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Weird, wacky and wonderful stories from French history
French history is wacky, wonderful - and seriously weird. If the only thing you know about French history is that you hated reading A Tale of Two Cities in high school, pour yourself a glass of pinot noir and get ready for a wild ride. Learn about the time France ran out of cows - and figured out how to eat zebras. Learn about the eccentric national hero keeping bees on top of the Louvre. Learn about the revolution which fought for brotherhood, equality, and a national holiday for marshmallows! New episodes every few weeks! /// Featured on iTunes Buzzed About, CBC/Radio-Canada, Bello Collective, and The Audit.
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Oct 28, 2021
71. Marie Bonaparte, Part I
“I liked murderers. I thought them interesting. Had not my grandfather been one when he killed the journalist? And my great-granduncle Napoleon, what a monumental murderer he was!” – Marie Bonaparte
Welcome back! After a long break to buy new soundproofing equipment – which may or may not have been successful – we’re back with a new miniseries. I’m excited, as I think we’re covering one of the most interesting subjects this show has ever covered: the heiress, philanthropist and pioneering psychoanalyst Marie Bonaparte. Naturally, if we’re going to discuss a pioneering child psychologist we have to go back to the beginning and tell the story of her family – and oh, what a family!
Episode 71: “Marie, The Last Bonaparte”
Transcript
Bienvenue and welcome back to The Land of Desire. I’m your host, Diana, and each month I provide a glimpse into French history and culture. As I’ve settled into my new apartment, it took a little longer than I’d hoped to set up a new recording studio, and I had to order some new equipment. It was a blessing in disguise, as this delay gave me time to really luxuriate in the research of this month’s subject, someone who might be one of my favorite characters ever featured on this show.
Marie Bonaparte is what I like to call a fascinating woman, the kind of woman who spends her life being unconventional, pioneering, wildly interesting and getting away with it all by being very rich. Her life story is outrageous, shocking, and almost too on the nose metaphorically: she’s the descendant of the man who swept away the Ancien Regime, and used her inheritance to drag Europe into the modern age. Marie Bonaparte was blessed and cursed with a larger-than-life family, and this obsession with family brought her into contact with the ultimate expert on the subject: Sigmund Freud. From a line of tyrants, murderers and emperors, Marie’s own enduring legacy is that of an advocate for the refugee, the child, and the visionary. While her ancestors traded on their power, their money and their name to acquire more of the same, Marie Bonaparte used her influence to push for newer worlds, broader minds and safer harbors. She experimented with her sexuality, she launched an illustrious career, and she saved the life of one of the greatest minds of the 20th century. Marie Bonaparte’s life is far too interesting to fit into a single episode. To begin – and with Freud, where else could you begin? – we’ll focus on Marie Bonaparte’s family. Perhaps you’ve heard of them. Along the way, we’ll encounter royal refugees, lions, murderers, Hitler, a seriously weird uncle, Edgar Allen Poe, Queen Elizabeth, Leonardo da Vinci, and more. This month, settle in for the fascinating story of Her Royal Highness, Princess Marie of Greece and Denmark, the last Bonaparte.
“I do not believe that any man in the world is more unfortunate in his family than I am.” So wrote Napoleon Bonaparte in 1810, after facing another disappointment from his sprawling, fractious family. To give a little credit to the family in question, Bonaparte was as tyrannical over the dinner table as he was over the continent. In the first year of his empire, Napoleon wrote to one of his lieutenants that he expected absolute loyalty, subservience and obedience from his family if they wanted to share in his glory and power. “I recognize only those who serve me as relations. My fortune is not attached to the name of Bonaparte, but to that of Napoleon…those who do not rise with me shall no longer form part of my family.” Ruling over an enormous band of jumped-up Corsicans was like herding cats, and even General Bonaparte himself could barely manage the task. The easiest cat in the bag was Napoleon’s older brother, Joseph, with whom he had always been close. Joseph was the perfect family ally: smart, obedience, and less ambitious than Napoleon. Sometimes he was too unambitious. On the rare occasion that the brothers clashed, it was almost always because Napoleon was asking Joseph to do something besides sit around in the backyard watering tomato plants. In 1806, Napoleon ordered Joseph to go be king of Spain, which was absolutely the last thing Joseph wanted to do, and Napoleon fired back with that warning: cross me and I’ll scratch your name off the family tree. While Joseph eventually gave in, Napoleon faced stiffer resistance from his younger brother, Lucien.
Only sixteen during the French Revolution, in many ways Lucien was the “true believer” of the Bonaparte family. From the beginning, Lucien Bonaparte represented the radical branch of the family, an ominous position which would echo over multiple generations. A self-declared Jacobin, the dramatic teenager vowed to “die with a dagger in his hand” and as long as his older brother represented a threat to the Ancien Regime, Lucien would do anything to support his cause. In 1799, Lucien was elected president of the Council of Five Hundred, and his flair for drama played a pivotal role in securing Napoleon’s rise. On the infamous 18th Brumaire, when Napoleon attempted a coup d’etat, Lucien slipped out of the council room and told the guards that the Council of Five Hundred were being harassed by a bunch of terrorists. Then, in a supremely goth 20-something move, Lucien pointed his sword at Napoleon’s heart, and swore to plunge it through his brother’s chest if he ever betrayed the country. At that moment, Lucien ordered the guards to expel anyone who resisted Napoleon’s coup d’etat. The guards marched in, the opposition marched out, Napoleon became the First Consul, and the French Revolution came to an end. Without Lucien, Napoleon might never have come to power – but the moment he did, Lucien began to wonder whether he had not created a tyrant. Napoleon and Lucien clashed over Napoleon’s iron-fisted rule over Europe – but they exploded when Napoleon extended his rule over Lucien’s private life.
Before the French Revolution, the teenaged Lucien disobeyed his parents and married the illiterate daughter of an innkeeper. After bearing him two children, Lucien’s first wife died, and the Bonapartes couldn’t wait to marry their third son off to someone more suitable. Unfortunately for Napoleon and his parents, Lucien already had a new wife in mind: a scandalous young widow named Alexandrine Jouberthon. She was completely unsuitable. Despite the objections of his family, Lucien married Alexandrine, and launched another tradition which would continue down his branch of the Bonaparte family for generations to come: marrying below one’s station. Only Mama Bonaparte recognized her son’s marriage – nobody else was willing to risk Napoleon’s anger. Despite a civil ceremony, Napoleon refused to recognize Lucien’s second marriage, or the child it produced, and in 1803 Napoleon made good on his threat and sent Lucien, his wife, and their children into exile. But the enemy of my enemy is my friend – and Napoleon had a lot of enemies, so it didn’t take long for Lucien to make wealthy, powerful friends, including the Pope.
In 1804, Napoleon rose once more from First Consul to Emperor. Napoleon issued a reminder to any members of the Bourbon family who still had heads on their shoulders: don’t even think about trying to reclaim your throne, and he issued a proclamation outlining the Bonaparte line of succession. Lucien Bonaparte, without whom Napoleon might never have risen to power, disappeared from the official Bonaparte family tree. A few years later, Napoleon offered Lucien another chance: divorce your wife, and I will welcome you back into the line of succession, and recognize your children as my family. You can even keep Madame Jouberthon as your mistress, so long as you bend the knee and apologize for what you did. Lucien rejected the offer, and tried to escape the continent altogether. Sailing for the United States, Lucien and his family were captured by the British, who allowed him to live the life of an English country gentleman. Napoleon was convinced Lucien was conspiring against him, when in truth the former Jacobin spent most of his time geeking out about telescopes and writing terrible poetry about Charlemagne. After Napoleon’s fall from power, Lucien moved back to Italy, where his friend the Pope granted him the title Prince of Canino. With oodles of money and a dozen children to occupy his time, Lucien spent his days scribbling more mediocre writing and excavating his backyard for Roman ruins. To the last, Napoleon couldn’t stop telling his little brother what to do, and even from his exile on the remote island of St Helena, Napoleon wanted Lucien to “cease writing poetry and to busy himself with writing a history of the Revolution and the Emperor’s reign.” Napoleon died before reconciling Lucien to the official family tree, and the Bonaparte line of succession soon became a headache which would rattle Europe for the next century.
Napoleon’s legacy was supposed to be a child of destiny. In 1810, desperate for an heir, he’d married the great-niece of Marie Antoinette, a neat little way to tie up loose ends and bad feelings. The couple could barely stand one another, but they did their duty well enough to produce Napoleon Junior. In 1814, he reigned as Napoleon II for two weeks – and before you scoff, what did you accomplish as a three year old? Not for the last time, the Bonaparte family made a home in Vienna, where Napoleon spent his time twiddling his thumbs, doing nothing of importance and then dying of tuberculosis at the age of 21, without an heir. Napoleon’s older brother Joseph had died without having any sons, so the line of succession should have passed to Lucien, old but still kicking around the Italian countryside. But since Napoleon had erased Lucien and all of his children from the Bonaparte family tree, the line of succession skipped down to the next Bonaparte brother, Louis. Unlike Lucien, Louis was determined to do whatever it took to stay in Napoleon’s good graces. By hook or by crook, he was going to write his family into the Bonaparte line of succession in permanent marker. Louis sucked up to his older brother in the most predictable fashion: his first son was named Napoleon Charles Bonaparte. His second son was named Napoleon-Louis Bonaparte. Then, just for good measure, he figured why not hedge my bets, here’s my third son, Charles-Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. Hedging bets was a good idea, since the first two Napoleon Bonapartes died young. So for those following along at home, Napoleon Bonaparte died on St Helena, his son Napoleon Bonaparte died of tuberculosis at 21, and the claim passed to his 24 year old nephew, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte.
Meanwhile, back in Italy, Lucien’s children were growing up, and one son in particular seemed to have inherited his father’s legacy, for good and bad. Despite being scratched out of his brother’s line of succession, Lucien also enjoyed naming all of his kids after the emperor. His fourth son, Pierre Napoleon Bonaparte, was a real chip off the old block: just like his father, he spent his teens and twenties desperate to “die with a dagger in my hand”. Known as “the wild boar of Corsica” Pierre enjoyed nothing more than a good old-fashioned street fight, to the exasperation and embarrassment of his parents, who on at least one occasion begged the Pope to arrest their son for his own good. They weren’t wrong, and right after Pierre was released he went off and stabbed someone to death. Pierre was sentenced to death, but come on, nobody’s gonna be the one to execute a Bonaparte, so Lucien sent his idiot son off to America until things cooled off. Pierre fell in love with New York City, probably because it offered so many more alluring opportunities for a street fight, and at some point he ran into his cousin, Louis Napoleon, the new heir. Louis was trying to gather supporters for his cause, but Pierre was more interested in gathering mistresses for his bedroom. Then, in 1852, history repeats itself, this time as farce. Louis-Napoleon makes his move, and names himself Napoleon III. That same year, Pierre Napoleon falls in love – with a woman completely below his station. The new Emperor Napoleon tells his cousin to knock it off, but like father, like son, Pierre tells the Emperor to stuff it, and marries Nina, the illiterate daughter of a foundry worker. Then, you guessed it, Emperor Napoleon got mad, and refused to recognize Pierre and Nina’s marriage. Nevertheless, the couple have a bunch of children and putter around the countryside, where Pierre raises a pet lion and manages to keep himself out of street fights – for a while, at least. In 1867, Pierre and Nina got married again, in the hopes that Pierre’s cousin would recognize her and their children, but Napoleon III still refuses. In fact, he tells Pierre to stop using his middle name in public: there can only be ONE Firstname Napoleon Bonaparte, buddy, and I’ve got dibs. Pierre, Nina and their children are social outcasts, and in a surprising turn of events, this did not turn Pierre’s mood around. In 1870, Pierre took time to troll some anti-Bonapartists with an outrageous letter to the editor. The anti-Bonapartists took offense and a pair of gentlemen marched over to Pierre’s house the next day. After ringing the doorbell, they challenged Pierre to a duel. We can never be sure what happened next, but the next five minutes changed the family’s fate forever: Pierre Napoleon Bonaparte, cousin of the emperor, shot an unarmed man to death in his front parlor. Pierre Bonaparte’s case was the trial of a generation. 100,000 Parisians attended the victim’s funeral, and European intellectuals saw the trial as the end of an era. In a letter to Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels observed, “This Pierre Bonaparte scandal…is a splendid initiation to the new era in Paris. Louis is decidedly done for. For the bourgeois a most unpleasant awakening from their illusions, as if the whole foundation of corruption and vileness, built up so slowly and carefully for eighteen years, were about to collapse.” Once again, however, the Wild Boar of Corsica escaped the gallows. His triumph didn’t last long, however – within a few months, the Communards looted Paris, and they took extra pains to loot the despised Pierre Bonaparte’s home before they burned it to the ground, erasing the last of the family’s fortunes in a single blow. Pierre and his cousin both hit the road for Belgium. No longer under his cousin’s tyranny, Pierre and Nina had one last wedding ceremony, legitimizing their union – and their children – once and for all. Having accomplished this, Nina left the Wild Boar of Corsica for good. Pierre spent his final days in drunken debauchery and poverty, while Nina set her sights on her family’s future. Illiterate, despised, and impoverished, Nina had only one asset left: at long last, she and her children were officially Bonapartes.
If Napoleon Bonaparte may be history’s most ambitious social climber, his nephew’s wife could probably give him a run for his money. Despite her own illiterate background, Nina’s son, Roland, soon proved to be a brilliant scholar – who shared his mother’s ambition and love of money. Roland didn’t have any money, but by god, he was a Bonaparte, and they might not be on the throne at the moment but the Bonaparte family had a habit of turning up like a bad penny. Nobody was ready to count the Bonapartes out of world history just yet. It was the Gilded Age, the belle epoque, when the Industrial Revolution produced its first generation of children ready to marry their new money to old names. Nina only had one son, one opportunity to marry him off to the right match. She only had one card to play, and in 1880, where else could you place your one big bet but the great gambling hall of Europe: Monaco.
In 1806, while newly crowned Emperor Napoleon fought to secure his territory, a set of twin boys, Francois and Louis Blanc, were born in southern France. Their father died just before the twins were born, leaving their desperate mother scrambling for means to keep food on the table. The two boys began working almost immediately, taking odd jobs as dishwashers and cafe waiters, but they had a knack for gambling in all its various forms. They made money as easily at the card table as they did on the stock market. Eventually, in 1843, the brothers opened their own enterprise: a sparkling new casino in the town of Bad Homburg (Bat Hohm-bourg). Practically overnight, the casino’s success propelled the Blanc brothers into the social stratosphere. This was no lowdown gambling hall: the Blanc casino drew a dazzling clientele of aristocrats, wealthy playboys and beautiful heiresses. No matter how much money they lost, everyone seemed determined to return to the casino to try their luck again – before long, François Blanc, most often seen walking the floors and shaking hands with high rollers, acquired the nickname “the Magician of Homburg.” Nothing touched him – even a near-disaster turned out his way in the end.
On September 26th, 1852, another bored aristocrat walked through the casino’s doors: Charles-Lucien Bonaparte, the elder brother of Pierre Bonaparte, a.k.a. “the Wild Boar of Corsica”. Unlike his brash, brawling younger brother, Charles-Lucien passed his time studying, illustrating and discovering new birds. The mourning doves I grew up listening to outside my bedroom window are named after Charles-Lucien’s wife. François Blanc wasn’t exactly shaking in his shoes when the most mild-mannered member of the Bonaparte clan walked through the door. Perhaps because of his unassuming disposition, or perhaps because he had the tremendous and rare good luck not to have Napoleon anywhere in his name, over the next three days, Charles-Lucien enjoyed an incredible run. Within 72 hours, he broke the bank and walked out with a staggering 180,000 francs, at a time when the average French man earned 2 francs per day. Charles-Lucien spent two days resting, probably distracted by a new type of crested sparrow, and then walked back in the casino. If his first run had been improbable, his second run seemed nothing short of miraculous. The ornithologist from New Jersey, the least ambitious member of the world’s most ambitious family, the cousin of Emperor Napoleon III, won another 560,000 francs. The number was staggering – almost enough to sink Europe’s grandest casino. After probably spending a few moments in the casino kitchen with a glass of brandy, François Blanc turned disaster into opportunity: the same way an airport casino in Las Vegas might flash a giant “LOOSE SLOTS” sign above the front door, Blanc told Europe, “Hey, we’re giving away money over here! Don’t miss your chance!” The ploy worked, and thousands of European aristocrats, heirs and fools streamed through the casino doors, eventually losing so much money that the Magician of Homburg turned a profit on the whole venture. The house always wins, y’all.
