H-France Review Vol. 2 (June 2002), No. 41
Gabriel P. Weisberg, Ed., Montmartre and the Making of Mass
Culture. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 2001.
xvii + 296 pp. Illustrations, notes, selected bibliography. $30.00 US
(pb). ISBN 0-8135-3009-1.
Review by Jerrold Seigel, New York University.
Although scholars and writers have given attention to many features
of life and culture in Montmartre during the decades between 1880 and
1914, a conference held at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in 1999
was organized to probe a "largely unexplored" aspect of life on and
around the Butte, "the nature of popular culture as it was cultivated
in Montmartre and...its continued significance in the postmodern
period" (p. 3). The resulting volume contains ten essays, plus an
introduction by the editor and a brief foreword by Karal Ann Marling.
[1] The various authors provide much interesting information about the
subject, some of it new, giving a broad portrait of the variety of
diversions, satisfactions, and dangers visitors sought or found in the
years when the Chat Noir cabaret and its imitators, as well as the
Church of the Sacré-Coeur, were relatively new, and when the region was
the subject of memorable depictions and advertisements by some of its
famous habitués and associates, including Toulouse-Lautrec,
Seurat, and Picasso.
Getting a group of scholars animated by their separate and diverse
interests to focus on a topic assigned by a conference organizer or an
editor is not easy, and it has not been accomplished with total success
here. Most of the contributors dutifully mention the question posed by
the editor, but their chief concerns lie elsewhere. John Kim
Munholland studies the views about Montmartre held by Third Republic
politicians, Elizabeth K. Menon examines images of women, Jill Miller
deals with bourgeois responses to lower-class poverty and alcoholism,
Richard Sonn with the anarchist circles and activities. All the other
writers, including the editor, deal with topics in art history or
cultural history that may bear on popular themes, but have only
peripheral connections to mass culture. Moreover, Raymond Jonas, whose
essay provides the most interesting perspective from which to think
about mass culture, calls into question the general assumptions
about it shared by most of the others.
Perhaps it would be too much to ask such a book to address some of the
many questions about popular culture that have arisen in debates about
modern media and their impact on audiences and consumers: whether
popular culture and mass culture are the same thing or different (the
two are never clearly distinguished in the book), whether popular
culture is dulling or invigorating, whether it provides needed
satisfactions and even forms of collective participation, or instead
manipulates desires, draws people into intensified forms of private
experience, and thereby weakens civic involvement. Although they do
not take up such issues, the contributors to the collection seem to
agree that mass culture is a good thing, and that Montmartre deserves
to be celebrated for providing an early exemplification of it. A chief
reason for this positive attitude appears to be the conviction shared
by most of them that popular culture, or at least the version of it
developed in Montmartre, was and is in some way "oppositional."
Thus the editor tells us that "the earliest moderns on the butte
systematically dismantled the world around them," reconstructing it in
their own way, and that Montmartre became a breeding ground for "what
today is termed "popular culture" because it was "literally on the
fringes of Paris," so that it escaped official control, and "became an
area where traditional boundaries were blurred (one of the primary
conditions considered today to be indicative of postmodernism)." He
adds that the middle-class patrons who frequented the area
were "compelled to experience the perverse pleasures of Montmartre and
it was their presence that stimulated a quest to provide ever more
shocking entertainment, frequently at their own expense-both
morally and financially." That avant-garde and bohemian locales shared
the heights with the new church of Sacré-Coeur "added another layer
of boundary-blurring" (pp. 3-4). Howard G. Lay thinks that, whatever
happened later, around 1880 "popular forms of signification, deftly
deployed, still seemed capable of doing oppositional damage to social,
cultural, and political authority" (p. 150). Elena Cueto-Asín believes
that middle-class people who witnessed the Chat Noir's shadow theater
found themselves in "a space originally designed to exclude
them"(p.244). And Richard Sonn holds that the "authentic bohemians" and
artists who made Montmartre what it was were animated by "a spirit of
rebellion" that was not invalidated by "the commercial appropriation of
bohemia" (p. 140). Leaving aside the question of whether either
modernist dismantling of traditional forms or post-modernist boundary-
blurring can serve as criteria for identifying or understanding mass
culture (relations between avant-garde practitioners and consumers of
popular culture have often been tense), the book mainly raises issues
about what it means to see Montmartre as "oppositional," and in what
way the answer to this question can help to understand the evolution
and meaning of mass culture.
