04 April 2014
From Vietnam to Vichy and beyond: Marguerite Duras
An artist who was constantly preoccupied with the theme of memory, true or false, Marguerite Duras had no shortage of such material to draw upon. Born on 4 April 1914 in Gia-Dinh (now Saigon) to parents attracted by government incentives to settle in French Indochina, the exotic nature of young Marguerite Donnadieu’s life bore striking resemblances to that of Madame de Maintenon; the colonial adventure turned out badly, her father died leaving her mother to raise her four-year-old daughter and two other children in relative poverty following a calamitous business investment, and at seventeen Marguerite returned to France to study at the Sorbonne, but not before embarking on a colourful affair with a wealthy Sa Dec merchant, Huynh Thuy Le. Although she returned to this period of her life in various memoirs and works of fiction, her most famous treatment is in her novel L’Amant (The Lover: BL shelfmark YA.1986.a.10677), with which she won the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary award, in 1984.
After studying mathematics, political sciences and law, Duras joined the French Communist Party and subsequently worked for the French government office representing Indochina. From 1942 to 1944, she worked for the Vichy government in an office that allocated paper to publishers (virtually acting as a book censorship system), but was also, together with her first husband Robert Antelme, a member of the French Resistance. He was deported to Buchenwald, and although he survived, the marriage did not. In 1943 she published her first novel, Les Impudents under the surname Duras, the village in the Lot-et-Garonne département which had been her father's home.
The first edition of Les Impudents (Paris, 1943). British Library YA.1993.a.26454
Although her early works were reasonably traditional in form, in her later novels she achieved an increasingly streamlined style of prose in which even the characters are stripped to essential qualities, sacrificing even the need for names and appearing simply as ‘Elle’ and ‘Lui’. The immediacy of her dialogue lent itself particularly well to cinematic adaptations, and she was also a gifted scriptwriter. Perhaps her best-known work in this capacity is the screenplay for Hiroshima mon amour (Paris, 1960; 11455.a.16), directed by Alain Resnais in 1959, a dialogue between a Japanese architect and French actress who, analysing the breakdown of their relationship, explore the truth and fallacy of memories and the analogy with the Japanese catastrophe of the Second World War.
Her explicit treatment of sexual relationships, her idiosyncratic use of dialogue and her distinctive prose style inevitably made Duras’s work the object of parody and pastiche, notably at the hands of Patrick Rambaud in Virginie Q. (Paris, 1988; YA.1989.a.8242) a skilful and witty treatment which is based on a sound knowledge of her writings. Yet she also inspired more serious works in other media; a recent exhibition at the Maureen Paley Gallery in London featured paintings and drawings by Kaye Donachie based on Duras’s novella La Maladie de la mort (Paris: Editions de minuit, 1983; X.958/26494).
These are only a limited selection of the works held by the British Library from the many which Duras produced during an outstanding creative life which drew to a close after a struggle with alcoholism and cancer of the throat on 3 March 1996. We hope that readers will be encouraged to embark on their own voyage through her strangely compelling world and, in doing so, to gather memories of their own.
Susan Halstead, Curator Czech and Slovak Studies
25 March 2014
Mistral blows in: Provence’s own Nobel laureate
It may seem perverse to celebrate the centenary of a poet’s death, but for those who would prefer to mark a more joyful event in the life of Frédéric Mistral, Provence’s greatest poet, 2014 offers two: 110 years since he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1904 and on 21st May, the 160th anniversary of the establishment in 1854 of the literary and cultural association Félibrige.
Portrait of Frédéric Mistral from Moun espelido: Memòri e raconte = Mes origins: Memoirs et récits (Paris, 1906) 10659.pp.7.
Frédéric Mistral was born on 8 September 1830 at Maillane in the département of Bouches-du-Rhône into an old landowning family deeply rooted in the soil of Provence. A reluctant pupil, his frequent truancies caused his exasperated parents to pack him off to boarding school, but neither this nor his legal studies at Aix-en-Provence weakened his profound love of his native region, or of the Occitan language. With the encouragement of his teacher Joseph Roumanille, he joined five other poets, Teodor Aubanel, Ansèume Matiéu, Jan Brunet, Anfos Tavan and Paul Giera, to found an organization devoted to the promotion of the ancient Occitan language at a time when the growth of railways and modern communications threatened its very existence as standard French was imposed throughout the country.
Perhaps the greatest achievement of Félibrige was its publication of Lou Tresor dóu Félibrige (1878–1886), which remains the most comprehensive and exact dictionary of the Occitan language, and one of the most reliable for the precision of its definitions. The British Library holds the first edition of Mistral’s two-volume work (12952.h.7), an Occitan-French dictionary covering all the dialects of oc, including mistralienne.