In 1863, the magician had a new trick up his sleeve. François Blanc purchased the casino of Monaco, along with every bit of real estate the nation had for sale. His considerable fortune grew into the kind of personal wealth usually guarded by a dragon. Money followed wherever he went, and even though he spent most of his time in Monaco, he kept an eye on events back in his native country. When Emperor Napoleon III’s rule collapsed ahead of the invading Prussian army, his secretary sent daily dispatches from the front lines of the war and the Commune. When the shaky Third Republic ran out of funds to finish Paris’s fancy new opera house, François personally lent it the money. As always, his bet paid off, and the architect, Charles Garnier, was so grateful that he traveled down to Monaco to build a beautiful new theater for François’s casino. When the impoverished young boy from the countryside finally died at the age of 71, he left behind a grand legacy: profitable businesses, a personal fortune of 88 million francs, and oh, yes, a lovely 18 year old daughter, Marie-Felix. Somewhere outside Paris, a scheming old woman felt a great disturbance in the force. Nina, the Princess of Canino, the three-times-over wife of Pierre-Napoleon Bonaparte, knew just the perfect husband for such a girl.
When Marie-Felix Blanc met Roland Bonaparte, he was a brilliant scholar who had just graduated at the top of his class at the prestigious Saint-Cyr military academy, founded by Napoleon Bonaparte himself. A handsome young man with a great mind and an even greater name, wrapped up in a flashy uniform – what naive young girl could resist? And Marie-Felix was certainly naive. As the youngest of six chidren, Marie-Felix was her elderly grandfather’s favorite. We don’t know much about her childhood, except that it was so gentle that it produced a sheltered, gullible girl who could barely make eye contact with the world. Somewhere along the lines, however, she made eye contact with Roland Bonaparte, and fell head over heels. Marie-Felix’s mother disapproved of the match completely, with good reason: Nina Bonaparte was still a social outcast with nothing to offer but her name. But what a name it was! Marie-Felix’s siblings had married for less, including her older sister, who had recently married a very dashing, very broke Polish prince. By now, the Gilded Age horse trade of an ancient name for new money made even the son of a famous murderer into a suitable match for an heiress. The two mothers came to an agreement, and on a rainy November 17, 1880, Roland Bonaparte and Marie-Felix Blanc were married in a fabulous ceremony at the Blanc family church. Roland and Nina began their scheming only an hour into the marriage: after escorting his new bride into a carriage after the ceremony, Roland made a sudden change of direction. Instead of taking Marie-Felix to the wedding reception, where her mother, siblings, and friends were waiting to celebrate, Roland sped them straight out of town to his estate outside Paris. If you’ve read anything about emotional abuse, or just know anything about human nature, your inner air raid siren is probably going off. The new bride gathered up the courage to ask, “Where are you taking me?” but Roland simply said “To my house.” You may think a carriage suddenly changing direction on a wedding day is a bit too on the nose, but nobody ever accused the Bonapartes of subtlety.
Upon arrival at Roland and Nina’s estate in Saint-Cloud (Sahn-Kloo), just outside Paris, Marie-Felix began a life of miserable seclusion. Roland and Nina despised the new bride: she was sheltered to the point of absurdity, and lightning and thunder scared her so much that the twenty one year old woman would flee to the basement. She was a superstitious scaredy-cat, uptight, and – worst of all – sentimental. Isolated from any friends or family, Marie-Felix kept company with cats and ducks, and gave away money like it grew on trees. In the long stretches in between visitors, Marie-Felix kept mind occupied with French and German poetry, which Roland hated, and beautiful waltzes, which Roland hated even more. Roland spent most of his days locked in his study. There was only one activity they seemed to have in common: they were both trying, desperately and without any fun, to conceive a child. Every month, Marie-Felix waited, and every month, she was disappointed. Over and over again, she visited doctors searching for answers. They all prescribed cures, medicines, techniques, and advice – but what is unclear is whether any of them suspected the truth. Did they notice the young woman in front of them seemed pale – especially pale, even by Gilded Age standards? Did they notice she was weak and frail? Did they chalk this up to delicate femininity, or did they realize what was really happening? Did Roland? Did Nina? This is the great question at the heart of the story to come: how much did Roland and Nina know, and how much did this influence their actions? Were the events to come an unforeseen tragedy – or was it something worse?
When Roland Bonaparte kidnapped his new bride back to Saint-Cloud, the very first thing he and Nina did was take out a life insurance policy on Marie-Felix. They had noticed right away what so many doctors failed – or refused – to see. Marie-Felix’s cheeks were pale. She swooned. She fainted, she coughed up blood. Marie-Felix wasn’t simply frail – she was consumptive. Nina and Roland blamed the cold morning baths, the corsets, the delicate nature of womanhood. As with so many young women of the 1880s, Gilded Age notions of fragile femininity helped disguise the essential truth that this 21 year old woman was dying of tuberculosis. For Nina, it was a race against time.
In 1881, Marie-Felix’s mother died at the age of only forty-seven. To everyone’s surprise, Roland refused to allow his wife to inherit anything from her mother, to add onto the fortune she’d already inherited from her father. Roland had been doing some digging, and knew what no one else in the Blanc family suspected: Marie-Felix’s mother had racked up enormous debts. By accepting any of her mother’s money, Marie-Felix would also be accepting her mother’s debts – and by rejecting her mother’s money, she left the burden of paying those debts to her siblings. The move stunned Marie-Felix’s siblings, who stopped talking to her – exactly as Nina had always hoped. There was only one danger left: if Marie-Felix died before producing any children, her personal fortune would revert to her siblings. So Nina and Roland encouraged Marie-Felix: go to your doctors, take their advice, swallow their medicines, and try, try, try for a baby. At long last, poor Marie-Felix discovered she was pregnant. Everything changed in a flash. For a brief period of time, the future looked rosy. Nina and Roland couldn’t have been more doting, and they kept Marie-Felix surrounded with attentive, hand-picked servants to keep her healthy during the pregnancy. Whenever Marie-Felix’s tuberculosis attacked, the servants reassured her she looked more beautiful than ever. “Am I really all that ill? Am I going to die soon?” Ah, of course not, dear, but now that you mention it, with a baby on the way, perhaps you should make a will? on March 17, 1882, Marie-Felix Bonaparte wrote a new will and testament. “Wishing to give my husband, Prince Roland Bonaparte, a proof of my attachment, I leave to him in entirety: the whole of my fortune. If I leave issue of our marriage, I leave to my husband all that the will permits me to dispose in his favor.” With this crucial task completed, Roland and Nina went to great lengths to make sure Marie-Felix – and her unborn child – would make it to the finish line. Years later, Marie Bonaparte would speak with her mother’s physician at the time. “Professor Pinard, who attended her confinement, assured me later that my mother was consumptive and that the whole of one lung was affected. He told me that in the course of her pregnancy she actually coughed up blood several times. But her consumption was something to be denied; they wanted to be able to count on her death without seeming to do so.”
On June 30, 1882, Marie-Felix went into labor. Three days later, she was still in labor. On July 2nd, Marie-Felix was fading fast, and so was the child. Professor Pinard delivered the baby, a daughter, blue and unmoving. Rushing the infant into the next room, the doctor heroically performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation for forty five minutes. Finally, the sounds of a baby crying reached Marie-Felix’s ears. Princess Marie Bonaparte, great-grandniece of Napoleon, was born.
Relieved, Marie-Felix rested quietly in her bedroom. Nina left the estate, her work to secure her son’s fortune complete. Roland disappeared back into his study. A wet nurse took care of the baby. Marie-Felix was alone again. A few weeks after the birth, Professor Pinard gave Marie-Felix permission to get out of bed. She invited her older brother over for dinner to celebrate. At the end of the evening, as Roland escorted his brother-in-law to the door, Marie-Felix turned to head upstairs. As she climbed into bed, Marie-Felix felt a terrible pain that left her gasping for breath, asking for a doctor and a priest. As Roland appeared in the doorframe, Marie-Felix looked at him sadly. “My poor Roro, I’ll never see you again.” Marie-Felix died the same way she lived: gently. She was buried a few days later in Versailles, next to her murderous father-in-law, Pierre. When Nina heard the news of her daughter-in-law’s death, she was nothing less than delighted. “What luck for Roland!” she cried out. “Now he gets the whole fortune!”
“I liked murderers,” Marie Bonaparte wrote in 1953. “I thought them interesting. Had not my grandfather been one when he killed the journalist? And my great-granduncle Napoleon, what a monumental murderer he was!” Yet Marie’s own father, the quiet scholar, could be just as ruthless as his father and granduncle. Perhaps it is no surprise that a Bonaparte would develop a lifelong interest in the dynamics of the family, but Marie’s passion stemmed as much from her traumatic birth as her last name. Reflecting on her mother’s life, Marie considered her a “scapegoat” for what she called the “Monte Carlo crime.” Perhaps Marie-Felix was always destined to die of tuberculosis. Nevertheless, Nina and Roland conspired to accumulate her fortune before she did. Little Marie grew up believing her mother’s fortune was “accursed” – and perhaps this was why she had little difficulty spending it and giving it away as an adult. First, however, Marie would have to navigate the experiences which would inspire a lifetime of study: she would have to grow up, the child of a strange family, and set out to create an even stranger family of her own.
Thanks for listening to The Land of Desire! In the next episode, we’ll discuss Marie’s early childhood experiences, which would form the inspiration of her finest work, and her marriage, which makes the rest of the Bonaparte marriages look downright conventional. If you thought this episode was juicy, believe me, you won’t want to miss part two. To tide you over until then, make sure to subscribe to the podcast newsletter at thelandofdesire dot substack dot com if you haven’t done so already, as I’ll be telling the wild story of François Blanc’s wife, which was too off-topic to fit in this script but too crazy not to tell. Keep an eye on your inboxes. Until then, au revoir!
Sources:
- Bertin, Celia. Marie Bonaparte. Yale University Press, 1987.
- A. Bingham, ed., A Selection from the Letters and Dispatches of the First Napoleon, Vol. II (London, 1884), p. 207.
- Henri Bertrand, Napoleon at St. Helena: The Journals of General Bertrand, January-May 1821, deciphered and annotated by Paul Fleuriot de Langle, translated by Francis Hume (Garden City, 1952), p. 203.
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Bowley, A. L. “Comparison of the Changes in Wages in France, The United States, and the United Kingdom, From 1840 to 1891.” The Economic Journal, vol. 8, no. 32, [Royal Economic Society, Wiley], 1898, pp. 474–89, https://doi.org/10.2307/2957090.
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Walton, Jean. Fair Sex, Savage Dreams: Race, Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference. Duke University Press, 2001, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv125jjq5.
- https://www.psicoanalisi.it/psicoanalisi/reflections-on-the-five-copybooks-of-marie-bonaparte/6478/
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The post 71. Marie Bonaparte, Part I appeared first on The Land of Desire.
Jul 15, 2021
70. Fifth Anniversary! Listener Q&A
What if it succeeds?
Aloha from Hawaii! Your host is celebrating a lot of things right now: Bastille Day, the ability to travel responsibly, the birthday of a certain overworked and abused producer-intern, and oh yeah, the fifth anniversary of The Land of Desire!!! I’m celebrating by answering some excellent questions from you, dear listeners. Merci beaucoup.
Episode 70: “Fifth Anniversary! Listener Q&A”
Transcript
Bienvenue and welcome back to the Land of Desire. I’m your host, Diana, and this month, The Land of Desire turns five! I can’t believe it! I wanted to celebrate by reaching out to all of you to answer your questions and say thank you! Thank you so much to everyone who wrote in over the past few weeks, whether you had a question, an episode suggestion, or just said hello. I won’t be able to answer every question I received, but here are a few of my favorites!
I’ll start with this question from Matt, which is by far the most popular question I received: What topics do you have coming up? How do you decide what to discuss?
When I first started The Land of Desire, I planned out all these epic miniseries. In a testament to my ability to scope projects appropriately, I originally intended to launch this show with a ten – yes, that’s right, ten – part series about the history of the Louvre. Needless to say, don’t expect that series any time soon. The problem with a big miniseries is that it’s easier to burn out – or worse, realize that your audience doesn’t actually care about this subject when you still have four more episodes to go! So I try to force myself to scale back and do more one-off episodes because they’re simply more sustainable. I mean, look at “Women at War” – that miniseries began in September 2019, and by the time it finished, I’d changed jobs, nursed my sister back from a car accident, begun sheltering in place and witnessed at least two waves of a global pandemic. These days, if I get any bright ideas like “Time for a deep dive of the entire Hundred Years War!” I shake my head, take a deep breath, and say, “No, let’s talk about the potato.”
Often when I’m beginning the process of brainstorming a new subject, I’ll take a look at my own personal life for inspiration. What am I reading lately? How have I been spending my time? What’s already got my attention these days? It’s a much better jumping off point for me than forcing myself to go back to a subject I selected for myself months ago. Take last month’s episode, for example – by the time this episode goes up, my boyfriend and I will be taking a very exciting vacation to Hawaii. Obviously in June I wanted an excuse to daydream about tropical islands some more, which led me down the path of studying the cultivation of vanilla. Since I’m in vacation mode, I’m trying my best not to think about next month’s episode topic. Empty head, no thoughts. It’ll be as much a surprise to you as it will to me.
Rhian then asks, : how long does the research process usually take?
For a single standalone episode, it’s about two to three weeks of research, while a miniseries of course can be much more research spread out over the course of months. My production schedule is always the same: aim to be done with research by Sunday night, aim to finish the script by Monday night, aim to finish recording and editing the vocals by Tuesday night, then on Wednesday mix in music, write the blog post and draft the social media updates. God knows it almost never works out that way. My research always starts in the same place: my enemy and my friend, JSTOR. The absolutely amazing San Francisco Public Library system offers me free access, and I take full advantage of it. I read 8 billion papers about a particular topic until I’m able to figure out what kind of slant or focus I want to take, and supplement with books and other scholarly works once I have a better idea of where I’m headed.
Steven asks How do you prioritize topics for the podcast ? (And how do we influence that process!)
Haha, you don’t! Sorry, everyone! It’s interesting to me that there’s one question nobody ever asks: how do I stay motivated to keep doing the show month after month? This podcast has now been my constant companion for nearly one sixth of my life! It’s a heck of a commitment! And one of the most important ways that I stay connected to the show is by creating a show for myself, and sharing it with others. Capitalism is a hungry beast which wants to monetize everything – anyone listening who has any kind of hobby is probably familiar with this feeling. Are you planning to do it full time? Is it like a side hustle? And so on. The Land of Desire is first and foremost a passion project, and the way that I stay passionate about it is by not feeling obligated to deliver episodes on topics I might not be feelin’ at the moment, or subjects that I don’t personally care about. Sorry everyone, it will always be a whimsical endeavor!
Steven had another really good question: What topic did you think was the most interesting of the topics you have covered?
Oh man, it’s so hard to choose! I absolutely loved learning about the history of the catacombs, it had everything I love: secret societies, hidden passageways, urban planning, and of course, sinkholes. I feel like I get to show off my knowledge of the catacombs much more often than I was expecting. Not sure whether that’s a good thing.
Rose Valland and her heroic notebooks is my favorite story in French history maybe ever, if you get enough drinks in me at a party, that’s going to be the story I tell to strangers, and it was such a joy to talk about her at the end of the long Women at War saga.
