"A muse for the masses": Gender, age, and nation in France, Fin de Siècle

American Historical Review

Volumn 109, Issue 5, 2004, Pages 1439-1474

  Pomfret, David M ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG   (Hong Kong)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 56249089002     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/530932     Document Type: Article

References (258)

1. The metaphor of "separate spheres" emphasized the occupation of different social domains by men and women. Supposedly, women occupied the private space of the home (where they performed reproductive and moral roles) while men occupied public space (immersing themselves in the market and the institutions of civil society) in the ideal of the rising middle classes of Europe and North America. More recently, scholars have reconsidered the value of this metaphor in historical research. Amanda Vickery, for example, raised the question of whether such a division can be located in contemporary ideology and society. Such criticism was the starting point for work highlighting the interconnectedness of the "public" and the "private" in modernity and examining the social conflicts inspiring attempts to legitimate and "naturalize" this dichotomy. Amanda Vickery, "Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women's History," Historical Journal 36, no. 2 (1993): 383-414.
2. Historians have begun to devote more attention to the role of how women's bodies were used as symbolic sites in the political project of nation building, a project founded upon modern constructions of sex difference. See, for example, Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann, and Catherine Hall, eds., Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 2000). Jo Burr Margadant has illustrated how images of women were central to narratives of the French nation during the July Monarchy.
3. Margadant, "Gender, Vice and the Political Imaginary in Postrevolutionary France: Reinterpreting the Failure of the July Monarchy, 1830-1848," AHR 104, no. 5 (1999): 1461-96.
4. See also, for example, Martha Banta, Imaging American Women: Ideas and Ideals in Cultural History (New York, 1987);
5. Susan Shifrin ed., Women as Sites of Culture: Women's Roles in Cultural Formation from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century (Aldershot, 2002);
6. Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825-1880 (Baltimore, Md., 1990).
7. For a less recent but provocative and relevant discussion, see also Eric Hobsbawm, "Man and Woman in Socialist Iconography," History Workshop no. 6 (1978): 121-38;
8. Maurice Agulhon, "On Political Allegory: A Reply to Eric Hobsbawm," History Workshop no. 8 (1978): 167-73.
9. On the encoding of women's marginality after 1789, see Joan W. Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, 1996).
10. This process was evident not only in the European and North American contexts. For discussions of similar developments in Africa and the Middle East, see Beth Baron, "Nationalist Iconography: Egypt as a Woman," in Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East, James Jankowski and Israel Gershomi, eds. (New York, 1997), 105-24;
11. Helen Bradford, "Regendering Afrikanerdom: The 1899-1902 Anglo-Boer War," in Blom, Hagemann, and Hall, Gendered Nations, 207-28.
12. For a discussion of these issues in relation to the Asian context, see Joan Judge, "Talent, Virtue, and the Nation: Chinese Nationalisms and Female Subjectivities in the Early Twentieth Century," AHR 106, no. 3 (June 2001): 1, 3.
13. For more on the success of women in appropriating the right to move in public space as part of political ceremony in the United States, see Ryan, Women in Public, 52. Scholars studying France have noted that women held central roles in the disorderly public celebrations of the revolution in the early 1790s.
14. See, for example, Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (New York, 1985), 286-87.
15. Mona Ozouf notes, however, that although "from the beginning women had aspired to take part in the festivals," this aspiration "was so often rejected," that their involvement remained "partial" at best. Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, Alan Sheridan, trans. (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 101.
16. After 1793, according to Joan Landes, "women were banned from active and passive participation in the political sphere." Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988), 147.
17. See also Madelyn Gutwirth, The Twilight of the Goddesses: Women and Representation in the French Revolutionary Era (New Brunswick, N.J., 1992).
18. On the sublimation of real women's public visibility in French politics into symbolic duty in the form of Marianne, see Lynn Hunt, "Engraving the Republic: Prints and Propaganda in the French Revolution," History Today (October 30, 1980): 17;
19. Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley, Calif., 1984), 65.
20. Maurice Agulhon, who examined the changing fortunes of Marianne as a visual representation of the republic, has argued that the American republic, "produced no female myth comparable to the French one," but endowed women with an embodied public presence, while in France a concomitant of this powerful myth was the relinquishment of an embodied role for women in the public ceremonies of the republic. Agulhon, Marianne into Battle: Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France, 1780-1880, Janet Lloyd, trans. (Cambridge, 1981), 182;
21. Hobsbawm, "Man and Woman in Socialist Iconography."
22. Music historians have referred to the couronnement de la muse du peuple, in particular, the earliest performances in Paris. See, for example, Mary Ellen Poole, "Gustave Charpentier and the Conservatoire Populaire de Mimi Pinson," 19th Century Music 20, no. 3 (1997): 237;
23. Jane F. Fulcher, "Charpentier's Operatic 'Roman Musical' as Read in the Wake of the Dreyfus Affair," 19th Century Music 16, no, 2 (1992), 168;
24. Steven Huebner, "Between Anarchism and the Box Office: Gustave Charpentier's 'Louise,'" 19th Century Music 19, no. 2 (1995): 136-60.
25. The event is also discussed in Martine Segalen and Josselyne Chamarat, "La Rosière et la 'miss': Les 'reines' des fêtes populaires," L'Histoire 53 (1983): 48-49.
26. Save for one concise local study, the impact of the ceremony in the provinces has been largely ignored. Renée Martel, "De la muse du peuple à miss France," Saint-Etienne Histoire et Mémoire 188 (1997): 73-82.
27. In France those under age twenty-one constituted 34.9 percent of the population, while in Germany the equivalent group was 43.7 percent. James F. McMillan, France and Women, 1789-1914: Gender, Society and Politics (London, 2000), 141.
28. For a discussion of fears of depopulation in France, see Karen Offen, "Depopulation, Nationalism, and Feminism in Fin-de-Siècle France," AHR 89, no. 3 (June 1984): 648-76.
29. For a discussion of similar fears in Great Britain, see Pat Thane, "The Debate on the Declining Birth-rate in Britain: The 'Menace' of an Ageing Population, 1920s-1950s," Continuity and Change 5 (1990): 283-305.
30. The historical study of life stages, generation, and age relations developed in the wake of the influential work by Philippe Ariès, L'Enfant et la vie familiale sous l'ancien régime (Paris, 1960). Although historians questioned Ariès's method, his argument that childhood was a cultural construct was persuasive and inspired the development of a subfield of "youth history." A number of scholars provided, subsequently, important insights into the ways in which modern and premodern societies represented and attributed meaning to pre-adulthood and how young people experienced this identity and its specific constituent life stages.
