Hôtel de Païva Champs-Élysées (Paris)
Avenue Frochot is a private cul-de-sac, closed by a wrought iron gate, near Place Pigalle. Developed in the 1830s, its enticing history is part of the modernist story. Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo lived here at one time; Toulouse-Lautrec had a studio at no. 15 with a fine example of Art Deco stained glass; Théodore Chassériau, residing at no. 26, was a neighbour to Gustave Moreau. Later film director Jean Renoir and guitarist Django Reinhardt settled in the avenue. Composer Victor Masse died at number no. 1 (supposed to be a haunted house because of various unexplained deaths). In 1909 Picasso stayed with his partner Fernande Olivier (real name: Amélie Lang) in a furnished place on the Boulevard de Clichy with windows overlooking the gardens of the avenue. There he painted L’avenue Frochot, vu de l’atelier de Picasso. Nearby Rue Frochot is less exclusive, but just as lively. It was here in 1886, at no. 6, that young Toulouse Lautrec came to see bassoonist Désiré Hippolyte Dihau, owner of L’orchestre de l’Opéra, a painting created some fifteen year previously by Edgar Degas. Rue Frochot was also the location of one of the most famous salons in Paris.
Hotel de Rambouillet, Francois Hippolyte Debon (Wikipedia)
The salon (‘salone’) was an Italian creation of the sixteenth century. It flourished in Paris throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and served as a space for socio-political and cultural debate. And there was plenty to discuss between 1770 through to 1830, years in which France experienced a plethora of change. The arrival and departure of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the Restoration, each left their marks on the Parisian salon. The presence of a fashionable patroness gave added charm to the concept. The first renowned salon gathered at Hôtel de Rambouillet, close to the Louvre, where from 1607 until her death Rome-born Catherine de Vivonne, Marquise de Rambouillet, entertained her guests. Visitors included Pierre Corneille, François de Malherbe, Jean de La Fontaine, Mme de Sévigné, Paul Scarron, and many other prominent figures. These meetings established the salon’s rules of etiquette which resembled earlier Italian codes of chivalry.
Decoration from the Hotel de Païva
Salons persisted into the twentieth century, not just in Paris but in most European capitals (Berlin, Vienna, and elsewhere). They were woven into the fabric of cultural life, but the role of hostess was gradually taken over by ladies of a different repute. By the late nineteenth century certain courtesans (‘grandes horizontales’) reached an elevated level of social acceptance and began acting as ‘salonnières’. Esther Lachmann, later Mme Villoing, later Mme la Marquise de Païva, later Countess Henckel von Donnersmarck, was born in a Moscow ghetto where her Polish father worked as a weaver. When sharing an apartment in Paris with the celebrated pianist Henri Herz, she invited guests to attend her salon - regulars included Richard Wagner, Hans von Bülow, Théophile Gautier, and Émile de Giradin. At a Baden spa she met Portuguese Marquis Albino Francesco de Païva-Araujo. She married him on 5 June 1851, acquiring a title and her nickname La Païva. She left him the next day. Her final conquest was Prussian Count Guido Henckel von Donnersmarck (who gave her the two famous Donnersmarck diamonds). With his money, she erected the elegant Hôtel de Païva at the Champs-Élysées. Her lush parties became symbolic for the decadent ambience of the Second Empire. Adolphe Monticelli’s painting Une soireé chez La Païva gives an indication of the sumptuous surroundings in which these gatherings took place.
Apollonie Sabatier by Auguste Clésinger
During the 1850s Apollonie Sabatier hosted a salon at no. 4 Rue Frochot, a spacious apartment built in 1838. Nicknamed ‘La Présidente’ by Edmond de Goncourt, she entertained the artistic elite, including such figures as Gérard de Nerval, Gustave Flaubert, Maxime Du Camp, Alfred de Musset, Hector Berlioz, Victor Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, Jules de Barbey d’Aurevilly, and Édouard Manet. Between 1852 and 1854 Charles Baudelaire addressed a number of poems to Apollonie, celebrating her as Madonna and Muse. Flaubert and Gautier dedicated articles to her; Vincent Vidal painted her portrait; and Auguste Clésinger sculpted her figure in marble as Femme piquée par un serpent (1847) which created a scandal at the Salon. Belgian industrialist Alfred Mosselman paid her bills (which caused his bankruptcy and forced him to auction his notable art collection in two separate sales in December 1861 and March 1863: Lugt 26446 & 27164). Gustave Courbet portrayed the pair in L’atelier du peintre. After Mosselman’s death, Sabatier became mistress to English aristocrat and art collector Richard Wallace. Over the years she had developed an exquisite feeling for fine art.
