H-France Review Vol. 1 (May 2001), No. 13
Paul Metzner. Crescendo of the Virtuoso: Spectacle, Skill,
and Self-Promotion in Paris during the Age of Revolution. Studies
in the History of Society and Culture, no. 30. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1998. xii + 385 pp. Notes, index. $50.00 (cl.), ISBN
0-520-20684-3.
David M. Gordon. Liberalism and Social Reform: Industrial Growth
and Progressiste Politics in France, 1880-1914. Contributions to
the Study of World History, no. 55. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press,
1996. 226 pp. Notes, appendix, bibliography, index. $65.00 (cl.), ISBN
0-313-29811-4.
Asti Hustvedt, Ed., The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and
Perversion from Fin-de-Siècle France. New York: Zone Books, 1998.
1088 pp. Notes. $58.00 (cl.), ISBN 1-890951-06-4; $32.00 (pb.), ISBN 1-890951-07-2.
Review by Robin Walz, University of Alaska Southeast.
The three books under review share little in terms of their content.
The historical actors range from post-Revolutionary virtuoso chess masters,
chefs, detectives, musicians, and automaton builders in Paul Metzner’s
Crescendo of the Virtuoso, to early Third Republic progressive
liberal industrialists in David M. Gordon’s Liberalism and Social Reform,
and finally to a cross-section of fin-de-siècle decadent authors assembled
in Asti Husvedt’s The Decadent Reader. Neither are the books linked
by period, as together they span the entirety of the long nineteenth century,
from the French Revolution to the eve of the Great War. Yet each engages,
in ways particular to its subject, the figure of the virtuoso, a “self-made
man” whose individual expertise and skill helped define an era.
In French history and criticism, individualism generally tends to be
subsumed by social, political, or aesthetic considerations. Under the
Napoleonic Code, individual legal status was established primarily through
the family unit. Beneath the “great men” of French political and intellectual
history, individual lives are most often examined socially in terms of
class or gender identity. French liberalism is more commonly associated
with the constitutionalism of Benjamin Constant and Alexis de Tocqueville’s
critique of democracy, than the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham or John
Stuart Mill. The nineteenth-century French cultural canon tends to elevate
creative genius, through its romantic, realist, bohemian, and avant-garde
pantheon, above the aesthetic innovations of more commercially-driven
artists, writers, and musicians (although, under the sign of Walter Benjamin,
this has been changing somewhat in the past decade). In short, the general
preference has been more to situate individual lives upon a matrix of
categories rather than to pursue individualism in the American or British
mold where the autonomous individual constitutes his own social foundation.
The issue of whether individuals are independent historical actors or
individuated symptoms of larger social and historical processes constitutes
a critical thread that winds through and binds these quite diverse books
to a very broadly shared historical fabric. Each in its way emphasizes
the unique contribution of individuals toward creating their historical
eras, rather than merely being expressive of them. These are not great
men of politics, aristocratic salonnières, or romantic geniuses
but an array of unlikely heroes who achieved success and influence largely
based upon their skills of technical manipulation, self-promotion, tenacity,
and audacity. Yet while these books do a wonderful job of bringing individual
lives and accomplishments to the forefront, in some measure they do so
at the expense of suppressing the complexity of the historical milieus
engendered in each case. Cultural and social historians will find each
of these books valuable resources, rich in information and ideas, but
may find the material most useful when applied to issues and questions
beyond those framed by their respective authors.
Of the three books under review, Metzner’s Crescendo of the Virtuoso
displays the greatest breadth in historical scope and claims. Set within
the Age of Revolution, from the late eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth
centuries, Metzner focuses upon Paris as a center of public spectacles
performed by technically accomplished virtuosos. Beyond technological
innovations in such serious realms as chemistry, physics, biology, archaeology,
and industry, Metzner extends “the cultivation and demonstration of technical
skill” (p. 6) into such diverse and obscure realms as chess, cuisine,
criminal detection, solo musical instrument performance, and automaton
magic shows. Beyond mere entertainment value, for Metzner such virtuoso
performances produced a “new self-centered worldview” (p. 7) that valued
personal achievement over tradition and social hierarchy, a historical
development that he regards as the logical outcome of this age of political,
economic, and social revolutions. In this milieu, the virtuosos themselves
were the architects of this self-centered worldview, through demonstrating
their superior abilities in “spectacle-making, the cultivation of technical
skill, [and] self promotion” (p. 9). Further, these spectacles of technical
prowess were championed by an entertainment-consuming public. Theirs was
the age of virtuosity, with the historical good fortune of being recognized
as such.