31. Important examples of this scholarship include Natalie Zemon Davis, "The Reasons of Misrule: Youth Groups and Charivaris in Sixteenth-Century France," Past and Present, no. 50 (February 1971): 41-75;
32. John R. Gillis, Youth and History: Tradition and Change in European Age Relations, 1700-Present (New York, 1974);
33. Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge, Mass., 1979);
34. Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (Princeton, N.J., 1994);
35. Carolyn Steedman, Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780-1930 (London, 1995).
36. On the Fin de Siècle, see Eugen Weber, France, Fin de Siècle (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 9-11;
37. Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York, 1981);
38. Christophe Prochasson, Les Années électriques, 1880-1910 (Paris, 1991), 5-14.
39. For a discussion of the pathologies of national decline, see Robert A. Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline (Princeton, N.J., 1984), chap. 5. French population levels rose only marginally from 36.1 million in 1871 to 39.6 million in 1914. This contrasted markedly with a 57.8 percent increase in the size of the German population during the same period. The French medical doctor, Bénédict-August Morel had helped to pioneer "degeneration theory" in the 1850s, theorizing connections between heredity, environment, medical pathologies, and decline. The population issue was debated with such regularity and intensity that medical discourse was bound into public discussions of degeneration. Max Nordau's work, Degeneration, published in 1892 and translated into French a year later, for example, was hugely influential.
40. On degeneration, see Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848-c.1918 (Cambridge, 1989).
41. For discussions of the perceived crisis of masculinity, see Robert A. Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (New York, 1993);
42. Edward Berenson, The Trial of Madame Caillaux (Berkeley, Calif., 1992), 11-12, 115-17, 186-96;
43. Annelise Maugue, L'Identité masculine en crise au tournant du siècle, 1871-1914 (Paris, 1987);
44. Maugue, "L'Eve nouvelle et le vieil Adam," in Histoire des femmes, vol. 4, Geneviève Fraisse, ed. (Paris, 1991), chap. 19.
45. As prophecies of the "end of the family" haunted the bourgeois imagination, women who resisted the norms of domestic femininity and made claims for suffrage were decried as decadent "idols of perversity." For a discussion of the expression of this crisis in fin-de-siècle literature and art, see, for example, Hollis Clayson, Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era (New Haven, Conn., 1991);
46. Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Female Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (New York, 1986);
47. Nicholas White, The Family in Crisis in Late Nineteenth-Century French Fiction (Cambridge, 1998), 17.
48. Steven Huebner, "Between Anarchism and the Box Office: Gustave Charpentier's Louise," 19th Century Music 19, no. 2 (1995): 141.
49. The Vachalcade was held only twice, in 1896 and 1897, a fact attributed by Jerrold Seigel to the poor weather afflicting it in its second year. Seigel, Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830-1930 (New York, 1986), 338.
50. In its mixture of elite and popular elements, the Vachalcade had much in common with earlier popular festivities, such as the Carnaval held during the week of Lent, which had reached its zenith in the 1830s and 1840s. "La Vachalcade," Le Petit Parisien, April 15, 1897.
51. For a more recent discussion of the Vachalcade see Nicholas Green, The Spectacle of Nature: Landscape and Bourgeois Culture in Nineteenth Century France (Manchester, 1990), 77;
52. Huebner, "Between Anarchism and the Box Office," 152-55. Mary Garden, the Scottish-American soprano who took the lead in Charpentier's Louise in 1900, remembered him as "a real bohemian to whom money and fame meant nothing. He was satisfied if he had enough to pay for drinks for himself and his friends at the Rat Mort.
53. He lived in a dirty little garret up on the butte. . . The production of his opera brought him nearly half a million francs, but he spent it all on the working girls of Montmartre." Mary Garden, quoted in Michael T. R. B. Turnbull, Mary Garden (Aldershot, 1997), 24.
54. See also André Himonet, Louise de G. Charpentier: Étude historique et critique, analyse musicale (Paris, 1922), 6-7.
55. Le Petit Parisien, covering dress rehearsals for the couronnement suggested the piece was "as curious as it is interesting." "La Vachalcade," Le Petit Parisien, April 15, 1897, 2.
56. L'Illustration described it as "most original." "La Fête populaire du centenaire de Michelet," L'Illustration, July 30, 1898, 68. La France, discussing the Bordeaux performance, was moved to ask "Why all of these muses? What are they for? What big idea do they represent?" La France, June 25, 1901, Fonds Charpentier 362, Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris (Hereafter, BHVP). All translations are by the author, unless otherwise stated.
57. In the earliest Paris performances, the poem "To the Muse" began with the lines: "O beautiful one! Chosen sister! Eternal inspiration," but in Saint-Etienne Paul de Champville's work "To the Muse" began with the words, "Cheerful and responsible girl worker, O muse you have no need for a crown, the workshop bench is the noblest throne." Saint-Etienne poem, 1I18, Archives Municipales de Saint-Etienne (Hereafter, AMSE). Notably, Jules Michelet had expressed strong views on the symbolic centrality of women to the republic. For a discussion of Michelet's views on women and the republic, see Judith F. Stone, "The Republican Brotherhood: Gender and Ideology," in Gender and the Politics of Social Reform in France, 1870-1914, Elinor A. Accampo, Rachel G. Fuchs, and Mary Lynn Stewart eds. (Baltimore, Md., 1995), 32-35.
58. By way of illustration, Saint-Etienne's municipal council allocated 49,000 francs to the event in 1902. "La Fête national," La Loire Républicaine, July 16, 1902, Archives Départementales de la Loire (Hereafter, ADL); Saint-Etienne Letter, Mayor of Saint-Etienne to Mayor of Romans, March 11, 1903, 1I16, AMSE.
59. The perceived "Frenchness" of Charpentier's music was an important pillar upon which the unifying potential of the Muse was built. Gérard de Lacaze-Duthiers saw Charpentier as "rediscovering the true French tradition which decidedly could not be accommodated to the Wagnerian yoke." Alfred Bruneau observed in the couronnement the "beauty of a virile music and the grace of a young woman." Bruneau was, like Charpentier, a former pupil of Jules Massenet. Lacaze-Duthiers, Ville de Châlons-sur-Marne Fête de couronnement de la muse, 14 juillet 1903: Gustave Charpentier et la muse du peuple (Châlons-sur-Marne, 1903), 8-9; Bruneau, "La Muse de Paris - et son poète," Le Figaro, July 25, 1898, 1.