Next, here’s an exciting question from Nicole: What are your favorite French-inspired or historically-French places in the United States? If you have any good suggestions for when we visit San Francisco, please let us know!
Nicole, you’ve struck upon one of the #1 topics I want to cover in a future episode – the French in America! More specifically, I’m almost as passionate about San Francisco history as I am about French history, and I debated for quite a while which place I should focus on in my podcast – I’ve thought about doing a spinoff miniseries on San Francisco quite a bunch, though I’m not sure whether there’d be interest in it. Luckily these two subject areas overlap quite nicely. I would LOVE to talk about the French forty-niners, for example, and maybe this is the year for it. I have never been to New Orleans, and I feel like a trip would be very important, you know, for research. If I have any listeners in New Orleans, say hello…
As for visiting San Francisco, take a walking tour of the old Barbary Coast, where the French immigrants first settled along the old shoreline, and see where the city decided to build right on top of sunken ships. In terms of food, oh yes, I have a million recommendations. My favorite French restaurant is Gaspar, but I’m not sure whether it’s reopened yet, it’s been closed for all of the pandemic. Take a trip out to the Inner Richmond to eat at Chapeau or get a perfect souffle at Cafe Jacqueline. When I first launched this podcast, I celebrated with a huge glass of wine at Aquitaine, which still has some of the best pommes frites in the city. For baked goods, there are easy winners depending on what you’re after. The best croissants are at Arsicault in the Richmond, the best kouign amann is at b. patisserie in Pac Heights, and the best fancy patisserie is at One 65 near Union Square. The best baguette is a much harder question, I’m not sure I’ve picked a team, but Tartine and Jane the Bakery are standouts.
And finally, I’ll wrap things up with a question from Corinne, who wants to take things all the way back to the beginning: What inspired you to start the podcast?
Great question, Corinne. I’ve mentioned this in a few places but I don’t remember whether I ever did so in a podcast episode. Quite a few years ago, I found myself unexpectedly dumped. I’d just moved back in with my parents, and now I found myself alone, sad, and incredibly bored in my small hometown – wamp, wamp. It was a miserable summer, and I needed a distraction fast. In an effort to keep from brooding, I started taking big daily hikes. If my hometown has one thing to offer, it’s vast endless space for hiking nowhere in particular, so off I went, stomping out my frustration in the fields for hours at a time. I started listening to podcasts along the way, and two shows really captured my heart: You Must Remember This and Revolutions. I found myself wishing for a show which was some kind of mashup of the two, some kind of laid-back entertaining pop history of France. I realized that no such thing existed! If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself, and god knows I had enough free time to pick up a new hobby, so that summer I began developing the skeleton of the show. That was back in 2015, and it would take an entire year before the show really got off the ground – I had a lot of books to read, some equipment to buy, and oh yeah, I met this cute guy who would end up becoming the show’s greatest cheerleader and most overworked intern. I made a million mistakes along the way – remember that 10 part miniseries on the Louvre? – and I did everything they said not to do. “Launch with at least 3 episodes in the tank! Don’t be a perfectionist!” Yeah, right. Well, after a year of preparation, the show finally launched on Bastille Day 2016. Now, five years later, I’m sitting on 70 episodes – and nearly one million downloads. I say that not to toot my own horn – well yes, dang it, it’s Bastille Day, the whole day is about tooting on horns – but to encourage anyone listening at home to do it. Try the new hobby! Start the new project! I know you’re thinking, “what if it fails?” but here’s a question for you: what if it succeeds? Five years later, the coolest part of this entire project isn’t the fact that I finally have an answer whenever someone in a meeting asks me for a fun fact about myself, it’s the fact that I get to talk to all of you! I’ve spoken with listeners from all around the world, you’ve offered stories, ideas, recipes, travel itineraries, even invitations to visit, and it feels like I have a little community spread around the world. I’ll be off the grid for the next few weeks, relaxing and furiously reapplying sunscreen, but when I come back I can’t wait to pick up this grand conversation where we left off. Until next time, au revoir!
Sources:
- Y’all
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Jun 24, 2021
69. The Boy Who Solved Vanilla
“Here Albius fertilized vanilla.” – Tribute to Edmond Albius, Saint Suzanne, Réunion.
We’re back! After a big move, which required the dismantling and relocation of the trusty recording studio (a.k.a. Diana’s closet), I’m excited to record in my new space!
Next month is the show’s sixth anniversary – I know, right?!! – and I’m asking YOU to submit questions for a special listener Q&A episode. You can contact me right here. Otherwise, send me a question on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter!
After my last episode about potatoes, I figured I’d follow up with a little dessert. Today, let’s learn about one of the most valuable and mysterious plants on earth, the dizzying journey it made from its native homeland to its most famous outpost, and the unlikely character who unlocked its secrets. This plant’s intoxicating flavor is so widely enjoyed, and so universally incorporated into dishes around the world, that its name has become a byword for the everyday and boring. This is extremely unfair, since we’re talking about one of the world’s most labor-intensive and delicate plants, the only edible orchid on earth. That’s right: this week, we’ll learn about the sultry secrets of vanilla.
Episode 69: “The Boy Who Solved Vanilla”
Edmond Albius, the boy who unlocked vanilla
Watch “Edmond’s gesture” in action in this video of vanilla hand-pollination, still used for the production of essentially all commercial vanilla in the world.
See the humble melipona bee, which naturally fertilizes vanilla plants in Mexico.
Transcript
Bienvenue and welcome back to the Land of Desire. I’m your host, Diana, and this is the show’s first episode ever recorded outside of a closet! Just in time for the podcast’s fifth anniversary next month, I’m finally settled into my new apartment, and I’m working out the kinks of recording in a new space. I’ll be ordering some more recording equipment to really set up the space, so I beg your patience if this month’s sound quality is below average. It sounded nicer when I was essentially recording an episode underneath a pile of coats, but it’s a little easier on your host to sit in a chair, you know?
Before I jump into today’s episode, a quick announcement: next month is the fifth anniversary of this podcast! I know, right? I’m going to celebrate with a big of a mixup – it’s been a few years since I did a Q and A episode, and there are a LOT more listeners nowadays. Between now and the end of the month, please send me your questions – these can be questions about subjects discussed in previous episodes, questions about the podcast’s production, or even just questions about me. You can send me questions through Facebook or Instagram or Twitter, or use the contact form on the show’s website, thelandofdesire.com. I look forward to answering my favorites in next month’s episode! Okay. On with the show.
Perhaps I love a theme, perhaps I’m just hungry, but this month I’m continuing the theme of curious French food history, but we’re moving as far away from the damp, gloomy soil of l’Hexagone and traveling all the way to the balmy shores of the Indian Ocean. We’ll learn about one of the most valuable and mysterious plants on earth, the dizzying journey it made from its native homeland to its most famous outpost, and the unlikely character who unlocked its secrets. This plant’s intoxicating flavor is so widely enjoyed, and so universally incorporated into dishes around the world, that its name has become a byword for boring. This is extremely unfair, since we’re talking about one of the world’s most labor-intensive and delicate plants, the only edible orchid on earth. That’s right: this week, we’ll learn about the sultry secrets of vanilla.
In 1519, the Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes reached the shores of Mexico. After an arduous journey into the interior, that November, Cortes and his straggling band of 250 Spanish soldiers reached the splendor of Tenochtitlan, (Ti-NOSHE-titlan) the glorious capital of the Aztec Empire. A city of gardens, floating out of a great lake, it must have appeared like something out of a dream. The emperor Montezuma allowed these pathetic strays inside his paradise, and walled them in near his zoos and gardens. For nine months, the Spanish fleet were simply another curiosity in the emperor’s collection. Invited to court, one of the Spanish soldiers observed another one of those curiosities: “a drink made from the cocoa plant, in cups of pure gold” which was “frothed up…and served with great reverence.” The xocoatl or “bitter water” was an extraordinary colonial triumph, a testament to the extent of Montezuma’s rule. Throughout the Aztec empire, territories paid tribute in the form of local produce. Xocoatl (SHO-coe-ah-ttle) was a mixture of these tributes: maize, honey, chili peppers, the cacao beans of course, and one ingredient which brought the whole dish together, a tribute from the Totonac people which they called xa’nat (CHA-nat) an orchid which grew wild in their forest-covered mountains. The Aztecs accepted the mysterious orchids and their beans, and used them in great quantities for their special xocoatl, but they had no idea how the Totonac people grew or harvested the plant. Once the Aztec empire fell, and Spain began its long age of colonial exploitation, they continued Montezuma’s practice of simply demanding vanilla beans, without ever acquiring the knowledge of their cultivation. Before long, vanilla made its way to Europe as part of the so-called Columbian exchange and became a favorite of the continental aristocracy. One early fan was the aging Queen Elizabeth I, who learned about the exotic bean from her apothecary. That same apothecary sent a few beans to a French botanist he knew, Charles de l’Ecluse, whose written description of the plant in his book is the first chapter of France’s history with vanilla.
While the Totonac continued to refer to their local plant as xa’nat, the Spanish referred to the orchid’s dark fruits as “little pods” or “vainilla” – a word derived from the Latin vagina, and if you’ve ever seen a Georgia O’Keefe painting of an orchid, you’ll understand why. Despite the spicy etymology, “vanilla” didn’t really catch on until the 1650s, and by the end of the century “vanilla” made its debut in French law, as part of an edict saying that all vanilla not grown in France must be sold by specific merchants paying specific fees and bringing their cargo through specific ports. Well, unfortunately for French gourmands on a budget, there was no other kind of vanilla – simply all of the vanilla in the world came from Mexico. Scarcity and competition launched a centuries long quest to break Spain’s monopoly on the mysterious orchid – but she wasn’t giving up her secrets anytime soon.
If you’re ever lucky enough you encounter a vanilla orchid in the wild, you probably won’t even realize it. Unlike its showier cousins, the vanilla plant is a rather unassuming vine which likes to drape itself over tree branches in humid mountain valleys. Its flowers are rather small, with whitish yellow petals, and the most identifiable thing about vanilla is utterly absent: a vanilla flower doesn’t smell like vanilla! It’s a nice floral scent, but nothing you’d associate with root beer floats or birthday cake.
For the first two hundred years or so, all vanilla plants which made a live crossing of the Atlantic were basically just duds. Europeans were going greenhouse-crazy, and every horticulturist worth his stuff had a steamy shed on his estate where, at least theoretically, conditions ought to produce some beans. But it never worked! Even as the demand for vanilla grew and grew, Europeans simply couldn’t get the plant to do anything. It wasn’t until 1806 that an Englishman announced that his vanilla plant was, in fact, blossoming! The event attracted crowds, and that lucky plant would lay the groundwork for widespread vanilla cultivation. But in 1806, everyone squeezing into that sweltering greenhouse to look at these long-awaited blossoms had only one question on their mind: how do you turn the blossoms into beans?
Though the Europeans didn’t realize it for many years, they’d failed to notice the Mexican vanilla plant’s best friend: the extra-tiny orchid bee. These humble heroes of Central America do the delicate work of pollinating vanilla plants in the wild. Bees rootle around inside the delicate orchid, covering their furry bodies with pollen which then shuffles off into the plant’s ovaries. The ovaries swell up into a familiar bean shaped fruit, each one containing thousands and thousands of tiny seeds. Without bees, Europeans were stuck with some pretty white petals and not much else to show for all their gardening. It would take another half century and a journey of 6,000 miles before the mystery was solved once and for all – by a very unlikely person.
THE SPICE HUNTERS
For three hundred years, spices ruled the world. An insatiable appetite for exotic flavors drove Europeans to every corner of the earth, where they’d go to any lengths to secure a reliable supply of some spice or another. It was high-risk, high reward stuff: spice hunting meant perilous sea journeys, pirates, and indigenous populations who didn’t feel like handing over the goods at the end of a gun. But the most dangerous part of being a spice hunter? Other spice hunters, of course. Competition was fierce, and nations were focused on the long view: if you sailed into port with a hull full of cinnamon, you were a rich man; but if you sailed into port with a hull full of cinnamon tree saplings? You were a national hero. For fifty years, the most exciting spice hunter in the world was a French man with a superbly perfect name for the job: Pierre Poivre, a.k.a. Peter Pepper.
If you wanted a life of adventure, you either joined the navy and sailed around the world or you became a missionary and sailed around the world. Pierre Poivre started out as a Jesuit missionary, and spent his twenties sailing around modern day Vietnam, China, and Macau. Poivre fell in love with China, particularly Chinese agriculture, and he spent time that may have been intended for studying the Bible studying terraced farms and spice markets. By 1745, Pierre turned 25 and gave up any pretense of godliness – to the relief of the other Jesuits, who kept kicking him out of assignments and strongly hinting that he ought to return home. But Pierre had tasted adventure and had no intention of a quiet life. He volunteered to join the French East India Company, where he assured everyone that he’d be able to obtain the spices – and the spice plants – France so desperately desired. The Company agreed to take him on, but they insisted on sending him back to the motherland for his official assignment. On the way back, traveling with two other French ships off the coast of Sumatra, the French fleet was canceled by a bunch of English ships. If Pierre wanted adventure, here it was: a fantastic battle played out on the seas, and midway through the fight, Pierre was hit by a cannonball. Pierre’s right arm was amputated, and he was forced to recover in prison, held in the Dutch port of Batavia, or as we know it, Jakarta. Eventually the French sailors were released and hitched a ride back to Europe by way of India. All along the way, Pierre learned everything he could about the spice trade from Dutch, French, and English merchants, not to mention the locals. Pierre learned everything there was to know about everything there was to acquire: cotton, sugar, coffee, batik printed cloths, coconuts, and of course spices. By the time he made it back to to meet his new bosses in person for the first time, Pierre’s proposition was simple: if you want to break the Dutch monopoly on nutmegs, I’m your man. I know everything there is to know, and I’ll stop at nothing until France can grow nutmeg trees of her own.
This was exactly what France wanted to hear. France was in the middle of a million costly wars, and soon she’d embark on the stupidest one yet – the so-called French and Indian War, which would cost the crown its best territory in Canada, Louisiana and India. France needed money, and what better way to make money than to grow your own versions of the most lucrative substances on earth?
So, in 1748, France sent Pierre on a mission to acquire spice plants for its newest territories in the Indian Ocean: the ile de France, now known as Mauritius, and the ile de Bourbon, now known as Réunion. The Dutch had a monopoly on nutmeg and cloves, and they did not come to play: over and over again, they didn’t hesitate to kill anyone who tried to smuggle out precious cargo. With the Dutch guarding their own supplies carefully, Pierre relied on his own networks. Sailing around to the Philippines, Pierre ran into some guys he knew, who knew other guys, who knew other guys, who eventually knew a guy from China who would sell fresh whole nutmegs to anyone brave enough to carry them out. Pierre bought 300 of the precious nutmegs, and managed to get nearly 50 of them to sprout. Nevertheless, bureaucratic red tape, missed connections and poor gardening by his colleagues meant that in 1753, Pierre Poivre finally sailed into Mauritius with five nutmeg saplings. But by god, they were five nutmeg saplings!
By 1766, the broke French government dissolved the French East India Company and began managing the national spice industry directly. Pierre Poivre was a man who knew his stuff, so they assigned him to oversee the islands of France and Bourbon. During his management of the islands, he sent endless expeditions around the world in search of rare plants, which he planted in a spectacular garden which is still thriving today. During his term, Poivre cultivated cloves, peppers, cinnamon, allspice, almonds and of course, his precious nutmegs. He trained young men on the islands to care for all kinds of rare and exotic plants, even those which weren’t well understood. Unfortunately, almonds and cloves weren’t the only expensive imports Poivre oversaw.
