Abstract
One of the best-established images of fin-de-siècle France depicts a decadent, or degenerate, culture. Eugen Weber devoted the first chapter of France, Fin de Siècle to decadence, giving us such vivid sketches as the contemporary claim that ‘The degeneration of the race pours out of our every pore … We are the mushrooms of ancient dunghills.’2 Robert Nye wove the theme of degeneration through his path-breaking discussion of male sexuality, introducing us to the psychiatrists who invented the concept of degeneration and in whose work it reached its apotheosis, then teaching us how degeneration illuminates our understanding of population, reproduction, homosexuality, and masculine identity.3 Roger Shattuck famously showcased the decadents in the cultural avant-garde in a world of ‘pompous display, frivolity, hypocrisy, cultivated taste, and relaxed morals.’4 Two generations of contemporary French medical scholars lamented the many manifestations of degeneration—from tuberculosis and syphilis to hysteria and neurasthenia.5 David Barnes has skillfully connected medical history and social history to show ‘the specter of the cabaret… in turn-of-the-century fears of French decline and degeneration.’6 The greatest attention to the social issues of decadent France has come from a generation of feminist scholars who have produced a large body of literature exposing the price women paid for, and the feminist responses to, an age of regulated prostitution, forbidden paternity suits, and unwanted pregnancy.7
An earlier version of this chapter was presented as a paper at the Rudé Conference in Wellington, New Zealand. The author wishes to acknowledge the helpful commentary and discussion he received there.
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Notes
André Derain, in an undated personal letter to Vlaminck, as quoted by Eugen Weber in France, Fin de Siècle ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986 ), p. 13.
Robert A. Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 74–5. See especially chapters four and five for degeneration.
Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: the Arts in France,1885–1918 ( Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1961 ), p. 3.
See, for example, the psychiatrists discussed by Nye, such as Bénédict-Augustin Morel and Valentin Magnan. For the late nineteenth-century physicians who studied syphilis in the belle époque, starting with Alfred Fournier, a good starting point is Claude Quétel’s History of Syphilis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), especially chapter six, ‘The Great Turning Point (around 1900).’
David S. Barnes, The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-Century France ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995 ), pp. 167–8.
The numerous works of Rachel Fuchs, such as Poor and Pregnant in Paris: Strategies for Survival in the Nineteenth Century (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992) and Abandoned Children: Foundlings and Child Welfare in Nineteenth-Century France (Albany: State University Press of New York, 1984), have pioneered this perspective on the belle époque.
Another excellent illustration of the place of women in this debate is Elinor Accampo’s evocatively sub-titled Blessed Motherhood, Bitter Fruit: Nelly Roussel and the Politics of Female Pain in the Third Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).
Accampo and Fuchs have joined with Mary Lynn Stewart to produce a collective volume which introduces many of the socialdebates of the era, Gender and the Politics of Social Reform in France,1870–1914 ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995 ).
Anne Cova, Maternité et droits des femmes en France: XIXe–XXe siècles (Paris: Anthropos, 1997), pp. 35–43.
See also the pioneering essay by Karen Offen, ‘Depopulation, Nationalism, and Feminism in Fin-de-Siècle France,’ American Historical Review, 89 (1984): 648–76.
The last French census to identify respondents by religion, the census of 1872, reported a total of 600,000 Protestants (1.66 percent of the population), chiefly in the Église Réformée (540,000) and the Lutheran Church (60,000). These numbers are repeated in the Annuaire Statistique during the 1870s. The Église Réformée reported 550,000 members to the Sous-directeur des cultes non-catholiques in 1883. See for the Archives nationales, F19 10 031–1 for this report, or the statistical annex based on it in André Encrevé’s remarkable thèse d’état, Protestants français aux milieu du XIXe siècle (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1986), pp. 1081–97. Pastor Gambier, who edited the Agenda Protestant, a reference handbook for the Church, was still using almost the same numbers in the late 1890s. Agenda Protestant: Recueil de renseignements relatifs aux églises et aux oeuvres du protestantisme de langue française (Paris: Fischbacher, 1898), p. 154, reports 560,000 in the Reformed Church, 80,000 Lutherans, and 10,000 in independent churches.