Mistral, however, was no dry pedant. Although he was notable for spending years on the writing and revision of his poems, the finished works possess a vivid freshness and sense of place which rapidly brought them to the eyes of a wider European public. His most famous poem Mirèio (Mireille), published in 1859 after eight years of effort and dedicated to Alphonse de Lamartine, achieved immense popularity; it was made into an opera by Charles Gounod (1863), and in 1867 ‘an English version, the original crowned by the French Academy’ by C. H. Grant was published by Joseph Roumanille at Avignon (11498.c.46). The story of the young heroine’s thwarted love for Vincent, a poor basket-maker, whom her parents force her to reject in favour of a wealthy suitor, takes place amid the picturesque landscape of the Camargue, with colourful evocations of its landscape, people and customs, reaching a climax when Mireille makes a pilgrimage to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer to implore their assistance and, having set out without a hat, dies of sunstroke in Victor’s arms under the eyes of her remorseful parents. Its emotional directness and wealth of exotic detail gave this moving tale an appeal which quickly caused it to be translated into many other languages, including Esperanto.
Illustration by Eugène Burnand from Mistral’s Mireille: poème provençal (Paris, 1891) 11498.k.15.
For many English readers their first encounter with Mistral may have come through reading Alphonse Daudet’s Lettres de mon moulin (1869), in which the chapter ‘Le poète Mistral’ describes a visit to his old friend on the occasion of the local fête. Against a background of the celebrations, with the traditional bull-running, music and sports culminating in the dancing of the farandole by night under the lanterns to the strains of fife and drum, Daudet describes Mistral reading from the exercise book which contained the manuscript of Calendal, the picaresque poem which he had just completed after seven years’ labour. The account ends with the tribute of one great author to another as a poet and as the man who had saved a rich and ancient language from decay. Daudet likens Mistral to a peasant’s son who discovers one of the great houses of Provence in disrepair, and, like Christ in the Temple, drives the grazing donkey and pecking hens out of the cour d’honneur and sets about restoring the glass and panelling, re-gilding the throne, ‘and put on its feet the vast palace of former times, where popes and empresses lodged.
‘That restored palace is the Provençal language.
‘That peasant’s son is Mistral.’
In 1904 Mistral shared the Nobel Prize for Literature with the Spanish playwright José Echegaray. Fittingly, as he had received it in recognition of his efforts to revive and restore the Provençal language, Mistral used his portion to set up the Museon Arlaten (Musée d’Arles), which remains the most considerable collection of Provençal folk art, including costumes, farming tools and musical instruments, pottery, textiles and furniture reminiscent of the world of his poetry.
Living in an unpretentious style, refusing to use the prize which he received for Mireille from the Académie Française to decorate his simple plastered bedroom as his mother suggested, Mistral died on 25th March 1914 in Maillane where he was born. Although he had no children by his marriage to Marie-Louise Rivière, he gave his native Provence some of its best-loved literary characters, and a priceless legacy in the renewal of its historic language.
Susan Halstead, Curator Czech and Slovak Studies
05 March 2014
'Paul et Virginie' - et Bernardin de Saint-Pierre
This year, 2014, is the bicentenary of the death of Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre – he was buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris and you can visit the grave, ideally on a dry day and with stout shoes, as it’s off the footpath. He is surrounded by fellow authors.
Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, portrait from the frontispiece of Paul et Virginie (Paris, 1806) C.156.k.7.
He lived a long and adventurous life – born in Le Havre in 1737 he travelled the world before settling in Paris in the early 1770s, leaving the city and his residence in the National Garden (of which he was director from 1792-93) when he married his printer’s daughter, Félicité Didot, in 1793. He was old enough to be her father and he moved to Essonne where he had a house built (now destroyed) and where his in-laws made paper for their presses. She died very young, in 1799, and Bernardin married again in 1800 to Désirée de Pelleporc – he was old enough to be her grandfather. She outlived him and eventually married Aimé-Martin, the entrepreneurial editor who managed successive publication of the complete works, including posthumous ones, that he had access to as Bernardin’s former secretary and, probably, as Désirée’s friend. But that’s another story.... (see Darrie, below)
Bernardin was not a happy person – he argued with friends and enemies alike and fought a long campaign to have protection for his (and others’) literary compositions.
His first published work, the Voyage à l’Ile de France, which appeared in Paris in 1773 (280.d.21.), gives an account of his journey to the Indian Ocean and his short stay on what is now Mauritius. He hoped to make his fortune there but left with no money, disenchanted by conditions on the island, in particular the thriving slave trade.