60. William B. Cohen, Urban Government and the Rise of the French City: Five Municipalities in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1998), 241-54;
61. "Les muses départmentales," Journal du Mans, July 26, 1899, Fonds Charpentier 361, BHVP;
62. "Les Muses à l'exposition," Le Matin, September 8, 1900.
63. "La Muse du peuple," La France, July 18, 1899, Fonds Charpentier 423, BHVP;
64. "La Doyenne des reines de beauté qui recevait par jour 65 lettres d'amour retourne, à 71 ans, des manteaux à 100F la pièce," Paris-Hebdo, September 18-21, 1952.
65. Saint-Etienne Police Report, Central Police Commissioner, "Antoinine Palle," 1906, 1I18, AMSE.
66. Councilors and the press, keen to read the benefits of their endowment into the reactions of those who observed it, paid a great deal of attention to the crowd's response and read this as betraying the reception of the event's implicit message. For the Républicain de l'Ouest, for example, "the people were not capable of understanding the symbolism" but, at the climax of the performance, "a shudder, nevertheless, shook [them]." "Chronique sur le couronnement de la muse," Le Républicain de l'Ouest, June 14, 1900, 2.
67. Although the few historians who have commented on the phenomenon have tended to focus only on the Paris events, the work was truly national, performed in more than a dozen cities in a decade. One report noted, "in six years fourteen muses have been crowned." Report cited in "Les Fêtes de la Muse - a Liège," Journal, July 21, 1903, Fonds Charpentier 363, BHVP.
68. References were made in the republican press to the "thousands of curious bystanders," crammed into central city squares, or "curious onlookers massed in great numbers." An estimated 60,000 people observed the event during Bastille Day in Saint-Etienne in 1902. "L'Election de la muse," Le Progrès du Nord, May 17, 1898;
69. "Le Couronnement de la reine des ouvrières," L'Echo du Nord, June 13, 1899, 2. In this way, the Fête de la Muse appears to have much in common with another spectacle, the Tour de France established in 1903, which also offered the French a vision and sense of their nation through urban spectacle and the newspaper press.
70. The muse festival was also performed outside France, in Belgium and Algiers, and was discussed in the English press. "Les Fêtes de la Muse - a Liège," Journal, July 21, 1903, Fonds Charpentier 363, BHVP;
71. Daily Telegraph, July 6, 1901, Fonds Charpentier 362, BHVP.
72. The rather starchy slate of events drawn up for republican festivals included reviews of troops and gymnastics performances by military preparation societies. Still, greased pigs and other popular entertainments did not disappear entirely from view during Bastille Day festivities. For more on republican festivals, see Charles Rearick, "Festivals in Modern France: The Experience of the Third Republic," Journal of Contemporary History 12 (July 1977): 450-56.
73. e siècle, 1800-1914 (Paris, 1978), 134-36.
74. Spring rituals held to celebrate fertility involving "queens" dated back to the late medieval period. For more on the custom of selecting rosières in the fête de la rose that flourished in France from the 1760s, see Sarah C. Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France (Berkeley, Calif., 1993), 68-85, 102-08, 130;
75. Segalen and Chamarat, "La Rosière et la 'miss,'" 47;
76. Segalen and Chamarat, "Les Rosières se suivent et ne se ressemblent pas," Centre d'Animation de l'Histoire de Nanterre (1979): 8.
77. e siècle (Bordeaux, 1969), 333-34. In Lille, socialists won control of the municipal council thanks to an agreement with the radicals in 1898.
78. e siècle (Lille, 1999), 75-76.
79. In Saint-Etienne, the socialists took overall control in 1900 of a council headed by an anarcho-syndicalist mayor, Jules Ledin. For an account of the socialist victory, see Jean Merley ed., Histoire de Saint-Etienne (Toulouse, 1990), 214.
80. Picking up on Charpentier's populist turn, Gérard de Lacaze-Duthiers explained that "a muse, is . . . less solemn, but is as dignified" as a "queen," appearing "more human, closer to us." Lacaze-Duthiers, Ville de Châlons-sur-Marne, 17-18. Liberty had been portrayed in the revolutionary iconography of womanhood as a virtuous daughter figure. Aspects of the visual style of performance of the muse - her proximity to the Hôtel de Ville, the enthronement, the gestures of deference - had much in common with the festival of the Triumph of Reason held on November 10, 1793.
81. This point was not lost on contemporary commentators. For more on Liberty, see Joan B. Landes, "Representing the Body Politic: The Paradox of Gender in the Graphic Politics of the French Revolution," in Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution, Sara E. Melzer and Leslie W. Rabine, eds. (New York, 1992), 32.
82. See also Stéphane Michaud, Muse et madone: Visages de la femme de la révolution française aux apparitions de Lourdes (Paris, 1985).
83. Notably, opera decor featured in the Festival of Reason of November 1793, as did "members of the Opera ballet and music from the Opera repertory." Hunt, "Engraving the Republic," 14;
84. Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class, 65. Another similarity lay in the rapid spread of the ritual from Paris to the provinces.
85. Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class, 63-64.
86. Huebner, "Between Anarchism and the Box Office," 153-55.
87. On the rosières' associations with the French aristocracy, see Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs, 72-73.
88. Republican press reports identified the disbursal of "beauty" for the benefit of the urban masses as the proper responsibility of socialist-influenced city council. Initial enthusiasm for a festival which, as one councilor put it, was "endowed with a solemnly artistic, popular and moral character," thus owed much to hopes that this might have an enlightening effect on those who viewed it. New conceptions of art as having a social function and of improving the taste of the workers were disseminated by intellectuals, in particular Camille Mauclair, who advanced such views in regular contributions to the debate on the democratization of beauty and luxury in the pages of the Revue Bleue. Rosalind H. Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley, Calif., 1982), 158-67;
89. Conseil Municipal de Bordeaux, Conseil municipal de Bordeaux, procès-verbaux des séances (Bordeaux, 1899), 267;
90. "Le Couronnement de la muse," Le Républicain de l'Ouest, June 5-7, 1900, 2.
91. Saint-Etienne Newspaper Extract, L'Aurore, July 17, 1902, 1I16, AMSE.
92. Lacaze-Duthiers, Ville de Châlons-sur-Marne, 9, 15.
93. "L'Election d'une muse," Le Figaro, July 11, 1898, 1;
94. "Le Couronnement de la muse," L'Intransigeant, July 26, 1898, 2. L'Indépendance of Cambrai, for example, explained the event in 1911 as "a work of art, the beauty and value of which has never been contested by anyone."
