text:
Get Thee to a Phalanstery
or, How Fourier Can Still Teach Us to Make Lemonade
By Dominic Pettman
May 1, 2019

Hot on the heels of the French Revolution — by way of extravagant orgies, obscure taxonomies, and lemonade seas — Charles Fourier offered up his blueprint for a socialist utopia, and in the process also one of the most influential early critiques of capitalism. Dominic Pettman explores Fourier’s radical, bizarre, and often astonishingly modern ideas, and how they might guide us in our own troubled times.

Critical thinkers, like myself, often emphasize the fact that Things Could Have Been Otherwise. Indeed, we like to convey the sense that Things could still be Otherwise, if we just start thinking differently. (And not just “differently” in the manner encouraged by Steve Jobs.) The premise is that society is, well, socially constructed, and that it actually takes a lot of invisible ideological work to keep the foundations of this strange — absurdly unjust — society replicating itself from generation to generation. (An approach known as “social reproduction theory”.) Charles Fourier, the unconventional proto-socialist who wrote at the beginning of the nineteenth century, is, it could be argued, the patron saint of Living Otherwise. He was the first thinker, to my knowledge, to not only critique the status quo, but to spend much of his life mapping out precisely how Things could be so radically different as to be virtually unrecognizable. This is why his name forever features in the pantheon of utopians. His notion of Harmony — an age in which all our present miseries and stupidities will be vanquished, almost overnight, by vastly improved social arrangements — is the first detailed attempt to create a blueprint for an actual existing utopia. A utopia not just for the anointed or the deserving, but for all humankind, united under a new global association of liberated souls (connected by what he called passionate attraction).
It is impossible to broach the topic of Fourier, however, without discussing some of his many eccentricities. So let’s get some of them out of the way from the get-go. He wanted to abolish the number ten. He believed that children could be motivated to happily do most of the labor in our future communes, like Oompa-Loompas. He believed lions and sharks would soon die out, replaced by “anti-sharks” and “anti-lions”. And most famously of all, he claimed a shift in our local cosmic conditions would change the chemical makeup of the earth’s oceans, so that they would taste like lemonade. There is also no shortage of paradoxes in Fourier’s character. He was a businessman who hated commerce. (Or at least the way commerce was practiced in his day.) He was a cosmopolitan universalist, susceptible to selective racism. He was a passionate rationalist and a utopian pessimist (in the sense he believed we live in the worst of possible worlds, but are only a few months away from flipping this scenario on its head). He was a scientific fantasist, a pedantic fabulist, a colonialist abolitionist, a revolutionary thinker who hated and feared revolutions, and a hyper-controlling conductor of freedom. Indeed, reading Fourier is quite a dissonant experience, given that he is as perceptive as he is naïve, and as prescient as he is absurd. (Indeed, I would argue that Fourier is a more amusing satirist than Jonathan Swift, for the simple reason that the former is deadly serious.)
Fourier’s writing smells (pleasantly, to my nose) “of the lamp”, since he was obliged to work late into the night, after working as a traveling sales clerk during the day (mostly in connection with the silk trade of his native Lyon). Even so, he enjoyed a staggering confidence in his own knowledge, and presumed unprecedented mastery of every branch of the human and natural sciences (cosmology, meteorology, geography, anthropology, etc. . . . even theology). Fourier’s most essential claim would have seen him burnt at the stake a century or so earlier: specifically, that all of humanity’s various instincts and passions, including lust, are part of God’s grand design and should not be repressed or stigmatized as sinful. The problem, according to Fourier, is not with our primal urges, but with the way these desires are stifled, stunted, and warped by civilization (a time period in the Western Hemisphere that dates from the ancient Greeks, by his reckoning). Make no mistake, when Fourier uses the term “civilized”, he is not marking a higher state or achievement, but rather hurling an insult with a curled lip. Civilization names a dark age of hypocrisy, disorientation, and universal unhappiness, where even the very rich are imprisoned in simply a more comfortable class of misery than the rest of us. While humanity has made great technical strides, according to our guide, which have led to astonishing leaps in our capacity to exploit nature for profit, we have not paid any attention to our own inclinations, our own souls, our own hunger for freedom, play, sensual exploration, artistic expression, confraternity, and collective erotic interaction. (Where “Eros” is figured not in its reduced form, as merely the sexual, but as the pulse of life and joy which Lucretius believed lies at the origin of life’s spark.) In other words, Fourier provided a fully fledged theory of alienation, several decades before Marx, just as he had a fully fledged theory of repression nearly a century before Freud.
Fourier was insistent that we need not force a violent revolution in order to usher in a new age; we just need to rearrange some of our social mechanisms and better regulate our intimate relations. Everything else would follow smoothly and swiftly in its wake. Removing obstacles was paramount, and the main obstacles in Fourier’s eyes were what we today call compulsory monogamy, wage slavery, alienated labor, financial insecurity, and finance capitalism. (And also bread. Fourier was not a fan of bread.) By banishing monogamy, people would no longer be obliged to cheat, lie, and sneak. Love, whether spiritual or physical, would be allowed to flourish whenever and however it began to blossom, and bitterness and resentment would subsequently evaporate almost overnight. (Strangely, while Fourier had a great faith in the motivational spur of comradely rivalry, he had little trepidation about the dark power of jealousy as an entrenched human — perhaps even animal — trait.) Wages are, for Fourier, a scourge, and should be replaced by a dividend or share of profits, and no one should be obliged to toil for a pittance. Monotonous work is to immediately be replaced by many different tasks, all vital to the community, and all intimately connected to the sense of worth and accomplishment of the clan. (Or what he called a Series.) Fourier imagined vigorous and friendly competition between the pear-growers and the apple-growers, for instance. But even so, a pear-grower would perhaps move to the woodshop later in the afternoon, before attending a rehearsal of her new play a couple of hours after that, all in order to honor the papillonnage, or butterfly-like caprice, of human attention.
The citizen of Harmony (known as a “harmonian”) would soon live to be 144 years old, need only five hours’ sleep, and be an average height of seven foot, due to the healthy lifestyle, refined superfoods, and overall orgone accumulation of the phalanstery. (While Fourier never used the phrase “orgone” energy, it is difficult to not see its presence at work in the vision of Harmony, from a post-Reichian perspective.) Indeed, Fourier’s vatic description of the phalanstery is a strange mix of the classical (including vestals), the medieval (wandering bards and errant knights), and the Renaissance (“courtly behavior”). It also anticipates the Victorian era (especially the craft-based counter-culture associated with William Morris), as well as the hyper-modern industrial age (utilizing, as it does, state-of-the-art architecture and engineering, such as weather-proof towns and forest-wide irrigation systems).
Among all the remarkable claims in Fourier’s seemingly tireless accounts of this tantalizing collective life, which exists just past our own selfish and self-defeating horizon (to the extent that he sometimes slipped into the present tense when describing it), one in particular stands out as striking. And that is the amazing faith he has in human association itself. Clearly, this thinker has never lived in a group house, or been obliged to sit on a committee, for he believed that a rather relentless public existence would, by its own account, bring us, without exception, a profound and unshakable happiness. (So much so that rich folk would live in a modest house of only three rooms, since they would spend three-quarters of their lives in active social commerce and activity.)
Rich folk, you ask? I thought Fourier was a socialist? Well, this is another one of his many contradictions. While our utopian architect abhorred exploitation, he reserved contempt for the notion of equality. “The associative régime”, he wrote,
is as incompatible with equality of fortune as with uniformity of character; it desires a progressive scale in every direction, the greatest variety in employments, and, above all, the union of extreme contrasts, such as that of the man of opulence with one of no means, a fiery character with an apathetic one, youth with age, etc.1
In other words, variety is the spice of life. And Fourier sought to keep things as spicy as possible. “We must not persuade ourselves that in Harmony mankind are brothers and friends”, he insisted. “It would be robbing life of its salt to cause the shades of opinion, contradictions, antipathies even, to disappear from it.”2 Fourier believed that there were 810 different personality types, so each phalanstery should be comprised of 1,620 inhabitants — one personality type of each sex.
Fourier’s utopia is thus, at the end of the day, a rather bourgeois one; just as his own writings were written for gentlemen, largely above his own station. (This is partly a reflection of Fourier’s own business model, which was subscription based, so that his writings were sponsored by those relatively well-to-do folks interested in his radical theories, à la left-leaning Patreon or Kickstarter patrons.) Nevertheless, we would be doing him a disservice if we did not acknowledge his astonishingly progressive views on women. Indeed, writing at the very beginning of the nineteenth century, Fourier went so far as to say: “As a general proposition: Social progress and changes of historical period are brought about as a result of the progress of women towards liberty.”3 Fourier is even credited with coining the word “feminism”. Of women, he asked,
Is there a shadow of justice to be seen in the fate which has befallen them! Is a young woman not a piece of merchandise offered for sale to whoever wants to negotiate her acquisition and exclusive ownership? Is not the consent she gives to the marriage bond derisory and enforced upon her by the tyranny of all the prejudices which have beset her since childhood?4
In one especially perceptive passage, Fourier noted:
[Men] even debase the female sex by their flattery of it, for what can be more inconsistent than Diderot’s claim that to write to women ‘you must dip your pen in the rainbow and sprinkle what you have written with the dust of butterfly wings’? Women might reply to the philosophers: your Civilisation persecutes us if we obey nature; we are obliged to behave artificially, and to attend only to promptings that go against our desires. In order to make us swallow your doctrines you have to play on our illusions and use the language of deceit, as you do with soldiers when you lull them with promises of laurels and immortality to make them forget their wretched situation. If they were really happy they would welcome being addressed in straightforward, truthful language of the sort which you are very careful to avoid. The same goes for women: if they were free and happy they would not be so eager to embrace illusions and cajolery, and you would not need the help of the rainbow and butterflies to write to them. If the military and the female sex, in fact the whole of the common people, have to be deluded all the time, then that is a serious indictment of philosophy for failing to organise anything in this world except misery and servitude. And when it mocks women’s vices it is actually criticising itself, for it is philosophy which produces these vices through a social system which represses women’s rights and abilities from childhood and throughout their lives, forcing them to resort to deception if they are to obey their natural impulses.5