When France acquired the islands of France and Bourbon, the two landmasses had no indigenous populations. This made administration fairly easy at first – but the island lacked enough of a labor force to do any serious growing, so 17th century France used its favorite shortcut: slavery. It was only a short distance from the African mainland to the tiny islands, and thousands of men, women and children made the journey over the next 200 years. While Poivre was relatively enlightened for his time, personally arguing against the slave trade and introducing legislation to improve living conditions for the enslaved people under his jurisdiction, let’s not kid ourselves: Poivre’s goal as governor was to grow the enslaved population on the island. Poivre viewed enslaved people the way France viewed spices: it would be better and more affordable to produce your own supply than import them from somewhere else. He promoted programs to encourage enslaved men and women to form families and bear lots of children. The plan worked, and the population of Bourbon ballooned. Enslaved men, women and children on Bourbon performed a wide variety of jobs, from simple cleaning to highly specialized farming. They were considered especially skilled at taking care of the island’s precious plants.
When a ship pulled into port in 1822 carrying a large number of vanilla plants, the samples had a prestigious geneology. Tracing their way back to Paris, and then across the Channel, these plants were cut from the same extraordinary vanilla orchid which had bloomed in a British greenhouse. For two decades, the most educated, privileged minds of Europe had been tending to this vanilla plant – and for two decades, they had failed to make it yield diddly squat. For the next two decades, the white planters of Bourbon kept up this tradition, yielding diddly squat, but colonially. So it was no small surprise when a young enslaved boy named Edmund took his owner by the hand to show him a secret: Edmund had figured out how to make the vanilla plants grow into luscious, lucrative beans.
In the town of Saint Suzanne, Ferréol Bellier-Beaumont’s sprawling plantation, Belle-Vue grew an assortment of tropical crops, mostly tended by dozens of enslaved men, women and children. One of those children, Edmund, was relatively new to the farm. The son of Pamphile and Mélise, parents whom he never met, Edmund’s original owner was Ferréol’s sister. When he was old enough to start working, Edmund’s owner sold him to her brother, and he began working on Belle-Vue, where he spent most of his time serving his new master and mistress in the main house. Edmund quickly became one of his master’s favorites, and the pair began taking morning walks around the plantation, where Edmund would pick up plant knowledge from those who were working in the fields. The plantation was a successful one, but there was one plant that simply failed, time and time again. As Bellier-Beaumont wrote, “Of one-hundred vanilla vines on our island, we would be lucky to see ten flowers, and even fewer fruits, in a whole year.” Without the right orchid bees, flowers simply withered into nothing.
So it was quite a shock when Ferréol and Edmund took their morning walk and came across a vanilla vine which wasn’t only blossoming – it was growing a pod! After Ferréol wondered out loud what on earth could have nudged this vine into producing fruit, Edmund replied, “Me!” Considering Edmund worked indoors, had no formal education and was all of 12 years old – not to mention racial attitudes about the intelligence of enslaved people – Ferréol understandably rolled his eyes and continued on his walk. Then, a few days later, on another morning walk, the pair came across another pod! This was beyond coincidence. This was a miracle! Turning to Edmond for an explanation, the young man bent down and pulled out a small stick. Taking careful hold of another blossom on the vanilla vine, Edmond used the stick to nudge aside a tiny membrane. This membrane is called the rostellum, and, well, I’m just going to say it: it’s essentially a condom – a very thin surface that separates the pollen from the ovaries. In Mexico, those tiny little orchid bees would shimmy their way past the rostellum, bringing along a bunch of pollen for the ride. Edmond used his tiny stick to simply nudge the rostellum out of the way and press the two parts together. It was a simple operation, but a very delicate one, and Edmond was suddenly the biggest show in all of Bourbon. Ferréol immediately reached out to other plantation owners, who crowded around to watch “Edmond’s gesture” as it was soon called. They knew, as they watched the young boy perform his so-called “orchid marriage” over and over again, that they would soon be very, very rich. Unfortunately, this cannot be said for Edmond himself.
In 1848, France sent two important pieces of information to its distant colony: First, the island had a new name – instead of Bourbon, the island would now be called Réunion. Second, oh yeah, we abolished slavery. Over sixty percent of Bourbon – excuse me, Réunion – was enslaved, and white planters worried about an uprising – or at least a failed harvest. So instead of notifying the enslaved people of Réunion that they were free, the governor and his allies simply decided….not to. They knew they couldn’t keep up the charade forever, but they simply decided to continue slavery until December – six months after receiving the news, eight months after slavery ended. Ferréol considered Edmond his favorite, and freed him well ahead of the fake deadline, but he didn’t have any particular cash on hand to set him on his way. On December 20th, after Réunion successfully exported fifty kilograms of vanilla pods to France, the governor announced, “My friends, by decree of the French Republic, you are free. All men are equal under the law, and you have no one around you but brothers. Liberty, you will understand, brings its own obligations, one of which is work and respect for law and order.” But the governor and the white planting aristocracy of Réunion weren’t interested in setting up their brothers with work. Edmond, along with thousands of other newly freed men and women, left the plantations for the city in search of paying jobs. There weren’t any jobs to go around, and after years of destitution, Edmond spent time in jail for theft. Ferréol himself recognized that he’d been set up to fail, and wrote to the governor asking for mercy and help. “Edmond…is just one of many slaves in our country who was thrust into the wide world without proper preparation…If anyone has a right to clemency and to recognition for his achievements, then it is Edmond. It is entirely due to him that this country owes a new branch of industry – for it is he who first discovered how to manually fertilize the vanilla plant.” The letter worked, and Edmond was released halfway through his sentence, returning to Ferréol’s farm to work – for pay – as his secretary. Yet after Ferréol’s death, nobody was left to vouch for Edmond, and he died in poverty in 1860, at the age of only 51.
Edmond’s gesture transformed the world’s vanilla supply forever. The growers on Bourbon began growing as much fruit as they could, and set about figuring out how to transform the fresh beans into the flavorful dried pods which fetched such high prices at the market. Processing fresh vanilla beans takes months, during which time it is massaged, daily – sometimes up to 2,000 times before it goes to market. Despite the lengthy process, within a few decades, Bourbon outstripped Mexico’s limited supply to become the world’s largest supplier of vanilla, exporting two hundred tons of dried vanilla by the end of the 19th century. The good fortune didn’t stop there – Bourbon planters shared their secrets with their neighbors on Mauritius and, fatefully, Madagascar. Madagascar proved to offer almost perfect growing conditions, similar to those of the forest in Veracruz, and Madagascar now produces 80% of the world’s vanilla. Taken together, France’s colonial outposts produced 80% of the world’s vanilla by the beginning of the 20th century, and the size of that supply grew from that first harvest’s mere 50 kilograms all the way to a staggering 30 tons. Growing supply only stoked a growing demand even further, and Europeans and Americans went vanilla wild. Europeans incorporated vanilla into their luxury perfumes, including Chanel No. 5, while Americans used the beans for their national obsession: vanilla ice cream. The French invented the dessert, and the very first American to fall in love with the treat was Thomas Jefferson, during a diplomatic visit in the 1780s. (In case you’re wondering, “French vanilla” just means the ice cream contains egg yolks, which may be a nod to the recipe used by Thomas Jefferson’s French butler.) Industrial food production, combined with the massive new supply of vanilla beans, meant everyone could now enjoy this previously rare indulgence. And boy, did they. Americans couldn’t get enough! By the 1920s, new immigrants passing through Ellis Island were handed servings of vanilla ice cream as part of their symbolic first meal. That wasn’t the only iconic American treat which relied on the French export. I don’t want to get sued, but it’s strongly suspected that the world’s biggest vanilla buyer is a certain soft drink company. This company balked at the rising cost of vanilla, and tried to reformulate their most famous soft drink without vanilla, only to experience one of the most famous flops in commercial history. But hey, I’m not naming any names here. Finally, vanilla is found in its most traditional form: mixed with cacao beans, corn products, and something sweet, though I doubt Montezuma would find anything recognizable about a Mars bar.
Despite the massive scale of the vanilla industry, most of the world’s supply is still grown by small-scale farmers. They sell their beans to intermediaries, who manage the drying and curing, and then those intermediaries sell it to their own brokers, who sell it to big corporations. Unfortunately, all those middlemen make for a pretty corrupt industry, and it can be hard for farmers to realize the profits from their beans. As any home bakers listening already know, deforestation and cyclones have reduced the world’s vanilla supply dramatically, and vanilla prices have skyrocketed ever since – but as with any gold rush, opportunists mushroomed their way into the process. Life as a vanilla farmer is tough, and often dangerous. Right now, it’s a boom time – but supply chain issues during Covid may mean the market gets flooded with vanilla, which is nice for grocery shoppers and bad news for growers. Not to put too nice a point on it, vanilla was originally grown wild, harvested by small farmers, and then snatched up by distant emperors, from Montezuma to Philip II. Then, vanilla was grown, harvested, and cured by enslaved workers, for the enrichment of their plantation owners. Now, enormous corporations and middlemen make most of the profits from the world’s second most expensive spice, only a fraction of which trickles down to the farmers who grow it. Today, two thousand tons of vanilla beans are produced in a good year’s harvest. Edward’s gesture is used to pollinate every single plant.
—
Thanks for listening to The Land of Desire. Please remember to submit questions for next month’s episode on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or through the contact form on my website. Before we sign off, one last important note: I began working on this episode a few weeks ago, and I couldn’t believe my own timing when I finished the script: last Friday, the United States formally declared a new federal holiday – Juneteenth. I have a lot of international listeners, so for those who aren’t familiar, here’s a history in 4 sentences. Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery in the rebellious Confederacy states with his famous Emancipation Proclamation – but enforcement didn’t begin until the rebel armies were defeated. Even after the Confederate Army surrendered on April, the gigantic, geographically isolated state of Texas held out the fight until June. It wasn’t until June 19th, 1865, that the Union Army arrived on the island of Galveston, Texas and announced: “All slaves are free.” African-Americans began celebrating Juneteenth from its very first anniversary, and have been urging its recognition as a national day of observance for decades. As of last Friday, it is now a federal holiday at last. Juneteenth doesn’t just mark the end of slavery – it pays tribute to the enslaved men, women and children in Texas who continued toiling between April and June without realizing they were legally free. On the island of Bourbon, that excruciating period lasted over twice as long. This episode is dedicated to Edmond, and the men, women and children of Bourbon whose ingenuity, intelligence and labor produced the vanilla we enjoy today.
Sources:
- Vanilla: Travels in Search of the Ice Cream Orchid, Tim Ecott.
- When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting That Changed History, Matthew Restall.
- Jean Gabriel Fouché, Laurent Jouve. Vanilla planifolia: history, botany and culture in Reunion island. Agronomie, EDP Sciences, 1999, 19 (8), pp.689-703. hal-00885962
- Brixius, Dorit. “A Pepper acquiring Nutmeg: Pierre Poivre, The French Spice Quest and the Role of Mediators in Southeast Asia, 1740s to 1770s.” Journal of the Western Society for French History, vol. 43, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0642292.0043.006
- Brixius, Dorit. “From Ethnobotany to Emancipation: Slaves, Plant Knowledge, and Gardens on Eighteenth-Century Isle de France.” History of Science, vol. 58, no. 1, Mar. 2020, pp. 51–75, doi:10.1177/0073275319835431.
- Maverick, Lewis A. “Pierre Poivre: Eighteenth Century Explorer of Southeast Asia.” Pacific Historical Review, vol. 10, no. 2, 1941, pp. 165–177. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3633634. Accessed 23 June 2021.
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The post 69. The Boy Who Solved Vanilla appeared first on The Land of Desire.
Apr 29, 2021
68. Antoine Parmentier & The History of the Potato
“The vegetable of the shack and the château.” – Le marquis de Cussy
April showers bring May flowers – unless they bring floods, famine, and fear. This month, I’m looking at the moment in French history when farmers turned their nose up at the foods of the New World – until they realized what the potato had to offer. Antoine Parmentier, one of the great hype men of food history, features in this month’s episode all about the tastiest of tubers!
Episode 68: “Antoine Parmentier & The History of the Potato”
Antoine Parmentier, “the apostle of the potato”
Portrait of Antoine Parmentier holding wheat and potato blossoms
that moment when u run into the king and it’s potato blossom season
Transcript
“Le légume de la cabane et du château.” – Le marquis de Cussy
Bienvenue and welcome back to The Land of Desire! I’m your host, Diana, and most of this script was written over the course of a gloomy, rainy weekend here in San Francisco. As always, the arrival of rain in the Bay Area has only one appropriate response: “Ah, but we need the rain” – and it’s true, California is always in a fluctuating state of drought, and this year is particularly bad. I say this to explain that I have climate shifts on the brain right now, and my recent reading all focuses on the relationships between humans, cities, and weather. This month, as we wait to see whether April showers really do turn into May flowers, I’d like to do a prequel episode, if you will. If you’ve been a listener from the start – or if you’ve taken a dig through the archives – you’ll remember that the debut episode of this podcast centers around the volcanic explosion which kicked off a series of bread riots in France, acting as kindling for the French Revolution. Today, let’s ask this question: why didn’t that volcano trigger riots in Britain, or other countries in Europe? Or to put it another way, we associate the French Revolution with an uprising of millions of French peasants. It was the 1780s, why on earth did France still have so many peasants? Today, we’re taking a closer look at a dreadful century when France was – horror of horrors – out of date, behind the times, and out of fashion. As the rest of the West underwent an agricultural revolution, the French kept her ancient farming practices – no matter what the cost. One of the greatest revolutions in French history didn’t take place in Paris, or even Versailles, but out in the sticks, where wheat – the so-called staff of life – gave way to new crops, and a whole new way of life. In this episode, let us appreciate one of the great changemakers of French history: the potato.
Subsistence farming/the old ways
“And six years thou shalt sow thy land, and shalt gather in the fruits thereof: but the seventh year thou shalt let it rest and lie still; that the poor of thy people may eat: and what they leave the beasts of the field shall eat.” This passage from the book of Exodus perfectly captures the shmita, or the Sabbath year of the ancient world, in which farmers would spend an entire year letting their fields sit, fallow, as the soil rested and recovered. Though they wouldn’t have known why at the time, the chemistry checks out. Cereal grains, like wheat and rye, are “scavenger” plants – their roots dig down, down, down into the soil, gobbling up nutrients and incorporating them into the the stems and leaves, thus producing a nutritious crop with enough vitamins and minerals to sustain, oh, the human race. But scavenging the soil comes at a cost: planting cereal grains like wheat and barley in the same dirt year after year eventually leeches those nutrients, especially nitrogen, out of the soil. Things stop growing. Giving the farm a break – a sabbatical, if you will, eh eh – let those biblical farms recover and kept the soil from eroding. There was just one problem: what do you do during, you know, the year without a harvest?
The impracticality of going a year without any harvest led to the development of the “two-field system” in which the farm was split in half – one field would be planted with crops while the other sat empty, and the next year they’d swap places. This system worked okay, which is why it persisted for thousands of years, but like a Gillette executive innovating razor blades, you’ve always got to ask yourself, what if we added another one? Around the year 800, French farmers gave it a shot – and it took feudal Europe by storm.
Under the new system, you needed – you guessed it – three fields. In the spring, you’d plant beans or oats in your first field. In the fall, you’d plant wheat in your second field. The third field would lay fallow, just chillin’ out. Beans are nitrogen-fixers, they speed up the process of introducing nutrients back into the soil, so the land doesn’t just recover, it’s positively bursting with fertility. Meanwhile, the third field sits around fallow, with cattle grazing on the weeds and contributing free manure into the process. The three-field system was a huge improvement: most obviously, you only had one third of your land sitting around doing nothing at a given moment instead of one half. You now had two harvests each year instead of one. Better yet, one of those harvests was a cash crop, which could help you buy food to live on during winter. Finally, the more successful farmers were able to raise livestock. It was definitely an improvement over the Sabbath year, but over the two thousand years that this system was in place, things started to get…complicated. The need for food often took second place after the need for power, and the three-field system in its most common form, the “open field system” was a byzantine arrangement which had less to do with keeping everyone fed than with keeping everyone compliant. The system was juuuust productive enough to keep Europeans from starving…until, of course, it wasn’t.
