Abstract
Among the many destabilizing consequences of modernity is, as Robert Nye has argued in Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France, that in the modern period ‘masculinity is always in the course of construction but always fixed, a telos that men experience as a necessary but permanently unattainable goal.’1 The paradoxes of modern French manhood and the multiple stresses to which masculinity is subject seemed particularly acute to contemporary observers at the fin de siècle.2 A century of political and social upheavals appeared to have unmoored all hierarchies, including gender hierarchies, from their seemingly inevitable and natural ground. Modern forms of capitalism threatened to render all relationships impersonal, abstract, and fungible. Productive labor, especially for the middle class, was increasingly sedentary and bureaucratic. As Steven Hause discusses in Chapter 6 in this volume, anxieties about depopulation, national degeneration, and decadence were widespread and gave rise to social protest movements urging moral renewal. The status of women was vigorously and publicly debated, with clear consequences for the status of men. Andrea Mansker demonstrates in Chapter 8 how fin-de-siècle feminists appropriated and transformed notions of honor in order to create new models of female citizenship, while Rachel Fuchs in Chapter 7 shows how women across social classes used the courts to attempt to restore their honor and that of their children.
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Notes
Robert Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1993 ), p. 13.
Landmark works on masculinity in France during this period are Annelise Maugue, L’identité masculine en crise au tournant du siècle,1870–1914 (Paris: Rivages, 1987);
Venita Datta, Birth of a National Icon: the Literary Avant-Garde and the Emergence of the Modern Intellectual (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999);
Christopher E. Forth, The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis ofFrench Manhood (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004);
and Judith Surkis, Sexing the Citizen: Morality and Masculinity in France,1870–1920 ( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006 ).
The scholarly literature on bohemia is voluminous. Signal works on French bohemianism include Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: the Arts in France,1885– 1918 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958);
César Graña, Bohemia versus Bourgeois (New York: Basic Books, 1964);
George Levitine, The Dawn of Bohemianism (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1978);
Luce Abélès, La Vie de bohème (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1986);
Jerrold Seigel, Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life,1830–1930 (New York: Viking, 1987);
Elizabeth Wilson, Bohemians: the Glamorous Outcasts (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2000 );
and Mary Gluck, Popular Bohemia: Modernism and Urban Culture in Nineteenth Century Paris ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005 ).
Maurice Donnay, Autour du Chat Noir ( Paris: Grasset, 1926 ), p. 15.
Forth, Dreyfus Affair, pp. 43–7, passim. See also David M. Hopkin, Soldier and Peasant in French Popular Culture,1766–1870 ( New York: Boydell Press, 2003 ).
‘Plus de bureaucratie! Plus de routine européene! Plus de sauvages blancs!’ Quoted in Armond Fields, George Auriol ( Layton, UT: Peregrine Smith Books, 1985 ), pp. 59–60.
See, for example, Léon Xanrof, Chansons à Rire (Paris: Flammarion, 1891);
Jacques Ferny, Chansons Immobiles (Paris: E. Fromont, 1896);
Henri Fursy, Chansons Rosses (Paris: P. Ollendorf, 1898 );
and Vincent Hyspa, Chansons d’humor ( Paris: Enoch, 1903 ).
See Jacques Lethève, La caricature et la presse sous la IIIe République (Paris: A. Colin, 1961), pp. 94–124;
and Philippe Roberts -Jones, La caricature du 2e Empire à la Belle Époque ( Paris: Club français du livre, 1963 ), pp. 5–9.
‘ Nous ne pensions pas à la guerre, ni au bolchevisme, nous ne pensions qu’á l’amour.’ Maurice Donnay, Autour de Chat Noir ( Paris: B. Grasset, 1926 ), p. 43.
‘…les bonnes moeurs de… cette bonne bourgeoisie où les mères les plus gourmées disent couramment: “Il faut qu’un jeune homme jette sa gourme.” Mais où la jeter, bonne mères qui ne vous doutez pas de l’importance du choix de la première femme pour la première idée que le jeune homme se fait de la femme?’ Maurice Donnay, Des Souvenirs ( Paris: A. Fayard et Cie., 1933 ), pp. 285–6.
Anne de Bercy and Armand Ziwès, A Montmartre… le soir: Cabarets et chansonniers d’hier (Paris: B. Grasset, 1951), p. 23. The respect accorded Krysinska is, of course, relative. She appeared in Le Chat noir only 17 times in the journal’s fourteen years of weekly publication; four other women were published, each no more than twice.
This belief in the opposition between ‘femininity’ and ‘creativity’ and the attendant ascription of inferiority to art produced by women is by no means limited to bohemian Montmartre, but is a pervasive feature of modern Western culture. See Linda Nochlin’s ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ in Art and Sexual Politics, ed. Elizabeth C. Baker and Thomas B. Hess (New York: Collier, 1973), pp. 1–39
and Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1988).
Anne Higonnet suggested that all nineteenth-century critical discussions of artists and art works were conducted in gendered terms in ‘Writing the Gender of the Image: Art Criticism in Late Nineteenth-Century France,’ Genders, 6 (Fall 1989): 60–73.
On the Union des Femmes Peintres et Sculpteurs, see Tamar Garb, Sisters of the Brush: Women’s Artistic Culture in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994);
and C. Yeldham, Women Artists in Nineteenth-Century France and England (New York: Garland, 1984),1: pp. 98–105.
I discuss the montmartrois attempt to resolve this‘contradiction’ through the trope of gender inversion at greater length in ‘Sans les femmes, qu’est-ce-qui nous resterait?: Gender and Transgression in Bohemian Montmartre,’ in Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (eds), Body Guards: the Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 195–222.
See Angus McLaren, Sexuality and Social Order: the Debate over the Fertility of Women and Workers in France,1770–1920 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1983), Chapter 10;
and Karen Offen, ‘Depopulation, Nationalism and Feminism in Fin-de-Siècle France,’ American Historical Review, 89 (3) (June 1984): 648–76.
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Wilson, M.L. (2010). ‘Capped with Hope, Clad in Youth, Shod in Courage’: Masculinity and Marginality in Fin-de-Siècle Paris. In: Forth, C.E., Accampo, E. (eds) Confronting Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle France. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230246843_10
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