Courtesan and cocotte gained their place in society on condition that these ladies behaved in a manner that was expected of them. The erotic at the time was a matter of stage setting. It demanded appropriate surroundings to heighten aesthetic satisfaction and manifested itself in a mania for suggestive decoration as a background for passion and lust. This fixation was exemplified by photographs of Sarah Bernhardt reclining in the Oriental luxury of tiger skins and silk hangings; or by images of Ida Rubinstein, a ‘mysterious’ queen of mime and gesture, who performed the stereotyped role of ‘la belle Juive’. These women were the theatrical orchids of fin de siècle Paris. The 1890s was an era of sexual fantasy and pose.
Death of Cleopatra
The female image reflected the hothouse culture of the age (a recurrent metaphor at the time: Maurice Maeterlinck published Les serres chaudes in 1890) with a whiff of overripe decadence and decline. Woman was portrayed as the seductress who had first led man astray and continued to do her fatal work. Her lustful body was as unsettling as was her loving soul. A trap and snare, she was to be approached with weariness (the phraseology here is derived from one of Guy de Maupassant’s short stories). Modernist artists were spellbound by the sensuous appearance of wicked women. Time and again the Classic idols of perversity, Salomé, Cleopatra, Medusa, and Judith, appear in poetry and painting. The ‘battle of the sexes’ (Nietzsche) and the fear for ‘seductive female attributes’ (Dostoevsky) often froze into misogyny. Man dreaded that the sins of woman would endanger his creative responsibilities. Like Orpheus, he was dragged towards the abyss.
A turn towards stylized eroticism was represented by the Decadent movement. Its followers celebrated a feast of artificiality and excess. J.K. Huysmans was the godfather of the faction. The impunity with which artists flouted moral standards made Paris appear as a modern Babylon. In England, the aesthetic movement evolved out of French roots. Walter Pater was its mediator and Oscar Wilde its prophet. The reputation of Decadents shocked and intrigued the public. Artistically these artists may have reached a limited audience only, but their exotic behaviour, their experiments with sex and drugs, their pseudo-mysticism, and their addiction to absinthe disseminated belief in the moral wickedness of the 1890s. The public eyed the figure of the ‘alienated’ artist with a mix of moralistic distaste and voyeuristic thrill. Decadence and the aesthetic movement represented the pose of avant-garde, the guise of modernism. It frequently deteriorated into affectation and falsehood obscuring some stark social realities.
A flower-seller selling her body.
Celebrated courtesans were showered with jewellery whilst bathing in champagne, but most prostitutes were desperate figures who had fled the provinces. By the end of the nineteenth century, some 34,000 ‘filles à numéro’ were registered in Paris, most of them forced into whoredom in order to look after themselves or their family. Alexandre Parent-Duchatlet noted in De la prostitution dans la ville de Paris (1836) that for many women sex was the sole means of survival. At one time, the seamstress was a respected worker. Mechanization brought about the demise of French textile centres. The skilled artisan of former days became a poorly paid factory worker. Hardship took its toll. Prostitution offered a way out which took considerable moral strength to resist and many poverty-stricken women succumbed to the pressure. The painted association of the profession with prostitution was made by Jean Béraud in his (undated) image of La modiste sur Les Champs Élysée.
The distressing story of prostitution was told by Émile Zola and fellow novelists. In spite of the suggestive sensuality of the Decadent movement, it was the glaring realism of these writers that worried the authorities. Their ‘documentary’ stories were too close to actuality. In 1865, physiologist Claude Bernard published his influential introduction to the study of experimental medicine with the aim of establishing the use of scientific method in medical treatment. Émile Zola reprised this work in Le roman experimental (1880) setting out to prove that Bernard’s methodology should be applied to literature in order to elevate the novel into the domain of science. Writing to him was comparable to surgery and he used his pen as scalpel. Critics of Zola despised his ‘lavatorial’ literature, accusing him of taking on sacred topics such as church, royalty, or matrimony, and after having dissected them he then displayed the wounded bodies as if they were corpses in an anatomy class.