The “free women of the combined order”, Fourier assured his readers, “will surpass men in their dedication to work, in loyalty and in nobility.”6
Fourier’s singular relevance for our own vexed moment is not restricted to his critique of political economy, nor to his early advancement of the feminist cause, but includes also his attention to matters of climate and environment. Fourier thus offers us a precious gift, in his reminder of the intimate relationship between the domestic sphere, wider society, and the cosmos itself. (In this sense, he is a kind of centaur — half Emily Post, half Georges Bataille.) Fourier was alive to “the influence of human cultivation upon atmosphere and climatic conditions”.7 His philosophy was somewhat inconsistent on this theme, however, as he was torn between being sensitive to the environment and reshaping it to our needs. He lamented the rapine of the environment, on the one hand, while he advocated vast changes to the natural world, on the other. “We bring the axe and destruction,” he wrote
And the result is landslides, the denuding of mountain-sides, and the deterioration of the climate. This evil, by destroying the springs and multiplying storms, is in two ways the cause of disorder in the water system. Our rivers, constantly alternating from one extreme to the other, from sudden swellings to protracted droughts, are able to support only a very small quantity of fish, which people take care to destroy at their birth, reducing their number to a tenth of that which they ought to produce. Thus, we are complete savages in the management of water and forests. How our descendants will curse civilisation, on seeing so many mountains despoiled and laid bare.8
And yet,
[T]he combined order will undertake the conquest of the great Sahara desert. It will be attacked at several points by 10 or 20 million hands, if necessary, and by dint of importing earth, and gradual planting and afforestation, they will succeed in humidifying the land, stabilising the sands, and replacing desert with fertile regions. There will be ship canals in places where today we cannot even create irrigation channels, and great ships will not only sail through isthmuses like Suez and Panama but far inland.9
Fourier looked forward to planned human interventions creating vast changes in the world’s “natural infrastructure”, if we can call it that. But he approached this in terms of making the planet more hospitable for habitation. He was not interested in exploitation without replenishment, as we still proceed to do, even today. The problem, in Fourier’s view, was not so much scale, but execution. The world should be radically changed, to allow for greater cultivation, since nature exists primarily for the delight and benefit of humankind. But any such changes should only be made in sympathy with the tendencies and desires of the planet itself. Our ambitious Frenchman was thus an early advocate of what we now call geo-engineering, though he would have been horrified at the scale and method of the works currently being conducted in China, West Virginia, Australia — indeed all over the world.
As for global warming, this was yet another item ticked off of Fourier’s prophetic checklist, down to the detail of the polar ice caps melting. For Fourier, however, this was far from a negative thing. While he was right about a marked increase in global temperatures, he could not have been more wrong about its effects, since he looked forward to a universally temperate, gentle, and pleasant climate (“The transformation of the polar winds into zephyrs . . .”10), and the opportunity it would afford to cultivate forests at unheard of latitudes. Each generation subsequent to the establishment of Harmony, he predicted confidently, “will see a very sensible bettering of its climatic conditions, thanks to the power which Association possesses of again covering the mountains with trees, judiciously distributing waters and forests, ponds for irrigation, and all branches of cultivation”.11 While sparse with details, Fourier believed we could transform the planet into a new Garden of Eden. Our anthropogenic influence, however, would not stop short of the earth and its atmosphere, since, by some kind of unexplained cosmic entanglement of influence, new moons would show themselves in the sky, and — most importantly of all — a crown of benign light and energy would descend over the Northern Pole.12 (A crown which would render the seas into lemonade, and allow agriculture over the entire globe.) The only reason our planet does not at present enjoy regal rings, like those of Saturn, is, according to Fourier, due to the fact that our civilization is so “impoverished” that we don’t deserve them yet. (He also took it for granted that aliens on other planets were far more evolved than we are, and that we are the slow kids on the cosmic block, having been mired in incoherency for so long.) Fourier even believed that the Earth itself would sometimes find itself “in heat”, like an animal:
This can be seen from the frequent appearances of the aurora borealis, which are a symptom of the planet’s being in rut, a useless effusion of creative fluid, which cannot conjoin with the southern fluid as long as the human race has not carried out its preparations.13
A reader of Malthus, Fourier considered the question of population to be key. He believed that the human race — once freed from the yoke of civilization — would first grow rather rapidly, and then stabilize at a sustainable number, thanks to a kind of innate, biological reduction in fertility rates. “Luckily”, he wrote, “the earth is vast in proportion to its small population; we are still only one-third of the globe’s proper number, with our small total of 2 billion.”14 Nevertheless, he added, “it will take only 150 years for the earth to be populated to its FULL CAPACITY”.15 While the prospect of overpopulation was one of the various specters haunting Europe in the nineteenth century, Fourier had great faith in the self-regulating mechanisms emerging from this new age. “After three generations of Harmony,” he pronounced, “two-thirds of the women will be unfruitful, as is the case with all flowers which, by the refinements of cultivation, have been raised to a high degree of perfection.”16 Thanks to a combination of “the vigour of women”, “integral exercise”, enlightened morals, and a new, healthier “gastrosophic régime”, children will arrive in Association at the same rate as people leave this mortal coil, and no more. (Quite the feat, given the elaborate orgies planned in the Phalanstery.)17
A hundred years ago, Sigmund Freud introduced us to the idea of “libidinal economy”.18 That is, the psychosocial modes of exchange, saving, and spending that we all negotiate on a daily basis. Any emotional investment you make in a person or project, for instance, in the hope it will make you happy, or more psychologically enriched in some way, is an example of your contribution to the wider libidinal economy. Even a stolen kiss is factored into the general accounting, theoretically speaking. Given that both microeconomics and macroeconomics depend on wants, needs, hopes, desires, etc., we can confidently claim that all economies have an erotic component, if we trace it back carefully enough. (Although, yes, sometimes a longterm capital gain dividend is just a longterm capital gain dividend.) Having tarried with the work of Fourier, I would like to float the notion of a “libidinal ecology”, that is, a more expansive conceptual lens than Freud’s, to better understand what is now called “the anthropocene”, or the measurable, rapidly accelerating human impact on the wider environment.
Fourier — whom one critic notes, “everybody knows . . . [but] nobody has read”19 — helps us understand the intimate link between economic and ecological concerns and behaviors. Economy was originally the spontaneous science of organizing the household (oikos). This involved not only distribution of domestic labor, but balancing budgets, exchanging services, regulating conditions, managing resources, recycling materials, processing waste, and so on. Given that economy begins in both bedroom and kitchen, it is inherently libidinal. It is fundamentally a matter of gender, sex, desire, as well as the kinds of contracts and obligations these, in turn, engender. Freud understood the inescapably transactional nature of erotic experience — you cannot get a free lunch, so to speak; and intense pleasure always comes at a price. But the father of psychoanalysis declined to map the “actual” economic sphere on to the sexual sphere with the insight and persistence of Fourier. He did not show, as the silk merchant from Lyon did, how these are in fact one single sphere, how they are one and the same body. In attempting to manifest justice in both spheres of love and economics, in a radically transformed world — both socially and geographically speaking — Fourier went a step further: he demonstrated the interpenetration of economy and ecology (before the latter term was even invented).
Now that “nature” has moved from the background of human affairs and become a fellow protagonist (or even antagonist) — with its own evolving concerns, and perhaps even its own destiny — ecological consciousness has given age-old questions a new tone and urgency. Fourier looked forward to the melting of the ice caps, because he believed this would open up new vistas for sustainable farming, and with it, a new generalized conviviality. He was wrong about the climatic effects and social repercussions of such major anthropogenic changes. But he was right that we need to invent radically new economic relationships in order to survive and thrive as a species among others. This means essentially banishing the profit motive from all aspects of society, from the boardroom to the bedroom. This means understanding our own natural impulses, and not shoe-horning them into compromised cultural shapes and arrangements. This means cultivating a sustainable libidinal ecology. One which honors and includes “the infinitely small as well as the infinitely great . . . the infinitely ridiculous as well as the infinitely charming”.20
Fourier — not despite his eccentric imagination, but precisely because of it — was a brilliant, far-sighted libidinal ecologist: one who understood the dangers of prioritizing avarice and vulgar materialism over a sustained, collective holistic attention to ars erotica and what the French philosopher, Bernard Stiegler, today calls “savoir vivre” (knowing how to live). While there were several attempts after his death to realize Fourier’s projections, and found actual phalansteries (including Brook Farm, near Boston), these of course never quite got off the ground. Nevertheless, his spirit entered the conceptual groundwater, and we can see his influence waxing in the free love of the 1960s, as well as the polyamory and queer sex-positivity of today. Many on the left today, for instance, look forward to what they cheekily call, Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism. If these kinky comrades and cosmonauts have not yet settled on a symbolic founder, they could hardly find a more well-suited one than this humble, arrogant, grumpy, tireless, visionary crypto-Calvinist Dionysian.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Dominic Pettman


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Photographing the Dark
Nadar’s Descent into the Paris Catacombs
By Allison C. Meier
October 25, 2019

Today the Paris Catacombs are illuminated by electric lights and friendly guides. But when Félix Nadar descended into this “empire of death” in the 1860s artificial lighting was still in its infancy: the pioneering photographer had to face the quandary of how to take photographs in the subterranean dark. Allison C. Meier explores Nadar’s determined efforts (which involved Bunsen batteries, mannequins, and a good deal of patience) to document the beauty and terror of this realm of the dead.