Parisian pleasure-seekers had long flocked to Montmartre, some for the
rural atmosphere and fresh air (that powered the various moulins
converted to gathering-places), others for the cheap wine made possible
by the region's location outside the gates where the octroi or
city excise tax was collected. During the Second Empire locales like
the Moulin de la Galette drew a large mixed crowd, famously depicted by
Impressionist painters. But a new phase in the quarter's history began
in the 1880s, sparked in part by the opening of the Chat Noir cabaret
in 1881. The Chat Noir became the model for a large number of other
establishments, most famously Aristide Bruant's Le Mirliton and the
Lapin Agile (older, but reconceived somewhat on the Chat Noir model)
where Picasso and his friends sometimes hung out. These were the spots
that drew Parisians in search of the bohemian Montmartre that is the
main subject of the present book. They were colorful, sometimes
riveting places. Performances of various kinds provided accompaniments
to drink and talk, many involving dramatic reading or singing, as well
as the famous pantomime shadow theater that performed in the Chat Noir
and other locales. Drama was often present in the settings (one was
fitted out like a jail, one prefigured Heaven and another's entrance
represented the mouth of Hell), and patrons were drawn into drama too,
at the Chat Noir treated with exaggerated, caricatured respect, at Le
Mirliton directly assaulted with the insults that darkly glimmered
beneath the Chat Noir's opposite style. Various varieties of sex were
available in and around some of these places, and even those who did
not seek it may have felt the frisson of its closeness,
magnified by the presence of pimps and petty criminals driven by
different passions.
That such a world was in some way marginal, occupying the repressed
borders of the organized, respectable daytime life led by most of the
cabarets' patrons, seems clear enough. But that world emerged out of a
particular history, one that remains essentially untold in the book
under review.[2] The Chat Noir was founded by two friends, Rodolphe
Salis and Emile Goudeau. Salis, who put up the capital and ran the
business, is often mentioned. Goudeau hardly appears in the book at
all, yet it was he who conceived the original model for the place.
Goudeau had led what he himself described as a bohemian life mostly in
the Latin Quarter during the 1860s and 1870s, but like many young men
with literary ambitions and limited talent before him, he ended up
seeking an escape from it. The exit he found was an imaginative one,
involving the formation of a club aimed at making young poets and
writers known to society at large through public readings in cafés.
Goudeau called his original locale the Club des Hydropathes; its
members included a number of people who would later be important in
Montmartre, including André Gill, Alphonse Allais, and Jules Jouy.
Alongside the readings, which attracted large crowds, the Hydropathes
published a paper, each issue featuring some member of the group, all
in pursuit of Goudeau's aim of making writers and artists known to the
ordinary bourgeois whose purchases of books and images were required to
sustain their careers.
In broad terms Goudeau's project was to organize cultural consumption at a moment when the old system of patronage was being swallowed up in new social relations-the growth of
Paris, the emergence of nouvelles couches sociales, political
democratization (Goudeau saw a link between the Hydropathes, founded in
1878, and the political crisis of the previous year)-all contributing
to a larger and as yet little-understood market for all kinds of
goods. His "system" (as he called it) had much in common with other
contemporary attempts to organize consumption, including department
stores (which similarly sought to form a public by mixing culture and
commerce), and the attempt by art dealers such as Paul Durand-Ruel to
educate lookers and buyers to appreciate new styles of painting
through exhibitions and publications. Richard Sonn observes
interestingly that even fin-de-siècle anarchism was devoted to
publicity-including "the deed" as a form of it (p. 138).
When Salis and Goudeau founded the Chat Noir in 1881, it was on the
model of the Hydropathes. The cabaret, like the society, had its
own newspaper and Goudeau became the editor (no one in the collection
under review mentions this). From the beginning, then, the aim was to
combine entertainment with publicity for the poets and artists
associated with the cabaret, and their works were on sale there. The
quasi-commercial inspiration of the new Montmartre culture was
therefore apparent from the very beginning. An early article in the
Chat Noir paper referred to one of the department stores, Les
grands magasins du Louvre, as a "fairy palace." What such a place had
in common with the cabaret was that both promoted their causes through
some form of the liberation of fantasy-about sex, social position, or
forbidden life-styles in the case of the cabarets, about foreign
places, luxury, or limitless possession in the case of the stores, as
Zola made clear in Au Bonheur des dames. Given this background,
it is far off the mark to claim as Elena Cueto-Asín does that the Chat
Noir was "an attempt to recuperate public space by excluding or
alienating the middle class that had imposed itself and its values of
exclusivity on the social order at large" (p. 230). Other contributors
to Montmartre and the Making of Mass Culture make similar
pronouncements. Some of them butt up against the limits to the
oppositionality they claim for the quarter's culture, but without
really coming to terms with what they find.