Crescendo of the Virtuoso divides into two sections. “Some Models
of Excellence” charts the lives and accomplishments of the virtuosos,
particularly chess master François-André Danican Philidor (1726-1795),
chef de cuisine Marie-Antoine Carême (1783-1833), Sûreté detective
Eugène-François Vidocq (1775-1857), violinist Niccolò Paganini (1782-1840),
pianist Franz List (1811-1886), and magician Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin
(1805-1871). In each instance, Metzner carefully charts the shift from
aristocratic to bourgeois sensibilities surrounding these activities,
from Old Regime diversions to Enlightenment idealization, and finally
to post-Revolutionary virtuosity. In the historical transition from novelty
to commercialization, virtuosity was given a second cultural life through
publications; chess guides, grande cuisine cookbooks, the mémoires
of Vidocq’s exploits, newspaper reviews of Paganini’s and Lists’s performances,
and Robert-Houdin’s exposés of gambling and magic tricks. In addition,
these individuals were exemplary models for the public, commercially democratic
in advertising the attainment of excellence through the mastery of skills.
In the second half of the book, “Some Modes of Excelling,” Metzner establishes
three modalities within the larger social and cultural terrain that fostered
virtuosity. Metzner sees the “publicanization” of virtuoso activities
from private into public realms as synonymous with the “Republicanizing”
of France, with both staging spectacles for ever widening and more distant
audiences and then reenacting these spectacles through publicity and publications.
Through the “exaltation of technical skill,” the Old Regime notion of
privilège was transformed into the values of technocracy: desacralization,
secularization, and instrumental manipulation. Finally, the “ballooning
of the self,” the self-aggrandizement of Rousseau’s amour-propre
(self-love), not only promoted individualism, but fostered the égoïsme
of nation and empire as well. Through these new modalities, Metzner concludes,
“The Age of Revolution validated virtuosity” (p. 291).
The accomplishment of Crescendo of the Virtuoso lies in Metzner’s
attempt to achieve a kind of grand historical synthesis, a highly commendable
enterprise in an academic profession often criticized for overspecialization
and inaccessibility to a generally educated audience. This yields a stimulating
intellectual and social history that bridges high and low cultural realms.
Diversions and entertainment are raised to the level of Enlightenment
philosophy, and historical change advances through spectacle, skill, and
self-promotion. Yet the sources of historical agency are somewhat nebulous
in Metzner’s analysis. There is a built-in assumption that the “Age of
Revolution” inherently promoted individualism, commercial enterprise,
invention, celebrity, spectatorship, democracy, careers open to skill
and talent. A fair amount of scholarship on the political culture of the
French Revolution in the past two decades has emphasized, by contrast,
contradictions and contingencies in the formation of bourgeois and revolutionary
values from this era. The social and political meaning of the revolution
shifted through its various phases and eventually yielded a synthesis
that alloyed liberalism with family traditions and social hierarchies
rather than being in opposition to them.[1] Further, a “self-centered
world view” may be explicitly anti-Republican and anti-democratic, as
the decadent authors gathered in Hustvedt’s collection attest. To infuse
large historical process with general intent is tricky business. Scholars
of Metzner’s book will likely find the lives of the virtuosos fascinating
and the modalities of excellence intellectually provocative, but may look
elsewhere for interpretive frameworks.
David M. Gordon’s Liberalism and Social Reform features a different
set of virtuosos: progressive liberal industrialists. Gordon explores
the careers of textile magnate Eugène Motte (1860-1932) and iron and steel
manufacturers Georges Claudinon (1849-1930), Antoine Arbel (1855-1933),
and François de Wendel (1874-1948), and he charts the ways in which these
enormously successful industrialists became leading Progressiste
politicians. For Gordon, these individuals constitute an elite who embodied
“the heroic spirit of French industrial capitalism” (p. 2) in the two
decades before the Great War of 1914. Through their individual “dynamism
and audacity” (p. 7) and skills at coalition building, these four industrialists
turned progressivist politicians “contributed to the evolution of French
liberalism into a modern political philosophy capable of winning popular
support in the age of the masses” (p. 26). With an entrepreneurial drive
that overcame the sluggishness of more cautious businessmen (bourgeoisie
fainéante), and a political acumen that sought out compromise when
Socialist, Radical, and anti-Republican nationalist agendas remained more
intransigent, the moderating leadership of Motte, Claudinon, Arbel, and
Wendel led the French economy and politics toward “a first, and very tentative,
step toward the modern welfare state” (p. 27).