Living on the King’s charity (many letters giving details of this can be found in the correspondence, now being published on Electronic Enlightenment), he set to work to publish a three-volume philosophical study of nature, the Etudes de la nature in 1784 (1507/1617). Within no time pirated editions were appearing and the author asked the authorities to intervene, but to no avail. This was big business and later, during the Revolution, his printer found a way of putting a watermark in the pages, indicating the genuine article – but buyers were more conscious of cost than authenticity. People wrote to the author, criticising his scientific ideas: he thought tidal movement was caused not by gravity but by the thawing and freezing of the polar ice caps, and he thought the shape of the earth was elongated at the poles rather than flat. Wrong, as we now know, but he defended his ideas until his death. To rub salt in the wound, correspondents actually wrote to him quoting pirated editions....
In 1788 he published the work for which he is now best known, the novel Paul et Virginie, a love story set on the island paradise he had so disliked. The story first appeared in volume 4 of the third edition of the Etudes in 1788 (BL 724.b.1-4). By 1789, recognising the its value as a short novel, he was publishing it separately – but there is actually a separate edition with an earlier imprint (Lausanne, 1788) which might be an audacious pirated text or a text with a false date. The same had happened to the text called L’Arcadie – we know it actually appeared in 1788 in the same edition but an edition appears with a date of 1781, which is clearly wrong.
Title page of the 1788 Lausanne edition of Paul et Virginie. BL 1073.c.3.
Paul et Virginie was an astounding success, possibly the most successful French novel ever published in terms of numbers of editions – it has never been out of print. Countless pirated editions appeared during the author’s lifetime but he could do nothing about it, except complain to the authorities and in his correspondence and prefaces.
Virginie shipwrecked, from the 1806 luxury edition of Paul et Virginie
In an attempt to beat the frauds he prepared a luxury quarto edition in 1806 (BL C.156.k.7), illustrated by the top artists of the day, a text that could not easily be copied and whose success would leave a valuable inheritance for his two children (called, would you believe, Paul and Virginie) but the edition did not sell well. Time had moved on, anybody who wanted the novel already had it and the trade of luxury illustrated editions was in its infancy. Bernardin, for all his literary success, died a poor man but the novel continued to appear, often with sumptuous illustrations – for example the beautiful Curmer edition (BL 1458.k.9.) and the elegant 1868 edition with illustrations by De la Charlerie.
The novel left its mark and many authors in the 19th century refer to it – Emma Bovary actually took it to bed with her and loved the feel of the rice paper that protected the illustrations.
Malcolm Cook, Emeritus Professor of French, University of Exeter
Further Reading
Malcolm Cook, ‘The First Separate Edition of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie’, French Studies Bulletin 2008 (109), 89-91. P.901/3295
Malcolm Cook, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, a life of culture (London, 2006) YK.2009.b.2307
Stephanie Darrie, The editorial work and literary enterprise of Louis Aime-Martin, PhD thesis, University of Exeter, 2009.
https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10036/97093
Odile Jaffré-Cook, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre après Paul et Virginie: Une étude des journaux et de la correspondance sur ses publications au début de la Révolution (1789-1792), PhD thesis, University of Exeter, 2009.
https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10036/96549?show=full
17 February 2014
50 years of exhibitions: a celebration
The recent Georges Braque retrospective in Paris (the catalogue is held by the British Library at shelfmark LF.31.b.9601) was the latest in the impressive series of exhibitions organised by the Réunion des musées nationaux (RMN) in the Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, a wing of the vast exhibition and museum complex built for the 1900 Exposition Universelle. These prestigious exhibitions benefit from the collaboration of major foreign museums, the combined resources of the organising institutions being instrumental in securing important loans.
Renée Grimaud’s 50 ans d'expositions au Grand Palais, Galeries nationales (Paris, 2009; shelfmark YF.2011.b.277), is a lavishly-illustrated survey of some 180 exhibitions staged since 1959, initially in the Louvre, the Orangerie des Tuileries and the Petit Palais, and, since 1966, in the Grand Palais. The presentation is chronological, with a short article describing the most important exhibitions each year, together with factual information about all the others: dates, attendance figures, number of works.
Typically, there are four exhibitions every year, two in the autumn and winter, and two in the spring and early summer; a monographic show is usually coupled with a thematic one (on a civilisation, an artistic movement, a historical figure, or a type of artefact). There have been several unforgettable exhibitions in both categories (no visitor to the great Manet exhibition in 1983 is ever likely to forget the experience). Particularly important, because they define the image of an artist for a whole generation of visitors, have been the monographic exhibitions on French artists, from Poussin to Vuillard; some artists – Courbet, Renoir, Monet, Cézanne – have benefited from two. Exhibitions now tend to be less comprehensive since insurance costs have become so prohibitive and museums, for conservation reasons, are wary of lending major works from their collections.