95. L'Indépendance, August 8, 1911, Fonds Charpentier 362, BHVP. Even after the rather racy plot of the opera Louise was revealed in February 1900, few dissonant voices were heard.
96. Saint-Etienne Newspaper Extract, La Vie Illustrée: L'Univers Illustré réunis, 197, July 25, 1902, 280, 1I16, AMSE;
97. "La Muse Lilloise," Lille Artiste, June 1, 1898, 2.
98. While ambivalent at best about the crowning ceremony, which was perceived as "revolutionary" and "pagan," Catholic spokespersons were at pains to explain that they did not wish to criticize the Muse herself. Pro-Catholic newspapers poked fun at the festival floats and raised doubts as to councilors' motives for sponsoring the event, but conceded that the performance itself was remarkably popular. In some cities, editorial staff from pro-Catholic newspapers even attended meetings held by the organizing committee of the municipal council. L'Indépendance, August 8, 1911, Fonds Charpentier 361, BHVP;
99. "Le 'Couronnement de la Muse,'" La Croix du Nord, June 6, 1898, 2. Notes from meeting of organizing committee members, June 30, 1902, 1I16, AMSE.
100. "La Muse de Paris," La Fronde, July 11, 1898, 1.
101. The poet Paul Verlaine dwelt on the tiredness of Marianne's image in the sonnet, "A Bust for the Town Halls" of 1881 in which he suggested that "Marianne is very old, getting on for a hundred . . . now she is a garrulous crone with thin hair and no teeth." This translation of Verlaine and further discussion of the evolving appearance of Marianne can be found in Maurice Agulhon, Marianne into Battle, 178-79.
102. See also Hunt, "Engraving the Republic," 17.
103. The "New Woman" was a widespread phenomenon but formed part of an especially forceful critique in the French case, articulated in such literary vehicles as the Journal des débats, Revue des deux mondes, La Plume, La Revue, La Nouvelle Revue, and others. For the "New Woman" in the French context, see Debora L. Silverman, "The 'New Woman,' Feminism and the Decorative Arts in Fin-de-Siècle France," in Eroticism and the Body Politic, Lynn Hunt, ed. (Baltimore, Md., 1991), 144-63;
104. Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style (Berkeley, Calif., 1989), 63-74, 193-206.
105. Mary Louise Roberts, Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-Siècle France (Chicago, 2002), 11-15;
106. Michael Wilson, "'Sans les femmes, qu'est-ce qui nous resterait?' Gender and Transgression in Bohemian Montmartre," in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub, eds. (New York, 1991), 195-222.
107. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "Discourses of Sexuality and Subjectivity: The New Woman, 1870-1936," in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey Jr., eds. (New York, 1989).
108. On the "New Woman" in the Anglo-Saxon context, see Ruth Brandon, The New Women and the Old Men: Love, Sex and the Woman Question (London, 1990);
109. Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York, 1990);
110. Smith-Rosenberg, "The New Woman as Androgyne: Social Disorder and Gender Crisis, 1870-1936," in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York, 1985), 245-96.
111. From 1889 to 1900, twenty-one feminist periodicals were established and three international feminist congresses were held, but real success in achieving convergence between the various women's leagues did not arrive until 1908-1909. For more on these developments and on the links between demographic crisis and the feminist challenge, see Offen, "Depopulation, Nationalism, and Feminism," 648-75.
112. For a detailed discussion of the growth and consolidation of French feminism before 1914, see Steven C. Hause, Women's Suffrage and Social Politics in the French Third Republic, with Anne R. Kenney (Princeton, 1984);
113. Laurence Klejman and Florence Rochefort, L'Egalité en marche: Le Féminisme sous la troisième république (Paris, 1989).
114. On this theme, see also George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York, 1996), 104;
115. McMillan, France, and Women, 204.
116. This figure formed part of a panoply of female caricatures representing those supposedly eroding male virility in public and private. While the "New Woman" was castigated for her rejection of reproductive "duties," the old mother, a symbol of declining fertility (to whom suspicions of clerical conservatism easily attached), was considered to be complicit in national decline, having been part of a generation of women who had produced too few babies. For more on such images, see Honoré Daumier, Intellectuelles (bas bleus) et femmes socialistes (Paris, 1993);
117. Michelle Perrot, "The New Eve and the Old Adam: Changes in French Women's Condition at the Turn of the Century," in Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, Margaret Randolph Higonnet, et al., eds. (New Haven, Conn., 1987), 59.
118. For a contemporary discussion of this "menace," see Georges Deherme, Le Pouvoir social des femmes (Paris, 1912), 238-75.
119. On the "New Woman" in the English context, see John Tosh, A Man's Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven, Conn., 1999), 152-53.
120. Women began to command respect and authority in new professional domains, notably in public sector work, as in the case of the school mistresses, labor administrators, and inspectresses discussed in Linda L. Clark, The Rise of Professional Women in France: Gender and Public Administration since 1830 (Cambridge, 2000), chaps. 1-4;
121. Clark, "Bringing Feminine Qualities into the Public Sphere: The Third Republic's Appointment of Women Inspectors," in Accampo, Fuchs, and Stewart, Gender and the Politics of Social Reform, 128-56;
122. Rachel G. Fuchs, "France in a Comparative Perspective," Gender and the Politics of Social Reform, ibid, 183-87.
123. According to one historian, the gradual "feminization" of the tertiary sector of the economy formed "perhaps the most striking change in the pattern of women's employment." At 20 percent of the total nonagricultural workforce, married women in the late nineteenth century were a significant presence in work spaces dominated by men. In France the percentage of married women who worked was among the highest in Western Europe. Perrot, "The New Eve and the Old Adam," 52.
124. e de la Confédération Générale du Travail), tenu à Rennes les 26-30 septembre et 1 octobre 1898, Compte rendu des travaux du congrès (Rennes, 1898).
125. For two important expressions of contemporary French opinion on adolescence, see Gabriel Compayré, L'Adolescence, études de psychologie et de pédagogie (Paris, 1909)
126. P. Mendousse, L'Ame de l'adolescent (Paris, 1909).
127. For a discussion of the idea (and institutionalization) of adolescence in France, see Agnés Thiercé, Histoire de l'adolescence, 1850-1914 (Paris, 1999). The attribution of new importance to adolescence was a widespread phenomenon in Europe and the United States around the turn of the twentieth century.