Feudalism is just a big daisy chain of power: at the top you’ve got God, and God bestows the crown on the king. The king bestows land onto his favorite lords. The lords then divided their vast tracts of land into tiny strips, which they rented out to local tenants. Here, this is your strip in the first field, this is your strip in the second field, this is your strip in the third field. It’s a bit like renting a parking space at your apartment building, and renting another parking space by your house – you probably won’t be using both of them at the same time, but you definitely want access to each of them when its turn comes up. Tenant farmers spent a loooot of time walking back and forth between their little strips. The tenants had the right to farm their little strips, and as long as they had rent money for the lord, the lord didn’t care about how you farmed it. The system prized stability over everything else: a lord couldn’t evict you or replace you, and you weren’t allowed to go somewhere else to work or try something besides farming. This was the system practiced by most of the European continent for centuries on end, from Charlemagne through the Renaissance. Whether you were farming in Normandy, East Anglia, or the banks of the Elbe, you were farming your little strips on somebody else’s land until you died. Unfortunately, that happened sooner rather than later for millions of Europeans.
Life in the three field system was, to put it simply, precarious. Crop yields weren’t very high, which meant you didn’t have much of a buffer. If you planted 10 wheat seeds, you’d get 40 wheat seeds at harvest, which was just enough for you to save half for next fall and eat the other half to stay alive through winter. If you had a bad wheat harvest, you could use the cash from your bean crop. But if you had a year of bad beans and bad wheat? God help you. No food for winter, and no cash to buy more – farmers frequently found themselves making an agonizing choice about whether to eat the wheat grains they were trying to save for next year’s crop. Yeah, you’d need those grains to plant – but what was the point of saving them if you weren’t going to be alive to plant them? Everybody lived on the subsistence line, and one run of bad luck was enough to doom entire villages. In 1315, everyone’s luck ran out.
Seven weeks after Easter, the rains began. “It rained most marvellously and for so long,” one witness observed. But the shine wore off as the rains continued. Day after day, and then week after week, those precious spring cash crops drowned under the weight of all that water. Anxious, the tenant farmers of feudal Europe turned to their precious fall crops, which would have to be gangbusters if they were all going to make it through the year. But it was just more bad news: September 1315 was freezing cold and rainy, and that harvest got trampled into the mud like the one before. A whole year of farming wasted. Most people assumed they’d been cursed by God, and no wonder. Even the French king, Louis X, on the eve of battle outside Flanders, found himself turning around before all the horses got stuck in the mud. Usually, when a village suffered a bad harvest, well-connected families compensated by networking with friends and family in other villages. What happens when everyone’s harvests fail at the same time? Worse yet, what if it happens again the next year? 1316 was just as wet as the 1315, and two bad harvests in a row was enough to kill a continent. From Normandy to Norway, villages filled with starving peasants, who ate diseased cattle and died on the side of the road. Unable to find nutritious food, humans ate questionable substances and died of malnutrition and disease. As desperate workers migrated in search of food, entire villages sat abandoned. In 1316, the entire grape harvest of France failed, and wouldn’t recover for nearly a decade. Livestock, just as hungry as their humans, succumbed to pests and disease, taking with them the last source of nutrition. Across the nation, French churches led special services and parades praying for good weather and food, but to no avail. Europe’s bad weather continued for seven years, and even after the famine ended, those who were lucky enough to survive it were forever weakened by the experience. When a mysterious plague arrived from Asia a few decades later, it found a frail, malnourished population, especially susceptible to disease, and it wiped out nearly one third of Europe.
Life in France
While farmers in the Low Countries were innovating their way out of famine, the vast peasantry of France was too busy surviving crisis after crisis. After the great famine years of the 14th century, followed by the Black Death which wiped out as much as 42% of the French population, the 15th century proved to be another endless series of disasters. Between 1420 and 1450, peasants faced massive food shortages at least 7 times in Paris alone. Roughly every ten years, the crops failed, and bad winters and worse wars kept people hungry until the middle of the century, when the French population finally recovered enough to repopulate the villages devastated by the Black Plague a hundred years earlier. The good times lasted for a few decades, before the return of cold winters spurred panic across the country, reaching its climax in a series of witchcraft trials. For most of the 16th century, England and France both followed the same patterns of traditional farming, which left the peasants existing at subsistence level at best, constantly vulnerable to the luck of the weather. Then, in the 1600s, something changed in Britain. Within one hundred years, Britain would undergo the first of a series of agricultural revolutions, and a stubborn, starving France found itself stuck in the past.
Ironically, this thousand year cycle of feast, famine and fallow fields came to an end in France itself, though the rest of the country didn’t know it. In the same fields of Flanders where Louis X had to turn his horses around to escape the deadly rains of 1315, farmers were determined to figure out how to break the endless grind of subsistence farming. Long before the Enlightenment, Flemish farmers began conducting experiments to see which crops fared better in their local soil, and their discoveries changed the way humans farm for the first time in two thousand years.
How to improve on a three-field system? That’s right. Give the Gillette executive another raise because that’s right, we’re going to add another field. Say hello to the four-field system. It changed what Europeans grew, and when they grew it.
First, the people of Flanders ate their vegetables. Unlike the British and French, who stuck to a diet of beer and bread with perhaps the occasional onion for centuries after the discovery of the New World, Flemish farmers were open minded about new varieties of vegetables and crops making their way across the Atlantic. Not only could the Flemish eat these crops, so could their livestock – how handy! Different countries had their fodder crop of choice, but the Flemish particularly loved the humble turnip, whose leafy greens fed the cattle, and whose starchy bases fed the farmers.
Second, Flemish farmers soon realized that certain kinds of grazing crops did just as good a job at restoring the soil as a season of doing nothing. Clover was particularly miraculous: cows loved it, but so did soil. Clover is very nitrogen rich, and a field of wheat or rye planted where clover used to be will be gangbusters.
By the 1600s, the Flemish had perfected their system: four fields, each staggered but following the same sequence – wheat, then animal fodder, then barley, then a grazing crop. No more fallow fields, no more wasted land, and enough year round crops to keep livestock happy and well-fed around the clock. For two thousand years, autumn meant it was time to slaughter most of your livestock, because you couldn’t afford to feed them your precious wheat during the winter. Every harvest festival, every Christmas feast, is a legacy of this ancient tradition. For the first time, farmers could sustain all of their livestock over the course of the winter, feeding them clover and hay during the warm months and turnips during the winter. Farmers had diversified their portfolio, so to speak, and were no longer doomed by a single bad harvest or a year of cheap wheat prices. As anyone who’s ever played Stardew Valley knows, keeping livestock unlocks the real moneymakers – leather, cheese, milk, and more. Suddenly, Flemish farmers were squeezing incredible amounts of nutrition out of their land. Suddenly, Flemish farmers were living longer, healthier lives, and making enough money to lift themselves out of subsistence. Suddenly, starvation was no longer waiting just outside the gates. It was a milestone in human agriculture. The landowners of Britain caught on relatively quickly. The landowners of France did not – and they’d come to regret it.
Change comes to Britain
During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, Londoners started seeing a new sight at the marketplace: vegetables. A wave of Dutch and Flemish immigrants brought with them the techniques – and the turnips – they’d perfected over the past century. As one witness recorded, they were the “first gardiners that came into these parts to plant cabbages and cauliflower and to sow Turnips, and Carrots, and Parsnips, to sow Raith, Pease, all of which at that time were great rarities, we having few or none in England but what came from Holland and Flanders…so ignorant were we of Gardening in those days.” Queen Elizabeth herself was a big fan of the newfangled treat called carrots. Nevertheless, it took many years for the farming techniques these newcomers used to get adopted by their neighbors.
Here’s the thing about British lords of the 18th century: they really, genuinely loved farming. Read through any literature of the era and the lords are always having long discussions in front of the fireplace about how to drain such and such marsh, and how to improve the harvest, and would you like to see the new chicken I’ve been breeding? British aristocrats loved stomping around on their lands finding improvements, and there was a booming trade in pamplets and treatises about how to produce a more profitable farm. One of the first gentlemen to take note? The diplomat Charles Townshend, a viscount who retired in 1730 to spend the rest of his life focused on his real pleasure: farming. He’d served as an ambassador to the Hague at various points in his career, where he’d come into contact with those savvy farmers and their innovative techniques. Back on his farm with too much time on his land, Townshend spent so much time promoting the new rotation strategy that the neighbors called him Turnip Townshend. After experimenting to see which of the Flemish crops would work best in British soil, he eventually settled on the perfect four-crop rotation for the area: wheat, barley, turnips, clover. He was eccentric, but he got results: Townshend’s farm had the output of lands far bigger than his. Slowly but surely, word spread, and between 1700 and 1900, as each enthusiastic landlord applied these techniques to his own property, the amount of good British farmland sitting around doing nothing went from 20% down to 4%. Turnips kept weeds at bay and the cows ate their leaves. Clover healed the soil and fed the animals. Together, turnips and clover kept animals alive over winter, and the resulting milk, cheese, meat, leather and manure meant British farmers were some of the most productive in the world.
But all this change came at a great cost. Transitioning from a three-field system to a four-field system was a big bet, an experiment, a risk. Individual tenant farmers struggling to survive on the margins couldn’t afford to take any risks. So the British landowners did the unthinkable: they broke the social contract of feudalism. Some landowners bought the rights to the tiny strips of land off of their tenant farmers. Others simply appropriated it from them and dared the tenants to do something about it. Slowly, and then all at once, the communal fields in which everyone farmed their strip of land or let their cattle graze were snatched back by the landowners and consolidated, a process called enclosure. I’m not going to get into it because I promise I have not spent as much time thinking about the process of enclosure as Karl Marx did, but I can’t just skip over it and focus on the carrots. Enclosure was incredibly controversial, and resulted in the creation of an enormous class of landless, rootless peasants completely unmoored from the social ties which had organized their lives. Millions of them went on to labor in – spoiler alert – the factories of the Industrial Revolution around the corner. Nevertheless, as destructive and disruptive as enclosure was, there’s no doubting the results: with the landowner able to coordinate the transition to a four-field system, British agriculture produced more food than ever before, and within a century or two, Britain’s food system was almost entirely self-sufficient and finally free of the endless cycle of subsistence farming.
Across the channel, however, it was a blast from the past.
In 1857, Jean François Millet debuted a startling new painting entitled The Gleaners, depicting three peasant women bent over in a wheat field. Familiar to any Art History student and now on display at the Musée d’Orsay, the painting is most famous for its provocative ideas about class warfare and the rights of the poor. But take a moment and think about what this painting literally depicts. Gleaning is an ancient feudal custom, in which the poor have the right to cross onto a farmer’s harvested field and dig for leftover scraps and roots. It’s the ancient equivalent of dumpster diving. What on earth is it doing in a painting from 1857? This is not a historical painting, and none of the voluminous criticism The Gleaners received accused it of being an exaggeration. 40 years after the last great famine of England, the French peasantry still hovered on the brink of starvation, caught in the old cycle of subsistence farming. What happened? How did France fall so far behind?
While the landed gentry of the British countryside spent the 17th century gleefully planting turnips and breeding new types of chicken, French aristocrats were busy elbowing their way into the king’s favor at Versailles. Louis XIV kept the rich on their toes at all times, because aristocrats busy gossiping about one another, eating 20 course meals and shopping, shopping, shopping are too distracted to bother fomenting rebellion. The landowning classes in France spent more of their time away at court than they did back home, tending the crops. They didn’t care what you grew, or whether you grew anything at all, so long as you had the money for rent. Enclosure? Sounds like a lot of paperwork, and we have 57 social events and a trip to Chambord coming up.
With absentee landlords, unpredictable harvests and zero margins, French farmers had no money to invest in upgraded equipment. They continued to farm the exact same way their great-great-great-grandfathers did, and often using the exact same tools to do it. The scythes and handplows weren’t the only thing their ancestors would have recognized. Long after the Dutch introduced 50 shades of carrots and the British discovered the joys of mashed potatoes, the French continued to reject New World crops. Nobody wanted to grow them, and nobody wanted to eat them. Potatoes were the first food Europeans had ever encountered which grew from an ugly little tuber instead of seeds. Highly suspicious. In 1751, no less than Diderot himself proclaimed, “No matter how you prepare it, the potato root is tasteless and starchy.” He went on to declare, “It cannot be regarded as an enjoyable food, but it provides abundant, reasonably healthy food for men who want nothing by sustenance.” Even this was sort of a PR coup – the rest of the nation thought the potato caused leprosy.
But sustenance was exactly what the French nation desperately needed. Even as Britain, the Netherlands, and the rest of Western Europe adopted new practices which enabled them to diversify their farms, improve their yields, and broke the wheel of subsistence farming, France suffered from famine after famine. France suffered major famines in 1650, and then again in 1660. Instead of recognizing the nation’s urgent need for agricultural reform, Louis XIV got distracted by his favorite pastime: fighting with the neighbors. He spent thirty straight years at war, draining the country’s bank accounts and leaving the nation unable to buy reserves when crops failed. And did they ever fail. In 1693, a stormy summer withered crops on the vine. Ten years later, a freezing winter forced everyone to eat what little reserves they had for next year’s planting. In both cases, malnutrition left everyone but the aristocracy completely vulnerable to disease, and millions of French farmers and peasants died from typhoid and dysentery. The famine of 1693 alone may have killed more French citizens than World War One. While courtiers at Versailles dined for hours on end, one tenth of the nation perished. With their populations literally decimated by war and disease, French farming villages sat abandoned, fallow as far as the eye could see.
A regime change wasn’t enough to fix the situation – the French nobility did not wake up the day after the Sun King’s funeral and begin caring about their tenant farmers and wheat yields. In the late 18th century, Arthur Young, a British agriculturist, toured the French countryside and couldn’t believe what he found. “Go to the districts where the properties are minutely divided, and you will see great distress, even misery, and probably very bad agriculture.” Surrounded by peasants so poor they went without shoes, he wrote, “This is a poverty that strikes at the root of national prosperity.” As long as the rent came in, the nobility didn’t care what happened, and as luck would have it, for a while the rent did indeed come in. Under Louis XV, the weather was nice and everything was great until suddenly it wasn’t, and everything was horrible. In 1740, Paris had seventy five straight days of frost. Everyone was sick, miserable, or frozen to death in their own homes. As melting frost flooded the fields, harvest dates got pushed back further and further. Famines were turning into a once-in-a-decade affair in France at the exact moment the rest of Europe was leaving them behind. France needed a wake-up call, and that call would come from an unknown pharmacist named Antoine-Augustin Parmentier.
At the moment Diderot published his observation that potatoes were only fit for men who were desperate for sustenance, Parmentier was that man. A prisonder of the Seven Years War, locked up five times by the Prussian army, he spent most of the 1750s eating nothing but potatoes. Instead of finding himself riddled with leprosy, Parmentier was a picture of health. The humble, nutritious potato left him better nourished than most French people of the era, and he devoted the rest of his life to spreading the good news. As a sort of French Johnny Potatoseed, Parmentier toured the country, urging French people to give taters a try. As luck would have it, his services were needed by one man in particular: the hopeless, hapless King of France, Louis XIV.
Guess who’s baaaaack? That’s right, it’s your old friend, Crop Failure. Just like clockwork, bad harvests led to wheat shortages in 1773. Grain merchants began hoarding wheat, prices skyrocketed, and the new king adopted a laissez-faire approach. This time, however, the French people weren’t accepting hunger as an act of God. Hundreds of riots broke out in 80 towns across the nation, and the so-called Flour War spurred conspiracy theories that the king was starving the people.