Few nineteenth-century Parisians saw the city like Félix Nadar. In 1863, he ascended in a huge airship called Le Géant, from which he captured aerial views of a rapidly changing metropolis. Under the urban renewal program led by Georges-Eugène Haussmann, old buildings were being demolished and replaced with broad boulevards, bringing uniformity and order to the narrow, winding medieval streets. But not all the changes that Paris was undergoing were visible from above. Public health had become an issue in the increasingly crowded capital, and a novel underground infrastructure was modernizing its management of waste. Around the same time Nadar ascended into the air, he descended into the pitch-dark tunnels of the city’s sewers and catacombs, where he pioneered the use of artificial light to reveal a new, previously unseen world.
Today, the catacombs of Paris are a major attraction. Timed tickets are sold to manage the large queue that forms daily outside a nondescript entrance on the Place Denfert-Rochereau (formerly called the Place d’Enfer, or “Hell Square”). A new graphic identity features a logo that cleverly hides a skull in a “C”, while a recently added gift shop sells all manner of skull-adorned souvenirs and magnets reading “Keep Calm and Remember You Will Die”.
While the signage might now be sleeker, and photographs of the skull-lined walls are abundant, the catacombs retain some of the mystery that drew Nadar. They were already a curiosity for adventurous tourists in the early nineteenth century; a line that guided torch-carrying visitors is still visible on the ceiling of the entry tunnel. Nadar’s photographs, however, helped make the catacombs a popular destination. As the urbanist Matthew Gandy writes in The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity, and the Urban Imagination, the “subterranean photographs of Nadar played a key role in fostering the growing popularity of sewers and catacombs among middle-class Parisians, and from the 1867 Exposition onward the city authorities began offering public tours of underground Paris.” 1
When Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, who later adopted the pseudonym Nadar, was born in 1820, Paris was under the Bourbon monarchy. Although old medieval streets still wound through the city, an 1820s building boom supported by capital freed from the pricey Napoleonic campaigns was fueling mass land speculation and building projects.2 As opposed to the later Haussmann planning, this was privately funded and developed construction. In the 1830s, under the reign of King Louis-Philippe, prefect Claude-Philibert de Rambuteau led revitalization efforts like paving sidewalks and adding boulevards to alleviate the crowded streets of the city center. This was partly to get traffic flowing, but it was also a response to epidemics, such as the cholera epidemic of 1832, which were blamed on the unhealthy close quarters. (A series of 1830s riots in these working-class neighborhoods also revealed how the narrow streets lent themselves to barricade building.)
When Napoleon III came to power in 1848, the large-scale reconstruction overseen by Haussmann modernized the city with scarce sentimentality for the past. It was this metamorphosis that drew Nadar’s eye. As the historian Shelley Rice observed in a 1988 essay for Art in America:
He never sought out old stones, or corners filled with the past; it was not his style to make a memory image out of a body devoid of life. He plunged, instead, right into the middle of Haussmann’s work, focusing on areas, especially in the sewer and aerial pictures, that were most characteristic of innovative nineteenth-century urban planning.3
Although he spent a brief time studying medicine, by age twenty Nadar had devoted his career to the literary arts and photography. In 1855, he opened his first photography studio with his brother. With his tall frame, red hair, and broad mustache, he cut a striking figure — one he reinforced through the pervasive use of the color red in his studio’s exterior and interior, including the huge letters spelling out his name in red gaslight on the building. He took portraits of the famed figures of the day, such as Victor Hugo, George Sand, Charles Baudelaire, and Honoré de Balzac. Always an innovator when it came to photographic methods, he used the then-new collodion process with glass-plate negatives that could produce more copies than the one-off daguerreotype.
He also pioneered new approaches to artificial light. With a wired series of Bunsen “batteries”, he was able to generate enough electric light to take a photograph in darkness. In an era when photography was closely linked with natural light from the sun, taking this technique into the darkest realms of Paris was radical. It was not easy. He initially experimented with the batteries — invented by German chemist Robert Bunsen in the 1840s using a chemical reaction of metal and acid — in his studio. He described in his memoirs how the radiance at night would “stop the crowd on the boulevard.” And it drew customers into Nadar’s studio “like moths to light”.4
The next challenge was to transport his experiment underground. It is difficult to date exactly when Nadar went into the sewers and catacombs. “The date given is either 1861 or 1865, but the assumption is that [the photographs] resulted from a single three-month campaign”, art historian Sylvie Aubenas writes in a catalogue essay for a 1994 Musée d’Orsay exhibition of Nadar’s work. “Nadar himself, in his writings, invariably speaks about these two expeditions as if they had occurred conjointly.”5 At least one example of his catacombs photographs was exhibited at the 1862 International Exhibition in London, placing his descent around 1861.
By the 1860s, the catacombs were already an established infrastructure for dealing with the centuries of dead who had long been buried in urban churchyards and burial grounds. Like many major cities, Paris had recently reached a crisis where its former ways of interring the deceased were no longer sustainable.
Eighteenth-century Parisian burial grounds were unpleasant places. One of the oldest and largest was the Cimetière des Innocents, where Parisians had been interred since the twelfth century. It bordered the busy central market of Les Halles, and though there had been attempts to keep the living and the dead separate — such as a wall constructed under King Philippe II Auguste — the market activity still regularly spilled onto the graves, where the odors of decomposing corpses mingled with the hawkers’ detritus. As disease was frequently attributed to miasmas, or bad air, there was concern that this noxious mix could be dangerous or even fatal. Then there was a ghastly 1780 incident in which the ground in a neighboring cellar broke open and threw corpses into the basement of a house. Medical expert Antoine-Alexandre Cadet de Vaux gave a report to the Royal Academy of Sciences deploring the “cadaverous exhalations”.6 The cemetery was finally closed, but what to do with the dead remained an open question.
Another calamity suggested a solution. Paris had been constructed on a massive deposit of calcium sulfate, or gypsum. This distinctive stone with its shellfish fossils had been quarried for local building material from the development of the Roman city Lutetia to the construction of the Louvre and Notre-Dame. All that mining resulted in extensive tunnels under the city. Most people gave little thought to these quarries until a series of 1770s catastrophes. In 1774, a mine collapse consumed a large section of a street; in 1778, a building was devoured. The Inspection Générale des Carrières was established to inspect and repair the mines, also revealing for the first time the full extent of the tunnels. By 1785, the skeletons of the Cimetière des Innocents and other burial grounds were being carted, night after night, into these quarries.
At first they were simply piled in heaps, but in the early 1800s Inspector Héricart de Thury spearheaded a more thoughtful arrangement. Skulls and bones were arranged in patterns, rows, and crosses; altars and columns were installed below the earth. Plaques with evocative quotations were added to encourage visitors to reflect on mortality. In 1809, tourists began to file into this immersive memento mori. Just before this opening, de Thury stated that he “believed it was necessary to take special care in the conservation of this monument, considering the intimate rapport that will surely exist between the Catacombs and the events of the French Revolution.”7 This rapport included the mass burial of the victims of the 1792 September Massacres, during which hundreds of prisoners were executed for fear they might join the counterrevolutionary forces.
In many ways, this empire of death below the streets mirrored the shifts happening in the world above. Although the catacombs were named before the Revolution, the evocation of the ancient Roman catacombs reflected the same fascination with classical influences seen during the 1780s and ’90s, when Revolutionaries cited the Roman Senate in their speeches and adopted the Phrygian cap as a symbol of liberty. There was also an equality of classes in the underground ossuary. Without monuments or names, no one corpse could be elevated above the others, and the sight of all those bones together made the thought of distinguishing one from the other absurd. In his essay “Paris Above and Below”, originally published in the Paris-Guide, par les principaux écrivains et artistes de la France released alongside the Exposition Universelle of 1867, Nadar relates this mortal scene:
In the egalitarian confusion of death, a Merovingian king remains in eternal silence next to those massacred in September ’92. The Valois, Bourbons, Orléans, Stuarts, end up rotting indiscriminately, lost between the wretched of the Court of Miracles and the two thousand “of the religion” that were killed on the night of St. Bartholomew.8
To this litany of royal and impoverished dead from French history, he adds the names of revolutionary victims and perpetrators like Maximilien Robespierre and Jean-Paul Marat. All are together, with “every trace implacably lost in the uncountable clutter of the most humble, the anonymous”.9
It was the post–de Thury version of the catacombs that Nadar witnessed, one which mixed the fragments of the departed with a modern design for death. In The Great Nadar: The Man Behind the Camera, Adam Begley describes how Nadar worked with the “inconveniences” of the Bunsen batteries in the catacombs: “The dozens of Bunsen cells, wired in series, were too bulky to transport down certain narrow subterranean passages, so on occasion he had to leave some of the batteries up on the street and run leads down to his chosen location.”10 All of this was time consuming and only sporadically successful, leading one of Nadar’s assistants to moan “We’re growing old here”.11
Yet Nadar succeeded in creating the first photographic documentation of this realm of the dead. The geometry of the walls of skulls is revealed in stark contrasts; long shots down tunnels give the viewer a sense of claustrophobic unease, with their framing of the low ceilings and seemingly endless bones. There are even photographs that highlight the grim labor of hauling and stacking the skeletal remains in this space. Because the exposure time could be as long as eighteen minutes, Nadar used a mannequin instead of a live worker. As he explained:
I had judged it advisable to animate some of these scenes by the use of a human figure — less from considerations of picturesqueness than in order to give a sense of scale, a precaution too often neglected by explorers in this medium and with sometimes disconcerting consequences. For these eighteen minutes of exposure time, I found it difficult to obtain from a human being the absolute, inorganic immobility I required. I tried to get round this difficulty by means of mannequins, which I dressed up in workmen’s clothes and positioned in the scene with as little awkwardness as possible.12
The only catacombs photograph with a living person is a self-portrait in which Nadar sits against a wall of bones, photographic chemicals from the collodion emulsion process at his feet, providing a glimpse of his own long labor behind the lens. In another image, a magnesium lamp is visible in the lower right-hand corner, reminding the viewer that light is only coming into this place through great human effort.
Despite the cumbersome equipment, its malfunctions, and the malodorous fumes of the batteries and magnesium, Nadar persisted in his quest to capture what had never been photographed. In the sewers, he again trundled in his mannequin, chemicals, and heavy camera to visualize its soaring tunnels and pipes. Walter Benjamin later wrote of these photographs that it was “the first time that the lens is given the task of making discoveries”.13
Nadar mostly retired from photography in 1873, though he continued to take the occasional portrait until his death in 1910. He wrote about his adventures in the catacombs again in his memoir, When I Was a Photographer (1899), where he recreates a visit to the catacombs with himself as the guide: “You do not know the Catacombs, madam; permit me to lead you there. Please take my arm and — let us follow the people!”14 Together with Nadar the reader descends “the interminable and slippery staircase”, following the “smoky smell of this succession of candles” as the procession of tourists enters the ossuary.15 He remarks that this “is the parade of the grand names of France as well as the small ones”, and that even the “fragment that your foot just bumped into, this debris without a name, is perhaps one of your grandfathers.”16 Curious sights are mingled with the bones, like a stone basin in which someone has released a few fish to swim blindly in the dark.
“What human vanity, what pride could stand before this final, inevitable promiscuity of our ashes?” Nadar wonders.17 Yet he also records that some people in this place of death laugh as they light their lanterns before journeying into the tunnels. In a guestbook installed in the catacombs in 1809 by de Thury, reactions indeed range from heavy meditations on mortality to mirth. One visitor in 1811 wrote: “They were what I am, and I will be what they are”;18 another quipped: “I’ve seen death, it is in front of my eyes, but my stomach is grumbling, and I’d much rather eat”.19
There is still this mix of reactions to the catacombs — down where some walk loudly making jokes and taking selfies while others stare quietly at the stacked skulls. Unlike in Nadar’s day, electricity now lights the tunnels. Still, at regular corners are closed gates to off-limits passages where darkness endures, a reminder that this accessible section is just a part of a sprawling labyrinth that spreads like veins beneath the city, a shadow of its development that Nadar first brought to light.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: October 25, 2019