Exhibition catalogues are the enduring records of temporary events, and the ones published by the RMN (and by their co-organisers in their respective countries and languages) have always been among the best, with introductory essays, detailed entries for each work, high quality illustrations, and comprehensive bibliographies. Several have become standard reference works. A personal selection of the most important ones is given at the end of this article but I would like to describe in more detail two outstanding catalogues, one monographic and one thematic .
The Seurat centenary exhibition in 1991 was, astonishingly, the first major exhibition of the artist’s work in France. Seurat’s works, paintings and drawings, were sold by his family after his death and most of them left the country. Of the six large-scale paintings he produced, only one (Le Cirque) is now in a French public collection, bequeathed to the Louvre in 1924 (by an American collector!) and now in the Musée d’Orsay. This exhibition was, therefore, something of a homecoming. Only two of these paintings could be borrowed but the absence of the other four was compensated by the abundance of preparatory drawings and painted sketches (some 30 for La Grande Jatte alone!) which, as it has often been pointed out, have a spontaneity and poetic freedom that the finished, monumental works lack. Seurat was one of the greatest draughtsmen, and his remarkable Conté crayon drawings – mysterious, brooding, melancholy – formed the backbone of the exhibition and are magnificently illustrated in this catalogue.
Georges Seurat, Seated Nude: Study for ‘Une Baignade’, 1883. (Scottish National Gallery; image from Wikimedia Commons)
L’Âme au corps, arts et sciences, 1793-1993 was one of the largest (the catalogue lists 1005 entries, many consisting of several items) and most ambitious ever staged at the Grand Palais. It was also one of the most unfortunate, as its run was curtailed when an unsafe roof necessitated the closure of the gallery for several weeks. The exhibition examined the interconnections between science and visual arts from the 18th century to the present. Focusing on representations of the human body, it brought together a wide range of objects – anatomical drawings and wax figures, automata – and a wealth of subject matter – physiognomy, phrenology, magnetism, theories of evolution, Lombroso’s theory of anthropological criminology, spiritism – all examined in eight large sections of the catalogue.
I would, however, like to finish on a more personal note, with a look at one of the first exhibitions I saw at the Grand Palais, in 1976.
Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898) was an artist previously mainly encountered, like Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon, in general discussions of Symbolist art. The decision to stage a major exhibition of his work was, therefore, a brave one. The organisers, like those of the Seurat exhibition several years later, faced the problem of having to represent the artist’s major works, his numerous decorative mural cycles that adorn museums and other public institutions in France, through clusters of preparatory studies – drawings, oil sketches and portable studies or reduced-scale replicas of the monumental works. They rose to the challenge magnificently and the exhibition revealed the peculiar genius of this artist: his refined, dream-like, elegiac arcadian scenes, his pared-down compositions, and also his delicate colourism and cool palette. Finally, in the audiovisual introduction to the exhibition, there was the inspired combination of Puvis’s allegorical pastoral scenes and visions of antiquity with Debussy’s Danse sacrée et danse profane, for harp and strings (1904).
Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, L’Été (Summer), 1891. (The Cleveland Museum of Art; image from Wikimedia Commons)
The exhibition was the starting point for a revaluation of the work of Puvis de Chavannes and his influence in late nineteenth-century art. It was followed by numerous exhibitions and publications that culminated in the 2002 mammoth show in Venice which aimed to demonstrate that Puvis exerted a wide-ranging influence in Europe, from Degas, Burne-Jones, and Munch to Carrà, Matisse and Picasso. It also led to the publication of the two-volume catalogue raisonné of his work in 2010.
Chris Michaelides, Curator, Italian and Modern Greek Studies
Some notable catalogues (all published by the Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris):
Monographic exhibitions
Puvis de Chavannes, 1824-1898 (1976-77) X:421/9091 or X:410/6307
Manet, 1832-1883 (1983) YV.1986.b.114
Watteau, 1684-1721 (1984) YV.1987.b.415
Fragonard (1987-88) YV.1988.b.334
Seurat (1991) LB.31.c.3713 (English language edition: J/X.0415/274(65) and LB.37.c.134) [Pictured right]
Géricault (1991-92) LB.31.b.6572
Degas (1988) f88/0467 (English language edition)
Toulouse-Lautrec (1992) LB.31.c.4079 (English language edition)
Nicolas Poussin, 1594-1665 (1994-95) LB.31.b.10584
Vuillard (2003-04) LC.37.b.18
Thematic exhibitions
L'Âme au corps: arts et sciences 1793 – 1993 (1993-1994) LF.31.b.7049
Le Siècle de Titien: l’âge d’or de la peinture à Venise. (1993) YA.1994.b.502
Mélancolie, génie et folie en occident (2005-2006) LF.31.b.2337
Other publications
From Puvis de Chavannes to Matisse and Picasso: toward modern art, edited by Serge Lemoine. (London, 2002) YC.2002.b.1307
Aimée Brown Price, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (New Haven, Conn., 2010). LC.31.b.7242 (vol. 1) and LC.31.b.7243 (vol.2)
Debussy, la musique et les arts (Paris, 2012) YF.2013.b.325
Jean-Michel Nectoux, Harmonie en bleu et or: Debussy, la musique et les arts (Paris, 2005) LF.31.b.2571
03 February 2014
Alsace-Lorraine and Anglophilia: the obsessions of Paul Déroulède
On 3 February 1914 Paris witnessed the greatest funeral procession to pass through its streets since the cortège of Victor Hugo in 1885. On this occasion, too, a poet, dramatist and political exile was being carried to his grave, but one who was not only a controversial political figure but had a distinguished military career.
