01 December 2014
The Two Sieges of Paris: more caricatures from the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune
In an earlier earlier blog post I wrote about Napoleon III’s defeat at the hands of the Prussians in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 as illustrated in our last collection of caricatures (Cup. 648.b.8) to be conserved to ensure that it is fit for use. Following the Emperor’s abdication, a provisional Government of National Defence was proclaimed on 4 September 1870, with General Trochu, the military governor of Paris, at its head.
Le plan de Trochu: seule histoire vraie du siège de Paris. Paris: Publication du Journal Le Grelot (Supplément). [27 August 1871].
This satirical print, Trochu’s plan: the only true story of the Siege of Paris, pokes fun at the General’s plan for defending the city from the besieging German troops. The main image shows Trochu clutching his plan and standing on a dish with scuttling rats: as the lyrics in the accompanying song put it, Parisians were reduced to eating ‘rats, mares and mules, and dogs in place of bread’. The smaller image on the left refers to the unsuccessful sorties (the French word means ‘exit’ as well as ‘military sorties’ or breakouts) that Trochu made under pressure of public opinion. The caricature on the right alludes, in an untranslatable pun (‘repasser’ means both to ‘to iron’ and ‘to go back across’), to the sortie of 30 November-2 December when Trochu’s troops crossed the Marne to meet the Prussians, but then had to retreat back across the river. The lyrics, composed cumulatively over time starting with the first verse in early autumn through to the following spring by a group of ‘well-known journalists’, sarcastically attribute every disaster – military defeats, starvation, bombardments and the eventual capitulation of Paris on 28 January 1871 – to deliberate manifestations of Trochu’s plan to be welcomed.
Trochu resigned on 22 January 1871. The new government, elected on 8 February and led by Adolphe Thiers, who had been a minister under King Louis Philippe, now tried to seize the guns that had been used to defend Paris in an attempt to disarm the city. Parisians fought off the government troops and kept their artillery, but this bungled attempt provoked the very rebellion it had been designed to forestall. A Commune (municipal council) to run the city was elected on 28 March, with the red flag as its symbol. The government retreated to Versailles. Its army, defeated by the Prussians, now turned its guns on its own people and encircled Paris. Government troops entered the city in the last week of May in what became known as the ‘semaine sanglante’ (‘bloody week’).
This pro-Commune lithograph shows Parisians fighting on the barricades led by a woman dressed in red (the colour of the Commune), in a pose reminiscent of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People.
Règne de la Terreur. Guerre civile. Insurrection de Paris, du 18 mars 1871 au 28 mai. Ruines de Paris. Les décrets et derniers documents de la Commune. Paris: Imprimerie Beillet, [1871]
By contrast, this anti-Commune print depicts the defeated Commune as a dying ‘pétroleuse’, a scandalously bare-breasted dishevelled harpy, carrying a container of petroleum and brandishing a burning firebrand, with a petrol bomb tucked into the skimpy folds of her dress. She is contrasted with the upstanding female personification of the victorious army. The small vignettes all around the print show burnt-out landmark buildings set alight in the face of the advancing government troops. The incendiaries were alleged to be female revolutionaries dubbed ‘pétroleuses’. The two smaller images show respectively the Commune’s shooting of Generals Lecomte and Thomas, and the execution of the archbishop of Paris, Monseigneur Darboy, depicted raising his arms in a pose recalling the central figure in Goya’s Third of May, in the prison of La Roquette. The archbishop, who was courageous and dignified in the face of the execution squad, became an instant and enduring martyr for the Catholic right. The government’s repression of the Commune was pitiless: an estimated 25,000 communards were killed, a further 12,500 tried and over 4,000 were deported to New Caledonia in the Pacific. Others fled into exile including the caricaturists Faustin and Pilotell, represented in our collection, who forged new careers for themselves in Britain.
The republican government’s bloody repression of the Commune made plain that the Republic did not represent the people as a whole and turned the Commune into an enduring Socialist myth. By the same token it proved to the propertied classes that a republican government was not synonymous with Revolution.
Calliste, L’Irascible…Le Statu Quo! (Bruxelles: Ch. Sacré-Duquesne, [1870-1871])
This satirical lithograph shows President Thiers as a monarchical republican crushing the Commune, symbolised by its red flag, while the moderate Orleanist monarchists, represented by the sons and grandsons of King Louis Philippe, trample on the flag while doing obeisance to him. The legitimist Comte de Chambord, grandson of the Bourbon Charles X, hovers above flying the white flag of the Bourbon monarchy: his rejection of the tricolour as the new national flag scuppered his chances of becoming king and restoring the monarchy.
Teresa Vernon, Lead Curator French Studies
References/Further Reading
Robert Tombs, The Paris Commune, 1871. (London, 1999). YC.1999.a.3641
Gay L. Gullickson, Unruly Women of Paris: Images of the Commune. (Ithaca, 1996). YC.1997.a.1077
Help us raise funds to conserve this collection of caricatures from the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune. By making a contribution, you support our conservators’ efforts to clean, repair, and reback these precious volumes, making them accessible to users both now and in the future. Please make a donation at http://support.bl.uk/page/care-for-collections today; every amount makes a difference .
27 October 2014
Félicien Rops, Baudelaire and skeleton passions
Félicien Rops (1833-1898), painter, printmaker, and illustrator, was active in both his native Belgium and in France, where he moved in 1874; his vast and varied output included landscapes, portraits, and, above all, representations of modern life, often caustic and disconcertingly frank. A leading figure of the Belgian avant-garde, he is perhaps best known for his etchings and book illustrations of the 1870s and 1880s which, with their heady mixture of of erotic (or frankly pornographic) and macabre imagery, make him one of the great figures of the late 19th-century Decadent Movement, and an artist whose work often reflects the themes investigated in the British Library’s current exhibition ‘Terror and Wonder: the Gothic Imagination’.
His friendship with Baudelaire during the two unhappy years (1864-66) the poet spent in Belgium had a profound and lasting influence on Rops, and determined much of his later imagery. Baudelaire went to Belgium in April 1864 to give a series of lectures and to evade his creditors. Already seriously ill, plagued by money worries and a broken man, his despair there manifested itself in ferocious misanthropic attacks on Belgium and the Belgians. Rops was well-known by then as a caricaturist, his lithographs of social and political satires in the style of Daumier and Gavarni published in various Belgian newspapers and magazines, and also for realist subjects inspired by Courbet. Rops was introduced to Baudelaire in May 1864 by Auguste Poulet-Malassis, the poet’s publisher and friend and, like him, in self-imposed exile in Belgium evading his creditors. Rops and Poulet-Malassis were the only persons whose company, in the words of the poet, “lightened [his] sadness in Belgium”.