Émile Zola
Zola felt the full power of repugnance when his novels were rendered into English. In 1888 and 1889 publisher Henry Vizetelly of Catherine Street, Strand, was twice convicted of indecency for issuing two-shilling translations. In its battle against pulic immorality, the National Vigilance Association had pushed hard for his prosecution. Zola’s entry into Britain’s literary landscape was discussed in the House of Commons in May 1888 after Samuel Smith, MP for Flintshire, had tabled a motion on the plague of ‘Corrupt Literature’. In the debate, he argued that Zola’s novels were ‘only fit for swine, and their constant perusal must turn the mind into something akin to a sty’. Victorian society rejected the novelist as an ‘apostle of the gutter’. To politicians the moral health of the nation was at stake. London may have been a capital of venereal disease (syphilis was endemic in the capital), but to them Zolaism was the stinking wound.
Early in his career, in June 1868, Zola had suggested that: ‘Il faut être de son âge, si l’on veut créer des oeuvres viables’. Two decades later Anatole Baju, founder of the journal Le Décadent in 1886 (Paul Verlaine was among its contributors), boasted that it was ‘à l’École décadente qu’était réservé l’honneur ... de créer un goût meilleur qui ne fût pas en contradiction directe avec le progrès moderne’. From these two statements one may conclude that the slogan ‘to be of one’s time’ is utterly meaningless. Or, one could ask the legitimate question which of the two ‘theorists’ was closer to the ambition of giving a voice to their generation’s concerns and preoccupations. During the later nineteenth century the novel was envisaged as a vehicle of social analysis. In spite of a process of continuous diversification, the genre remained a channel for taking a political stand. To many critics the battle for justice and equality was fought out in the novel, although there is a tendency to overstate its liberating impact. Even authors holding detestable opinions - as in the case of Ezra Pound or Knut Hamsun - can produce great art. Many novelists did not choose the side of reform and stood firm defending the values of the old order. In the words of Evelyn Waugh: every artist must be a reactionary. The novel performed as a force of conservation in a wildfire of change. That is politics nevertheless. Looking at it from a socio-political angle, one can only conclude that Zola’s positioning (the great whistle blower of literature) was far more relevant as an expression of the age than the aesthetic posing (‘to be modern is to be outrageous’) of Anatole Baju and friends.
In the twentieth-century ideological battle against modernism the author’s name once again emerged. Zola himself characterized the novel as ‘a poem of modern activity’. The 1930s left little scope for poetry in Europe. On the night of 10 May 1933, Germany witnessed the first mass book burning ceremony at the Opernplatz (now: Bebelplatz) close to the University of Berlin. Organized by Joseph Goebbels, the purge was carried out by Nazi students. An estimated 20,000 books, including work by Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, Erich Maria Remarque, Karl Marx, and Albert Einstein, were destroyed for being ‘un-German’. Widely read foreign authors experienced a similar fate. Novels by Marcel Proust, Jack London, H.G. Wells, Ernest Hemingway, and Upton Sinclair were also torched. Émile Zola was probably the most despised novelist in Nazi Germany. With the fall of the Third Republic in June 1940, France was reorganized into an occupied German zone and a ‘free’ Vichy sector. In both areas strict censorship was imposed. Zola was deemed unsuitable to the spirit of ‘new’ France. His work was taken of the shelves in bookshops and libraries. At the same time, sculptures of ‘suspect’ authors and philosophers (Voltaire, Rousseau, Marat, Gambetta, Victor Hugo, and many others) were smashed and demolished. Émile Zola’s statue ended up in a scrap metal warehouse, was melted down, and recycled for German bullet production.
Statue of Zola, destroyed in 1942
[Jaap Harskamp. Chapter of his forthcoming book Charleston at the Bauhaus Roof]