Paul Déroulède (1846-1914) had already seen his first play Juan Strenner (Paris, 1869; 11739.cc.17.(3.)) performed at the Théâtre Français in 1869 before joining up as a private to fight in the Franco-Prussian war. Wounded at the battle of Sedan, he escaped from imprisonment in Breslau (Wrocław) to rejoin the army and fight against the Paris Commune (1871) before being promoted to lieutenant. When an accident put an end to his military activities, he concentrated on literature, and achieved considerable popularity with his collections of patriotic poems Chants du soldat (Paris, 1872; 011483.e.42) and Nouveaux chants de soldat (Paris, 1875; 11482.aa.2).
Paul Déroulède in 1877 (portrait by Jean-François Pourtaels from Wikimedia Commons)
His experiences in the war heightened the sense of bitterness which he experienced at the loss of Alsace and Lorraine to the newly-established German empire, and he became a familiar figure at the annual commemorations of those who had fallen in the conflict. Together with the historian Henri Martin and Félix Faure, who later became President of France, he founded the Ligue des patriotes in 1882 to avenge the loss of the provinces. It rapidly gained a considerable membership, and in 1885 he became its president.
In the political sphere, though, he was less successful; after finally being elected in 1889 to the Chambre des députés as the member for Angoulême, he proved so noisy and disruptive during debates that he was expelled the following year, and not reinstated until 1898. In the meantime he had been equally vocal in his attacks on Dreyfus. Finally, after failing to persuade General Roget to advance on the presidential palace in 1899, he insisted on being arrested for treason, and was finally sentenced to ten years’ exile from France for conspiracy against the Republic. He retreated to San Sebastián in the Basque country, but was enabled to return by an amnesty decreed in 1905.
One of the most colourful episodes in his career, which inspired a famous painting by Henri Meyer, was a duel to which he challenged the future president Georges Clemenceau in 1892 over the latter’s implication in the scandal resulting from the collapse in 1889 of the Panama Canal Company because of corruption and mismanagement. Neither was wounded, but this reinforced Déroulède’s reputation as an extreme nationalist and opponent of the Third Republic.
Pragmatically as ideologically Déroulède was a notable Anglophile, though his own experiences when seeking election had convinced him that the British parliamentary system was not appropriate for France. However, he saw Britain as an indispensable ally against Germany, and saw the acquisition of French colonies as a poor substitute for the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, especially as he regarded colonialism as a likely source of conflict with the British Empire.
Cover of Paul Déroulède's Monsieur le Hulan et les trois couleurs: conte de Noël (Paris, [1917]) 1873.dd.8.
It is tantalizing to speculate on the reasons for Baroness Orczy's choice of the name Paul Déroulède for the hero of her novel I Will Repay (London, 1906; 012633.a.31). Yet it is hard to imagine that, as a convinced Anglophile who, like his fictional namesake, had demanded to be arrested for treason, he would not have been delighted and flattered by this coincidence.
Susan Halstead, Curator Czech Slovak and Lusatian.
03 January 2014
The Panizzi Lectures - Censors at Work: Bourbon France, Imperialist India, and Communist Germany.
The Panizzi Lectures, based upon the original researches of eminent scholars of the book, have been delivered annually since 1985. They cover a wide and international subject range within the overall umbrella of historical bibliography. In this year’s series of three lectures, on Monday 6, Tuesday 7 and Thursday 9 January 2014, Professor Robert Darnton will look at how censorship operated in three different periods and countries - Bourbon France, Imperialist India, and Communist Germany.
The image used in the publicity for the lectures (above) is a detail of a satirical print by J. J. Grandville, published in November 1833 in L’Association mensuelle, a special edition of Charles Philipon’s La Caricature. It shows King Louis Philippe and his entourage raiding the workshop of the Freedom of the Press. The king is seen on the left, brutally trying to silence a woman worker (a personification of Freedom of the Press), his right foot treading on a paper called Le Bon Sens (‘Common Sense’). Other officials are depicted attacking the press itself, or tearing newspapers. Hanging above are issues of anti-Government papers like Le Charivari and La Caricature, the latter showing a pear - a notorious caricature of the head of Louis-Philippe, created by Philipon in 1831 and subsequently used by artists (notably Daumier) to represent the king.