Images of skeletons are evoked in Baudelaire’s poetry and described in his art criticism (for example Alfred Rethel’s series of engravings Auch ein Todtentanz). They evidently influenced Rops who confided to Poulet-Malassis that he shared the poet’s “…love for the primary crystallographic form: the passion for the skeleton”. He was accordingly commissioned to execute the frontispiece of Les Épaves, a collection of incidental verse by Baudelaire which would include the six censored poems from the 1857 edition of Les Fleurs du mal. Les Épaves was finally published in 1866 with the Rops frontispiece illustrating the complex iconographic programme elaborated by Baudelaire. It depicts a skeleton, symbolising the tree of good and evil, in whose feet grow flowers representing the seven deadly sins. Angels and cherubs are flying high above around a medallion of the poet carried away by a chimera.
Frontispiece by Rops from Baudelaire’s Les Épaves (Paris, 1866). British Library 011483.c.19
This was the first of a series of skeletons that would feature regularly in Rops’ work over the next three decades, most of them direct or indirect evocations of Baudelairian themes, showing the lasting effect of the poet’s work. They include La Mort qui danse (‘Death Dancing’, ca 1865), and the painting La Mort au Bal (‘Death at the Ball’, 1865-75), both of which show a skeleton dressed as a woman and evoke Baudelaire’s poem ‘Danse macabre’. Mors Syphilitica (1875) shows the grim reaper masquerading as a prostitute in a doorway whereas La parodie humaine (1878) shows death hiding behind the elegant appearance of a young fashionable woman (another syphilis warning).
Félicien Rops, La Mort au bal. (1865-75) (Otterlo, Kröller-Müller Museum)
Félicien Rops, La parodie humaine (1878) (Namur, Musée provincial Félicien Rops)
Satan is also sometimes depicted as a skeleton, as in the two versions of Satan semant l’ivraie (‘Satan sowing seeds among the wheat’), one pastoral and one urban. The earlier of these images (1867, below left) shows Satan dressed as a peasant sowing the seeds of discord, in the later print (1882, below right), a gigantic Satan is crossing Paris, his right foot resting on the towers of Notre-Dame; in this case the seeds of discord, sown with his right hand, are women (a typically misogynistic image of woman as the instrument of the devil).
The two versions of Satan semant l’ivraie (Musée provincial Félicien Rops, Namur)
Finally, skeletons appear in various guises in Rops illustrations to literary works by, among others, Joséphin Péladan’s Le Vice suprême (1884). Curiously, Rops never illustrated a work by Edgar Allan Poe, whose prose works would have been known to him through Baudelaire’s translations.
‘Le vice suprême’ from Josephin Aimé Péladan, Études passionnelles de décadence. Le vice suprême (Paris, 1884) Tab.603.a.29.
Postscript: It was while visiting the baroque Jesuit church of Saint-Loup in Namur on 15 March 1866, in the company of Rops and Poulet-Malassis, that Baudelaire had a seizure which led ultimately to aphasia, paralysis and, the following year, his death. His collapse occurred as he was praising the elaborate confessionals of the church the interior of which he had earlier described as a “terrible and delightful catafalque” and as a “catafalque embroidered in black, pink and silver”. Four years earlier Baudelaire had an ominous warning, which he described in his diaries in apocalyptic terms – “I constantly suffer from from vertigo, and today… I felt pass over me the wind of the wing of imbecility”; he must have now realised that the end was imminent.
The Church, a masterpiece of Belgian architecture, has recently been deconsecrated and is currently being restored. A stone’s throw away, the Musée provincial Félicien Rops, houses a rich collection of the artist’s work. Its façade is adorned with a street sign showing Pornokratès, Rops’s most famous work, its rather curious putti bearing a distinct resemblance to those of his frontispiece of Baudelaire’s Les Épaves, an appropriate reminder of the poet in this neighbourhood redolent with baudelairian associations.
Chris Michaelides, Curator Italian and Modern Greek
Félicien Rops, Pornokratès (Museum Félicien Rops, Namur)
References:
Charles Baudelaire, Les Épaves: Pièces condamnées – galanteries – épigraphes – pièces diverses – bouffonneries. (Brussels, 1866). 011483.c.19.
Félicien Rops, 1833-1898, lithographies, gravures, dessins, peintures. (Namur, [198?]). YA.2000.a.15029
Michel Draguet, Rops. (Paris, 1998). LB.31.b.17754
Bernadette Bonnier, André Guyaux, Hélène Védrine, Autour des Épaves de Charles Baudelaire (Antwerp, 1999) YA.2001.b.1454
Bernadette Bonnier, Véronique Carpiaux, Museum Félicien Rops (Oostkamp, 2003) YF.2006.a.5513.
Bernadette Bonnier (ed.), Le Musée provincial Félicien Rops, Namur (Brussels, 2005). LF.31.b.2064
17 October 2014
One book, many faces: the Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano
When the French novelist Patrick Modiano (b.1945) was announced as the winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature, many readers in the English-speaking world reacted with incomprehension. Even allowing for the notoriously low percentage of publications each year represented by foreign literature in translation, this might be understandable, as none of his books has aroused the international curiosity or controversy as those of Michel Houellebecq or Michel Tournier. Revisiting the same themes and employing similar stylistic devices, he has instead provoked certain critics to see this as recourse to a tried and tested formula or lack of imagination. At the very outset of his career, in 1975, Modiano himself remarked in an interview that he did indeed have the feeling that he had been repeatedly writing the same novel from the beginning.
There is no excuse for those with a limited knowledge of French to neglect his novels, as several have been translated, including Le quartier perdu as A trace of malice (1988; Nov. 1988/2400) and Voyage de noces (Honeymoon, 1992; YK.1993.a.1120). The more one reads, the more apparent it becomes that instead of rehashing old material for want of new ideas, Modiano is probing more profoundly into subjects of timeless significance and constantly honing and refining the tools which he employs.
Interestingly, for an author whose use of language is so subtle and polished, Modiano’s first tongue was not French but Flemish, in which he was raised by his maternal grandparents who cared for him during the frequent absences of his mother, the actress Louisa Colpijn, and father Albert Modiano who, despite his Sephardic Jewish origins, had evaded deportation during the Second World War, trading on the black market and actively associating with the Paris Gestapo. This clouded background influences many of Modiano’s writings, including the one for which he may be best known outside France: the screenplay for Louis Malle’s film Lacombe, Lucien (1973; screenplay published Paris, 1974: X.909/29206), which explores the protagonist’s involvement with the French Gestapo when he is rejected by the French Resistance. Modiano’s very first novel, La place de l’Etoile (Paris, 1968; X.908/17202), is the initial statement of a theme which so enraged his father that he attempted to buy up the entire print-run, experiencing this wartime story of a Jewish collaborator as a personal attack.