The classic statement of this thesis is André Siegfried’s Tableau politique de la France de l’ouest sous la Troisième République (Paris: Armand Colin, 1964). It has been restated with such frequency that it requires few reminders. For the period considered here (1860–1910), Protestants were prominent among the critics of the Second Empire (as were Edmond de Pressensé, Eugène Pelletan, Jean-Jacques Clamageran, Auguste Scheurer-Kestner, and Ferdinand Buisson) and leading champions of republicanism and opponents of monarchical restoration (Pressensé, Charles Freycinet, Léon Say, and William Waddington).
For other overviews of the political role of French Protestants, see Stuart R. Schram, Protestantism and Politics in France (Alençon: Corbière et Jugain, 1954);
Patrick Cabanel, Les Protestants et la République, de 1870 à nos jours (Paris: Editions complexe, 2000);
and Philip Nord, The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), esp. chapter five, ‘Liberal Protestantism.’
André Encrevé and Michel Richard (eds), Les Protestants dans les débuts de la Troisième République,1871–1875 ( Paris: Société de l’histoire du protestantisme français, 1979 ), p. 358.
For the Ligue des droits de l’homme, see William D. Irvine, Between Justice and Politics: the Ligue des droits de l’homme (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007) and Wendy E. Perry, ‘Remembering Dreyfus: the Ligue des droits de l’homme and the Making of the Modern French Human Rights Movement’ (PhD dissertation: University of North Carolina, 1998), UMI Number 9914888. Part Two (volume two) of Perry’s dissertation is an especially valuable dictionary of the membership of the league.
Steven C. Hause, with Anne R. Kenney, Women’s Suffrage and Social Politics in the French Third Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984 ), esp. pp. 255–9;
see also the same argument in Laurence Klejman and Florence Rochefort, L’Egalité en marche: le féminisme sous la Troisième République ( Paris: Presses de la foundation nationale des sciences politiques, 1989 ).
See Pim Den Boer, History as a Profession: the Study of History in France, 1818–1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), esp. pp. 33off on ‘The Historians’ Journal: the Revue historique’; and Benjamin Harrison, ‘Gabriel Monod and the Professionalization of History in France, 1844–1912’ (PhD dissertation: University of Wisconsin, 1972), UMI Number 72–31, 679.
Auguste de Morsier, Appel aux chrétiens, suivi des déclarations de E. Gounelle et W. Monod ( Geneva: Kündig, 1909 ), p. 29.
Pierre Poujol and Stuart Schram, ‘Le Protestantisme rural: traditions, structures, et tendances politiques,’ Christianisme social, 65 (1957): 549–72; quotation, p. 551.
See Alice Wemyss, Histoire du Réveil, 1790–1849 (Paris and Lausanne: Les Bergers, 1977). Wemyss uses the starting date of 1790 (instead of 1814 given above) to provide a background chapter entitled ‘Préparation, 1790–1812’, then she too begins the discussion of the Réveil with the end of the Napoleonic wars.
Both songs are from the temperance society known as the Blue Cross which proclaimed a non-sectarian identity, but whose founders and leaders were Protestant. Léon Say and Dr Gustave Monod were the first presidents. Anonymous, Chants de la Croix-bleue (8th edition: Lausanne, 1892), pp. 211 and 135.
For the discomfort of French Protestants with subjects of human sexuality, see Isabel Lisberg-Haag, ‘Les Protestants et la question sexuelle au tournant des XIXe et XXe siècles,’ in Isabelle von Bueltzingsloewen and Denis Pelletier (eds), La Charité en pratique: Chrétiens français etallemands sur le terrain social (Strasbourg: Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 1999);
for a good illustration of it, see the preaching of Pastor Vinet (de Pressensé’s master) against masturbation, in Jean Stengers and Anne Van Neck, Histoire d’une grande peur, la masturbation (Brussels: Université de Bruxelles, 1984), pp. 74ff. The leadership of the Conseil national des femmes françaises was predominantly Protestant during its early history, and the CNFF strongly opposed the neo-Malthusian feminism of women such as Nelly Roussel and Madeleine Pelletier. One of the first women physicians in France, Dr Blanche Edwards-Pilliet, was a member of this Protestant leadership and the person who delivered the CNFF lectures against birth control.