The three lectures are:
1. Monday 6 January 2014. Bourbon France: Privilege and repression.
Censorship under the Ancien Régime in France was positive: a royal endorsement of a book’s quality in the form of a privilege. Books that could not qualify for privileges circulated in a vast underground trade, which a specialized literary police attempted, with limited success, to repress.
2. Tuesday 7 January 2014. British India: Liberalism and Imperialism.
After the rebellion of 1857, the British masters of India realized they understood little about the country they had conquered and therefore produced extensive surveys of “native” literature. The surveys reveal the nature of imperialist discourse about Indian literature, and they provided material for the repression of everything deemed seditious after the partition of Bengal in 1905.
3. Thursday 9 January 2014. Communist East Germany: Planning and Persecution.
In Communist East Germany, censorship meant “planning,” a literary version of social engineering. Every book had to be incorporated in an annual plan after a complex process of negotiation and compromise, which made authors complicit with censors and led to struggles that reverberated up to the top of the power structure.
Professor Robert Darnton (right) is Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the University Library at Harvard. He has written and edited many books, including The Business of Enlightenment: A publishing History of the Encyclopédie (Cambridge, Mass., 1979, an early attempt to develop the history of books as a field of study; British Library X.981/21846), The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York, 1984, probably his most popular work, which has been translated into 18 languages; X.800/41225), Berlin Journal, 1989-1990 (New York, 1991, an account of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of East Germany; YC.1993.a.3801), and The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Prerevolutionary France (New York, 1995, a study of the underground book trade; YC.1995.b.3040). His latest books are The Case for Books (New York, 2009; m09/36681), The Devil in the Holy Water, or The Art of Slander in France from Louis XIV to Napoleon (Philadelphia, 2010; YC.2012.a.15402), and Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge, Mass., 2010; YC.2010.a.16713).
All lectures will be in the Lecture Theatre of the British Library Conference Centre, 96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB. 18.30-19.30. Admission is free and the lectures are not ticketed; seats will be allocated on a first come, first served basis.
The last lecture will be followed by a drinks reception to which all are welcome.
Chris Michaelides, Secretary, Panizzi Foundation.
27 December 2013
C'est ma chanson
A while ago I went to see Petula Clark in concert at the Barbican in York. As a fan since the 1960s it was an emotional occasion as Petula turned 81 in November and may not give many more live concerts.
Petula was a child star and first performed on radio for the BBC during the Second World War. She was a popular singer in the UK and became world famous in 1964 with her hit ‘Downtown’. In the 1950s she began to record in French, eventually moved to France, and in 1961 married a Frenchman, Claude Wolff.
Petula Clark in 1960. (Photo by Henk Lindeboom / Anefo from Wikimedia Commons) 
She didn’t like France at first but the French took her to their hearts and loved the way she spoke French with an English accent. She became friends with the singers Françoise Hardy, Charles Aznavour, Sacha Distel and the Belgian Jacques Brel, who wrote ‘Un Enfant’ for her, and she admired the work of songwriter Serge Gainsbourg for whom she recorded a number of songs. She wrote and recorded ‘La Chanson de Gainsbourg’ in his honour and her signature is among the famous tribute graffiti on the exterior walls of his Parisian home.
It is her French recordings that I love and listen to regularly to this day. The title of this piece is the French version of one of her most famous hits, ‘This Is my Song’, written for her by Charlie Chaplin. Most of her best French songs have been captured on a set of nine CDs entitled Anthologie which cover the years 1958 to 1976. She sometimes combined her love of England and France in her singing, as in ‘La Seine et la Tamise’, the music for which she wrote herself with lyrics by Pierre Delanoe, and in ‘Hello Mister Brown,’ which celebrated English pop culture.
The collection also includes some classic French songs such as ‘Pigalle’, ‘La Vie En Rose’ and ‘La Mer’. There are many other songs with soulful, haunting melodies like ‘Pierrot Pendu’ and ‘Pourquoi Dis-Tu Pourquoi?’, as well as lively, upbeat numbers such as ‘Ya Ya Twist’. A search for recordings by Petula Clark on the British Library’s catalogue brings up many of these French language recordings held in our Sound collections.
Petula Clark has also starred in many films, including Goodbye Mr Chips with Peter O’Toole and Finian’s Rainbow with Fred Astaire. She has had a notable career in stage musicals too, both in London’s West End and on Broadway. She has never permitted an official biography, but two unofficial ones have appeared in 1983 by Andrea Kon and 1991 by Stephen Warner, and she gave her blessing to an illustrated French book about her life and work in 2007.