In historiographic terms, Gordon proposes a corrective to accounts that
treat this era as one of economic and political stalemate, characterized
by a broad but weak collection of republican parties caught between radical
socialists and anti-republican nationalists, with industrialists typically
cast into a conservative and reactionary role.[2] In sharp distinction
to this interpretation, Gordon adopts political historian Douglas Johnson’s
position that “the motor of French political life is not so much an oscillation
between Left and Right, as a small, almost insignificant movement between
Left-center and Right-center” (quoted in Gordon, p. 17). From such a vantage
point, the careers of these four Progressiste politicians are regarded
as the specific individuals who successfully negotiated that crucial political
center of activity. The substantive chapters of the book seek to demonstrate
this through reconstructing the political careers of these four men in
great detail. In the conclusion, Gordon notes the historical irony that,
through two decades of political compromises necessitated by the democratic
process, free-market and free-labor Progressiste industrialists
arrived at a common purpose with formerly revolutionary Socialists of
promoting social progress through free-market economic productivity.
In contrast to the large historical waves ridden by Metzner’s virtuosos,
Gordon’s account is detailed to the level of specific election campaigns.
In his own fashion, however, Gordon fails to make the case that the successful
manipulation of the political center was due solely to the efforts of
his four Progressiste industrialists. When political developments
favor economic liberalism, Gordon attributes success to the political
prowess of these individuals. Conversely, when their agendas are thwarted,
failure is credited to circumstances beyond their personal control. But
such generosity in political fortunes is not to be extended to leading
Radicals or Opportunists, the other principal actors shifting between
“Left-center and Right-center.” Socialists are criticized for altogether
wrong-headed political strategies, with Jules Guèsde portrayed in particularly
unpleasant terms (“a vivid figure with long hair, a sickly pallor, and
a black beard... the most intransigent of the French Marxists,” p. 22).
Without a common framework for judging either individual politicians or
the activities of various political parties, the extensive level of detail
provided by Gordon’s book is impressive, but inconclusive.
The preference given to these particular political elites as agents of
historical change may be attributed, in part, to Gordon’s explicitly neo-liberal
economic perspective. The opening pages of the book proclaim the failure
of socialism to provide social justice in our contemporary age, and Gordon
champions the capitalist marketplace as providing the economic foundation
for social welfare. The development of the latter, Gordon emphasizes,
was due primarily to political compromises between these Progressiste
politicians with Radicals and begrudging Socialists. But ultimately, social
justice takes a back seat to the capitalist marketplace: “Progressiste
victories strengthened capitalism by helping to limit government interference
in the economy” (p. 190). Yet it is reasonable to question whether capitalist
economic growth in twentieth-century Europe has been achieved through
a lack of governmental intervention, and it remains an open question whether
market-driven economic growth will continue to sustain and promote the
social welfare state.[3] Progressiste industrialists may have been
skilled individual politicians, but their economic prescience and their
status as world-historical actors may be overdrawn in Gordon’s book.
The literary virtuosos collected in The Decadent Reader share
absolutely nothing with Gordon’s industrialists, save a temporal coincidence.
Railing against scientific progress, bourgeois respectability, and democracy,
decadent authors reveled in an artificial paradise of reveries (drug induced
and not), the poetics of necrophilia, and the cult of oneself to the point
of self-annihilation. Self-stylized aristocrats, and sometimes by inheritance
actually so, they tended to be anti-democratic in politics, misanthropic
and misogynistic in social sentiments, flamboyant in lifestyle, male in
gender preference, and insolent in literary expression. Not surprisingly,
the term “decadence” has typically been cast in pejorative terms, the
fin de siècle at its sickest, as expressed in Max Nordau’s 1893
polemic, Entartung (“Degeneration,” French translation Dégénerescence,
1894).