Some of Modiano’s books in the typical livery of his French publisher Gallimard
Throughout his career Modiano returns to the themes of, memory and loss, the fallibility of recollection, the fragile nature of identity and the many ambivalent elements of which it is composed. He sometimes draws on factual material, as in Dora Bruder (Paris, 1997; YA.1999.a.11146. English translation Berkeley, Calif., 1999; m00/17481), inspired by an item in a 1941 number of Paris Soir which set him on a search for a 15-year-old Jewish girl who escaped from the convent which had sheltered her, only to end up on a transport to Auschwitz. His characters struggle with amnesia or with troublingly persistent memories; they search for the families, loves and past which they have lost or remember only in fragments. Yet amid this atmosphere of rootlessness and displacement Modiano also displays a startlingly detailed sense of place, most evident in his vivid evocation of the landscape of Paris. Appropriately, he received the telephone call from his daughter announcing his award, the crown of a career in which he had also won the Prix Goncourt, Austrian State Prize for European literature and Prix mondial Cino Del Duca, as he was walking near the Jardin du Luxembourg.
It was a meeting with the writer and critic Raymond Queneau which launched Modiano’s career by bringing him into contact with the Parisian publishing house Editions Gallimard. His style, however, has little in common with that of the author of Exercises du style and Zazie dans le métro; indeed, he has been described as the Marcel Proust of his time. Outside French literature, though, one might compare him to another European writer whose work is tinged and haunted by the same feeling of loss and hallucinatory quality of wandering through a landscape which is now bewilderingly strange, now painfully familiar – W. G. Sebald. Both share an ability to act as the remembrancers and consciences of an age threatened by the consequences of an amnesia which is all too deliberate.
Susan Halstead Curator Czech & Slovak
10 September 2014
Before the ‘Miracle of the Marne’ – what if the Germans had reached Paris in September 1914
In August 1914 the German army broke through Belgium into France and advanced towards the French capital. French troops under General Joffre, backed by the British Expeditionary Force, met the German army on the river Marne (6-12 September 1914) and successfully halted the German advance: Paris was saved! Popular memory in France now recalls how General Galliéni, the military commander of Paris, requisitioned a fleet of Paris taxis, the so-called ‘taxis of the Marne’, to ferry reinforcements to the front.
The widespread belief and fear that Paris would be taken and that the city would be destroyed has been forgotten. On 2 September, the French government had relocated to Bordeaux in South West France. The US Ambassador, Myron T. Herrick (1854-1929), however, decided that ‘as the representative of the greatest neutral power I should remain in Paris and exercise all my power to save the art treasures of Paris from the fate of Louvain’. On 3 September, he had a ‘large number’ of posters printed in both French and German that he intended to be pasted on the houses of American citizens to safeguard their property. He then had a notice posted ‘in the Herald’ [presumably the New York Herald (European edition)] requesting American citizens to come to the Embassy between 4 and 7 September to collect them.
Sauvegarde. Avis est donné par l’ambassadeur des Etats-Unis d’Amérique que le local situé a Paris… (Paris, Imprimerie Herbert Clarke, [1914]). 63 x 40.5cm. British Library WW1.P/3 (1-22).
Schutzbrief. Die Botschaft der Vereinigten Staaten Von Nord-Amerika macht bekannt dass die in Paris… (Paris, Druckerei Herbert Clarke, [1914]) 63 x 40.5cm. WW1.P/3 (1-22).
SAFEGUARD The United States Ambassador gives notice that the building in Paris situated at – is occupied by Mr. – an American citizen and hence is UNDER THE PROTECTION OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT. The Ambassador therefore asks that the Americans living in said building be not molested and that its contents be respected. Myron T. Herrick. Ambassador. (Translation by Myron T. Herrick).
The British Library’s copies of these two posters come from a collection of posters, postcards and ephemera formed by Mrs Albinia Wherry (1857-1929) when she worked at the Women’s Emergency Canteen for Soldiers (‘Cantine Anglaise’) below the Gare du Nord in Paris from 1915-1918. Staffed predominantly by British women, it provided food, hot drinks, cigarettes, washing facilities and later sleeping accommodation for Allied troops. The collection was donated by Albinia Wherry’s daughter in 1962 and is kept the Library’s French and Philatelic collections. A photograph of Albinia Wherry and a postcard of the Canteen are now on display in our current exhibition in the Folio Society Gallery ‘Enduring War: Grief, Grit and Humour’.
The collection of posters and ephemera at BL shelfmark WW1.P/1 (1-51) to WW1.P/5 (1-15) in French Collections has recently been beautifully and expertly conserved by the British Library’s Conservation team. Bernard Wilkin, our collaborative British Library/Sheffield University PhD student, spotted these two posters and their significance when working on a project describing this collection in 2013.
A pencil inscription on the French poster, ‘Given me by the publisher. Never published’ indicates that Albinia Wherry obtained these posters directly from the printer, Herbert Clarke. Herbert Clarke was an English printer and publisher based in the rue Saint Honoré, and a long-standing member of the British colony in Paris, so this is probably how Mrs Wherry got to know him. The pencil inscription on the German-language poster adds ‘printed in 1914 for use if [the] Germans entered Paris’ (below).
The Hoover Institution also holds copies of these posters which they date ‘1940-1944?’ It would be interesting to find out whether any other copies are held elsewhere. Of course the posters were never actually used since the Germans did not reach the capital, but they provide vivid testimony to the widespread belief at the time that the Germans would occupy Paris.
Teresa Vernon, Lead Curator French Studies
References:
Lindsay Krasnoff . The Lives of Diplomats: Americans in Paris, 1914 http://blogs.state.gov/stories/2014/02/10/lives-diplomats-americans-paris-1914
Thomas Bentley Mott, Myron T. Herrick, Friend of France. An autobiographical biography. (Garden City, N.Y, 1929). 10885.cc.8.
Réception de M. Myron T. Herrick… à l’Hôtel de Ville de Paris le 26 juillet 1920. (Paris, 1920) 10170.l.16.
03 September 2014
Matisse and Tériade
The spectacular display of Jazz (Paris, 1947), one of the greatest livres d’artiste, is one of the highlights of the magnificent exhibition Matisse: the Cut-outs at Tate Modern (until 7 September; then at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, 12 October 2014-8 February 2015).