Here came Parmentier. A few years earlier, he’d had a major breakthrough: thanks to his hard work, the Paris Faculty of Medicine made it official: Potatoes were edible. It was a start! Parmentier published books and pamphlets pleading with the French to give taters a try: “The vegetable kingdom affords no food more wholesome, more easily procured, or less expensive, than the potato.”Parmentier launched a series of PR stunts to rescue the good name of potatoes everywhere. He fed French nobility an all-potato dinner. He adorned the royals with delicate potato blossoms, tucked into Marie Antoinette’s hair and threaded through the king’s lapel. According to one legend, Parmentier planted 40 acres of potatoes and surrounded the plot with armed guards, to convince French society of their value. At one point, Parmentier served the American ambassador a meal so delightful, the ambassador saved the recipe and brought it back home. In 1802, Thomas Jefferson introduced Americans to their new best friend: the french fry.
Unfortunately for King Louis, Parmentier was a man ahead of his time. Despite their best efforts, French society took another twenty years to fully embrace the potato. In the meantime, as I covered in this show’s first episode, a volcanic explosion triggered yet another failed harvest. “The general temper of the population is so highly charged,” wrote one observer, “it may well feel itself authorized to ease its poverty as soon as the harvest starts.” By the 1780s, the flour supply wasn’t the only thing in France that got cut off.
Sure, the French revolution toppled God and King, but that didn’t mean it was enough to topple the most enduring institution of France: the three-field system. In one of its final acts, the National Assembly issued a ruling on the traditional three-field farms of France: essentially, “do whatever you want”. The creation of new common pastures was abolished, and landowners now had the right to enclose their lands like the British aristocracy, but communities who practiced traditional farming were free to continue their ancient practices and boy, did they. Ten years after the Revolution, the threat of famine was still so strong in the French imagination that French villages could force all able-bodied residents to drop what they were doing and collectively bring in the harvest.
The reign of Napoleon overlaps almost perfectly with the coldest cold spell modern Europe ever did see. Each year was colder than the last, leading up to April 11, 1815 when – you guessed it – another massive volcanic eruption wreaked havoc around the world. The ash and smoke which filled the Earth’s atmosphere was so thick that 1816 is still known to this day as “The Year Without A Summer.” Half of the French wheat crop died, and all of the wine grapes were lost. By the summer, the French began rioting. Police escorts guarded wagons of grain from hungry villagers. While Napoleon shivered in his prison cell, rumors flew around the nation that he was staging a comeback, triggering more and more violence. Unlike previous crop failures, the French government couldn’t even turn to other countries for help: everyone was suffering the same fate at the same time. For one summer, the European continent found itself hurled back to into the Middle Ages, facing down the same threat as their ancestors had exactly 300 years earlier. As the historian John D. Post wrote in 1977, 1816 was “The Last Great Subsistence Crisis in the Western World”.
Slowly, very slowly, French farms began to change. Instead of the laissez faire approach which left farmers vulnerable and villagers hungry during the late eighteenth century, French policies actively incentivized smarter, more productive farming. Unlike the British, French governments didn’t kick everyone off the land and force them to change their ways – but they made it easier for farmers to justify taking risks. Common pastures and fallow fields continued all the way into the twentieth centuries. But new policies encouraged the farmers to begin coordinating and synchronizing their little strips of land, devoting large territories of a field to one crop, even if that field belonged to twenty different farmers. Nobody would force you to plant the same thing as your neighbors in a big synchronized rotation – but the neighbors would make it a lot harder for you if you didn’t. If you planted your strips of land using the same rotation as your neighbors, you were allowed to walk around wherever you liked, and step on your neighbors’ strips of land to get to yours. If you went rogue and planted whatever you wanted, you had to go the long way to reach your different strips of land, as though your neighbor’s tiny strips were made of hot lava. Plus, it was a hell of a lot easier to turn a plow around if you didn’t have to keep it inside an itty bitty plot of land. Over time, the combination of this social incentive and this natural incentive resulted in more and more common fields transitioning to a modern crop rotation. Central to that rotation? The humble potato. In 1825, the celebrated food critic, Brillat Savarin, published The Physiology of Taste, in which he declared, “I appreciate the potato only as a protection against famine, except for that, I know of nothing more eminently tasteless.” Ouch. Luckily for the spud, the rest of the French nation was coming around.
In the 25 years following the Year Without A Summer, the French national potato crop quintupled in size. By 1850, the French were growing 10 million tons of potatoes on their tiny little strips. France now grew more potatoes than any other nation in continental Europe. And those potato fields fueled a population boom: an acre of potatoes yields nearly four times the calories as a field of wheat, with more vitamins and minerals to boot. Childhood mortality plummeted, birth rates went up, life expectancy increased. Nobody got scurvy anymore. A diet of milk and potatoes provided every single vitamin essential to the human diet. Introducing potatoes raised the average height of an adult French villager by half an inch. Plus, while France suffered invasion, siege, and social unrest in the late 19th century, the potato’s underground harvest offered a huge advantage: soldiers, thieves, and tax collectors couldn’t see them growing. Whether it was a group of Prussians, Communards, or Germans sweeping through your village, they might make off with your wheat crops, but nobody was going to take the time to dig up your potato fields. When potato blight arrived, the French nation suffered tremendously, but they had it a lot easier than Ireland, in part because the four field rotation ensured a diverse series of backup crops. After the potato crops recovered, the French never suffered a full-scale famine again.
By 1920, French agriculture modernized at last. It took nothing less than a world war to do it. Gone were the open fields, the tiny strips of land, and the threat of hunger. In its place were productive, stable fields, healthy livestock, and lots and lots of potatoes. Exactly 100 years after the year without a summer, in 1916, potatoes gave France a strategic wartime advantage. In Germany, then the largest potato grower in the world, potato crops were hit by blight, and the copper which would normally save the nation’s harvest had all been confiscated for the war effort. That year, hundreds of thousands of Germans starved and turned to another innovative root vegetable for survival – today, Germans still refer to 1916 as the Turnip Winter. Meanwhile, French rations mostly consisted of macaroni, rice, and yes, you guessed it, potatoes. By the end of World War One, France produced 500 million bushels of potatoes each year. At some point during that war, American soldiers stationed in Francophone Belgium ate some potatoes fried in oil, and in a blunder which refuses to die, named the treat “French fries”. The French fry may not be French at all, but a deep affection for potatoes sure is.
As the French finally came around on the potato, Antoine Parmentier’s efforts did not go unnoticed. The French love their culinary heroes. Commuters taking Line 3 of the Paris Metro can wait for their train at the Parmentier station, and pass the time reading extensive murals about the history of the potato. And finally, as anyone who has ever dined in a French bistro knows well, Parmentier’s name is now a byword of its own. Potage parmentier, salade Parmentier – if you see Parmentier on a menu, you know it’s coming with spuds. Most famously, French shepherd’s pie is known as hachis parmentier. What better honor could a nation bestow than naming one of its greatest comfort foods after you? You can even eat your potatoes on Parmentier avenue. And boy do they ever: the average French adult eats 110 pounds of potatoes each year. Three hundred years ago, Antoine Parmentier shook his head at the injustice done to his favorite root: “They have not escaped the shafts of calumny. How many imaginary evils have been imputed to them!” Today, he rests in Pere Lachaise cemetery, and the French pay tribute by covering his grave with potatoes.
Thanks for listening to The Land of Desire! If you’re thinking one French history podcast isn’t enough, may I recommend The Siécle? That show has a particularly great episode about The Year Without A Summer, it’s definitely worth a listen. Say hello on Instagram or Twitter, and if you’d like to sign up for my monthly newsletter, you can do so at thelandofdesire dot substack dot com. Until next time, au revoir!
Sources:
- The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850 – Brian Fagan
- De Moor, T. (2015). The Dilemma of the Commoners: Understanding the Use of Common-Pool Resources in Long-Term Perspective (Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139135450
- JONES, P.M. “Arthur Young (1741—1820): For and Against.” The English Historical Review, vol. 127, no. 528, 2012, pp. 1100–1120., www.jstor.org/stable/23272740. Accessed 29 Apr. 2021.
- Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, Vol. I: The Structure of Everyday Life – Fernand Braudel
- “How the Potato Changed The World” Charles C. Mann, Smithsonian Magazine, November 2011.
- Nunn, Nathan, and Nancy Qian. “THE POTATO’S CONTRIBUTION TO POPULATION AND URBANIZATION: EVIDENCE FROM A HISTORICAL EXPERIMENT.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 126, no. 2, 2011, pp. 593–650. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23015685. Accessed 29 Apr. 2021.
- A Bite-Sized History of France: Gastronomic Tales of Revolution, War, and Enlightenment – Stephane Hénaut & Jeni Mitchell
- Earle, Rebecca. “Promoting Potatoes in Eighteenth-Century Europe.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 51 no. 2, 2017, p. 147-162. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/ecs.2017.0057.
- Observations on such nutritive vegetables as may be substituted in the place of ordinary food, in times of scarcity – YA BOY, Antoine Parmentier
- “Starvation Stalks Europe” Erik Sass, Mental Floss, August 24, 2016.
- The Potato: How the Humble Spud Rescued the Western World – Larry Zuckerman
- The History and Social Influence of the Potato – Redcliffe N. Salaman
- Gráda, Cormac Ó., and Jean-Michel Chevet. “Famine and Market in Ancien Régime France.” The Journal of Economic History, vol. 62, no. 3, 2002, pp. 706–733. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3132553. Accessed 29 Apr. 2021.
- Grantham, George W. “The Persistence of Open-Field Farming in Nineteenth-Century France.” The Journal of Economic History, vol. 40, no. 3, 1980, pp. 515–531. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2120751. Accessed 29 Apr. 2021.
- Séguy, Isabelle, and Christine Théré. “Demography and Famine: A Pioneering Article.” Population (English Edition, 2002-), vol. 71, no. 3, 2016, pp. 541–545., www.jstor.org/stable/44135483. Accessed 29 Apr. 2021.
- Meuvret, Jean. “SUBSISTENCE CRISES AND THE DEMOGRAPHY OF FRANCE UNDER THE ANCIEN RÉGIME.” Population (English Edition, 2002-), vol. 71, no. 3, 2016, pp. 547–554., www.jstor.org/stable/44135484. Accessed 29 Apr. 2021.
- Nunn, Nathan, and Nancy Qian. “THE POTATO’S CONTRIBUTION TO POPULATION AND URBANIZATION: EVIDENCE FROM A HISTORICAL EXPERIMENT.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 126, no. 2, 2011, pp. 593–650. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23015685. Accessed 29 Apr. 2021.
- MCNEILL, WILLIAM H. “How the Potato Changed the World’s History.” Social Research, vol. 66, no. 1, 1999, pp. 67–83. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40971302. Accessed 29 Apr. 2021.
- Newell, William H. “The Agricultural Revolution in Nineteenth-Century France.” The Journal of Economic History, vol. 33, no. 4, 1973, pp. 697–731. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2116783. Accessed 29 Apr. 2021.
- Exceptionalism and Industrialisation: Britain and its European Rivals, 1688–1815 – Leandro Prados de la Escosura
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The post 68. Antoine Parmentier & The History of the Potato appeared first on The Land of Desire.
Mar 25, 2021
67. Marcel & Celeste, Part II
“Proust n’a aime que deux personnes, sa mere et Celeste.” – Prince Antoine Bibesco
What better way to “celebrate” a year of sheltering in place than a closer look at France’s most famous social distancer? This week, I’m looking at the curious relationship between the eccentric, reclusive writer, Marcel Proust, and his beloved housekeeper-confidant, Céleste Albaret. Together, the two hunkered down into a mostly nocturnal life of writing, collaborating, and remembering while the world outside became incomprehensible. It’s the ultimate experiment in working from home – if your Uber Eats came from the Hotel Ritz, that is! Here’s the conclusion of our two part history of Marcel & Céleste. (Listen to part one here: 66. Marcel & Celeste, Part I.)
Episode 67: “Marcel & Celeste, Part II”
Transcript
In 1916, Marcel received a surprising letter: a sixteen year old soldier who had snuck his way to the front line wrote him from the trenches to admire his work. Entering into a discussion of friendship, Proust confessed, “I am myself only when alone, and I profit from others only to the extent that they enable me to make discoveries within myself, either by making me suffer…or by their absurdities, which..help me to understand human character.” While Proust continued making sorties outside his apartment, it’s unclear whether they were out of genuine loneliness or a colder, more ambitious sort of reconnaissance. In his all-encompassing dedication to In Search of Lost Time, Marcel’s own life seemed less and less important – in many ways, it seemed, his life was already over. His real life – that of dazzling society soirees and elegant salons, was an anachronism, murdered by the war. He now existed for reconnaissance work: categorizing the beauty and elegance he had known, trying to capture its essence in full. One night, he knocked on the door of a quartet leader, asking to hear a particular work of music as soon as possible. The two of them shared a cab around Paris, picking up the other musicians, and ferrying them back to 102 boulevard Haussman at one in the morning. Another time, he interviewed his housekeeper Celeste’s young niece to accurately capture the writing of a high school girl. He spent his money recklessly – what use was money if not in service of his work, and what use was money if he was going to die young? Of this he was convinced, the only question was whether he would finish his great work first. “I am a very old man, Celeste,” he once told his beloved housekeeper and friend. “I shan’t live long…and that is why I am so anxious to finish.”
In 1917, as World War One ground up a generation of Europeans, Marcel Proust began attending regular dinners at the Hotel Ritz. There, he dined with other refugees of the old world: princesses on the run from empires which no longer existed, sophisticated artists and intellectuals, aging dandies and more. Relying on his personal charm and the gossip of the Ritz staff, Proust learned everything he’d ever wanted to know about the ruling classes of the aristocracy. Spending the dwindling reserves of his fortune on lobster and champagne while the war approached its climax, Proust was an eyewitness to the changing of the guard. On July 27th, 1917, attending a dinner party in the Ritz hotel room of a Greek princess, Proust heard the air raid siren go off. Standing on the balcony, Proust replayed that fateful night from three years earlier, “watching this wonderful Apocalypse in which the airplanes climbing and swooping seemed to complement and eclipse the constellations.” A few months later, Proust stepped out onto the sidewalk and encountered two soldiers: Americans. It was the end of the war, and the end of Proust’s world. In the years to come, Paris would fill up with this new, young, “Lost Generation”, and the world of Bizet, Zola, and Anatole France was giving way to Hemingway, Stein, and Fitzgerald. On November 11th, Germany signed the armistice. “What a marvelous allegro presto is this finale,” he wrote, “after the infinite slow movements of the beginning and all that followed.” Marcel’s brother, Robert, returned home unharmed, but 1,384,000 men did not. Even then, Marcel knew, it was the beginning of the end.
Just as the second volume of In Search of Lost Time appeared in stores, Marcel received a blow: he was being evicted from his apartment. For a moment, he allowed himself to dream: would he live in Venice? Would he finish his life’s work in Florence? But reality intruded – he was broke, and, his doctor reminded him, he would not survive the trip. “For an asthmatic,” he wrote, “moving to new quarters is usually fatal” but he was determined to finish his work. For months, Céleste ran ragged, making arrangements for Marcel, packing up his belongings, selling his possessions, and to the eternal chagrin of Proust scholars everywhere, burning Proust’s old notebooks in the stove. After taking one last look around his beloved home, Marcel exited 102 boulevard Haussman and with it, his connection with the outside world. As Céleste recalled, “Death began for him with our leaving Boulevard Haussman.”
At once, Marcel set to work recreating his beloved isolation chamber. In went the carpets, the servants’ bell, his electric lamp, his electric kettle, the thick blue satin curtains. The apartment was freezing cold, and Marcel was hardly attached to his physical surroundings. According to Céleste, “he spent those last two years…in an atmosphere that already resembled the grave.” When she asked if he was comfortable in his new home, he would simply reply that they were “only passing through. When I have finished we will be more comfortable.” As he had murmured during their seaside strolls in Cabourg, Marcel assured Céleste that someday, when he was finished, they would travel, and he would show her the marvels of the world. Inside his cloistered apartment, Proust gasped “like a half-drowned person pulled out of the water, unable to say a word or make the slightest movement.” Outside, the second volume of In Search of Lost Time was a bestseller. On December 10th, Within A Budding Grove received the Prix Goncourt, France’s highest literary honor. Within a day, the first edition was entirely sold out. Suddenly, the outside world spilled into Proust’s sanctuary. Within three days, Marcel received 886 letters of congratulations. Just before the publication of the third installment, Marcel received word that he had been awarded the Legion of Honor, just like his father. Marcel was world famous – but his grasp on life was more tenuous than ever. Whether out of stress, illness, or just plain addiction, Marcel depended on heavy doses of drugs to sleep. Life was now a race against time. He’d finished the all of his manuscripts, and now he had to correct the proofs, send them to publishers, and see them published before he died.