128. For a discussion of the development of this life stage in the British context, see John Springhall, Coming of Age: Adolescence in Britain, 1860-1960 (Dublin, 1986);
129. Harry Hendrick, Images of Youth: Age, Class and the Male Youth Problem, 1880-1920 (Oxford, 1990).
130. On the "schizoid" tendencies of the fin-de-siècle adolescent self, see Bill Schwarz, "Night Battles: Hooligan and Citizen," in Modern Times: Reflections on a Century of English Modernity, Mica Nava and Alan O'Shea, eds. (London, 1996), 176-207.
131. For a discussion of adolescence in the Austrian context, see J. R. Wegs, "Working-class 'Adolescence' in Austria, 1890-1930," Journal of Family History 17, no. 4 (1992): 439-50.
132. On Germany, see Gillis, Youth and History.
133. On the United States, see Joseph Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present (New York, 1977).
134. The fin-de-siècle emergence and development of adolescence as a literary theme has been discussed by Justin O'Brien, The Novel of Adolescence in France (Oxford, 1939);
135. John Neubauer, The Fin-de-Siècle Culture of Adolescence (New Haven, Conn., 1992);
136. Patricia Meyer Spacks, Adolescent Idea: Myths of the Young and the Adult Imagination (New York, 1981).
137. On the political left, efforts were made by unionists to set up educational wings, and revolutionary, "collectivist," and socialist student groups also emerged in the 1890s. Into the early twentieth century, reactionary forces, especially the Catholic church, reinvigorated their own extensive networks of social contact with young people, while conservative nationalist writers elevated the regenerative potential and national significance of "youth" to new heights. Agathon [Henri Massis and Alfred de Tarde], Les Jeunes gens d'aujourd'hui, le goût de l'action, la foi patriotique - une renaissance catholique, le réalisme politique 4th edn. (Paris, 1913);
138. Gaston Ragéot, "A Propos de la jeunesse d'aujourd'hui," Annales Politiques et Litteraires (February 1913): 113-14;
139. Ferdinand Antonin Vuillermet, Les Sophismes de la jeunesse (Paris, 1910).
140. Great efforts were made by republican activists, in particular those working within the Ligue d'Enseignement, to enroll adolescents in after-school societies. These societies were admitted, after 1890, in larger numbers to perform in Bastille Day celebration schedules. The Muse, in this way, formed part of a wider movement to reinvigorate republican festivals (by then struggling to recapture the imagination and interest of the public) through ritual performance by the young. For details of the institutionalization of adolescence in France, see Kathleen Alaimo, "Shaping Adolescence in the Popular Milieu: Social Policy, Reformers and French Youth, 1870-1920," Journal of Family History 17 (1992): 419-38;
141. David M. Pomfret, Young People and the European City: Age Relations in Nottingham and Saint-Etienne, 1890-1940 (Aldershot, 2004), 103-52.
142. This was reflected in terminology. When it had first come into common usage earlier in the nineteenth century the term, jeune fille (young girl), had been used to refer to young, single women from the haute bourgeoisie. By the late nineteenth century, contemporaries sometimes used the terms jeune fille and jeune femme (young woman) interchangeably. See, for example, Fémina Bibliothèque, Pour être belle (Paris, 1913), 12.
143. For a discussion of the vagueness of the upper and lower boundaries of adolescence (and in particular female adolescence) in France, see Thiercé, Histoire de l'adolescence, 20-24, 161-63.
144. Alaimo, "Shaping Adolescence in the Popular Milieu," 425.
145. Most of the girls selected to perform as Muses were between sixteen and eighteen years old. Thus, when one scholar refers to the Muse as a "proletarian woman," he ignores the important role played by the variable of age in explaining the cultural significance of this phenomenon. Huebner, "Between Anarchism and the Box Office," 152. It is worth noting that Charpentier's work Louise played upon the key theme of adolescent rebellion and that, as an artistic movement, verismo (with which Charpentier's work was identified) emphasized characteristics often attributed to both adolescents and the lower classes in social commentary. In this vision, workers were seen as, "'more natural' men and women, whose emotions were closer to the surface and hence more intense than those of effete upper class city dwellers."
146. On this see Dona De Sanctis, quoted in Helen M. Greenwald, "Realism on the Opera Stage: Belasco, Puccini, and the California Sunset," in Opera in Context: Essays on Historical Staging from the Late Renaissance to the Time of Puccini, Mark A. Radice, ed. (Portland, 1998), 280.
147. e siècles) (Paris, 1996).
148. For a discussion of the apaches, see Michelle Perrot, "Dans la France de la belle époque: Les 'Apaches', premières bandes de jeunes," in Cahiers Jussieu: Les Marginaux et les exclus dans l'histoire (Paris, 1978), 387-407.
149. At this time, concern also began to crystallize around the figure of the "girl mother" (filles mères) whose transgressive behavior and fatherless offspring ruptured the ideal family and threatened the nation. On the filles mères, see Rachel G. Fuchs, "Morality and Poverty: Public Welfare for Mothers in Paris, 1870-1900," French History 2, no. 3 (1988): 298-301;
150. Fuchs, Abandoned Children: Foundlings and Child Welfare in Nineteenth-Century France (Albany, N.Y., 1984);
151. Yves Roumajon, Enfants perdus, enfants punis: Histoire de la jeunesse délinquante en France. Huit siècles de controverses (Paris, 1989).
152. For a discussion of concern over young females in the American context during this period, see Ruth M. Alexander, The Girl Problem: Female Sexual Delinquency in New York, 1900-1930 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1995);
153. Regina G. Kunzel, Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890-1945 (New Haven, Conn., 1993);
154. Mary E. Odem, Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885-1920 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1995);
155. Kathy Lee Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia, 1986).
156. A survey of prominent writers' views of recent changes in young women's lifestyles, though often producing sharply critical opinions, was notable for the fact that the majority of those interviewed still felt it worthwhile to articulate their ideal of the French girl and to offer their views on how this ideal might be realized. "Le Type idéal de la jeune fille française," Fémina, February 1, 1908, 54.
157. The eponymous protagonist of Charpentier's Louise, for example, was a young working-class seamstress, feisty, impulsive, and contrarian, who rejected parental constraints to throw herself into the cultural tumult of Montmartre, a free love relationship, and the freedoms of the city streets. Similar themes of autonomy and resistance to the authority of the family can be found in a number of other operas in this period. These included, for example, Giacomo Puccini's La Bohême (1896), Madama Butterfly (1904), and La Fanciulla del West (1910) and Pietro Mascagni's Iris (1897).