Literary assessments of decadent authors have tended to be disparaging
as well. As Asti Hustvedt emphasizes in the general introduction, “decadence
continues to suffer from a bad reputation in French literary studies.
Works that fall under the decadent label have been, for the most part,
considered marginal, inferior, or unreadable” (p. 12). As an artistic
and intellectual movement, decadence has been pushed to the periphery
of the French literary canon despite some significant scholarly attention
given to the subject.[4] The situation has been even worse in English,
where most readers’ knowledge of decadent literature has been limited
to a few works, such as Against Nature by J.-K. Huysmans (1848-1907)
and The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1854-1900).
The Decadent Reader seeks to redress this situation, in part,
by making a broader selection of decadent works available to the English
reader, much for the first time. Some of the authors, like Jean Lorrain
(1855-1906), Catulle Mendès (1841-1909), Joséphin Péladan (1858-1918),
and the Rachilde (1860-1953), were strongly associated with the decadent
movement at the time but have suffered from relative neglect since. Others
are not commonly thought of as decadents, such as late romantic Jules
Barbey d’Aurevilly (1808-1889), realist Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893),
naturalist Octave Mirbeau (1848-1917), and symbolists Villiers de l’Isle-Adam
(1838-1889), Jean Moréas (1856-1910), Remy de Gourmont (1858-1915). Yet
the inclusion of such a wide array of individual authors serves to demonstrate
that decadent ideas were widely diffused throughout late nineteenth-century
French literature. The themes represented in these decadent writings are
diverse as well, stories not only of the supernatural and occult, but
of science fiction, romance, and “slice of life” sensational crimes (faits
divers).
The assembled authors and selections are introduced by leading French
literary critics Emily Apter, Janet Beizer, Charles Bernheimer, Jennifer
Birkett, Peter Brooks, Asti Hustvedt, Françoise Meltzer, Richard Sieburth,
and Barbara Spackman. Third Republic historians unfamiliar with current
trends in literary criticism may be perplexed by some of these introductions,
which repeatedly invoke the trope of Charcot’s hysterical female body,
interpret sexual perversion as psychological fetish, and emphasize textual
indeterminacy. Other introductions are biographical and contextual, and
will no doubt be more pleasing to many historians. Yet historians of fin-de-siècle
France may derive the greatest benefit from this collection by removing
the individual selections from the somewhat internal discourse of these
literary critics and placing them upon other cultural terrain. The cases
of Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s The
Future Eve illustrate the point.
In the introduction to Monsieur Vénus, Janet Beizer rejects Maurice
Barrès preface to the novel (included in this translation) as a “privileged
means of access to Rachilde” (242). Barrès focuses upon the sexual inversions,
and thereby perversions, of the novel in which a young, artistic, and
aristocratic woman named Raoule de Vénérande is Monsieur Vénus, and her
mistress is a young, male, flower maker named Jacques Silvert (called
“Jaja,” Zsa-Zsa). Barrès attributes such a scenario to the “virginal”
imagination of young Rachilde (she wrote the novel at age twenty), which
he regards as “natural” evidence of woman’s monstrous nature and expressive
of the maladie du siècle “made up of an excessive nervous fatigue
and a pride hitherto unknown” (p. 273). Beizer eschews Barrès’s perspective
in favor of her own deconstruction of Monsieur Vénus as a “hystericized
text” in itself. But social and cultural historians may find Barrès’s
introduction provocative in terms of fin-de-siècle fears of national
degeneration, and Rachilde’s novel may provide historians of gender with
a useful supplement to discussions of nineteenth-century masculinity,
homosexuality, “tribades,” and “pederasts.”[5]
Villers de l’Isle-Adam’s The Future Eve, about an artificial woman
invented by Thomas Edison, similarly provides greater possibilities for
the cultural and intellectual historian than the introduction initially
suggests. Hustvedt focuses his critique upon the way in which late ninteenth-century
French writers and scientists formulated the “woman problem” in terms
of a hysterical body: “Jean-Martin Charcot and Villiers’s Edison share
a conception of flawed womanhood and the desire that springs from it:
to make a new, artificial Eve” (p. 499). Over the course of the introduction,
he also notes sympathies between The Future Eve and La Mettrie’s
L’homme-machine (p. 504), mechanical reproduction in print and
photographic media (p. 507) and wax and plaster models (p. 509), yet he
always interprets these connections in terms of the hysterical body. Cultural
and intellectual historians may develop these connections differently,
relating Villers’s novel to commodification, consumerism, modernist shifts
in perception, spectatorship, and the transformation of everyday life
at the end of the nineteenth century.[6] As a case in point, Metzner devotes
a portion of Crescendo of the Virtuoso to Robert-Houdin and automatons,
a chapter rich in considerations about the interrelationships between
humans and machines without a single reference to Charcot. And successfully
so.
