnasse, Montmartre, Montrouge, Grenelle, and of course Belleville-Ménilmontant (his home base) along with the prisons and the disciplinary corps: Saint-Lazare, La Roquette, Mazas, Biribi, Bats d’Af. Most of the songs are portraits, in some cases summing up entire lives in six or eight verses; in others, written from the point of view of the subject. In “À Saint-Lazare,” for instance, a prostitute sentenced to a cure for some sexually transmitted disease writes to her man, worrying about him since she can’t provide him with money: “To think of you like that, without a dime, makes me ache. / You’re likely to do something stupid, it eats me up. / You’re too proud to go picking up cigar butts, / The whole time that I’ll be spending at Saint-Lazare.” And just like that he makes you see the shape and nuance and dynamic of the relationship—the songs are short stories, the least of them vignettes, rendered in the (sadly untranslatable) everyday language of his subjects, who were also his ideal audience. His star power, his flamboyance, his roaring good health did not represent a paradox for his constituency; those were not just his due but also a kind of token of luck to be passed on.
The vast majority of Bruant’s heirs were women. In a woman’s voice, his songs were stripped of their irony, their tragic core fully exposed and bleeding; “À Saint-Lazare,” for example, was covered dozens of times by female singers. Among the first women to sing Bruant’s repertoire was Eugénie Buffet (1866–1934), who was also the very first to be called a chanteuse réaliste. She dressed in the short jacket, long skirt, and apron of the street prostitute, a pierreuse, and her powerful chest voice, with its reverberating vibrato, owed nothing to vocal convention but instead evoked the cries of market hawkers. Her “Sérénade du pavé” was an enormous hit in 1892, and it remains indelible today; you can hear Piaf sing it in Jean Renoir’s 1955 French Cancan. Buffet was so popular that police barriers were put up automatically to contain the crowds whenever she was to appear—and the cops sang along with the fans. And she took her role seriously, singing in the streets for the poor and for striking workers and, until the end of her career, appearing at every possible benefit. She was in fact a right-wing populist activist, whose first act upon hitting Paris in 1889 from her native Algeria was to shout “Vive Boulanger”—referring to the conspirator—at the passing carriage of the president of the Republic, which netted her a term in jail. She was later appointed an honorary sergeant in the Croix-de-Feu, the veterans’ organization that became a virulently rightist and anti-Semitic street-fighting unit during the Popular Front 1930s.
“Belleville-Ménilmontant,” by Aristide Bruant, illustrated by Théophile Steinlen, from Dans la rue, vol. 1, 1889
“À la Roquette,” by Aristide Bruant, illustrated by Théophile Steinlen, from Dans la rue, vol. 1, 1889
Her immediate heir, in turn, was Fréhel (1891–1951), born Marguerite Boulc’h in Paris to Breton parents, who first called herself Pervenche (Periwinkle) but later took the name of Cap Fréhel in Brittany. She began as a street singer, hawking sheet music, when she was still a child. Barely into her teens, she was onstage at the Pépinière, soon moving up to the tavern at the Olympia music hall, where she became a favorite of the grandes horizontales: Cléo de Mérode, Liane de Pougy, La Belle Otéro. Her recording career began, with a single and isolated two-sided date, in 1909. She was plus belle que belle, according to her most consistent boyfriend of those years, the equally young Maurice Chevalier; there were scores of other lovers, from millionaires to boxers, including Jack Johnson. She gave birth to a child who died in infancy, attempted suicide, and in those prewar years, when access to drugs was easy as well as legal, fell under the spell of cocaine and ether, in addition to alcohol. An invitation to sing in Russia in 1914 coincided with the start of the war; unable to make it back to France, she spent the duration in Bucharest and then Istanbul, where drugs became her life.
Eugénie Buffet and her accompanists performing in a courtyard, 1895
She didn’t get herself repatriated until 1925, and her reappearance was a shock to everyone who’d known her before—she’d grown enormously fat and was aged beyond her years. By her own estimation she looked like “a stallholder at Les Halles, puffy-faced and truculent.” But that did not stop her from resuming her singing career, this time around as “Madame Sans-Gêne” (Shameless), the incarnation of the streets, whose greeting to her audiences was “Shut your traps so I can open mine.” As ostentatiously free of illusions as she was of makeup and styling, she assembled a repertoire that merged Bruant’s style of social realism with the torch song. Her songwriters pitched lyrics aimed squarely at her image and her life, such as “J’ai l’cafard” (I’m depressed; Jean Éblinger, 1928): “I’ve taken tons of things, / Ether, morphine, cocaine, / Evil drugs / That lure women, / All the better to crush their brains, / Even as I know that every drop / Of that disgusting poison / Drags my body / To its death.” In her earthy, raucous voice, impeccably musical nevertheless, she sang about the Zone and its pleasures, about prostitution, about criminal lovers sent off to the penal colonies or guillotined at La Roquette, and about nostalgia—about the fortifications being leveled and the old houses of Montmartre razed in favor of bank branches. She who had been a rising star at the close of the Belle Époque and now staggered through life as if it were one long hangover was perfectly positioned to evoke the lost youth of the generation that achieved its fullness of maturity in the 1930s.
Her charisma and strength of personality, in addition to the map of her life in her face—her big eyes and full lips remaining as proof of lost beauty under the palimpsest—got her cast in movies, sixteen of them, mostly in the 1930s. She never had a starring role, but she was impossible to overlook. In Coeur de lilas (Anatole Litvak, 1932) and Pépé le Moko (Julien Duvivier, 1937), she played opposite Jean Gabin (the son of a café-concert singer and himself the most convincing male claimant to the réaliste mantle), with whom she sang raucously in the first and regretted lost chances in the second. But she never reformed. After her death, an anonymous woman wrote to the newspaper Ici Paris:
One afternoon in 1938, outside the Anvers Métro station, I stopped short at the feet of a big woman, probably drunk, crumpled at the base of a tree. A police wagon soon arrived to pick her up and take her away. But she faced down the cops. She yelled: “Leave me alone! I’m Fréhel, yes, Fréhel the singer.” … They hesitated for a minute, and I managed to whisper in her ear, “Sing! I be
g you, sing!” Then, hands on hips, suddenly sober as if by magic, she started in on “La java bleue” with as much force as in her prime. Soon a crowd had formed, agog at having witnessed an authentic miracle.
In her last years, she sold vegetables on the street. Her landlady said, “She scared me. She was like a bull.” In 1950 a group of young admirers that included Jacques Yonnet and Robert Giraud got her to perform one last time, in an old ballroom in the Contrescarpe, before an audience of clochards and ancient bohemians, but that was the end. A year later she was dead in a miserable hôtel de passe in Pigalle.
Fréhel, “Queen of the Apaches,” 1930
Fréhel and Jean Gabin in Anatole Litvak’s Coeur de lilas, 1932
The realist style, which flagged somewhat during the First World War and during the intoxicated années folles of the 1920s, returned in full force in the 1930s, during the worldwide financial crisis and, locally, a decade of strikes and factory occupations and enormous and often violent street demonstrations. The style was not political as such, its singers not especially engagées, the only major exception being Marianne Oswald (née Sarah Alice Bloch, 1901–1985), the daughter of Polish Jews resettled in Lorraine. Her voice was beyond unschooled; it was altogether indifferent—her mode was Sprechstimme (talk-singing), and she had both a great deal of soul and a perceptible analytic intelligence. She started out as the major French interpreter of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, later had songs written for her by Jean Cocteau, Jacques Prévert, Hanns Eisler. On her last record, in 1957, the liner notes were by Albert Camus.