She received a standing ovation in York and I hope to see her perform on stage again before she finally ends her long and glorious career. Meanwhile, as a festive touch, you can hear her singing a French version of ‘Silent Night’ here.
Trevor Willimott, former West European Languages cataloguer
References:
Anthologie. CDs 1-9. Paris: FGL Productions, 1998-2002.
Kon, Andrea. This is My Song: a Biography of Petula Clark (London, 1983) YM.1989.b.544
Warner, Stephen. Petula Clark: a Biography.(London, 1991) YK.1993.a.9035.
Piazza, Françoise. Petula Clark: une baladine (Paris, 2007.) YF.2008.b.2810
16 December 2013
Christmas Music and Popular Songs: Free Concert at the British Library
When: Mon 16 Dec 2013, 13.00 - 14.00
Where: Entrance Hall, British Library
Admission free
Join the British Library & British Museum Singers for a programme of Christmas Music and Popular Songs. This concert has become an annual fixture and, as always, the programme will consist of a sprinkling of European Christmas music including items sung in the original French, German, Spanish, Czech, Polish and Russian alongside a generous helping of familiar English carols and popular songs from all ages. The concert will be conducted by Peter Hellyer.
The British Library & British Museum Singers
The Polish carol to be performed in the concert is ‘W zlobie lezy’ (‘Jesus lying in the manger’, better known to English-speakers as ‘Infant holy, infant lowly’). It is believed that this carol originated in the 17th century and it is attributed to Piotr Skarga, a Polish Jesuit, preacher and the leading figure of the Counter-Reformation. The music is based on the polonaise composed for the coronation of King Ladislaus IV Vasa.
‘Il est né, le divin enfant’ (‘He is born, the divine child’) is a traditional French carol, which was first published in 1862 in a collection of Christmas carols entitled Airs des noêls lorrains compiled by a church organist, Jean-Romary Grosjean. And the Austrian carol ‘Stille Nacht’ is, of course, familiar in both its original German, and in English as ‘Silent Night’; during the First World War, in the Christmas truce of 1914 German, English and French soldiers are said to have sung it together, all in their own languages, across the lines.
Peter Hellyer, Musical Director British Library & British Museum Singers and Curator Russian Studies
29 November 2013
Olympe de Gouges and 'Les Trois Urnes'
In the course of the 19th century, the British Museum Library gained fame through both the scale and rarity of its ever-growing holdings. However, whilst the staff were valiant in cataloguing what was a tidal wave of acquisitions, they were always few in number and working to make each acquisition available to readers as quickly as possible. The resulting catalogue therefore was characterised by the brevity and terseness of its entries for all but a few works. Regrettable also was the failure sometimes to identify authorship of works of great significance.
The British Library is the approximate successor to the British Museum Library and inherited its catalogue whose entries it is currently trying to enhance. It also has a vast number of attentive and scholarly readers whose knowledge can transform a bare catalogue entry into rich and accurate description and thus correct the defects of the past.
Such has been the case with the seventh of 125 posters bound together in the volume at shelfmark Tab.443.a.3. Since its purchase by the British Museum Library until February 2013, it lay, modestly described and with no author attribution, under the catalogue heading URNES. And then a reader identified its author and informed the British Library, and the importance of this poster was made clear. It is entitled Les Trois Urnes, ou Le salut de la patrie authored by ‘Un voyageur aerien’. Although it is undated and carries neither printer’s name nor place of publication, external evidence allows us to date it to July 1793 and to identify the author as Olympe de Gouges (1748-1793).
The original printed catalogue entry for Les Trois Urnes. You can find the updated and improved record in our online catalogue
Olympe de Gouges had already made something of a name for herself in the late 1780s as the author of several plays inspired by immediate political issues. With the status of citizen which the French Revolution gave her and all others, she gave full rein to her belief in her right to address the most important questions and the most highly placed citizens of the day. Most famous among these addresses is her pamphlet on the rights of women as equal members of the body politic and sociable. In both format and argument, it is structured as the unpublished but necessary complement to the constitution ratified by the Constituent Assembly in 1791. It concludes with a chapter emulating, even in its title, Rousseau’s Social Contract.
Using to the full her legal rights and the political ideals of equality and free speech, Olympe de Gouges became a commentator on and increasingly a critic of the direction of the Revolution whilst absolutely rejecting the political regime that it had replaced. In a series of tracts, she directed her arguments to Queen Marie-Antoinette, to the Army and to the radicalising Society of Friends of the Constitution. In a courageous act of solidarity with the principles supposedly embedded in the Revolution, she even offered herself as defence counsel for Louis XVI.