When Howard G. Lay (whose intelligent essay contains some powerful and stimulating readings of visual images, notably Seurat's Chahut)quotes a writer in Le
Rappel who described what went on at the Lapin Agile as "Nous
payons; mais nous chantons; c'est une révolte qui ne casse rien, et qui
nous suffit" (We pay; but we sing: it's a harmless revolt, and that's
enough for us), he glosses it by saying "what better way to describe
the chemistry of oppositionality." But surely the most such a
sentiment harbors of oppositionality is a kind of contained nostalgia
for it (a feeling Goudeau retained when he put bohemian life behind him
and founded the Hydropathes). What this quote really exhibits is
ambivalence, an affective embrace of the opportunity bourgeois life
affords to live simultaneously inside and outside its boundaries. A
similar observation seems required in regard to John Kim Munholland's
presentation of Montmartre as "a delinquent community." Munholland's
modelfor such delinquency is a roomful of schoolboys who throw spit
wads at a teacher whose back is turned. That is disrespectful behavior
to be sure, but those who engage in it go forth-in the large majority-
to find their stable place in respectable society soon enough. In fact
Munholland recognizes this more clearly than some of his fellow
writers, noting that the Third Republic's easing of regulations on
places where alcohol was served actually helped to make Montmartre
culture possible, and he sensibly concludes that the quarter never
posed any kind of serious threat to the regime or its values.
Many contributors to the book refer to the locales of Montmartre as
bohemian, but most of them do so in a one-sided way that casts a veil
over an important aspect of the story. For them, bohemianism means a
revolt against bourgeois restriction, a quasi-anarchist search for
liberation from the strait-laced, disciplined, ordered ideals of middle-
class existence. There were (and are) surely bohemians who fit this
description. But French bohemia in the nineteenth century contained
another side, a recurring criticism of bourgeois life not for being
overly rigid and confining, but for being too soft, indulgent, and
corrupt. If there was an uninhibited bohemia there was also a kind of
puritan one, exemplified in the group that called itself the "water-
drinkers" during the 1840s (they appear, recognized as heirs of the
ancient Stoics, in Henry Murger's classic tales and plays), in the
fiercely moralistic Fourierist apostle Jean Journet (who frequented
some of the same locales as Murger and Baudelaire), and in some of the
student groups that published short-lived newspapers in the last decade
of the Second Empire. Their bohemia was not a place of indulgence, but
of serious, devoted work. In this two-sidedness, bohemia mirrored the
bourgeois society outside, from which it sprung, and whose moral
alternatives some of its denizens sought to develop in purified fashion.
This second current in bohemianism was present at the Chat Noir too, in
the person of such performers as Maurice Rollinat, the quasi-mystical
enthusiast for Baudelaire (whose poetry he read there; his own writings
would be an important inspiration for Rodin's Gates of Hell, as
Debora Silverman has shown) and the fanatical Catholic Leon Bloy, who
brought a tone of dour, repentant spirituality to the newspaper and the
café. Janet Whitmore is the only writer in the current collection to
recognize the presence of such concerns in the Chat Noir's mix, but the
point is dulled by being made in an essay devoted to "absurdist
humor." Elizabeth Menon notes that Willette, a Chat Noir fixture, gave
warnings about the dangers of prostitution in the quarter, but she
thinks they were stirred up only by an increased brazenness in the
behavior of street women.
Beyond these missed opportunities for a more complex understanding of
its subject, errors of misspelling and odd translation periodically crop
up in the book. Lay twice misspells Eugène Vermersch's name as
Vermesch (pp. 157-58.) Whitmore weirdly renders Bloy's self-description
as "Un Trappiste Raté" as "an ineffectual Trappist Monk" (p. 217).
Menon strangely mistranslates one cartoon caption, "Méfie-toi camerade,
c'est pas de l'amour, c'est la vache enragée" as "Trust me... It's
not Love, it's a Wild Ride" (pp. 47-49); méfie-toi is about
the opposite of trust, and la vache enragée refers to
misèreor hunger.