The book, a turning-point in Matisse’s use of the cut-out technique, is a life-affirming explosion of colour and energy produced in the face of life-threatening illness (Matisse started to work on it in 1943 while convalescing from a serious operation). It was published in a limited edition of 270 copies, and 100 albums of just the prints were also produced. In the exhibition all the prints from one of these albums are shown, together with facsimiles of all the texts. The display of the book in its entirety has the great virtue of allowing visitors to compare all 20 original cut-out models (the maquettes) with their stencil reproductions in the printed book shown with Matisse’s accompanying handwritten texts. It also enables them to appreciate why the artist was originally disappointed with the resulting loss in the book (despite the extreme care taken by the printers to reproduce the exact colours of the originals –the production of the book took nearly five years), of the contrast between the different paper surfaces of the original cut-outs.
In his introduction Matisse plays down the importance of his texts and asks for the reader’s indulgence, explaining that their role is a purely visual one, as a black and white counterpoint to the colours of the plates or as ‘asters to the composition of a bouquet of more important flowers’. This is a modest way of introducing his succinct and enthralling reflections and aphorisms on art and life. In one of them he compares his technique of cutting with scissors directly into the gouache-coloured paper to a sculptor’s carving into stone. In another, he describes lagoons (recollections of his trip to Tahiti in 1930 and the subjects of three prints) as one of the seven wonders in the paradise of painters. Some texts are veritable prose poems. The subjects of the book’s 20 plates are taken from the circus, folklore, mythology, and personal artistic practice or reminiscences. The title Jazz was thought up by Tériade, the book’s publisher, whose ambition was to to produce a modern illuminated manuscript. Though unrelated to the subjects depicted, the title is perhaps an indication of the book’s spirit of discovery and improvisation.
Tériade was a key figure in the Parisian art scene for some five decades. Born in Greece in 1897 (‘Tériade’ is a francized form of his real name, Efstratios Eleutheriades) he went to France in 1915 to study law but soon abandoned his studies for art journalism and, later, art publishing, following in the footsteps of his compatriot Christian Zervos (the publisher of the monumental catalogue raisonné of Picasso’s works). He first met Matisse and published his first article on the artist in 1929 and the collaboration between the two men continued until Matisse’s death 25 years later
Henri Cartier-Bresson ‘Tériade and Matisse’ 1953. Photograph taken in the garden of Tériade’s Villa Natacha. From Tériade & les livres de peintres (Le Cateau-Cambrésis, 2002) British Library L.B.31.b.28002
Matisse was a subject or contributor in all of Tériade’s editorial or publishing ventures. The entire range of their collaborations is listed and illustrated in the exhibition catalogue Matisse et Tériade (Arcueil, 1996; L.B.31.b.16914), from the first article Tériade wrote about Matisse in Zervos’s Cahiers d’art, to Matisse’s contribution in Minotaure, the avant-garde magazine which Tériade edited between 1933 and 1936, for which the artist designed one of its famous covers and the various Matisse-related issues of Verve (the arts magazine published by Tériade, 1937-1970), nos 1(1937), 3 (1938), 4 (1938), 8 (1940), and 13 (1945).
Minotaure, Cover of no.9 (1936). C.180.d.1. Lithograph after Matisse’s ink drawing.
Cover of Verve: revue artistique et littéraire, no 8, June 1940 (Cup.800.g.3.), showing ‘La Symphonie chromatique’, a lithograph after Matisse’s cut-out maquette for which 26 colours were used.
Tériade’s greatest publishing venture was the 27 livres d’artiste illustrated by, among others, Chagall, Braque, Giacometti, Léger and Picasso. Matisse illustrated five of them (the highest number by a single artist): Stéphane Mallarmé Poésies (1932), Lettres de la Religieuse Portugaise (1946), Jazz (1947), Poèmes de Charles d’ Orléans (1950), and Une Fête en Simmerie (1963), and these are also richly-illustrated and documented in this catalogue. Moreover, the catalogue led to the generous donation by Tériade’s widow, Alice, of her husband’s publications, art collections and part of his archives to the Musée Matisse at Le Cateau-Cambrésis (the artist’s birthplace). The occasion was marked in 2002 by the inauguration of a permanent gallery dedicated to Tériade and the publication of Tériade et les livres de peintres, a comprehensive catalogue of all the artists’ books he published.
Both catalogues are a valuable and touching reminder of a great and fruitful friendship, also celebrated in the wonderful series of photographs taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1951 in Tériade’s Villa Natacha at Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, in the last of which Matisse is only present in spirit, by his signature on the great painted tile decoration (‘L’Arbre’ – the preparatory study of which, now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, is in the exhibition) which can be seen behind Tériade, its dedicatee, a personification of the joie de vivre that characterises all his collaborations with Matisse.
Henri Cartier-Bresson, Tériade in the dining room of Villa Natacha, 1953. From From Tériade & les livres de peintres
Chris Michaelides, Curator Italian and Modern Greek
References:
Minotaure: revue artistique et littéraire (Paris, 1933-39) C.180.d.1.
Verve (Paris, 1937-60) Cup.800.g.3 (French edition), or Cup.800.g.4 (English edition).
Henri Matisse Jazz (Paris, 1947). C.108.eee.16.; a modern edition with facsimile of the prints and transcription and translation into English of the texts (Munich, 2001) is at YC.2003.a.11186.
Hommage à Tériade (Grand Palais, 16 May to 3 September 1973). (Paris, 1973). S.E. 293/49
Hommage à Tériade [Diploma Galleries, Royal Academy of Arts]. (London, 1975). X.419/3145.
Jack D. Flam Matisse on Art. Revised edition. (Berkeley, 1995) 95/24994.
E. Tériade Écrits sur l'art. (Paris, 1996). YA.1997.a.3905
Claudia Beltramo Ceppi Zevi (ed), Matisse et Tériade [Exhibition, 1996-1997: Museo Mediceo, Florence and Musée Matisse, le Cateau-Cambrésis] (Arcueil, 1996). LB.31.b.16914.
Beatrice Lavarini Henri Matisse Jazz (1943-1947) : ein Malerbuch als Selbsterkenntnis (Munich, 2000) YA.2001.a.22816
Tériade et les livres de peintres [Exhibition, Musée Matisse, 2002]. (Le Cateau-Cambrésis, 2002) LB.31.b.28002.