By May 1921, the third and fourth volumes appeared in bookstores, and Proust could not stand out of bed without falling down. One week later, Marcel made it all the way out of his apartment to the Jeu de Paume museum, to attend an exhibit on Dutch masters, including a work by Vermeer. Standing outside the terrace of the museum, a passerby recognized the world-famous author and took a snapshot. Pale and sickly, with bags under his eyes but impeccably dressed, he looks into the distance, perhaps unaware that he is being photographed. He would never be photographed again in his lifetime. He spent the next six months in bed. He dragged himself out of bed to attend a lavish party on New Year’s Eve. He would not see the next one.
Sources:
The two biggies:
- Marcel Proust: A Life, William Carter, 2013.
- Monsieur Proust, Celeste Albaret, 2003. (Screw those reviewers, reading this book was a joy, I loved it.)
The rest:
- “Marcel Proust and the medicine of the Belle Epoque” pamphlet, the Royal Society of Medicine: proust-exhibition-booklet.pdf">https://www.rsm.ac.uk/media/2060/marcel-proust-exhibition-booklet.pdf
- Lamont, Rosette, and Céleste Albaret. “Interview Avec Céleste Albaret.” The French Review, vol. 44, no. 1, 1970, pp. 15–33. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/385924. Accessed 25 Mar. 2021.
- “In the Footsteps of Marcel Proust” William Friedkin, The New York Times, friedkin-marcel-proust.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/15/t-magazine/william-friedkin-marcel-proust.html
- Boym, Svetlana. “Nostalgia and its discontents.” The Hedgehog Review, vol. 9, no. 2, 2007, p. 7+. Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A168775861/AONE?u=sfpl_main&sid=AONE&xid=9c209110. Accessed 25 Mar. 2021.
- Manley, Janet. “Longing for a Distant Home Amid a Pandemic.” New York Times, 14 Sept. 2020, p. B6(L). Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A635356510/AONE?u=sfpl_main&sid=AONE&xid=115d21c9. Accessed 25 Mar. 2021.
- “these were the days; OPINION.” Globe & Mail [Toronto, Canada], 11 July 2020, p. O1,O6,O7. Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A629146415/AONE?u=sfpl_main&sid=AONE&xid=6f8acd35. Accessed 25 Mar. 2021.
Further reading:
- “How I Came to Love My Epic Quarantine Reading Project”, Oliver Munday, The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/11/reading-proust-in-search-of-lost-time-during-pandemic/616850/
- “Analogue Ambles: Marcel Proust’s Dark Room”, Adam Scovell, February 10 2019, https://www.caughtbytheriver.net/2019/02/marcel-prousts-dark-room/
- Kear, Jon (2007) Une Chambre Mentale: Proust’s Solitude. In: Hendrix, Harald, ed. Writers’ Houses and the Making of Memory. Routledge, New York/Oxon, pp. 221-235. ISBN 978-0-415-95742-7
Subscribe to the newsletter
Want more French history and pop culture in your life? Subscribe to the Land of Desire newsletter. The revamped newsletter comes in two flavors: free and paid. Free subscribers receive one newsletter per quarter; paid subscribers receive at least one newsletter per month. Subscribe to the newsletter here.
Support the Show
There are so many ways to support the show! First and foremost, sign up for a paid subscription to The Land of Desire newsletter or contribute via Patreon. If you’re a paid subscriber, chime in on our Substack discussion threads whenever a new newsletter is sent out!
But that’s not all: you’re always welcome and strongly encouraged to ask questions on the show’s Facebook page or through Twitter! And of course, you can contact me directly here. Thank you so much for listening to the show. Until next time, au revoir!
Join the Discussion
- Join our Substack discussions
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- Follow us on Twitter (so many GIFs)
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The post 67. Marcel & Celeste, Part II appeared first on The Land of Desire.
Mar 25, 2021
66. Marcel & Celeste, Part I
“Proust n’a aime que deux personnes, sa mere et Celeste.” – Prince Antoine Bibesco
What better way to “celebrate” a year of sheltering in place than a closer look at France’s most famous social distancer? This week, I’m looking at the curious relationship between the eccentric, reclusive writer, Marcel Proust, and his beloved housekeeper-confidant, Céleste Albaret. Together, the two hunkered down into a mostly nocturnal life of writing, collaborating, and remembering while the world outside became incomprehensible. It’s the ultimate experiment in working from home – if your Uber Eats came from the Hotel Ritz, that is!
Episode 66: “Marcel & Celeste, Part I”
Transcript
Bienvenue and welcome back to the Land of Desire! I’m your host, Diana, and before I get started, I’d like to give a big welcome to new listeners! For those who don’t already know, this week I was able to live out one of my childhood dreams. Growing up, my favorite section of the newspaper was always the advice columns. What can I say -I love telling people what to do! My friend, Danny Lavery, is better known as Dear Prudence over on Slate, and this week they invited me to be their guest host! For my longtime listeners, if you’ve ever thought, “Hmm, I really love Diana’s weird anecdotes about French history, could she tell me how to raise my children?” then it’s a banner day for you. You can listen to the episode at slate.com/podcasts/dear-prudence, and I’ll put the link in this episode’s show notes. Meanwhile, if you’re a Dear Prudence listener tuning in for the first time, thank you and welcome! With that happy announcement out of the way, let’s turn to today’s episode.
Listeners, we have come to the end of a very, very long year. I’m cranky, I’m bored, I’m really really really good at baking now and I miss my friends terribly. One of the only ways I’ve gotten through 2020 with my sanity arguably intact is by experiencing it side-by-side with my loving boyfriend, Daniel, or as he prefers to be known, the much-abused unpaid intern and occasional producer of this show. He has been the bright spot of my year, and I wanted to pay him back by giving him a little Christmas gift: an episode all about his favorite person in the world, and perhaps the person best suited to comment on this strange period of history, the great French writer, Marcel Proust. 2020 was a year of seclusion and confinement, and it was also a year of transition. We speak of the Before Times, and a world, a whole way of life, which feels like it’s slipping out of our reach. At the same time, we hunker down, sheltering ourselves against an invisible enemy, staying within the safe confines of home and wiping down the groceries. Who could better understand the story of this year than a man conceived during a siege, who spent the last third of his life as a recluse, terrified of infection, dreaming of a lost world and mourning the impossibility of return? But there is one aspect of Marcel Proust’s life which feels especially relevant to us today, a part of his story which is often skipped over. While Proust famously loved and adored his sainted mother, his later years are inextricably linked to Proust’s father: the world-famous epidemiologist, Adrien Proust, pioneer of the modern cordon sanitaire. Today, we will navigate between the inner world and the outer, between safety and exposure, between past and present, between reality and memory, between sickness and health, between the glittering world of fin-de-siècle Paris and the dark chamber in which our story is set. The chamber in question was a refuge, it was a nest, and in many ways, it was a cage. This is the story of Proust’s bedroom.
I. Open with impending siege (so he thinks) of Paris in September 1914, culminating in the flight to Cabourg
II. Flashback to 1870 and the Siege of Paris
III. Proust’s childhood illnesses (what is dad doing during this time?)
IV. November 1913 – Swann’s Way is published.
IV. Says goodbye to the Paris that he knew and leaves for Cabourg. But the hotel is no escape (soldiers etc) and so he must return home. Coughing fit on the way home resigns him to the idea that he doesn’t have much longer – and so he must devote his remaining time to finishing his great work. Begins life as a recluse.
One evening in September 1914, Marcel Proust woke in the middle of the night and took a last look at Paris. It was the opening salvo of World War One, and Paris, everyone assumed, was doomed. With Kaiser Wilhelm’s troops on the march, it would only be a matter of time before glittering fin-de-siècle Paris found herself ground under German boots. It should have been a joyous time for Proust. Six years previously, he’d begun working on what he believed would be his masterpiece: a sprawling multivolume meditation on time and memory. After a string of rejections, he published the first volume, Swann’s Way, in November 1913, to wild acclaim. But he had little time to savor the victory – only a few months later, France found herself preparing for war. On August 2nd, just before Germany issued a formal declaration of war, Proust wrote a letter to a friend. “My petty interests…seem wholly unimportant when I think that millions of men are going to be massacred.” Three million Frenchmen received mobilization orders that day, including Proust’s friends and family. Though he’d done routine military service as a young man, Proust was far too ill to fight now, and he found himself left behind in a city full of women, children and the elderly, all of whom were preparing to flee.
On August 29, Proust witnessed the first breach: a German monoplane flew over Paris and dropped a few bombs. By September 6th, the German army was only 30 miles outside Paris, all the taxis in Paris were barreling to the front lines carrying reinforcements, the government was packing up for Bordeaux, and Marcel Proust stood in the moonlight, making his farewells. He was leaving for Cabourg, a fashionable resort town on the coast where he’d stayed every summer with his family. With his genteel wardrobe folded gently into trunks, his manuscript gathered securely in his battered old suitcase, and his medications close at hand in his trusted housekeeper’s purse, Proust was one of a million Parisians saying goodbye. “In seeing this immense Paris that I did not know I loved so much, waiting, in its useless beauty, for the onslaught that could no longer be stopped, I could not keep myself from weeping.”
Almost exactly forty-four years earlier, another man had faced almost identical circumstances: an invading army on the doorstep, Paris preparing herself for a siege, a city unsure whether to stay and fight or flee for safety. Like Marcel, this young man was at a turning point: after rising steadily through the ranks of his profession, he was on the cusp of a great breakthrough. Like Marcel, he would use the war to come as fodder for his career, and by the war’s conclusion, he would enjoy international fame. But as the Prussians advanced towards Paris on that sunny afternoon, the young man had only one thing on his mind: it was September 3rd, 1870, and Doctor Adrian Proust was getting married.
At the age of 32, Adrian Proust embarked on the adventure of his life. For the past ten years, he’d been a rising star: graduating with honors from the Academie de médecin, before defending his doctoral thesis in 1866. After passing one final exam, Adrian was certified for a teaching post at the Academie de médecin – but a medical catastrophe that summer changed the course of his career. For the third time that century, a dreaded monster reared its head: cholera. Cholera was a disease of cities, found where too many people cluster together and contaminate the water supply. Originating out of India, the disease made its way to Europe by boat, and as trade between Asia and Europe grew, so did the threat of an outbreak. In 1832, cholera arrived in France and killed 100,000 people. In 1849, it returned and killed three times that many. In 1866, as Dr. Proust began weighing the option of a teaching position or a practice, cholera returned to Paris, deadlier than ever. That year’s outbreak had a fatality rate of 50%. All summer, Dr. Proust worked long hours, caring for patients while maintaining strict personal hygiene standards to keep himself from getting infected. As hard as he tried to save his patients, there was only so much Adrian could do – once infected, patients often died within 72 hours, by which point their family members would usually arrive with symptoms of their own. The only way to beat cholera, he knew, was to prevent it from happening in the first place.
Adrian Proust belonged to a burgeoning discipline we would eventually come to know as epidemiology. Studying under his mentor, Adrian learned about the concept of a cordon sanitaire – a means of keeping infected persons isolated to prevent the spread of disease. While John Snow had famously shut off the Broad Street Pump in London during its 1854 cholera outbreak, the jury was still out about what exactly caused cholera, and it would be another 20 years before a German scientist discovered the guilty bacteria. In the meantime, Doctor Proust experimented in his own clinic, by isolating his cholera patients away from everyone else, to great success. After seeing the results on such a small scale, Proust wondered whether big results could only come from big measures: what if you could apply a cordon sanitaire to a whole country? What if a country with an outbreak could be hemmed in, to prevent outsiders from getting in to contract an infection, and to prevent infected people from getting out? In 1869, Doctor Proust represented France at the International Health Conference in Vienna to propose this audacious idea. “The question of international hygiene,” he proclaimed, “passes and surpasses political frontiers.” But before you could even begin to stop the transmission route of a disease, you’d have to know where, exactly, that transmission route was located. With the blessings of the conference, Doctor Proust set out on a grand international quest: starting in Russia, making his way to Persia, and then from Persia to Mecca, Turkey, Egypt and then finally back to Paris, he would map the voyage of the invisible enemy across the Western world.
The voyage spanned thousands of miles, crossed on ever-changing modes of transport. Leaving Paris in a gleaming luxury train, after crossing into Russia he downgraded to the rudimentary wooden kibitka carriage. From there, he crossed the Caucausus Mountains on horseback, before descending into Persia on the back of a camel. In Tehran, Adrian found himself meeting the shah of Persia, desperate for relief from the cholera epidemics raging through his own empire. In Mecca, Proust watched millions of pilgrims sharing squalid conditions on the road to Hajj. Finally, in Egypt, Doctor Proust walked through the ports, inspecting ships bound for Europe. Retracing the path of every cholera outbreak of the 19th century so far, Doctor Proust had asked himself, “Where was cholera breaking out just before it reached Europe?” Every time, the answer was the same: “Egypt”. As the chokepoint between India and Europe, Egypt, Proust would one day write, “must be considered Europe’s barrier against cholera.” After completing his epic voyage, Doctor Proust returned home on November 28, 1869, accompanied by steamer trunks full of notes. He was the talk of Paris, and everyone wanted to meet this brave, pioneering young doctor to hear of his adventures – including a beautiful young woman from a good family, Jeanne Weil. (Jzhan Vey-uh) In the summer of 1870, Adrian made one last trip to inspect ports of entry around the French coast, but it was no time to be far from home. The Prussians were rattling their sabers, and Adrian had a girl waiting for his return. On September 2nd, 1870, the French army surrended to the Prussians. On September 3rd, Adrian Proust and Jeanne Weil were married. On September 19th, Paris was under siege.
In a single terrible blow, after a year spent traveling thousands of miles across the world, Adrian’s world suddenly shrank to a single city. He found himself subject to an older, crueler form of isolation: the cordon militaire. Cut off from the outside world, Paris was a world apart. With all lines of communication cut except a few brave carrier pigeons and a daring hot air balloonist, Parisians knew they were on their own. Nothing could cross the barrier, not even food. Rationing kicked in at once. The cows disappeared, then the horses, then eventually dogs, cats, rats, and worse. Almost immediately, disease ravaged the capital. Two months into the siege, smallpox deaths tripled, and dysentery deaths quintupled. By the beginning of December 1870, Parisians were dying at triple the normal rate. Almost as terrible as the hunger and disease was the isolation: like Susan Sontag’s “kingdom of the ill” Parisians existed in a different time and space from the rest of the nation. They felt abandoned and forgotten. Paris was a world apart. At that moment, Jeanne came to Adrian with an announcement: she was pregnant.
In the weeks ahead, Paris descended into a hellish winter: in subzero temperatures, Prussians cut the gas lines, firewood ran out, and food was a distant memory. By the end of the month, as discussed in the second episode of this podcast, desperate Parisians broke into the city zoo to eat the animals. Victor Hugo’s Christmas dinner was a slice of roasted elephant. Finally, on January 26th, just before the last of the food was set to run out, the French government in Versailles declared a truce. While starving Parisians fought over rations distributed by the Prussian army, the French government reassembled at Versailles to determine the outcome of the Prussian war. By that point, Parisians were estranged from their countrymen in every way: for four months, they’d held out against the Prussians, refusing to betray their country by giving in to the enemy, paying a terrible cost for their loyalty. But for what? Now, they’d been sold out by the same bungling government which had gotten them into this war, and if the peace treaty wasn’t insulting enough, it couldn’t have been more insensitive to the needs of starving, impoverished Parisians. In one outcry which feels particularly resonant today, the government announced that all landlords were entitled to full back payment on rent, which had been suspended during the siege, at the same time they suspended wages to the National Guard. Little surprise that in March, a violent uprising commenced in the poor districts of Paris, which we now know as the Commune.