158. From the 1880s, a number of French writers endowed young female characters with tendencies to willful independence that often produced tension in relations between daughters and their parents. Early examples included Emile Zola, Germinal (Paris, 1885);
159. Marcel Prévost, Les Demi-Vièrges (Paris, 1894). In George du Maurier's hugely popular novel, Trilby (1894), the vitality of an independent and promiscuous orphan girl was snuffed by bourgeois convention.
160. For more on this theme, see Clifford H. Bissell, Les Conventions du théâtre bourgeois contemporain en France, 1887-1914 (Paris, 1930), 114-18;
161. Roberts, Disruptive Acts, 22, 32-34, 79 .
162. Between 1880 and 1914, a slew of legislation granted women new legal rights. Reforms in 1881 and 1886, for example, gave women the right to set up savings accounts without their husbands' intervention or authorization. In 1884, the right to divorce was reintroduced. In 1907, married women gained the right to use their own earnings as they wished. McMillan, France and Women, 152.
163. Although this piecemeal approach has led historians to identify France as comparatively backward in developing welfare provision when contrasted with other European countries and the United States, according to Rachel Fuchs, "an early, if uncoordinated, introduction of welfare measures" occurred. In this revisionist view, the republic can in fact be seen as "a European leader in designing family policies and allowances." Fuchs, "France in a Comparative Perspective," in Accampo, Fuchs, and Stewart, Gender and the Politics of Social Reform in France, 159-61.
164. "La Muse du Peuple," L'Indépendant, July 23, 1911, Fonds Charpentier 361, BHVP.
165. The reference to Goethe's classic novel of adolescence is noteworthy, as are the voyeuristic overtones of this bourgeois observer's account of his penetration of the inner domestic recesses of the working class "slum" districts in search of workers' daughters. "La Muse Lilloise," Lille Artiste, June 1, 1898, 2.
166. In a similar vein, reporters were careful to explain that the "Muse Noire" of Lens (designated thus to represent the local coalmining industry) "while black has very white skin." One newspaper expressed parents' anxieties at the potential of the male gaze to render their girls "deflowered in image" or "undressed" in public during these events. Evénement, June 20, 1901, Fonds Charpentier 362, BHVP;
167. "La Muse Lilloise," Lille Artiste, June 1, 1898.
168. Lacaze-Duthiers evoked a similar idea a few years later in his claim that, "a muse . . . will be the most delicate, the most healthy, the most lively." Lacaze-Duthiers, Ville de Châlons-sur-Marne, 18. The search for the regenerative girl was cast in the kind of narrative form then being employed in French accounts of encounters with the "exotic" in the colonial context. In France, in the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair, women who moved beyond fixed and admissible subject positions inspired racially coded condemnation. In particular, "the Jew" and the "New Woman" were linked as cultural constructs through characteristics of race and gender. The former was constructed as a rootless, effeminate element in the social body while the latter broke (or "wandered") free of her domestic roots through her cosmopolitanism. Both supposedly weakened the national organism by breaking traditions constituting the "eternal" France. In France, the writer and journalist, Marcelle Tinayre, for example, viewed such women as "wandering Jews, whose position cannot be defined, and to whom one refuses respect." In this context, the young Muse appeared as a provocative figure, racialized and wandering between autonomy and dependence, but her age made this a "natural" tendency, part of her vulnerability, and in this way protected her against censure.
169. Marcelle Tinayre, "Ménages d'artistes," La Fronde, March 3, 1898, quoted in Roberts, Disruptive Acts, 113.
170. On "patriarchal patriots" and the crisis of male virility, see Offen, "Depopulation, Nationalism and Feminism," 669.
171. "Mazas ou Charenton - election de la muse de Paris," L'Intransigeant, July 12, 1898, 1;
172. "Couronnement de la Muse du Peuple," Tribune Républicaine, July 4, 1906, ADL .
173. In relation to the influence of the classical aesthetic on modern notions of beauty, it is worth noting that the Muse appeared on stage dressed in long white ceremonial robes, a conspicuous reference to the origins of the norms of "elemental" beauty that the girls were chosen to represent. For an early discussion of the classical influence upon modern notions of beauty, see Auguste Debay, Hygiène et perfectionnement de la beauté humaine. Dans ses lignes, ses formes et sa couleur. Théorie nouvelle des aliments et boissons, digestion - nutrition, art de développer les formes en moins et de diminuer les formes en trop, 4th edn. (Paris, 1864), 9-17, 33. Michael Hau has examined this process in the case of Germany.
174. Hau, The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany: A Social History, 1890-1930 (Chicago, 2003), 33.
175. On the links between Social Darwinism and fin-de-siècle theories of the nature of beauty, see Kurt Bayertz, "Biology and Beauty: Science and Aesthetics in Fin-de-siècle Germany," in Fin-de-Siècle and Its Legacy, Mikuláš Teich and Roy Porter, eds. (Cambridge, 1990), 278-96.
176. In the United States, "Lafayette Girls" had been selected in the early nineteenth century from each state to celebrate the visit of the French hero of the War of Independence. In 1854, P. T. Barnum organized the exhibition of photographic beauty contests, an idea taken up in the press. In 1880 the "first beauty contest of record," the Miss United States beauty pageant was held in the resort of Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. These contests, in spite of the name, proliferated mainly along the eastern seaboard of the United States and were organized with a view to boosting tourism. The first national photographic contest was held in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1905, with 40,000 entrants. Later, regional competitions were unified in the first Miss America event held in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1920 (the same year in which the journalist, Maurice de Waleffe, organized the inaugural Miss France contest). The Miss World pageant, which commenced in 1951, brought together international competitors for the first time. For a brief historical overview of the American context, see Colleen Ballerino Cohen, Richard Wilk, and Beverly Stoeltje, eds., Beauty Queens on the Global Stage: Gender, Contests, and Power (London, 1996), 3-5.
177. For a more detailed discussion, see Lois W. Banner, American Beauty (Chicago, 1984), 250-61.
178. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983);
179. Alon Confino quoted in Silke Wenk, "Gendered Representations of the Nation's Past and Future," in Blom, Hagemann, and Hall, Gendered Nations, 66.
180. In the same vein, Durand had famously made claims for the debt owed by French feminism to her blonde hair. For more on Durand and the feminist celebration of beauty, see Roberts, Disruptive Acts, 44-70.
181. For a discussion of feminists' invocation of democratic notions of beauty in the context of the United States, see Lois Banner, American Beauty, 206-08. According to Banner, in the United States ethical definitions of beauty remained more important to feminists who perceived the dangers that claims for democratic access to physical beauty held for their cause.