author: Allison C. Meier

source: public-domain-review

type: essay

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
Rambling Reflections
On Summers in Switzerland and Sheffield
By Seán Williams
December 11, 2018

In the footsteps of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Philipp Moritz — from the peace of Lake Biel to the rugged Peaks — Seán Williams considers the connection between walking and writing.

In late summer and early autumn of 1765, Rousseau was on the run. He was always fleeing some sort of persecution: at times very real, and legal; at others perhaps more perceived, and highly personal. A restless existence, certainly, yet Rousseau’s last and most retrospective work tells of a life not of flights, escapes, escapades — but of contemplative walks. Les rêveries du promeneur solitaire (The Reveries of the Solitary Walker) comprises nine-and-a-bit meandering recollections and reflections, written as walks, and found among the writer’s personal effects on his death in 1778. The central essay of the collection concerns his sanctuary for almost a month and a half during 1765 on St Peter’s Island in Lake Biel, in the canton of Bern, Switzerland. Walking was his primary activity here. He spent his time strolling by the edge of the water, stumbling on brooks, rambling across the island — unless he was messing about in boats. According to Rousseau’s earlier autobiographical Confessions — published, like the Reveries, by friends in 1782 — he had first come across his refuge while on a “pedestrian pilgrimage” the year before.1 St Peter’s Island became a place of happiness for him. And happiness, Rousseau concluded, was a state of contented stillness, the paradoxically permanent awareness of our momentary being.
When walking, Rousseau would stop and look at plants. He was annoyed whenever he was mistaken for an apothecary or barber-surgeon’s assistant, out searching for herbs to apply as cures for itches and swellings. For Rousseau, botany was about observation and reflection: leaving no leaf unturned to gain a sympathetic, intellectual, and artistic understanding of the world around us. “Pharmacology” should not spoil “pastoral” images.2 Throughout history, writers have always paced around, philosophising, and earlier in the eighteenth century, people perambulated through pleasure gardens as a pastime. But the Romantics broke out into the fields, peaks, and onto islands. And in Romanticism — from Rousseau through to the time of Schubert and his wonderful piano solo, the Wanderer Fantasy — wandering became a very writerly, intellectual, artistic activity. It went hand in hand with reflections on nature and its plant life, which were one and the same as conjectures on culture. Indeed, such was the shift of the word “culture” itself: originally a term for growth, as we might grow a culture in a petri dish today, culture came to denote a habit of mind, and from there the intellectual and artistic development of a society. Contemplative walking and botanical observation offered a route into culture.
Two hundred fifty years later, in 2015, I shared Rousseau’s sense of what it meant to walk by Lake Biel. I was not the first to trace his route, of course: many an aspiring writer has made the journey to the island, as W. G. Sebald — who himself walked, reflected, and wrote there — remarked in 1998.3 As a young lecturer at the University of Bern, an academic pilgrim of sorts, I would wander on a weekend with close colleagues along the shoreline — that is, until we had enough of high-brow hiking and set off for more epicurean pursuits instead. (A nearby wine-tasting festival in the hills was a good find.) But for me, Rousseau’s idea of happiness in Helvetia became both a welcome calm after stormy doctoral study at home, and a quintessential, exasperating Swiss cliché. It was an undeniably beautiful if oftentimes stultifying cultural landscape. In Bern I was comfortable, content, happy even. Yet a general societal self-satisfaction at the relative quiet and stability of contemporary Switzerland was also unnerving — and, like Rousseau’s depiction of his peace on the island, a skewed perspective. Walking is all well and good — I am a keen hiker — but it seemed to me to have taken over the Swiss way of seeing the world, their Weltanschauung. So I was on the move again, back to England. Ironically, I was to follow in Rousseau’s footsteps.
In January 1766, Rousseau settled — for a while — on the southern, Staffordshire, side of the Peak District. Two and a half centuries later, I came to Sheffield to take up a post at the university. Weekends were for wandering. As a scholar of the eighteenth century, and especially of German lands, I wondered who had trodden these South Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Staffordshire paths before me. Any Germans? Indeed. In the summer of 1782, the German writer Karl Philipp Moritz spent around one and a half months travelling through England — mostly on foot, which secured him notoriety and international literary fame. Moritz was often taken for a beggar or vagabond when on the road because he walked rather than bought a ride in a post-chaise. The scenes of sentimental travel literature had been framed by the carriage window, whereas Moritz tells of the men he met and the landscape he saw when walking. He remarks on reactions to him by locals; he notes quirky differences in dialectal pronunciation; and he describes for his German readers the portraits that hung on the walls of inns — of the royal family, in the main, but also the King of Prussia. He wandered up through the Peaks as far as Castleton, where, even back then, you could pay to see the caves. Reisen eines Deutschen in England im Jahr 1782 was promptly published the next year, in 1783, and was translated into English just twelve years later as Travels, chiefly on Foot, through several parts of England in 1782. Both versions were a hit.
As Moritz walked beyond the village of Ashford-in-the-Water, he reached what must be Monsal Head. At this point in his account, his companions are two local craftsmen. One is rather grandly referred to as a “philosophical” and “poetic” saddler, who apparently knew his Homer, Horace, and Virgil, chapter and verse. Moritz is not being ironic: there was a contemporary fashion for discovering so-called “peasant poets” or rural, original geniuses. It was a means of rendering working-class literature acceptable. While I can find no sources to corroborate Moritz’s story of the saddler, Monsal Dale did become reputed for having a local bard. William Newton made machines for the Derbyshire cotton mills and was a head carpenter over at Buxton as well. Beyond his day jobs, he was known for his poetry. Perhaps Newton was a friend of Moritz’s companions. In any case, Moritz goes on to describe the view that I have stood and observed myself many a time, though it is nowadays obscured by a Victorian viaduct (a leftover from the nineteenth-century railway line, which brought tourists to the spot made famous by Moritz and subsequent literary-cum-travel writers). In the words of the English translator:
We came to a rising ground, where my philosophical saddler made me observe a prospect, which was perhaps the only one of the kind in England. Below us was a hollow, not unlike a huge kettle, hollowed out of the surrounding mass of earth; and at the bottom of it a little valley, where the green meadow was divided by a small rivulet, that ran in serpentine windings, its banks graced with the most inviting walks; behind a small winding, there is just seen a house where one of the most distinguished inhabitants of this happy vale, a great philosopher, lives retired, dedicating almost all his time to his favourite studies. He has transplanted a number of foreign plants into his grounds. My guide fell into almost a poetic rapture as he pointed out to me the beauties of this vale, while our third companion, who grew tired, became impatient at our tediousness.4
I have strained my eyes to work out which house Moritz meant, if indeed it still stands today. The historian in me has become obsessed with working out who this “great philosopher” might have been. But the translation is misleading. The German “groß” could have expressed “fine” or “dedicated” as much as “great”. The English “distinguished” is therefore an embellishment, though being of note the person surely must have had something of a reputation. Nevertheless, it was unlikely someone of Erasmus Darwin’s stature, say, who founded the Derby Philosophical Society (and was Charles Darwin’s grandfather). Besides, Darwin lived miles and miles away, outside the Peak District proper. Naturforscher in German did convey the idea of a natural philosopher in the eighteenth century — but it could also mean, more simply, a botanist with a curious, speculative bent. Perhaps one prone to more theoretical musings on plants. The German critical edition of Moritz’s travelogue offers up John Baker at the nearby Cressbrook Mill as a possibility. Although he fits the description as a known amateur botanist, he seems a disappointingly undistinguished choice to me. Gardening was hardly an unusual hobby: scanning the subscription lists for contemporary books and magazines on the botany, minerals, and agriculture of the area shows that almost every named household in the vicinity purchased copies.
Lost in the annals of Google Books, I came across one name I really wanted our philosophically-minded botanist to be: Thomas Knowlton. He published on plants and was a specialist on hot houses. He had a reputation for cultivating pineapples in eighteenth-century England: might these be the foreign plants referred to above? I suddenly imagined the quaint English scene scattered with ornamental pineapples — a classical equivalent to the plastic, kitschy pineapples that used to sit in my Derbyshire nan’s kitchen. A fanciful, if not implausible, thought. Chatsworth’s friendly archivist and two PhD students working on the history of servants at Chatsworth have assured me that, in his retirement, Knowlton advised the fifth Duke of Devonshire. There is a house belonging to the Chatsworth estate near to Monsal Dale, too, which plausibly might have put Knowlton up. But he died the year before Moritz was out walking in the peaks, which is reason enough to tame my enthusiasm. Yet Moritz’s information is second or perhaps third-hand, and from a rapturous saddler at that. He could well have guided our German through the vale with poetic licence. The historian in me might want to identify Monsal’s “great philosopher”, but it is only with a literary imagination that I can settle on an answer.
Moritz was writing at a significant historical moment for walking. His working-class companions remind us that in England as elsewhere, writerly wandering is thought to have set off on a left-wing tradition around 1800. It is a common (but not universal) view that Wordsworth was a young radical before turning Tory only in his old age, and that his writing on walking was anti-capitalist. (What is beyond debate is that Wordsworth definitely walked, a lot. De Quincey claimed to have calculated that he covered over 175,000 miles.) In England, walking easily became a political act because enclosure laws made roaming the countryside more difficult. In the wandering age of Romanticism and its modern legacy, fields, forests, and hillsides were increasingly for the private use of the, well, landed classes. Kinder Scout in the Peak District had long been publicly accessible King’s Land until it was fenced off in 1836. In 1932, it became the site of an organised trespass as part of the English class struggle. In the meantime, the moneyed went off to Switzerland for their walking throughout the long nineteenth century, where they could amble around the Alpine trails without controversy.
Although writerly wandering is popularly associated with the left, and not just in England, it is not necessarily so. Irrespective of interpretations of Wordsworth’s poetry, German writing about walking since Romanticism has traversed the full political spectrum. Heidegger used a walk along a country path (Feldweg) to define thinking, Denken, as a meditative release from the functions of representation or intention.5 Although he is careful to say that his conception of thought is not a complacency that just goes with the flow (as it were), it is fair to characterise his philosophy as radically ontological. That is to say, Heidegger’s philosophy is about being in the world, and is less concerned with how we can change it than with understanding how we are within it. Indeed, Heidegger’s ideal of change in the world would concern our authentic, abstract relation of being in it, not specific societal structures. In this sense, Heidegger’s thinking could be considered conservative. Of course, Heidegger was much more extreme in his actual politics than any legitimate conservative: he was complicit in the Nazi regime, and antisemitic. We cannot pin his day-to-day political positions onto his abstract philosophy in any straightforward way, nor onto his walks in the German forest. But the point stands that writerly wandering is not a preserve of the left. Writerly wandering is not well-described as activism, then, as my critically-minded colleagues would have it, some of them immersed in French theories of the flâneur. But we can say that writing about walking is necessarily an observation on our own place in nature and culture — or nature as culture. On that, all our authors from Rousseau onwards would agree.
Leaving politics aside, what most writers on walking also share is sociability — although it is often hidden, or downright denied. Rousseau did not live in solitude on St Peter’s Island. Readers could be forgiven for thinking he did, but  he was there as the guest of a Bernese tax collector. (As Sebald reminds us, there were also constant visitors and seasonal farm hands present.) Wordsworth may have written that he “wandered lonely as a cloud”, but his sister Dorothy accompanied him. Heidegger’s discourse on thinking while walking is written as a sort of Socratic-style conversation, between a scientist, teacher, and scholar. My own walks in the Peak District or in Switzerland have been with those closest to me: my sister, friends, parents, an erstwhile partner (with whom I would descend into Monsal Vale in particular, on a full stomach following yet another visit to a gastropub). These were wanderings in conversation and in shared silence — banal conversations, perhaps, which, in their cumulative familiarity against a beautiful backdrop, lead to the sort of routine happiness that Rousseau conceived as solitary.
Rousseau soon fled the Peak District for France. I intend to stick around here for summers to come. I have more walks to discover, conversation topics to hold forth on, and thinking to do. And in moments of academic contemplation, I might even take up gardening. Or simply buy some plastic pineapples.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: December 11, 2018

author: Seán Williams


text:
Of Pears and Kings

By Patricia Mainardi
January 9, 2020

Images have long provided a means of protesting political regimes bent on censoring language. In the 1830s a band of French caricaturists, led by Charles Philipon, weaponized the innocent image of a pear to criticize the corrupt and repressive policies of King Louis-Philippe. Patricia Mainardi investigates the history of this early 19th-century meme.