Karl Buchberg [et al.], Henri Matisse: the cut-outs (London, 2014). [Awaiting shelfmark]
Cover of the catalogue Matisse et Tériade (Arcueil, 1996). L.B.31.b.16914
04 August 2014
Cats, courtesans and Claudine: the colourful career of Colette
Many English readers first make the acquaintance of Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (1873-1954) through the stage or film adaptations of her novella Gigi (1945; 012550.p.6.). Deliciously frothy, it captures with elegance and grace the extravagant world of the belle époque, far removed from the austerities and humiliations of wartime France under the German occupation, and might give the impression that the author was a frivolous airhead with little interest in the realities of those harsh times. Yet while she was conjuring up the vanished Parisian demi-monde to enchant her readers and, she admitted, to lift them out of the drabness and anxiety of their daily lives, she was engaged in a far more dangerous and deadly serious enterprise – rescuing and assisting Jews, including her own husband, whom she hid throughout the war.
Born in January 1873 as the daughter of a retired army officer, Colette grew up amid the countryside of Burgundy which she lyrically describes in many of her writings. Her marriage at the age of twenty to Henry Gauthier-Villars, a writer and music-critic known as Willy, who was fifteen years her senior, transplanted her to Paris and led to the publication of her first novels, the Claudine series. These four broadly autobiographical stories of a young girl’s schooldays, her marriage to a much older man, her encounters with Parisian society, visit to the Bayreuth Festival and love affair with Annie, the narrator of the last book, did not appear under her own name, however, but under that of Willy, who, she later claimed, had read her jottings in old school exercise books, encouraged her to write, and appropriated the results. He combined plagiarism with infidelity, and in 1906 Colette left him and, with the help of Mathilde de Morny, Marquise de Belbeuf, became a music-hall artiste of some notoriety and the lover of her sponsor. She recorded her experiences and her fascination with the world of the music-hall and circus in Garçon, l’audition! (1901; the British Library possesses a presentation copy signed ‘Willy’), Entre deux airs (1895; 1578/1186), whose author was given as ‘L’ouvreuse du Cirque d’été’, and Mes apprentissages (010665.df.11).
Colette, Garçon, l’audition! (Paris, 1901) 1578/1188
In 1912 Colette married Henri de Jouvenel, the editor of the newspaper Le Matin, and the following year gave birth to her only child, a daughter named Colette. During the war she converted the de Jouvenel estate at St-Malo into a convalescent home for officers and in 1920 was made a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur in recognition of her services. The marriage ended in 1924 when Colette divorced her husband following an affair with her stepson Bertrand de Jouvenel which is reflected in her novels Chéri (1920) and La fin de Chéri (1926), whose depiction of the relationship of the hedonistic young hero and the ageing courtesan Léa aroused considerable controversy.
Portrait of Colette by Jean Cocteau, from Colette, Le pur et l’impur (Paris, 1941) X.900/21054.
Colette enjoyed her new freedom to mingle with the Parisian circle of artists and writers surrounding Jean Cocteau in the 1920s, and rose to become acknowledged as France’s greatest female writer. As well as novels and autobiography, she wrote the libretto for Maurice Ravel’s opera L’enfant et les sortilèges (first performed in 1925), the story of a rebellious child who is punished by the objects which he has damaged in a tantrum and is finally rescued when he shows his repentance by tending a wounded squirrel. The list of characters includes a pair of cats, creatures for which Colette had a lifelong love; they feature frequently in her writings, and her novel La chatte (1933) centres on the bond between a young man and Saha, the cat who displaces his bride in his affections.
A cat looks on as Colette writes. Picture from Colette, Mes apprentissages ([Paris], 1936) 010665.df.11.
Colette’s third marriage in 1935 to Maurice Goudeket endured happily for the rest of her life, but placed her in considerable danger during the German occupation because of his Jewish origins, which compelled him to go into hiding in their attic. Remaining in Paris and continuing to write and publish, Colette made a living which enabled to help many other Jews, and in 1945 was elected to the Académie Goncourt as its first-ever female member, becoming its president in 1949. Since 1935 she had been a member of the Belgian Royal Academy, and in 1953 became a Grand Officier of the Légion d’honneur. Her work is notable for its delicate and subtly sensuous quality, evoked in such details as Claudine licking the precious ruby presented to her by her bridegroom ‘because it ought to melt and taste like a raspberry fruit-drop’, the scents of the wild herbs in Colette’s mother’s garden, the salt and sunshine of a holiday in Normandy where two adolescents discover each other in La Blé en herbe (1923, 012547.ccc.11), and the textures of fine lace or a cat’s fur.
When she died on 3 August 1954, Colette was buried in the cemetery of Père Lachaise, the first woman in France ever to be given a state funeral. Although she was denied a Roman Catholic ceremony because of her two divorces, the scandals surrounding her racy career, bisexuality and spicy early novels had long since been dispelled by recognition of her outstanding gifts as a writer.
Susan Halstead, Curator Czech and Slovak
14 July 2014
Vive [la] France! 'Les Dieux ont soif' and the French Revolution
In 1921 the French author Anatole France (1844-1924; photo below from Wikimedia Commons) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature ‘in recognition of his brilliant literary achievements, characterized as they are by a nobility of style, a profound human sympathy, grace, and a true Gallic temperament’. He had been a member of the Académie Française, and in 1927 the Symbolist author Paul Valéry was elected to succeed him among the Immortels. Tradition decreed that he should deliver a eulogy in honour of his predecessor, but instead the new Academician proceeded to launch an attack on France’s humble origins as the son of a Paris bookseller, his prose style, his politics and his pusillanimous nature. What was responsible for the discrepancy between the international acclaim which France received abroad and the vicious obloquy meted out to him in his own country so soon after his death?
Many of the reasons can be found in the resentment felt by Valéry and his fellow Symbolists at what they perceived as France’s mockery of their work. In reaction against the Romanticism of the early nineteenth century, he had written in the tradition of the Realist movement, and never more brilliantly than in his novel of the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (Paris, 1912; British Library 12550.ppp.22).
Variously translated as The Gods are Athirst and The Gods will have Blood, this is the story of a young man, Evariste Gamelin, who during the Terror undergoes a transformation from a devoted son and sensitive artist to a fanatical member of the Commune prepared to despatch countless victims, including his own brother-in-law, to the guillotine, and ends up, like Robespierre, being destroyed by the Revolution itself in a coup which outlaws the entire General Council which supported the rebellious Commune. France mercilessly portrays the inexorable corruption of the principles on which the revolution was based as the Terror gathers momentum and sweeps bewildered and hapless innocents – an old bread-woman, for example, accused of plotting to rescue the Queen – into the Tuileries and onto the tumbrils on trumped-up charges of counter-revolutionary activities. The appearance of Marie Antoinette in court is almost incidental in the general turbulence, described in a brief throwaway paragraph or two. France shows how the personal and political are equally polluted as Gamelin becomes increasingly delusional, condemning a blameless young man to death on false evidence as he is convinced that the latter was the man who had seduced his mistress Elodie, and a disturbing element of increasingly frenzied and hectic sado-masochism marks their relationship. He illustrates the decline of lofty ideals to the squalor and squabbling of the Paris mob in a bread queue and dogs licking yesterday’s blood below the guillotine. Yet alongside these he creates painterly scenes of startling beauty – two women preparing quinces for jam-making, a small Savoyard boy entertaining passers-by with a dancing marmot – which complement the background of Gamelin, an artist, and Elodie, an art-dealer’s daughter. He also presents the reader with an entirely convincing depiction of a truly good man in the figure of the former aristocrat and avowed atheist Brotteaux, who rides on his last journey between a former monk and a young prostitute and offers comfort to them both.