182. The "disruptive" tendencies of the most high profile female theater star, Sarah Bernhardt, are discussed in Roberts, Disruptive Acts, 15, 55, 165-78.
183. With the erosion of the highly eroticized image of the actress and the "chastening of the stage," according to Lenard Berlanstein, "theatregoing became an increasingly feminised cultural event." Berlanstein, Daughters of Eve: A Cultural History of French Theater Women from the Old Regime to the Fin-de-Siècle (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), 161-67.
184. In 1900, Marguerite Durand was thirty-six years old, Sarah Bernhardt was fifty-six, and Julia Bartet (star of the Comédie-Française) was forty-six, Jeanne Granier (actress and opera singer) was forty-eight, Jane Hading (actress) was forty-one. Berlanstein, Daughters of Eve, 8, 166, 197.
185. Mathilde Pokitonoff, La Beauté par l'hygiène: Son développement et sa conservation (Paris, 1892), 1;
186. Fémina Bibliothèque, Pour être belle, (Paris, 1913) 32;
187. Ernest Monin, Pour le beau sexe: Causeries d'un vieux spécialiste (Paris, 1914), 300. In her revisionist history of Victorian fashion styles, Valerie Steele has argued that older women were able to exploit erotic dress forms, emphasizing bodily concealment and the undergarment, to preserve their sexual allure. However, by the turn of the twentieth century, changes in dress style served to introduce more distinctive forms of appearance for young women, reflecting in fashion the developing acknowledgement of this group's age-specific allure.
188. Valerie Steele, Fashion and Eroticism: Ideals of Feminine Beauty from the Victorian Era through the Jazz Age (New York, 1985), 221-34.
189. Women were consigned in this Enlightenment paradigm to the status of subordinates or adjuncts. Carole Pateman, The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism and Political Theory (Stanford, Calif., 1988), 3-4, 9-10, 18-19, 44-47.
190. This argument runs counter to that of Silke Wenk, who states that "the public visibility of women . . . occurs outside of the space where politics is negotiated." Wenk, "Gendered Representations of the Nation's Past and Future," 65.
191. Warner, Monuments and Maidens, 293.
192. According to George Mosse, "when woman left the place assigned to her in the division between the sexes, she became an outsider as well and presented one of the most serious and difficult challenges to modern masculinity." Mosse, The Image of Man, 102.
193. "Préface pour programme," Fonds Charpentier 423, BHVP,
194. cited in Huebner, "Between Anarchism and the Box Office," 152.
195. Charles Chincholle, for example, described how these girls were "elegantly slim." "L'Election d'une muse," Le Figaro, July 11, 1898, 1. In her underdeveloped state, the Muse was notably androgenous. In the medical discourse of this period, the adolescent was often referred to using the neuter pronoun, it.
196. On the androgenous woman, see Maugue, L'identité masculine en crise, 106-13.
197. "La Musc Lilloise," Lille Artiste, June 1, 1898, 3.
198. In Cambrai, for example, the Muse and her ladies-in-waiting received garments from the high-quality fashion houses of the city. "Journée du 15 - le couronnement de la muse," L'Indépendant, August 17, 1911.
199. Prizes offered in Lille included such items as a "silk robe from Galeries Lilloises, two superb illustrated books by Librairies Allandier, a basket of ribbon by Modes Parisiennes, a purse by Phénix" and so on. "La Fête de la muse - A Lille," Le Réveil du Nord, May 31, 1898, 2.
200. This thesis is put forward convincingly in Lisa Tiersten, Marianne in the Market: Envisioning Consumer Society in Fin-de-Siècle France (Berkeley, Calif., 2001).
201. On the rise of the department store and the dangers that lay therein, see also Michael B. Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869-1920 (Princeton, N.J., 1981);
202. Elaine S. Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store (New York, 1989). The notion of luxury was complicated in this period as the number of consumers increased. These developments raised questions of established bourgeois modes of consumption and prompted experiments with new ways of consuming.
203. Rosalind H. Williams, Dream Worlds, 109-10.
204. Tiersten, Marianne in the Market, 85.
205. One might wonder why children, a group defined similarly, were not chosen as the focus of this spectacle. In considering this, it should be noted that though advances had been made in realizing the bourgeois view of childhood as dependent, these had been won through the highly contentious education reforms of the 1880s, which had alarmed Catholics (who fought against the loss of prestige and influence these changes entailed) and workers (many of whom contested the idea of a non-working childhood). As a critical site on which the battle for the future of the nation was fought, childhood therefore made a less suitable focus at this time for a festival of national unity. Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian Britain: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851-1941 (Stanford, Calif., 1990), 243.
206. Tiersten, Marianne in the Market, 3. In this way, it can be seen that although, as Elinor Accampo has suggested, the state "used middle-class women to moralize working women in the public sphere," it also utilized working-class women to moralize women across the class divide.
207. Accampo, "Gender, Social Policy and the Formation of the Third Republic," in Accampo, Fuchs, and Stewart, Gender and the Politics of Social Reform, 21.
208. "Mazas ou Charenton - éléction de la muse de Paris," L'Intransigeant, July 12, 1898;
209. "La Muse du peuple," La France, July 18, 1899, 3.
210. Denied the right to elect men (or women) to govern them, young women were afforded the right, through the simulacrum of suffrage that formed part of the event, to elect aesthetic representatives. The event was interpreted in several daily newspapers as a "feminist ceremony" and a means through which "feminism has taken a great step forward." "Causerie," Petite Gironde n.d., Fonds Charpentier 361, BHVP;
211. "L'Election du Mans," Journal du Mans, July 15, 1899, Fonds Charpentier 361, BHVP.
212. "Pour la jeunesse," Le Figaro, July 9, 1898, 1. The reference to the premodern, carnivalesque charivari is notable. Electors were encouraged to select a candidate who was hardworking, humble and dedicated to her family. Ideally, the Muse would project these values in spite of material impoverishment. In the selection process, young candidates skillfully manipulated this gendered discourse of honorable impoverishment and female sacrifice to portray themselves as deserving daughter-martyrs and to attack other candidates as less than deserving.
213. "La Muse de Paris," La Fronde, July 11, 1898, 1. Charpentier later recalled seemingly interminable rounds of voting in 1897, as the girls, all candidate-voters, repeatedly cast their ballots for themselves.
214. "Le Couronnement de la Muse," Fonds Charpentier 430, BHVP;
215. "M. Gustave Charpentier qui dirigea jusqu'à ce jour plus de cent couronnements de 'sa' muse évoque pour nous des souvenirs," Excelsior, July 2, 1933.