Portrait of Olympe de Gouges by Alexander Kucharsky (image from Wikimedia Commons)
Her final public statement as a free woman was the poster under discussion. In format, it emulates any revolutionary official or government proclamation: it is a large folio sheet, printed on one side only, the title, printed in large, bold capitals, contains a rhetorical flourish, while the text is printed in two vertical columns. Most strikingly and very much drawing attention to itself as not an official publication, is the vividly-coloured paper on which it is printed.
Les Trois Urnes, ou Le salut de la patrie [Paris?, 1793]. British Library Tab.443.a.3(7)
The poster argues the need for a national plebiscite to decide which form of government is most favoured by the French people. The choice is offered between a unitary republic, a federal system or a constitutional monarchy. Even a particular election procedure is described and advocated. The writing is urgent but the authorial identity adopted – a sprite come from mythical foreign parts to solve the dilemmas of humankind – is possibly too flippant, too knowing and altogether too learned to command respect or a hearing during these desperate times when stern slogans and rallying cries were the order of the day. Furthermore, the argument was at odds with itself: monarchy had been equated with tyranny in the first section of the poster so how could any form of monarchical government be other than an infringement of the liberties achieved by the Revolution?
Louis XVI had been guillotined on 21 January 1793, Marie-Antoinette was in prison, the Girondist Deputies in the National Convention, with whom Olympe de Gouges sympathised politically, had fallen and their arrest had been ordered on 13 June 1793. The death penalty was freely used. In addition, France was beset by external enemies, the National Convention admitted no challenge to its sovereign power, and its dominant faction – the Jacobins – made clear the ideological structure of their non-negotiable State in every decree issued: the Republic, one and indivisible. De Gouges’ own arguments concerning the structure of the State belonged to a calmer time. Her publication of them in Les Trois Urnes was exceptionally brave, but suicidally so, and it is hard to believe that she did not know this.
She was quickly identified as the author of the poster, arrested and tried before the Revolutionary Tribunal on a charge of sedition on 2 November 1793, the content of her poster being used as part of the evidence against her. Found guilty, she was beheaded on the guillotine the next day. Marie-Antoinette, the Girondist Deputies and many others had already preceded her.
Her courage lives on as do her words which are increasingly consulted to help us understand the position of women during the French Revolution. Authorship of the British Library’s copy of this poster was identified by researcher Clarissa Palmer who has also informed us of its extreme rarity. It seems that the Revolutionary government destroyed all known copies of it, keeping only the one used during Olympe de Gouges’ trial. That copy is now in the Archives Nationales in Paris. The British Library’s thanks to Ms Palmer are given here.
Des McTernan, Curator French Studies
20 November 2013
“A French Connection” : Concert by the British Library & British Museum Singers 21 November 2013
To mark the 50th anniversary of the death of the French composer Francis Poulenc the British Library & British Museum Singers will give a performance of Poulenc’s Gloria conducted by Peter Hellyer accompanied by Christopher Scobie.
When: 13.15, Thurs 21 November 2013
Where: St Pancras Parish Church (Opposite Euston Station, Euston Road)
Francis Poulenc (with the harpsichordist Wanda Landowska, 1930. Image from Wikimedia Commons)
The programme will also include:
Poulenc : Le Bestiaire
Poulenc : Banalités: Hôtel; Voyage à Paris
Passereau: Il est bel et bon
Fauré: Après une rêve; Chanson, op. 94; Mandoline
Offenbach : Gendarmes duet
Saint-Saens: Danse macabre (song)
The programme features the first performance of Orphic fragments (based on verses by Apollinaire) by Christopher Scobie. Christopher writes:
“These three very short songs for choir are settings of three very short poems by the French surrealist poet and writer Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918). Presenting texts from his collection Le Bestiaire, ou Cortège d’Orphée (a collection of animal tales in the spirit of earlier bestiaries), I have tried to capture the brief, epigrammatic nature of each, and given something of the character of: 1) the magical, slowly unfolding song of the Thracian tortoise, 2) the call-to-arms of the caterpillar-poets whose hard work will transform into beautiful butterflies, and 3) the brilliant coat of the Tibetan goat.”
The songs by Poulenc included in the programme are also settings of poems by Apollinaire. The poems that Poulenc set in his song cycle Le Bestiaire are: Le dromadaire; La chèvre du Tibet; La sauterelle; Le dauphin; L’écrevisse; La carpe. The words of Hôtel and Voyage à Paris from Banalités are also by Apollinaire.
It is interesting to note that that there are both Polish and Russian connections in Apollinaire’s family history. He was born Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki in Rome, a Russian subject whose mother was a Polish noblewoman from what is now Belarus. He adopted the name Apollinaire after later emigrating to France.
Peter Hellyer, Musical Director British Library & British Museum Singers and Curator Russian Studies
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