A set of revolutionary playing-cards from 1790-92, similar to those designed by Evariste Gamelin in the novel, showing republican motifs including the elements, the seasons and values associated with the declaration of the Rights of Man, from Egalité-sur-Marne (Château-Thierry), in Henri-René d’Allemagne, Les Cartes à jouer du XIVe au XXe siècle (Paris, 1906) LB.31.c.6035.
France himself had seen at first hand the duplicity and deformation of ideals betrayed and political cynicism during the Dreyfus trial, and his action in coming to Dreyfus’s defence and thereby risking his social and literary reputation was not that of a timorous man. Moreover, the scrupulous precision with which he handled language stemmed from his conviction of the importance of preserving it from the kind of creeping debasement in the service of ideology which George Orwell, one of his greatest admirers, would later identify in his essay Politics and the English Language (London, 1946; shelfmark 12987.h.3.).
Two years after the publication of Les Dieux ont soif, France’s country, with the rest of Europe, would be plunged into another conflict which, Cronus-like, devoured its children as pitilessly as the Revolution did Gamelin. His evocation of the terrible consequences of fanaticism and the belief that any means are justifiable to achieve its aims endowed his greatest novel with an eerily prophetic quality in the years preceding the First World War, and continue to give it a timeless relevance today.
Susan Halstead, Curator Czech and Slovak
07 July 2014
Not just cycling: the other Tours de France
Today London hosts the finish of the third of the three British stages of this year’s Tour de France.
Yet the idea of a tour of France is an old one, and this blog will be about some of the antecedents of the cycle race: a royal tour of early modern France, the tour de France completed by journeymen in the 19th century, and a best-selling primary school textbook, Le tour de France par deux enfants, first published in 1877.
On 24 January 1564 the young king Charles IX and the Queen Mother Catherine de’ Medici set off on a royal progress that lasted until 1 May 1566, and took in most the country. The aim of the journey, which took place during the peace after the first War of Religion, was to display the king to his Catholic and Protestant subjects alike, and stamp his authority on his riven kingdom. The royal party travelled south down Eastern France into Provence and on to Languedoc and back up south-western and western France finally returning to Paris via the central province of Auvergne. The itinerary included stopovers in non-French border regions such as the Duchy of Lorraine and the Comtat Venaissin, a papal enclave. Just like the modern Tour de France, Abel Jouan’s 1566 account of the royal tour (reprinted Paris, 1759; 1321.c.1.) includes an indication of the distance travelled for each stage, and he also tells us that the King completed a total of 902 leagues, roughly 4,000 kilometres.
Apprentice craftsmen completed a ‘Tour de France’ lasting several years to learn their trade culminating in the production of a ‘chef d’oeuvre’ (masterpiece). Their journey was sustained by associations known as ‘compagnonnages’, quasi-masonic brotherhoods, which provided inns run by a ‘Mother’ in each town. The ‘compagnonnages’, of late medieval origin, but particularly strong in the early 19th century, still exist and today artisans can still complete a tour de France lasting from five to eight years. The best- known ‘compagnon’ is the joiner Agricol Perdiguier (1805-1875), also known as ‘Avignonnais-la-Vertu’ from his home town of Avignon. In his Mémoires d’un compagnon (Geneva, 1854-1855), Perdiguier describes in great detail the ‘Tour de France’ that he undertook between 1824 and 1828. The novelist George Sand, who greatly admired his earlier book, Le livre du compagnonnage (Paris, 1839) based the character of the carpenter Pierre Huguenin, the protagonist of her novel Le compagnon du tour de France on Perdiguier (Brussels, 1841; 1458.b.15) and English translation (Dublin, 1849; 12518.c.34.).
An edition of Perdiguier's memoir of his ‘Tour de France’ as a journeyman (Moulins, 1914) 010662.dd.26
Le tour de France par deux enfants (Paris, 1877; revised edition 1906) published under the name G. Bruno, but really by Augustine Fouillée (1833-1923), is an illustrated didactic and patriotic schoolbook. Two orphaned brothers, André (14) and Julien (seven), observe their dying father’s last wish and travel to France from Lorraine, annexed by Germany after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, over the Vosges mountains during the night to evade the border guards to find their uncle in Marseille and become French citizens. The children travel round much of the country (there are local maps throughout). They discover the variety of its regions and the occupations of its people from agriculture to industry as well as the lives of its great men. The book shares its nation-building ideology with contemporary European classics for schoolchildren such as Edmondo De Amicis’ Cuore (‘Heart’) with its monthly story set in different regions of the newly unified Italian peninsula or Selma Lagerlöf’s The Wonderful Adventures of Nils which describes the varied geography of Sweden. Unlike these works, however, Fouillée’s book is devoid of literary merit.
Crossing the mountains by night; illustration from Le tour de France par deux enfants (13ème édition, Paris 1878) 12202.eee.14
Founded in 1903, today’s Tour de France, a multi-stage three-week cycle race, has a different itinerary each year, but always consists of a circuit of France, la Grande Boucle (great loop), increasingly with stages in neighbouring countries, covering about 3,500 kilometres in total. It too is designed to showcase the regional variety of (mainland) French landscapes and cultural heritage. It also aims to reinforce the national identity and unity of mainland France known as the ‘Hexagon’ after its shape, implying ‘natural’ boundaries created since time immemorial, rather than built progressively over the centuries through marriage alliances and territorial annexations. For example in 1906 through to 1910, with the agreement of the German authorities, the race passed over the Vosges into the ‘lost’ former French territory of Alsace-Lorraine. French spectators reportedly sang the ‘Marseillaise’. The 2014 itinerary, meanwhile, commemorates the anniversary of the First World War with visits to Ypres, the Chemin des Dames and Verdun.