See the discussion of this in Jennifer Waelti-Walters and Steven C. Hause (eds), Feminisms of the Belle Époque: a Historical and Literary Anthology ( Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994 ), p. 242.
Although these women were all deeply involved in Protestant philanthropic and social activism, they were not all practicing Protestants. Avril de Sainte-Croix has been identified as a Protestant in several works, including by Michelle Perrot, ‘Preface,’ in Laurence Klejman and Florence Rochefort, L’Egalité en marche: Le Féminisme sous la Troisième République (Paris: des Femmes, 1989), p. 17: ‘les philanthropesprotestantes, affranchise du conservatisme catholique: Avril de Sainte-Croix, Sarah Monod, Isabelle Bogelot, Emilie de Morsier…;’
and by the present author: Steven C. Hause with Anne R. Kenney, Women’s Suffrage and Social Politics in the French Third Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 59: ‘Avril de Sainte-Croix… also came to feminism through Protestant philanthropy.’ The thorough research on Avril de Sainte-Croix by Karen Offen suggests that she may have had Huguenot ancestors, and that she held several anti-Catholic attitudes, but she was probably not a practicing Protestant.
See Offen’s‘France’s Foremost Feminist, or Who in the World is Madame Avril de Sainte-Croix?’ Archives du féminisme, 9 (2005): 46–54; and her ‘Intrepid Crusade: Ghénia Avril de Sainte-Croix takes on the Prostitution Issue,’ Proceedings of the Western Society for French History, 33 (2005): 352–74. Materials in the Fonds CNFF at the Centre des Archives du Féminisme (Angers) show that when the foundation of the Conseil national des femmes françaises provoked some concerned discussion about the predominance of Protestants in the organization, Avril de Sainte-Croix stated that her own role in the leadership should be seen as proof that the council would be impartial. ‘Procès-Verbal de la réunion du Comité d’initiative,’ 10 April 1901, Fonds CNFF 2AF3, Folder‘Réunions, 1900–1901.’
A good illustration of the close cooperation of women across religious lines would be the Catholic Lefevre sisters, better known by the married names of Caroline de Barrau de Muratel (1828–88) and Marie d’Abbadie d’Arrast (1835–1913), who worked in numerous groups which were predominantly Protestant, such as the Conference de Versailles. Both sisters chose to work closely with Pastor Fallot’s Ligue française pour le relèvement de la moralité publique. Fallot, in turn, called Barrau de Muratel ‘a laïc saint.’ Geneviève Poujol, Un Féminisme sous tutelle. Les protestantes françaises, 1810–1910 (Paris: Editions de Paris, 2003), p. 194. Abbadie d’Arrast’s obituary in La Femme stressed that she was especially concerned to collaborate in social campaigns ‘sans distinction de culte.’
For brief biographical sketches of Fallot, see: Jean Baubérot’s entry in Jean-Marie Mayeur and Yves-Marie Hilaire (eds), Dictionnaire du monde religieux dans la France contemporaine: Volume 5; André Encrevé (ed.), Les Protestants (Paris: Beauchesne, 1993); and the entry in Roman d’Amat et al. (eds), Dictionnaire de biographie française, 13, p. 542.
For a fuller study see Marc Boegner, La Vie et la pensée de Tommy Fallot, 2 vols (Paris, 1914–26).
Quoted by Elie Gounelle in ‘T. Fallot: un prophète au XIXe siècle,’ La Revue du Christianisme social, 17 (1904): 470.
Fallot’s speech ‘Protestantisme et socialisme’ which he published as an essay in La Revue chrétienne in December 1888. This phrase formed Article 2 of the statutes of the Association protestante pour l’étude pratique des questions sociales, adopted at Nîmes in 1888. The statutes were reprinted in Le Protestant (15 December 1888).
The best available history of the anti-pornography campaigns of the Third Republic is Annie Stora-Lamarre, L’Enfer de la IIIe République: censeurs et pornographes,1881–1914 (Paris: Imago, 1990). It has a strong international perspective (finding the center of a pornography industry in Brussels and the center of an antipornography movement in Geneva) and a detailed treatment of ‘l’enfer’ at the Bibliothèque nationale (the section of the library for forbidden books), but it has little detail on the Protestant anti-pornography campaign. See pp. 88–91 and 116–19. The best accounts of the Protestant campaign are contained in Tommy Fallot’s pamphlets.