“Around this damnable tyrannical pear there gathered a great howling mob of patriots. There was such fury and incredible unity in their stubborn demand for justice that when we leaf through old humor journals today, we find it a subject of enormous astonishment that such unrelenting warfare could continue for years.” — Charles Baudelaire, “Some French Caricaturists”, 1857.1
Wherever open speech is prohibited, symbols and allusions abound. The historian Peter Gay lamented that in our positivist age, this metaphoric language has waned because we now see in only one dimension, the literal and obvious one. Gay traced the beginnings of this loss to the Enlightenment, beginning with the rise of science as a paradigm and the gradual eclipse of religion; an example would be the formerly near universal comprehension of calling someone “a good Samaritan”, a term that simultaneously invokes the present and a biblical past, enabling us to think on two parallel planes at once.2 Caricature, with its mixture of word and image, the literal and the allusive, does this better than language alone, which has caused it to be highly regulated and often prosecuted by authoritarian regimes.
Under one such authoritarian regime, nineteenth-century French caricaturists produced one of the most powerful political metaphors in modern history: the representation of King Louis-Philippe as a pear. The era was, with apologies, “ripe” for this kind of messaging because caricature, imported to France from England during the revolutionary period of the late eighteenth century, was ideally suited to evade the draconian censorship laws instituted by the Bourbon Restoration of 1815.
Censorship could occur in several intensifying degrees. In France, censorship of images was always more severe than censorship of text because images were thought to have a more direct appeal to the lower classes whose literacy was limited. It was customarily exerted in one of two ways: normally, censorship was post-publication, meaning that if a text or image was judged offensive, it would be seized and the author, artist, and publisher tried, fined, and imprisoned. In periods of great instability, however, the more severe measure of prior censorship was instituted. This meant that nothing, neither text nor image, could be published or even exposed to public view, unless it had first been submitted to government censors and approved by them. Not only artists, authors, and publishers could be held responsible, but even printers were liable and could lose the license that permitted them to work. This is why so many publications (Diderot’s Encyclopédie, for example) falsely identified their origin as outside France — usually Switzerland, where laws were more liberal.
During the Restoration, artists created a metalanguage of symbols to evade censorship: censorship itself was personified as a large pair of scissors always on the attack, the clergy were represented as candlesnuffers busily extinguishing the light of the Enlightenment, and the regime’s political figures as crayfish who knew only how to walk backwards. In 1830, however, after the “Three Glorious Days” of the July Revolution, the absolutist legitimist monarchy was overthrown in favor of a new constitutional monarchy governed by what was called “The True Charter”. The new king, Louis-Philippe (who ruled 1830–1848), styled himself the Citizen King and promised, among numerous reforms, to restore liberty of the press. His promises were short-lived; within a few months, he had enacted the “Law that Punishes Attacks on the Rights and Authority of the King and his Legislature by the Press”.3 Violators would be punished with a prison sentence of three months to five years and a fine of three hundred to six thousand francs. While this severe punishment did not in any way dissuade the political opposition, it did inspire even more resourceful evasions.
Many of the most notorious nineteenth-century battles over censorship are well known: the condemnation of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Manet’s lithograph The Execution of Maximilien. Unlike these cases, however, the Battle of the Pear continued for several years because the government was powerless to suppress it, although not for lack of trying.
The individual responsible for this battle, Charles Philipon (1800–1861), while not so well known as Baudelaire or Manet, had an outsized influence in nineteenth-century France. The English novelist William Makepeace Thackeray called him “an indifferent artist. . ., a tolerable designer, and an admirable wit.”4 A cartoonist of middling talent, Philipon soon abandoned drawing for publishing, founding several periodicals in which appeared the most memorable cartoons of the century by France’s leading artists — among others Daumier, Gavarni, Grandville, and Traviès. Recognizing the limitations of his own artistic talent, he compensated by suggesting subjects and themes to his artists, even writing captions for them and often including lengthy texts explaining the drawings’ symbolism, or even denying it to better evade the censors. His empire included the publishing house Auber (named after his brother-in-law) and several periodicals, including La Caricature (1830–1835) and Le Charivari (1832–1937), which inspired the English journal Punch, originally subtitled The London Charivari. He also maintained a retail shop where prints from his periodicals could be purchased in black and white or hand-colored, on varying qualities of paper, sold by the sheet, in portfolios, or bound as books. Those lacking funds for purchase could enjoy the changing displays of his shop windows, which often constituted free exhibitions of political opposition. He commissioned Traviès to depict his shop, taking advantage of the opportunity to include images of pears in its windows, with a viewer gesturing towards one and commenting: “You have to admit the head of state looks pretty funny”.
Although Philipon was not the first to suggest the pear as a symbol for King Louis-Philippe, he must be credited with its dissemination. It came about seemingly accidentally. Less than a year after Louis-Philippe was installed on the throne, Philipon’s newly established La Caricature published an anonymous untitled drawing depicting a mason busily engaged in plastering over all references to the 1830 revolution.
Several features of the drawing made its political meaning indisputable. Prominently displayed is “Street of July 29”, the date of the fall of the legitimist monarchy and installation of Louis-Philippe’s constitutional monarchy; another is “Liberty or Death”, a slogan of the revolution. The mason works from a trough labeled “Dupinade”:  André Dupin was the most outspoken conservative voice in the Chamber of Deputies, opposing every reform that the 1830 revolution had promised to guarantee. What sealed Philipon’s fate, however, was the unmistakable resemblance of this mason to Louis-Philippe, a clear violation of the new censorship law.
Since the drawing was published anonymously, Philipon as publisher was held responsible. At his trial in November 1831, he defended himself with the claim that there was no proof this mason represented the king, whose name, he pointed out, appeared nowhere on the drawing.5 To demonstrate that his accusers could find the king’s physiognomy anywhere, he drew a series of four portraits that began with the king’s recognizable likeness and ended with a pear.
Truth be told, Louis-Philippe’s physiognomy did somewhat resemble a pear, but an added bonus was that the French word for pear, poire, also signifies a fool — although there is some dispute as to whether this meaning predated or was the result of Philipon’s metaphor. Philipon’s defense did not impress his judges and he was condemned to six months in prison and a 2000-franc fine. Nor was he alone in meeting such a fate; numerous artists, including Daumier, the most famous cartoonist of the century, were jailed at one time or another for subversive drawings.
It is sometimes said that waging a battle with the press is a losing proposition. Nowhere was this more clear than in what transpired next. In the first issue of La Caricature published after his trial, Philipon announced a subscription to pay his fine and warned the government: “Wait until both my hands are paralyzed before you rejoice”.6 He became relentless in promoting the proto-meme of the Pear in his journals, with such success that its fame spread internationally. He began by publishing his pear drawings in La Caricature. To the original drawings, he added captions with the statements he had made in court.
He began thus: “If to identify the monarch in a caricature, you rely solely on a resemblance, then you fall into absurdity. Look at these crude sketches, which should have assured my defense.” Under the first he wrote: “This sketch looks like Louis-Philippe, so you would condemn it?” Under the second, more abstract, he wrote: “So then it would be necessary to condemn this one which resembles the first.” By the third, the king’s physiognomy was looking definitively pearish; nonetheless, Philipon captioned it: “Then condemn this one, too, which looks like the second.” The fourth drawing is unmistakably a pear. Philipon concluded:
And finally, if you are being logical, you would not be able to exonerate this pear, which resembles the previous drawing. So, for a pear, for a brioche, and for all grotesque heads in which chance or malice might find some resemblance, you would punish their author with five years of prison and a five thousand franc fine?! Admit, Gentlemen that this is a most peculiar liberty of the press.
Philipon liked his “Birth of the Pear” meme so well that he used it again when Le Charivari ran into trouble with government censors in 1834 and 1835; he had it printed as a poster and inserted into the periodical.7
Ever the businessman, he hawked it as though it were the latest pop culture phenomenon, placing a large advertisement for it in La Caricature: “THE FOUR PEARS DRAWN at the hearing of the assize court in Paris by Ch. Philipon, and sold to pay the fine of Le Charivari. Price for the Sheet: 2 SOUS”.