216. "Les Fêtes Desrousseaux," Le Progrès du Nord, June 10, 1898, Fonds Charpentier 360, BHVP.
217. Newspaper Extract, Le Stéphanois, 1900, 7C17, AMSE.
218. "Les Fêtes de la Muse," Loire Républicaine, July 10, 1902, 3, ADL. Notably, a high proportion of those who enrolled as candidates in the competition to become the Muse were factory workers.
219. "Mazas ou Charenton - éléction de la muse de Paris," L'Intransigeant, July 12, 1898, 1;
220. Saint-Etienne Police Reports, Fête de la Muse du Peuple, 1900-1906, 1I15, ASME.
221. On the rise of mass culture, see Patrick Brantlinger, "Mass Media and Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Europe," in Teich and Porter, Fin de Siècle and Its Legacy, 98-114;
222. Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley, Calif., 1998).
223. On advertising and its links with artistic and commercial culture, see Marjorie A. Beale, The Modernist Enterprise: French Elites and the Threat of Modernity, 1900-1940 (Stanford, Calif., 1999), 11-47. Studying the United States, Susan Glenn has drawn attention to the process through which theater, in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, provided a space in which women could investigate possibilities for self-promotion and self-realization.
224. Glenn, Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism (Cambridge, Mass., 2000).
225. From the 1880s in France, as elsewhere, a new kind of advice literature emerged to counsel women on the economic and social management of beauty. It was believed to be especially important for young women to adopt the beauty practices espoused by experts because, as possessors of the intrinsic beauty of young womanhood, they supposedly had a greater chance of prolonging this beauty through body discipline. See, for example, Paul Marrin, La beauté chez l'homme et la femme: Les Moyens de l'acquérir et de l'augmenter, 15th edn. (Paris, 1891);
226. Dr. Luiggi, La Beautyculture (Paris, 1893), 3-5;
227. Y. H. Khamed, Vénus biblion arcanes physiologiques. La Beauté conservée et restituée par la science (Paris, 1899), ii-iv;
228. O. De Jalin, Les Secrets de la beauté (Paris, 1904);
229. Comtesse de Tramar, Que veut la femme? Être jolie, être aimée, et dominer (Paris, 1911), 5-10, 18, 23-24;
230. Fémina Bibliothèque, Pour être belle; Monin, Pour le beau sexe. These practices and the literature that supported them were legitimated through their endorsement by the stars of page, stage, and screen.
231. For more on the extension of fashionable clothing to the girl worker in this period, see Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (Berkeley, Calif., 1985), 77-78, 157. Consciousness of the need for body maintenance was also being raised in other areas at this time and spaces for the cultivation of the body were opened up in the form of hygienic sports clubs.
232. See for example, Alaimo, "Shaping Adolescence," 426;
233. Thiercé, Histoire de l'adolescence 176,
234. Mary Lynn Stewart, For Health and Beauty: Physical Culture for Frenchwomen, 1880s-1930s (Baltimore, Md., 2001), 13;
235. Jacques Thibault, "Les Origines du sport féminin," in Les Athlètes de la république: Gymnastique, sport et idéologie républicaine, Pierre Arnaud, ed. (Toulouse, 1987), 336.
236. Michael Hau's work on the "life reform" movement in Germany and Michael Anton Budd's work on bodybuilding in Britain illustrate similar moves toward "body culture" elsewhere in Europe. Hau, The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany;
237. Michael Anton Budd, The Sculpture Machine: Physical Culture and Body Politics in the Age of Empire (Basingstoke, 1997).
238. One young woman was also offered 300 francs per month by the Gaité-Rochechouart and Divan Japonais simply to make a brief appearance on stage. "Les Muses de départements," Les Débats, July 17, 1921, Fonds Charpentier 361, BHVP;
239. "Representations populaire du couronnment de la muse," Le Progrès du Nord, June 13, 1898, Fonds Charpentier 361, BHVP.
240. "La Doyenne des reines de beauté" BHVP. The Lilloise Muse of 1898 received two return tickets to Paris courtesy of the Compagnie du Chemin de Fer du Nord.
241. "La Fête de la muse - A Lille," Le Réveil du Nord, May 31, 1898, 2.
242. "La Doyenne des reines de beauté," BHVP. Other Muses used the publicity they received to launch successful careers in show business. One became a singer, for example, and another, Geneviève Felix (elected Muse of Montmartre), a little later, became a silent movie actress.
243. "Les Muses de départements," BHVP.
244. "Les Fêtes Desrousseaux," Le Progrès du Nord, June 10, 1898, Fonds Charpentier 361, BHVP.
245. Letter, Hélène Raumes to Gustave Charpentier, May 30, 1948, Fonds Charpentier 432, BHVP.
246. "Mazas ou Charenton - éléction de la muse de Paris," L'Intransigeant, July 12, 1898.
247. "La Muse de Paris," La Fronde, July 11, 1898, 1.
248. "Les Fêtes Desrousseaux," BHVP.
249. Segalen and Chamarat, "La Rosière et la 'Miss,'" 49;
250. "Gustave Charpentier, gloire nationale," La France du Sud-Ouest, July 3, 1930 Fonds Charpentier 318, BHVP;
251. "Le Couronnement de la Muse," Fonds Charpentier 442, BHVP. The last performance of the crowning ceremony to which reference is made in the Fonds Charpentier was held in Liévin on June 23, 1963.
252. On the "moderate" and "consensual" turn of the French suffrage movement (centering around the Union française pour le suffrage des femmes) see Hause, Women's Suffrage and Social Politics, 132-45;
253. McMillan, France and Women, 215.
254. The decline of the couronnement from its prewar heights coincided with what has been seen as the rolling back of French feminism during and after World War I. Perrot, "The New Eve and the Old Adam," 59-60.
255. Berlanstein, Daughters of Eve, 161.
256. Accampo, "Gender, Social Policy and the Formation of the Third Republic," 10, 21-22.
257. The pushing of beauty norms down the age spectrum was a phenomenon witnessed in European and North American society beginning in the late nineteenth century and developing to new levels of prevalence after World War I. The figure of the modern, young beauty reemerged with striking monotony in such forms as the "postcard girl," the "flapper," the "Gibson girl," "Miss World," and many others. Richards, Commodity Culture of Victorian Britain, 240-44.
258. Francine Muel-Dreyfus, Vichy and the Eternal Feminine: A Contribution to a Political Sociology of Gender Kathleen A. Johnson, trans. (Durham, N.C., 2001), 313.