For the reaction of the Protestant press, see: ‘La Loi sur la presse,’ Le Christianisme au XIXe siècle, 26 August 1881. For a survey of anti-pornography laws and the reaction to them, see Anonymous, Congrès international contre le pornographie. Paris, 21 et 22 mai 1908. Rapports, discussion, voeux, et decisions ( Paris: Mouillot, 1908 ).
Following Josephine Butler’s speaking tour of France, Italy, and Switzerland in 1874–75, efforts were begun to create an international association to support the abolitionist cause. The Union internationale des amies de la jeune fille was founded in Geneva in 1877 by twenty-two representatives from seven countries. Sarah Monod led the French delegation. The Paris chapter of the union was led by women chiefly drawn from Protestant philanthropy and social work: Mme Fisch (the wife of a pastor), Julie Siegfried (the daughter of a pastor), and Mme Admiral Puaux. For Josephine Butler’s role, see her Personal Reminiscences of a Great Crusade (London, 1896).
For the Protestant leadership of the union, see Anne-Marie Käppeli, Sublime croisade: ethique et politique du féminisme protestant,1875–1928 (Geneva: Zoé, 1990). For the role of French Protestant women, see the Protestant press, especially: ‘L’Union internationale des amies de la jeune fille,’Le Protestant, 9 November 1895. For the leadership role of Tommy Fallot, ‘L’Union internationale des amies de la jeune fille,’ Le Protestant, 16 April 1887. See also the summary in an unidentified obituary of Monod by J. Davaine, available in the Monod Papers (MS 1546 ), BSHPF.
For more on Edmond de Pressensé, see: Steven C. Hause, ‘A Pastoral Family in French Politics: Edmond, Elise, and Francis de Pressensé,’ Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History, 17 (1990): 383–91;
Jules Calas, Edmond de Pressensé: un libéral chrétien (Rouillac: Etendard évangélique, 1892);
Henri Cordey, Edmond de Pressensé et son temps, 1824–1891 (Lausanne: Bridel, 1916). For his role in the morality league, see Cordey, pp. 486–9.
The new legislation can be found in the Journal officiel for 22 January 1895 and 16 March 1898. Louis Comte was not so prolific a writer as Fallot, but his thinking can be seen in Faut-il que jeunesse se passe? (Saint-Antoine, Dordogne: Relèvement social, nd.) and in his regular contributions to La Revue du Christianisme social. Biographical sketches are available in Encrevé, Les Protestants, pp. 135–6 and in the Dictionnaire de biographie française, 9, pp. 426–7. The fullest study is by one of his collaborators, Elie Gounelle, La Vie et l’oeuvre de Louis Comte (Alençon, 1927).
The Papiers Elie Gounelle at the BSHPF (MS 1670) contain many materials on Comte, especially in Carton 8. For the congress, see: Anonymous, Congrès international contre le pornographie. Paris, 21 et 22 mai 1908. Rapports, discussion, voeux, et decisions (Paris: Mouillot, 1908), which includes a summary of antipornography legislation.
BSHPF, Rapports/T606, Fédération des Sociétés contre la pornographie, Liste des Sociétés contre la pornographie, Janvier 1910 ( Paris: Desfosses, 1910 ).
See ‘Encore une lettre de Zola,’ published in La Croix, 22 January 1898, although originally written in defense of Nana in 1881. Zola denounces ‘the Protestant spirit’ in vehement terms. ‘Under the often hypocritical pretext of morality, they have a hunger to discipline… [but] we are in France, not in Germany!’ For the anti-Protestant context of these remarks, see Steven C. Hause, ‘Anti-Protestant Rhetoric in the Early Third Republic,’ French Historical Studies, 16 (1989): 183–201.
For his suspension, see the files on Comte in the records of the Ministère des cultes at the Archives nationales. The most helpful files are in the series of complaints against pastors, F19 10,443. For a sketch of him, Idelette Chapelle, ‘A Propos du pasteur Louis Comte, 1857–1926,’ BSHPF, 133 (1987): 471–9. (For his suspension over Dreyfus, pp. 477–8.)
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Hause, S.C. (2010). Social Control in Late Nineteenth-Century France: Protestant Campaigns for Strict Public Morality. 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_7
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