In circuitous ways, these examples suggest that there may be inherent
limitations to thinking about history through individuals, or in historical
interpretations that move directly from the particular to the general.
The authors and contributors do magnificent jobs in their respective books
of highlighting the influence of highly accomplished individual performers,
politicians, and writers on nineteenth-century French society and culture.
These virtuosos were not simply molded by circumstance; each made a unique
imprint upon the age. At the same time, context is everything. The authors
set their respective historical actors upon historical, or semiotic, fields
articulated by themselves. Setting these same subjects within different
contextual fields will engage alternative mediating processes, and will
thereby shift the meaning as well. Historians are encouraged to do so.
NOTES
[1] See, for example, Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the
French Revolution, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Durham: Duke University
Press 1991); Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary
France (New York: Norton, 1996); Lynn Hunt The Family Romance of
the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992)
and Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984); and Michelle Perrot, ed., From
the Fires of Revolution to the Great War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer,
vol. 4 of A History of Private Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap/Harvard
University Press, 1990).
[2] Specifically, Stanford Elwitt, The Making of the Third Republic:
Class and Politics in France, 1868-1884 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1975) and The Third Republic Defended: Bourgeois
Reform in France, 1880-1914 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1986); Stanley Hoffman, “Paradoxes of the French Political Culture”
in In Search of France (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963);
and Herman Lebovics, The Alliance of Iron and Wheat in the Third French
Republic, 1960-1914 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1988).
[3] See, for example, numerous works by another David M. Gordon, a labor
economist at the New School for Social Research, whose single and co-authored
works in the past decade include Economics and Social Justice: Essays
on Power, Labor, and Institutional Change (Northampton, Mass.: Edward
Elgar, 1998) and After the Waste Land: A Democratic Economics for the
Year 2000 (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1990). My thanks to economist
William S. Brown for pointing out the contrary and erroneous name coincidence
between the two David M. Gordons. For a contemporary socialist perspective
critical of the liberal economic and social policies in Western Europe
favored by Gordon, see Daniel Singer, Whose Millennium? Theirs or Ours?
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999).
[4] Major works cited by Hustvedt are Jean Pierrot, The Decadent Imagination,
trans. Derek Coltman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); Jane
Birkett, The Sins of the Fathers (London: Quartet Books, 1986);
Barbara Spackman, Decadent Genealogies (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1989); and David Weir, Decadence and the Making of Modernism
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995).
[5] See, for example, Carolyn Dean, The Frail Social Body: Pornography,
Homosexuality, and Other Fantasies in Interwar France (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2000); Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant T. Regan, Jr.,
eds., Homosexuality in Modern France (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1996); and Robert Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern
France: The Medical Concept of National Decline (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1984); and Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in
France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
[6] See, for example, Christoph Asendorf, Batteries of Life: On the
History of Things and Their Perception in Modernity, trans. Don Reneau
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Leo Charney and Vanessa
R. Schwartz, eds., Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley:
University of California Prss, 1995); and Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular
Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-SIècle Paris (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1998).
Robin Walz
University of Alaska Southeast
rwalz@uas.alaska.edu.
Copyright © 2001 by the Society for French Historical Studies, all rights reserved. The Society for French Historical Studies permits the electronic distribution for nonprofit educational purposes, provided that full and accurate credit is given to the author, the date of publication, and its location on the H-France website. No republication or distribution by print media will be permitted without permission. For any other proposed uses, contact the Editor-in-Chief of H-France.
H-France Review Vol. 1 (May 2001), No. 13
ISSN 1553-9172