If Philipon had left it at that, the Pear affair would have made an amusing footnote in the history of caricature, but, from the inception of his newly invented meme, he began commissioning artists to use it in political cartoons. It spread more rapidly than earlier memes ever did, and not only in publications. As a result, it would be impossible to count all the pears that appeared in various venues in the following years. One factor in the Pears’ success might well have been the simplicity of the shape, which even a child could draw. In fact, many children did, if we are to believe the drawings of Philipon’s artists, who churned out Pear drawings first for La Caricature and, beginning in 1832, for Le Charivari as well. In a January 1833 edition of La Caricature, Auguste Bouquet depicted an old woman attempting to prevent three industrious little boys from defacing the wall of her house with pear drawings, shouting at them “Go draw that filth farther away, you little devils!”. A few months later, in Le Charivari, Traviès depicted a similar event in The Pear Has Become Popular, where he shows a street urchin drawing a pear on a wall; its caption announces: “This is how the walls of Paris are being decorated these days.”
Works like these not only spread the Pear meme, they made it clear that all ages and classes were united in detesting the king. Thackeray echoed Traviès, writing: “Everyone who was at Paris a few years since must recollect the famous poire which was chalked upon all the walls of the city, and which bore so ludicrous a resemblance to Louis Philippe.”8 Philipon openly took credit for its success by publishing a drawing entitled What Sauce Would You Like with That? depicting the workshop of La Caricature with himself center-stage serving as its presiding spirit, “The Demon of Caricature”. He is shown directing the work of his most celebrated artists: Grandville, Daumier, Traviès, and Forest. On the left, a whole new class of apprentices is practicing drawing the Pear, and pears cover every available surface of the workshop, including one perched on a modelling stand posing for the students.
The success of the Pear meme even inspired a book entitled The Physiology of the Pear, written by Sebastien Peytel under the pseudonym “Louis Benoît, Gardener”. While announcing itself as a horticultural tome, it actually presented thinly disguised, scathing critiques of the king. Should anyone manage to work their way through its 265 pages without realizing its true subject, its last page presented a drawing of a pear seated on a throne surrounded by pear-courtiers, similar to one drawn by Grandville for La Caricature entitled Reception. The book was so popular that a second edition was published almost immediately.
The most famous Pear drawing is, no doubt, Daumier’s The Past, the Present, the Future, depicting Louis-Philippe’s pear head in triplicate, his topknot defining the fruit’s stem. The caption (possibly written by Philipon himself) notes: “What was in the beginning: fresh and confident; What is now: pale, thin, and anxious; What will be: despondent and broken. The accuracy of the present and the past can be verified by everyone. As for the future, this prediction cannot be in doubt.” Nor could it be in doubt that the absence of any sign directly identifying the pear as the king saved Daumier, at least this time, from a repeat of Philipon’s court battles.
While many of the Pear drawings were in the nature of schoolyard taunts that merely insulted the king’s appearance, the best of them used the pear to signal a more complex political attack, filled with puns and allusions often lost on us today. An example is the drawing by Grandville and Desperet who together produced an image aptly entitled Enigma, accompanied by a doggerel poem in the form of a riddle.  While the figure’s pear head and stooped posture immediately identified Louis-Philippe, the poem printed below piled on insults and allusions. Among the more obvious ones: “A bag of a thousand francs replaces my belly, / an iron trowel represents my hand.” This dual reference to the king’s avarice and the Dupinade drawing that began the Pear’s reign is continued with the line: “The seat of my pants is a plasterer’s trough, the True Charter is hung on my back.”
Louis-Philippe’s notorious lack of loyalty to his supporters is represented in Desperet’s Gratitude is the Virtue of Kings, where the Pear King is seated in a room whose drapery, carpeting, and throne are all festooned with pears. He brusquely dismisses one of his earliest supporters, the President of his Council of Ministers Jacques Lafitte, by giving him a brusque kick in his posterior. Gratitude indeed!
In The Nightmare, Daumier riffs on Henry Fuseli’s celebrated 1781 painting of that title by showing another of the king’s early supporters, General Lafayette, burdened by the realization of his error, visualized here as a giant pear that is weighing heavily on his sleep — the document near his hand lists Louis-Philippe’s broken promises.
The corruption of his regime, alluded to by the money bag in Enigma is made explicit in Bouquet’s The Pear and Its Pips, where the king’s cronies are shown devouring the rotting state from within. Even more explicit is The Moderates Soil Themselves, in which a pair of clowns representing the juste-milieu (moderates) are shown carrying a pear-shaped bag of night-soil. In other words, the king is full of shit and those who enable him soil themselves by supporting him.
As battle lines hardened, imagery became ever more explicit. There were even thinly-disguised suggestions of regicide: an untitled drawing by Daumier shows workers hanging a giant pear; a drawing by Traviès shows the stock figure of the ordinary citizen, Mayeux, preparing to guillotine the fruit, crying “Oh deceitful pear, why are you not true?” — another allusion to his many violations of the “True Charter” of 1830.
While the government at first responded to these drawings with repression and seizures, it gradually came to adopt, however reluctantly, a laissez-faire approach. In the course of numerous prosecutions, Philipon had learned how to turn court cases into circuses, much to the amusement of jurors who often declined to convict him. Government prosecutors lost so often that eventually only the most egregious transgressions were brought to trial. When he was hit with fines and imprisonment, Philipon invented a new meme to evade and enrage the censors: the typographic Pear, which he recycled several times.9 Since part of any judgment against periodicals was that the court order had to be published in the offending journal, Philipon obliged, in his own ingenious way. He explained to readers of Le Charivari: “Since this judgment, comical though it might be, risks offering small amusement to our readers, we have tried to compensate, at least in form, for what is absurd in content.” And so he published the text of the judgment in the shape of a pear, beginning with: “Louis-Philippe, king of the French, to all present and to come, greetings. The assize court of the department of Seine-et-Oise, seated at Versailles, has rendered the following verdict”.
This cat-and-mouse game continued for five years; by 1835 Philipon and his artists were in open revolt. Grandville and Desperet together signed a barely disguised call to revolution, a drawing entitled “Oh July Sun, Come Quickly”. Its explanatory text provided a long rationale “explaining” that the ministers of Louis-Philippe, depicted here as children, had accidentally made their snowman in the likeness of the king and so wanted the July Sun to come quickly and melt it away before they were charged with violating the censorship law. But, of course, everyone understood that this was, in reality, a thinly disguised call for a revival of the July Revolution of 1830.
In 1835, after an unsuccessful assassination attempt on Louis-Philippe, his government finally succeeded in passing the notorious “September Laws”, re-instituting the prior censorship of the Restoration and outlawing any discussion of the king and the monarchy. Political caricature had become impossible. Rather than submit to these laws, Philipon closed down La Caricature in August 1835. Le Charivari survived by entering into a long period where it published only caricatures of manners and mores, not of politics. Even the great Daumier, for the time being, was rendered relatively benign. Political caricature had to go into hibernation until the Revolution of 1848, when Louis-Philippe was deposed and the September Laws were repealed.
Philipon brought this chapter of publishing history to a close, fittingly enough, with three typographic Pears which he printed on the last page of the last issue of La Caricature, 27 August 1835. Entitled Other Fruits of the July Revolution, the Pears’ texts were composed of the provisions of the new September Laws pertaining to printed images, beginning “No drawings, engravings, lithographs, medals, prints, or emblems, of any kind, can be published, exhibited, or sold without preliminary authorization of the Minister of Interior in Paris or the Departmental Prefect”.
In his final “Letter to Subscribers”, Philipon began on a sardonic note: “After four years and ten months of existence, La Caricature is succumbing to a law that reestablishes censorship, by virtue of this formal article of the True Charter: ‘Censorship will never be permitted to be reestablished’”. He continued, more seriously, by attacking the “apostates of liberty”:
We have pilloried them in our journal, and we have pitilessly exposed them to the ridicule of the people they so exploited. They can destroy the charges that our justice has nailed over their heads, but it will not be so easy to erase or cause to be forgotten the stigmata of shame with which we marked them during the last five years.
He concluded: “We believe that what we leave behind will be consulted by all those who will write about or who will want to study and to understand the first years of the reign of Louis-Philippe.”
He has been proven correct on all counts, for here we are in the twenty-first century, still engaged with questions of the absolute right of rulers to be above criticism, and still laughing at the Pear.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: January 9, 2020