Teresa Vernon, Lead Curator Romance Collections
02 July 2014
The Triumph of Mannerism – Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino in Florence
De Triomf van het Maniërisme (The Triumph of European Mannerism), a mammoth (518 items) Council of Europe exhibition in Amsterdam in 1955 was the first comprehensive examination of Mannerism – the dominant, and previously overlooked, artistic style between the High Renaissance and the Baroque, roughly between 1520 to 1600. It was followed, a year later, by the Mostra del Pontormo e del primo manierismo fiorentino at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, on Pontormo and early Florentine Mannerist art. In 1972, L’École de Fontainebleau, an exhaustive (705 items) examination of French Mannerism, largely indebted to Italian artists working for Francis I, completed the trio of major exhibitions that led to a proliferation of monographs, conference proceedings and exhibitions on Mannerism which continues unabated. In the first half of 2014 alone there was a rich crop of Mannerist shows: El Greco in Toledo and Madrid (one on his library and one on his influence on modern art), Pontormo drawings in Madrid, and Baccio Bandinelli and Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino in Florence.
Pontormo & Rosso Fiorentino: diverging paths of Mannerism revisits the subject of the 1956 Florence exhibition. It follows the stylistic development of these two leading artists of early Florentine Mannerism in roughly chronological order but with separate sections on their portrait paintings and their drawings (they were both remarkable draughtsmen). They had much in common, both temperamentally and artistically. They were ‘born under Saturn’ (i.e. they were eccentric, restless, and anguished) and were influenced by Michelangelo’s paintings and by Northern Renaissance prints, especially Dürer’s.
The exhibition, as its title indicates, also aims to demonstrate that, after their common beginnings in the workshop of Andrea del Sarto, the careers of the two artists took different directions. Pontormo enjoyed the protection of the Medici family for the rest of his life,whereas Rosso, thanks to his republican inclinations, was forced to lead a peripatetic existence, working in various artistic centres in Tuscany and also in Rome and Naples before going to France, where he spent his last ten years in the court of Francis I, becoming one of the key figures of the School of Fontainebleau. This last period of Rosso’s output, though examined in the catalogue, is largely omitted in the exhibition as it was the subject of a major show in the Château de Fontainebleau last year which demonstrated the far-reaching influence Rosso’s allegorical decorations exerted, through prints, on subsequent generations of artists. The present exhibition includes, nevertheless, two contrasting, examples from Rosso’s French years, his Pietà and Bacchus, Venus and Cupid, the first tragic and austere, the second erotic and voluptuous.
Rosso Fiorentino, Pietà (ca 1538-40). Paris, Musée du Louvre. Image from Wikimedia Commons
Rosso Fiorentino Bacchus, Venus and Cupid (ca 1535-39). Luxembourg, Musée National d’Histoire et d’Art. Image from Wikimedia Commons
The exhibition is a feast for the eyes. It opens spectacularly with three enormous detached frescoes, by Andrea del Sarto, Rosso, and Pontormo, from the atrium of the Church of SS Annunziata, all newly restored for the exhibition. Numerous other works have also been cleaned recently, sometimes with unexpected results – the cleaning of Rosso’s The Marriage of the Virgin has made St Joseph, traditionally depicted as an elderly man, look even more youthful whereas the head of a donkey, previously obscured by layers of grime, has been revealed in the background of Pontormo’s magnificent Visitation.
Rosso Fiorentino, The Marriage of the Virgin (Ginori Altarpiece) 1523. Florence, Basilica di san Lorenzo (Image from Artemagazine)
Pontormo, Visitation (ca 1528-29). Carmignano, Pieve di San Michele Archangelo. (Image from Wikimedia Commons)
The Mannerist treasures in churches and museums in Florence and surroundings are
overwhelming. They include Pontormo’s most famous work, his otherworldly Deposition/Lamentation, in the church of Santa Felicita and his beautiful lunette fresco decoration of Vertumnus and Pomona, in the Medici country villa at Poggio a Caiano. Palazzo Pitti has the world’s most important collection of Andrea del Sarto paintings, the Uffizi an incomparable collection of paintings by Bronzino, Pontormo’s pupil and himself the subject of a memorable exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi four years ago. Bronzino’s frescoes for the Chapel of Eleonora da Toledo are in the Palazzo Vecchio where several rooms were decorated by Giorgio Vasari, Johannes Stradanus, and Francesco Salviati and other artists of the second generation of Florentine Mannerists.
Chris Michaelides, Curator Italian and Modern Greek
A Select Bibliography of Florentine Mannerism and the École de Fontainebleau
Pontormo, Rosso and Mannerism in Florence
Pontormo e Rosso: atti del convegno di Empoli e Volterra progetto Appiani di Piombino. [Congress held on Sept. 22, 1994 in Empoli and on Sept. 23-24, 1994 in Volterra]. (Florence, 1996). YA.1998.b.216.
L’Officina della maniera: varietà e fierezzanell’arte fiorentinadel Cinquecento fra le due repubbliche, 1494-1530. (Venice, 1996). YA.2000.b.284.
Pontormo, Bronzino, and the Medici: The Transformation of the Renaissance Portrait in Florence (exh. cat., ed. by C. B. Strehlke; Philadelphia, PA, Mus. A., 2004–5). m04/.37453
Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino: diverging paths of mannerism / edited by Carlo Falciani and Antonio Natali. (Florence, 2014). LF.31.b.10009.
Pontormo
Mostra del Pontormo e del primo manierismo fiorentino : [tenuta al] Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze, marzo-luglio 1956. (Florence, 1956). YV.1989.a.419.
Pontormo: disegni degli Uffizi / catalogo di Carlo Falciani. (Florence, 1996). WP.4334. v.79.
Pontormo, dibujos (Fundación Mapfre, Madrid, 12 de febrero-11 de mayo de 2014) [comisariado, Kosme de Barañano] (Madrid, 2014). LF.31.b.11064
Rosso Fiorentino
Cecile Scaillierez, Rosso. Le Christ mort. (Paris, 2004). YF.2014.b.2174
Antonio Natali, Rosso Fiorentino: leggiadra maniera e terribilità di cose stravaganti. (Cinisello Balsamo, Milan, 2006). LF.31.b.3723.
Le roi et l'artiste: François Ier et Rosso Fiorentino : Château de Fontainebleau, du 23 mars au 24 juin 2013 / commissariat, Thierry Crépin-Leblond, Vincent Droguet. (Paris, [2013]) YF.2014.b.420.
Bronzino
Janet Cox-Rearick, Bronzino’s Chapel of Eleonora in the Palazzo Vecchio. (Berkeley, 1993). YK.1994.c.10.
Bronzino: artist and poet at the court of the Medici / edited by Carlo Falciani and Antonio Natali. (Florence, 2010). LC.31.b.8601.