A lone contribution to the book suggests a different approach to
Montmartre as a site of mass culture, Raymond A. Jonas's essay on the
Sacré-Coeur and the pilgrimages made to it. Other writers in the book
mention the presence of the new church, to be sure, largely as a target
of anti-Catholic sentiment. Munholland points out that it was the
church that made the quarter suspect as harboring rightist as well as
leftist opposition to the Republic, and both Sonn and Jonas refer to
Steinlen's 1900 lithograph of Liberty leading an unchained people in an
assault on the church. But what makes Jonas's contribution so
interesting and suggestive is his demonstration that in many ways
pilgrimage to the church was itself a form of mass culture, and one
with surprising ties to more secular ones. Montmartre had long been a
site of pilgrimage (none of the contributors to the collection mention
this). Jonas shows not only that the annual rhythm of the pilgrimage to
Sacré-Coeur followed that of other travel in France, peaking in the
summer months, but easily the most popular year for pilgrimage, and the
one that produced by far the largest number of donations was 1889, when
the Universal Exposition that celebrated the centenary of the
Revolution brought many visitors to Paris. Jonas imagines pilgrims
leaving the church after a sermon on the terrible consequences of the
Revolution for Catholic France, and descending to enjoy the Exposition,
where the glories of modern secular civilization were celebrated. That
some of these pilgrims might have been drawn to other features of
Montmartre culture (for instance the folkloric processions, even some
of the modernized copies or parodies of them) there seems no way to
know. Jonas is probably correct that there was little overlap between
the pilgrims and the patrons of the cabarets, but given the presence of
figures like Rollinat and Bloy in the latter, perhaps we should not be
overly dogmatic in denying it. In any case Jonas is surely right that,
already in the years before 1914 (as today), the church "so animated
local activity that, over time, Montmartre came to depend upon the
Sacré-Coeur as much as the Sacré-Coeur depended upon it" (p. 111).
Here we come to the basis of a different understanding of Montmartre
as a place where some of the lineaments of modern mass culture began to
make an early appearance. But from this point of view oppositionality
or marginality no longer helps much in recognizing the phenomenon in
question. There may be a sense in which traditional religion
constitutes a kind of remonstrance against modern life, a way of
holding out against it, but Jonas's evidence suggests that the pilgrims
to Sacré-Coeur could be Catholic and modern at the same time. Such a
mix of tradition and modernity is visible in many constituents of
contemporary mass culture, from the astrology columns of mass-
circulation newspapers to soap operas, most pop music, and sporting
events. Whatever else modern mass culture may be, it is surely not
single-minded or consistent in its values or attitudes. A much better
word than "opposition" or "protest" to describe its overall stance
toward the dominant features of "official" life would be ambivalence,
just as it is a better term to use about most forms of bohemianism than
alienation or rebellion. That is in the end why Montmartre and
the Making of Mass Culture remains an unsatisfying book. The
contributors seem too caught up in the romance of resistance to have
absorbed the lesson of Jonas's contribution to the symposium where it
originated.
NOTES
[1] The contents: Karal Ann Marling, "Americans in Paris: Montmartre
and the Art of Pop Culture" (Foreword); Gabriel P.
Weisberg, "Montmartre's Lure: An Impact on Mass Culture"
(Introduction); John Kim Munholland, "Republican Order and Republican
Tolerance in Fin-de-Siècle France: Montmartre as a Delinquent
Community"; Elizabeth K. Menon, "Images of Pleasure and Vice: Women on
the Fringe"; Jill Miller, "Les enfants des ivrognes: Concern for
the Children of Montmartre"; Raymond A. Jonas, "Sacred Tourism and
Secular Pilgrimage: Montmartre and the Basilica of Sacré-Coeur"; Richard D. Sonn, "Marginality and Transgression: Anarchy's Subversive
Allure"; Howard G. Lay, "Pictorial Acrobatics"; Michael L. J.
Wilson, "Portrait of the Artist as a Louis XIII Chair"; Janet
Whitmore, "Absurdist Humor in Bohemia"; Elena Cueto-Asín, "The Chat
Noir's Théâtre d'Ombres: Shadow Plays and the Recuperation of Public
Space"; Gabriel P. Weisberg, "Discovering Sites: Enervating Signs for
the Spanish Modernistas."
[2] I take the following account from my book, Bohemian Paris:
Politics, Culture, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830-1930
(New York: Viking Press, 1986; reprinted Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1999), Chapter 8.
Jerrold Seigel
New York University
jes3@nyu.edu
Copyright © 2002 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. 2 (June 2002), No. 41
ISSN 1553-9172