author: Patricia Mainardi


text:
Our Masterpiece Is the Private Life
In Pursuit of the “Real” Chateaubriand
By Alex Andriesse
October 9, 2019

While nowadays he might be best known for the cut of meat that bears his name, François-René de Chateaubriand was once one of the most famous men in France — a giant of the literary scene and idolised by such future greats as Alphonse de Lamartine and Victor Hugo. Alex Andriesse explores Chateaubriand’s celebrity and the glimpse behind the public mask we are given in his epic autobiography Memoirs From Beyond the Grave.

In the spring of 1816, Alphonse de Lamartine was restless, ambitious, and twenty-five years old. Four years later, with the publication of his Méditations poétiques, he would be the toast of Paris, but for the moment he was just another provincial scribbler in the capital, too shy and proud, he says in his memoirs, to set foot in a literary salon. He therefore decided he would do the next best thing. He would travel four miles to the south, to the leafy Vallée aux Loups, and roam the forest, hoping to catch sight of one of the “great living figures of our era.”1
This figure was François-René de Chateaubriand. A Bourbon royalist, a Catholic apologist, and the author of several popular books (including the novels Atala and René), Chateaubriand held a fascination for his contemporaries hard for us to understand. His fiction, which we often find high-flown and formal, they experienced as daring and wild; his conservative politics, which some of us regard with suspicion, were appreciated for being admirably idiosyncratic. Chateaubriand may have coined the word “conservative” in the political sense (by titling the Bourbonist journal he edited Le Conservateur), but he was also, in Anka Muhlstein’s words, “a liberal, open to modernity” (modernité being another word he is said to have coined).2
Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, the French public looked to Chateaubriand as a man of principle, a defender of the freedom of the press, and an independent thinker unafraid to criticize both the tyrannical Napoleon and the disappointing Bourbon king Louis XVIII. In 1830, a few days before he resigned his seat in the Chamber of Peers — refusing to swear allegiance to the “usurping” king Louis-Philippe — a group of university students spotted him in the street and spontaneously hoisted him onto their shoulders, chanting “Long live freedom of the press! Long live Chateaubriand!” Yet, following his death in 1848, the reasons for his reputation soon grew vague. The entry for Chateaubriand in Gustave Flaubert’s Dictionary of Accepted Ideas, a book of bourgeois bromides compiled in the 1870s, might as well have been written yesterday: “Best known for the cut of meat that bears his name.”3
Back in the 1810s, no one would have associated Chateaubriand with sirloin. He was famous and subject to fame’s magnifying lens. “I want to be Chateaubriand or nothing”,4 the fourteen-year-old Victor Hugo wrote in his diary, only a month or two after Lamartine, that fanboy avant la lettre, had gone to skulk around Chateaubriand’s house in the Vallée aux Loups. Adolescent identification with this tragic master of melancholy — who’d spent seven years of the 1790s exiled in England while several members of his family were guillotined under the Reign of Terror — drove many young romantics to a kind of madness, although none, so far as I know, acted on their madness with as much fervor as Lamartine.
Wandering the Vallée aux Loups, Lamartine found Chateaubriand’s house easily enough. He was unable to see anything over the garden wall, however, and so he climbed into some trees overlooking the property. “I stayed sitting in the branches, hidden by the leaves, from noon until night, but to no avail”, he recalls in his memoirs; “I saw nothing moving except a trickle of water that sparkled as it sputtered from a stucco fountain, and the shadows that shifted and spread over the grass beneath the weeping willows.”5 When night fell, Lamartine was forced to return to Paris. But he had not abandoned his folly. By noon the next day, he was back, like Calvino’s baron, in his perch among the branches:
Half the afternoon elapsed in the same silence and disappointment as the afternoon before. Finally, at sunset, the door of the little house turned slowly and noiselessly on its hinges. A short man in black clothes, with broad shoulders, skinny legs, and a noble head, emerged, followed by a cat, to whom he threw balls of bread to make it gambol on the grass. Soon, both cat and man were swallowed by the shadows of an alley of trees; the undergrowth hid them from my sight. A moment later, the black clothes reappeared at the threshold of the house, and locked the door. This was all I saw of the author of René, but it was enough to satisfy my poetic superstitions. I went back to Paris dizzy with literary glory.6
In later life, Lamartine’s fervor for Chateaubriand inevitably cooled. He could no longer see what had once excited him in the writing, which he now found too theatrical (“always treading the boards”).7 As for the man, Lamartine would be introduced to him several times in the embassies and palaces of Paris, London, and Rome. “But the Chateaubriand of the Vallée aux Loups has for me always been the real Chateaubriand”, he concluded: “The person, rather than the persona.”8
Like every celebrity, from Virgil to Marilyn Monroe, the “real” identity of Chateaubriand was an object of speculation. Readers approached him expecting to find the living embodiment of his books, and Chateaubriand, for his part, made an effort to oblige. “He is too grave and serious”, the American scholar George Ticknor wrote in his diary after dining with Chateaubriand at a soirée held on May 28, 1817,
and gives a grave and serious turn to the conversation in which he engages; and even when the whole table laughed at Barante’s wit, Chateaubriand did not even smile; — not, perhaps, because he did not enjoy the wit as much as the rest, but because laughing is too light for the enthusiasm which forms the basis of his character, and would certainly offend against the consistency we always require.9
Consistency of character was a tenet of the nineteenth-century belief in “great men”, whose conduct never wavered, but even if the culture encouraged such consistency, Chateaubriand took it to extremes. Amélie Lenormant (the niece and adopted daughter of Chateaubriand’s longtime mistress and renowned salon hostess Madame Récamier) observed that, by placing him on a pedestal, Chateaubriand’s admirers “often put him in the awkward position of striking a pose.”
When there were no strangers present, and he was alone with people he liked, and of whose affection he was certain, he gave himself up to his true nature and became entirely himself. His animated conversation, which often edged into eloquence, his cheerful witticisms, and his hearty laughter made his company incomparably delightful. In private, no one was so easygoing and childlike, if I may use this word in speaking of a man whose genius and character inspired so much respect. But all it took was the presence of a stranger, or sometimes a single word, to make him resume his Great Man’s mask and his stiffness of manner.10
The mask that Chateaubriand wore to face the public was not meant to be charming; it was meant to be impressive, in keeping with the impressive principles he’d pledged to uphold. George Ticknor — calling on Chateaubriand at his home a few days after the formal dinner during which His Eminence had appeared so humorless — was surprised to find him relaxed enough to chat candidly about a bad review while playing with his cat “as simply as ever Montaigne did”.11 But this sense of surprise may tell us more about the naivety of Ticknor than the personality of Chateaubriand, who wrote in his Memoirs from Beyond the Grave: “Do you think I’m stupid enough to believe that my nature has changed because I’ve changed my clothes?”12 If Chateaubriand could be pompous, bombastic, and vain, he could also — at least once he had closed the door on the world outside — laugh at the absurdities of existence with the best of them.
In Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, the more than two-thousand-page autobiography he composed between 1803 and 1847, Chateaubriand allowed himself to drop his great man’s mask at length. Although the Memoirs are often looked upon as a historical document, they are more than that: they’re a masterwork of literary style as the expression of sensibility — an exploration, in the tradition of Montaigne’s Essays, of the moods and memories of an individual mind. Abridgements of the work, which boil it down to “essentials”, do readers a disservice by eliminating Chateaubriand’s digressions, which are precisely what give the work its zest. Sainte-Beuve was the first in a long line of practical-minded critics to complain of these digressions: “At the most critical and decisive moments, he turns into a dreamer and starts talking to swallows and crows in the trees along the road.”13 But the Memoirs are not always about what they claim to be about. The Old Regime, the Revolution, the Empire, the Restoration, the July Monarchy — all of these form a backdrop for the book’s central subject, which is the author himself.
Chateaubriand had originally intended Memoirs from Beyond the Grave to be published fifty years after his death. However, when he resigned from the Chamber of Peers in 1830, he forfeited his government pension. By 1834, he was broke. Madame Récamier came to his rescue, arranging for readings of the Memoirs at her house and publication of excerpts from them in journals. She even helped organize a society of shareholders whose payments — investments in the Memoirs’ future sales — would provide Chateaubriand with a modest annuity to the end of his days. The formation of this society also placed the Memoirs out of Chateaubriand’s legal control. In his last years, he was pained to realize the autobiography he’d regarded as private would be published the moment he died, in order to generate profits for shareholders. This was far from the glorious future he had imagined for his work.
The end of Chateaubriand’s life was harrowing. Immobilized by rheumatism, suffering bouts of neuralgia and vertigo, he was vulnerable to the swarm of Boswells who surrounded him. These ranged from his secretary Julien Danièlo — who published a worshipful and paranoid book called Conversations with Monsieur de Chateaubriand: Against His Accusers (1864)14 — to Victor Hugo and Alexis de Tocqueville. Hugo, who had long ago given up wanting to be Chateaubriand, wrote in detail of the elderly man’s physical decline and of his daily visits with Madame Récamier, at her house a few blocks away:
By early 1847, Monsieur de Chateaubriand was a paralytic and Madame Récamier was blind. Every day, at three in the afternoon, Monsieur de Chateaubriand was carried to Madame Récamier’s bedside. The scene was touching and sad. The woman who could no longer see fumblingly stretched out her hands to the man who could no longer feel; their hands met. God be praised! Life was dying, but love still lived.15
Tocqueville, Chateaubriand’s nephew and friend, chronicled the “sort of speechless stupor” that, during his final months, in 1848, “sometimes led us to believe his mind had gone”.
Yet, while in this state, he heard the rumble of the February Revolution and wanted to know what was happening. He was told that they had just overthrown Louis-Philippe’s monarchy. He said, “Well done!” and fell silent again. Four months later, the noise of the June days reached his ear and again he asked what it was. We told him that there was fighting in Paris and he was hearing gunfire. At this, he made futile efforts to stand up, saying: “I want to go there and see.” Then he fell quiet, and this time forever, for he died the next day.16
The day after Chateaubriand died, on the fifth of July, Hugo paid a visit to the death chamber, criticized the bedstead (“of rather doubtful taste”), described the corpse, and inventoried the room with an exactitude that, depending on one’s point of view, either attests to Hugo’s stylistic clarity or to his love of cleanliness and fine décor. He was especially horrified to learn that the forty-eight notebooks containing the Memoirs were “in such disorder . . . that one of them had been found that very morning in a dark and dirty corner where the lamps were cleaned.”17
Chateaubriand’s last years were so well documented, it may come as no surprise that even his barber wrote a memoir about him. The book, titled (what else?) Chateaubriand’s Barber, by Adolphe Pâques, is of limited interest, even if Pâques — who not only cut his client’s hair, but shaved him daily — does paint a memorable picture of Chateaubriand in the years before he was confined to bed:
I can still see him sitting in a big armchair. On his left is the fireplace, where a bright fire used to crackle in every season, for he was very prone to chills. On his right was a table piled with papers, books, and political and literary journals of every size and hue — all of it pell-mell and in an admirable disorder. I was permitted to take whatever journals I liked from the pile, and every day I carried off three or four to the greatest satisfaction of the clients at my shop. The kettle containing the shaving water sloshed around before the hearth. I shaved him on the spot. I have already spoken of the simplicity of the great writer’s tastes; the frockcoat he used as a housecoat was threadbare; its lapels made very clear, to anyone who was not already aware, that the porter’s breakfast must have been chocolate.18
More interesting to consider are the two pictures Pâques painted using Chateaubriand’s own hair, which he had saved for years in a wooden box before — during his retirement and long after Chateaubriand’s death — he daubed and arranged it in such a way as to represent, on one canvas, the room in which Chateaubriand was born and, on another, the tomb in which he was buried. The idea of painting with a dead man’s hoarded hair is ghoulish. Still, one has to admit the results are not half bad.
Chateaubriand’s fame ensured he would be documented by any number of writers and portrayed by any number of artists. But he did not think highly of any of the portraits made during his lifetime. He believed they bore him no resemblance because the portraitists had proceeded from an idea of who he was which had little to do with reality: “The crowd”, he writes in Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, “is too frivolous, too inattentive to give themselves the time, unless they’ve been warned beforehand, to see individuals as they are.”19
The smiling public man — or rather the glowering public man — is certainly what we see in the well-known portrait by Girodet. The Roman ruins in the background, the heroic pose, and the far-off stare keep the viewer at arm’s length. The only portrait I’ve come across that suggests something of the author we meet in the Memoirs is a pencil drawing by Hilaire Ledru done in 1820, when Chateaubriand was in his early fifties. Here, again, he has been posed, but his crossed arms and cautiously amused expression intimate a wry melancholy, obscurely reinforced by the gloves and the open shell of the top hat he holds in his right hand.
The images of Chateaubriand as seen by others are intriguing for the insight they give us, especially into the role he played in the collective imagination of early nineteenth-century France. The Memoirs, on the other hand, are a self-portrait, almost cubist in their complexity, dominated by shadows, contradictions, and doubts. Chateaubriand, like his contemporaries, may have imagined he was destined to be remembered for having defended tradition, poeticized religion, and served the nation of France. As it turned out, though, his greatest gift was for translating personhood into prose. His masterpiece was the private life.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: October 9, 2019

author: Alex Andriesse