Pontormo, Bronzino, and the Medici: the transformation of the Renaissance portrait in Florence / Carl Brandon Strehlke; with essays by Elizabeth Cropper ... [et al.]. (University Park, Pa, 2004). LC.31.b.2261.
Cellini
John Pope Hennessy, Cellini (London, 1985). L.45/3693.
École de Fontainebleau
L’École de Fontainebleau [catalogue of the exhibition in the Musée du Louvre and the Galeries nationales d'exposition du Grand Palais]. (Paris, 1972). X.410/5309.
Primatice: maître de Fontainebleau: Paris, Musée du Louvre, 22 septembre 2004-3 janvier 2005. (Paris, 2004). YF.2006.b.1071
Dominique Cordellier, Luca Penni, un disciple de Raphaël à Fontainebleau. (Paris, 2012). LF.31.a.4504.
Xavier Salmon, Fontainebleau, le temps des Italiens ([Heule?], 2013)]. LF.31.b.9839
Francesco Salviati
Francesco Salviati et la bella maniera: actes des colloques de Rome et Paris. (Rome, 2001). Ac.5233.a/284.
Francesco Salviati (1510-1563) ou, La bella maniera / sous la direction de Catherine Monbeig Goguel. (Paris, 1998). LB.31.b.17992.
Andrea del Sarto
Andrea del Sarto, 1486-1530: dipinti e disegni a Firenze : [catalogo della mostra a] Firenze, Palazzo Pitti, ... nov. 1986-mar. 1987. (Milan, 1986). YV.1987.b.798.
Giorgio Vasari
Patricia Lee Rubin, Giorgio Vasari: art and history. (New Haven; London, 1995). YC.1995.b.4896.
Giorgio Vasari disegnatore e pittore, a cura di Alessandro Cecchi. (Skira, 2011). LF.31.b.8051
Pontormo, Vertumnus and Pomona ( 1519-21) Poggio a Caiano, Villa medicea. Image from Wikimedia Commons
23 June 2014
Napoleon III meets his nemesis: caricatures from the Franco-Prussian War
The ten months from early July 1870 to the end of May 1871 were among the most significant in French and German history. In a little less than a year France lost its hegemonic position in Europe to its rival Prussia and became a Republic, while a united Germany was created. The British Library holds a world-class collection of (mostly) French and (some) German caricatures in three separate collections bound in 55 volumes. The two larger collections (14001.g.41 and Cup.648.b.2) have recently been conserved, and are now accessible to researchers. We now need to conserve the last much smaller collection bound in four volumes (Cup. 648.b.8) to ensure that it too is fit for use. In many ways, these volumes act as a taster for the collection as a whole, and in this first of two blogs, we will look at the Franco-Prussian war as seen through the eyes of French and German caricaturists.
France declared war on Prussia on 19 July 1870. The French Army of the Rhine, under the personal leadership of Emperor Napoleon III, invaded Germany on 2 August. After an initial ‘victory’ in an insignificant skirmish, the French army suffered repeated defeats at the hands of the superior Prussian forces and their South German allies. On 2 September Napoleon was captured with his army at Sedan and imprisoned. 100,000 French troops became prisoners of war.
This factual German lithograph shows the arrival of French prisoners at Ingolstadt in Bavaria prior to being interned. Note the ethnographic interest in the colonial troops from Africa.
Arrival of French prisoners at Ingolstadt, 10 August 1870
This crushing and humiliating defeat led to the immediate collapse of the Empire. Republican deputies proclaimed a Provisional Government of National Defence on 4 September.
The French and German caricaturists exhibit a common contempt for the defeated Napoleon and a desire to humiliate him.
This dramatic German caricature depicts Napoleon III speared by the German eagle and consigned to Hell, while his family flees to England crying ‘We are lost’!
Bilder -Cyklus. Schrapnels No. 1. (Düsseldorf, Selbstverlag. Fr. F. Reis)
This image and text is a witty riff on Goethe’s poem Der Erlkönig. Here the horseman is Napoleon and his young son the Prince Imperial. The Emperor rides on, soon to be engulfed by the flames, reassuring his son that the looming devil is but the ‘gatekeeper of his kingdom’.Eines alten Komödianten letzte Gastrolle – Erlkönig!
This striking French colour lithograph printed in Belgium shows a statue of King Wilhelm I of Prussia as the winner of the war in the macabre guise of a skeleton in uniform standing atop a mound of skulls.
Statue à élever à la mémoire du vainqueur et à l’ambitieux destructeur du genre humain. (1870. J. Dosseray, Editeur, rue de Prusse, 10, Cureghem)
On 18 January 1871, the German chancellor Bismarck proclaimed Wilhelm as the Emperor of a united Germany in the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles. Adolphe Thiers and Jules Favre, the head and foreign minister of the new government elected in February, negotiated with Bismarck, but had to agree harsh terms finally ratified in the Treaty of Frankfurt (10 May 1871). France lost Alsace and a considerable part of Lorraine to Germany, and an army of occupation was to remain in North-Eastern France until the payment of a large indemnity of 5 billion francs.
In this image, standing astride sacks of money labelled ‘5 milliards’ (5 billion), Bismarck crowns Wilhelm who in turn grabs two women personifying Alsace and Lorraine, while a weeping France and a tearful Thiers and Favre look on impotently.
L’Actualité. Par G. Gaillard fils. Ce qui les attend!... No. 2 Mars 1871. Signed G. Gaillard fils. (Grognet lithographe. Madre, éditeur)
Teresa Vernon, Lead Curator French Studies
References/Further Reading
Jean Berleux, La caricature politique en France pendant la Guerre, le siège de Paris et la Commune (1870-1871). (Paris, 1890). 7858.g.31
Morna Daniels, ‘Caricatures from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the Paris Commune’ Electronic British Library Journal, art 5 , pp. 1-19 http://www.bl.uk/eblj/2005articles/article5.html
W. Jack Rhoden, ‘French caricatures of the Franco-Prussian War and Commune at the British Library’, FSLG Annual Review issue 6 (2009-2010), pp.22-24 http://frenchstudieslibrarygroup.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/fslg-annual-review-2010.pdf
Bettina Müller, ‘The Collections of French caricatures in Heidelberg: The English connection’, FSLG Annual Review issue 8 (2011-2012), pp.39-42 http://frenchstudieslibrarygroup.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/annual-review-issue-8-2011-12-current.pdf
Help us raise funds to conserve this collection of Franco-Prussian War caricatures. By making a contribution, you support our conservators’ efforts to clean, repair, and reback these precious volumes, making them accessible to users both now and in the future. Please make a donation at http://support.bl.uk/page/care-for-collections today; every amount makes a difference.
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