Fearing for the safety of his wife and unborn child, Adrian weighed his options. He’d just spent four months enduring the unthinkable in the city he loved. But he couldn’t bring himself to abandon his patients. When Jeanne begged him to stay home rather than travel through the barricades to treat wounded fighters, Adrian refused. In a prescient argument his son would one day echo, Adrian explained that he had a duty to fulfill, and a fear of death was not a good enough reason to abandon his duty. When Jeanne was six months pregnant, an insurgent took fire at Adrian, and the bullet just barely grazed his coat. Jeanne dissolved into fear, and became so overwhelmed with anxiety for Adrian’s safety that the doctor began fearing for her health, and that of their baby. More for their protection than his own, Adrian finally crossed the barrier, passing his family through the city gates to the estate of Jeanne’s uncle, Uncle Louis, in the suburb of Auteuil. In May, Paris burned. In June, the government broke through from the other side. After months of Parisians trying to get out of the capital, the French army was now getting in, killing 17,000 Communards and dumping their bodies in mass graves. A few weeks later, on July 10th, 1871, Jeanne went into labor. Once again, the transition from within to without was not easy. In the first of many such occasions, Marcel Proust was unwilling to enter the wider world. After a long and difficult labor, Marcel nearly died. It took two weeks before Adrian and Jeanne believed he was out of danger. They realized at once that Marcel was a frail child. Between Jeanne’s malnutrition, anxiety, and suffering, Marcel was the victim of a turbulent world before he was even born.
In 1873, the Proust family experienced two major triumphs: the arrival of Marcel’s younger brother, Robert, and the publication of Doctor Proust’s groundbreaking paper: “An Essay on International Hygiene: Its Applications against Plague, Yellow Fever, and Asiatic Cholera”. The so-called essay was really over 400 pages explaining how cholera originated in Asia and traveled its way to Europe, complete with a map. Cholera, Doctor Proust explained, was like an invading army. Constant vigilance at the borders could keep infection out – better yet if you could draw a line around the sick to separate them from the well. Once again he argued for a cordon sanitaire, in which European nations would cooperate to enforce a quarantine for all international ships trying to enter their waters. It’s not hard to see how the siege of Paris could seep into Doctor Proust’s thinking about illness, even if he wasn’t conscious of the fact: by standing united against a common enemy, by barring the gates to the outside world, by inspecting anything that crossed the threshold to the inner sanctum, Europe could stay healthy. To anyone who’s lived through 2020, however, the response will hardly come as a shock. The rest of the world rejected Doctor Proust’s arguments. Not because of any ethical concerns about what it means to seal up an entire community, but because they were worried about the impact it would have on the global economy. Sure enough, cholera reared its head again a decade later. After that epidemic, France finally adopted Adrian’s idea, and the next time cholera showed up in the Middle East, ships began quarantining at French ports before unloading. Years later, based on his recommendations, France would lead the formation of the International Office of Public Hygiene, which you may know better as the World Health Organization. The 1873 essay, and his eventual success at keeping cholera outbreaks out of France, secured Adrian Proust fame and fortune and the Legion of Honor. But for all his international expertise, there was one health puzzle he couldn’t seem to solve: what was wrong with his son Marcel?
On a fine spring day in the spring of 1881, Marcel and his family took a long walk through the Bois de Boulogne. After enjoying an afternoon outdoors, they turned back towards the family home, when all of a sudden, nine year old Marcel stopped breathing. Gasping for air, he collapsed into his father’s arms. As the esteemed doctor watched in terror, Marcel nearly died right there on the sidewalk. As it turned out, Marcel suffered from severe asthma. This first attack traumatized the entire family, and changed the course of Marcel’s life. His brother, Robert, remembers that all of a sudden, his rambunctious brother had to give up “outings in the open air, the beauty of the countryside, and the charm of flowers.” Marcel spent the rest of his life terrified of suffocation, and while his asthma went into remission during certain periods of his life, he wrestled with it his entire life.
The rest of Marcel’s childhood became a struggle to keep him alive. 110 times, Marcel had his nasal passages cauterized, to render him less sensitive to pollen. The doctors assured him the procedures would work, but after a trip to the country, a field of lilacs left Marcel “seized with such violent asthma attacks that until they were able to bring me back to Paris, my hands and feet remained purple like those of drowning victims.” His parents didn’t know what to do. They were from the old school: fresh air was a good cure, and if that wasn’t enough, accompany it with a brisk walk. Over and over, Adrian took Marcel to the seaside, hoping the sea air would strengthen his lungs. For the rest of his life, Marcel treasured those days, but they were few and far between. Instead, he spent long stretches of time in his bedroom, cut off from the world. Here, cocooned away from pollen, dust, and other dangers, young Marcel learned how to dwell in his own imagination, recreating the outside world. It was a skill that would shape the rest of his life.
Thanks to his father’s prestigious career, Marcel was admitted to the Lycee Cordorcet, where he enmeshed himself into a social network of rich, privileged children. Though he missed long stretches of school due to illness, Marcel was an adept social climber, and by the time he graduated school, his life was consumed with society events, with a bit of writing going on in the background. The year of his graduation, France passed a law requiring a year of voluntary military service. Improbably enough, the sickly, frail Marcel enlisted. Within weeks of his arrival at the barracks, the captain asked him to take a room in town because his nightly coughing fits kept the other soldiers awake. Marcel made it through a year of service, mostly thanks to a colonel impressed by his fancy parents. Excused from most athletic requirements, the most active part of his week came on Sundays, when Marcel used his leave to visit fashionable salons. After enrolling in the local military college, he finished 63rd in a class of 64. Meanwhile, his brother Robert was thriving. After leaving the army, Marcel drifted headlong into society life, publishing a few pieces of writing in between trips to the theater and nights at the salon. His writing was well-received, but not especially serious – mostly society sketches and clever gossip columns. Like many a rich young doofus, he spent gobs of money on everything, slept all day and stayed out all night, and wrecked his health. He fell in love with men, and possibly women, and visited brothels on his to try to sort out his urges, to little success. In a real flex move, Marcel took a job to please his parents, immediately applied for sick leave, and extended it for three years, until they decided he had resigned. He’d never once showed up for work. By the end of the century, the nearly 30 year old Marcel was barely employed, very well known in society circles, a little bit published, and very unmarried. Jeanne and Adrian were terrified that their brilliant son might just amount to nothing at all.
Worst of all, his illness kept worsening. His letters reveal a young man whose nights of social chatter and the arts were interrupted by life-threatening fits that lasted for days. “For two days,” one letter says, “my asthma has been so violent that I’ve not been able to bear anything or anyone near me.” Later he describes “two days of convulsions caused by asthma and suffocation.” Another letter describes “attacks so violent that nothing could stop them.” His medical treatment was, shall we say, haphazard. Skeptical after so many failed procedures, Proust insisted on developing his own treatments, the most infamous of which were anti-asthma powders, which he used to fumigate his room. He would smoke anti-asthma cigarettes, and as as asthmatic myself, I have to really shudder at that particular product, but they were worse than you’d think: sometimes, the smoke from the medicated cigarettes would mix with the smoke from the fumigation powders and Proust would give himself atropine poisoning.
Meanwhile, his father was busy writing prestigious papers about a neurological disease of the day called neurasthenia. Adrian published a paper in 1897 in which he described neurasthenia as a “weakness of the nerves” causing “headache, insomnia, and irritability.” It was to be found among those who lived in high society: “those who go out much, have their whole day taken up by the duties that convention and the van care of their reputation impose on them: visits, dinners, balls, and evening parties.” The condition could be made worse by what Adrian called “bad education” – too much attention from one’s mother. In an ironic turn of events, Adrian objected to Marcel’s isolation, which was little more than a cordon sanitaire in miniature. He considered Marcel’s isolation emasculating, “women’s treatments”. When reading these passages, I can only think back to the siege of 1870, when Adrian strode out among the barricades to treat the ill and Jeanne had to stay home, burrowing as deep within her home as she could, putting as much distance between herself and her unborn child and the dangerous streets as she could. In some ways, neurasthenia becomes a way to pathologize the crime of being a mama’s boy. I can only imagine how the 26 year old Marcel reacted to this paper, if he could read it between coughing himself close to death. Even today, Marcel Proust has a reputation for hypochondria. Modern scholars compete to see who can discredit more of his health problems as attention-seeking or mental illness. They see his illness as a metaphor for homosexuality, as attention seeking behavior, as something that was all in his mind – as though that made it any less real. But this was a young man with a life-threatening condition, traumatized by near-death experiences, who lived in terror of the next unstoppable attack which could be his last – wouldn’t you close the shutters, too? But he persisted in his society life and his writing, publishing some early works but mostly, as he would put it, wasting his time away. Then, a series of calamitous events changed Marcel’s entire life. Before long, he would be on his way to literary immortality – and physical collapse.
On Tuesday, November 24, 1903, Adrian Proust walked out the door to a meeting and returned home on a stretcher. Participating in yet another committee at his beloved Academie de medecin, Adrian suffered a stroke, and after two days deteriorating at home, he passed away. Adrian’s obituary in Le Figaro took up the entire front page, but Marcel’s own tribute took place in letters to his friends. Suddenly, the long hours spent with his father treating his asthma and neurasthenia seemed like a blessing in disguise. “Now,” he wrote a friend, “I bless those hours of illness spent at home, which during these last years enabled me to enjoy so much of Papa’s affection and company.” Aware that he was “the dark spot in his life” Marcel regretted his final conversation with Adrian – an argument about politics, and he vowed to support his beloved mother in her grief. But he did not do so for very long. Only two years later, on a mother and son spa getaway, Jeanne collapsed. Rushing her back to Paris, Jeanne died on September 26th, 1905. It was the worst tragedy of Marcel’s life, and he would never truly recover. “She takes my life with her, as Papa had taken away hers.” As he wrote soon afterwards, “My life has now forever lost its only purpose…I have lost her whose unceasing vigilance brought me in peace and tenderness the only honey of my life.” Worst of all, he blamed himself for causing her so much anxiety over the years. “I have the feeling that because of my poor health I was the bane and the torment of her life.” With his parents dead, and his younger brother married with a child of his own, and his romantic desires considered shameful and impossible, Marcel found himself truly, utterly alone. Jolted out of his old life, Marcel realized he had wasted his life: an entire decade spent at dinner parties instead of committing himself to his writing. Soon thereafter, he moved into his late uncle’s Paris apartment at 102 boulevard Haussman, and embarked on a new way of life: serious, hardworking, and indoors.
Within weeks of his move to 102 boulevard Haussman, Marcel Proust adopted the habits which would distinguish him for the rest of his life: nocturnal hours, an almost negligible appetite, and an a neurotic obsession with sensory intrusions from the outside world. He was not, at least then, a recluse. Marcel continued his ventures into society, where his characteristic wit and unfailing manners secured him good will and interest in his next publication. Yet he was also known for rejecting friends who showed up at his home, for canceling appointments, and for refusing entry to anyone wearing perfume. His attacks got worse: within weeks of moving in, he wrote that “for the first time in my life I’ve been laid low by attacks which last thirty six hours, forty, fifty hours!” He set to work renovating 102 boulevard Haussman to suit his needs: stowing most of the family treasures around the apartment but tucking a very few totemic items into his small bedroom. In one of the most famous home renovations in literary history, Marcel lined the walls of his bedroom with cork to keep out the sound, affixed heavy shutters to his window, and created a sensory deprivation chamber in which to dedicate himself utterly to his writing. There, as in his childhood bedroom, Proust could sink into his own imagination, recreating the world he had known. It was during this time that a germ of an idea formed in his mind: what does it mean to experience the world? what does it mean to remember your experiences? what does it mean to lose something, some one, some time? is it possible to fight back against the tyrannical passage of time? In the summer of 1908, Proust began sketching the structure of a grand work, though he didn’t realize it at the time. For the next four years, Proust divided his time between writing and stepping into the world to conduct research: research on high society and low society, research on streetcars, research on market stalls, research on women’s hats and the era’s unwritten rules of conduct. His entire life until now had been smorgasbord of sensation, and Proust was attempting nothing less than to capture it all. Bit by bit, Marcel’s kernel of an idea shaped itself into a story, then into an grand vision.
By 1912, Proust’s first book was complete. That Christmas, the Nouvelle Review Française received an immaculately wrapped manuscript. The manuscript was picked up by the avant-garde intellectual, Andre Gide, who instinctively reacted to the name on the cover. He knew Marcel Proust, thank you very much: a dilettante, a social butterfly, an unserious man, and a snob. Gide claimed to have read two passages, but Marcel knew better: his valet’s meticulous wrapping job was untouched. Andre Gide sent notice: the NRF was not interested in publishing this so-called “Swann’s Way”. After receiving Gide’s rejection, along with a string of others, Proust decided he would simply publish the work himself, using his considerable inheritance. He worked like a madman that year, editing endless proofs, dragging himself out of bed and across town to wheedle and schmooze society contacts who could influence the novel’s reception, all while his mental and physical health deteriorated. “My health has degraded entirely,” he wrote, “and I have grown so thin you would not recognize me.” Deeply underweight with a bushy beard, Marcel traveled outside the city only to return days later, unable to go further. In the week leading up to his book’s publication, Marcel conducted interviews with leading newspapers and journals from his bed. One journalist was struck by Marcel’s bedroom. Not realizing how famous the space would one day become, he documented its piles of “books, papers, letters and little boxes of medicine. A little electric lamp, whose light is filtered by a green shade.” He noted that the author wrote only at night, and always in bed. Another journalist marveled at the “bedroom eternally closed to fresh air and light and completely covered in cork.” Proust replied, in a prescient quote which would dominate the last decade of his life, “Shadow and silence and solitude…have obliged me to recreate within myself the lights and thrills of nature and society.”
Swann’s Way was sensational. On November 14th, 1913, Swann’s Way arrived on shelves. No fewer than 19 reviews appeared before the end of the year, a few critical but most of them effusive with praise. Perhaps the greatest review of all came from none other than Andre Gide, he who had turned down Proust’s manuscript the year before. “My dear Proust, for several days I have not put down your book. The rejection of this book will remain the gravest mistake ever made by the NRF and (for I bear the shame of being largely responsible for it) one of the most bitterly remorseful regrets of my life.”
Things were looking up. A dilettante no more, Proust had published his first great work, and had earned the respect of his peers. His appetite began to recover, and in January 1914, he sat down to eat “macaroni, a liter and a half of milk, roasted veal, three croissants and an enormous raspberry tart.” But as Proust’s narrator might lament, the good times didn’t last.
That spring, Marcel’s former chauffeur and one of the loves of his life, Alfred Agostinelli, died in a plane crash. “I found myself hoping,” he told a friend, “that every time I got into a taxi that an oncoming bus would run me down.” He was still deep in the throes of grief when thousands of miles away, a Serb nationalist assassinated the Archduke Francis Ferdinand and triggered the outbreak of war. At once, Marcel’s fortunes were frozen in the financial chaos hitting the markets. Utterly unfit for service, a weak Marcel watched his more robust male friends and family members leave for war, including his younger brother, Robert, now a distinguished doctor like their father. After waving Robert off at the train station, Marcel began reading seven newspapers a day to follow along with his brother’s movements. “I have just seen off my brother who was leaving for Verdun at midnight” he wrote a friend that week. “Alas, he insisted on being posted to the actual border.” The war effort already reached inside Proust’s own home: first, the war board called up his beloved valet, Nicolas. A few weeks later, they called up the replacement valet, too. Then, his remaining chauffeur, Odile, received his own mobilization papers. The driver’s wife, Céleste, moved in with Marcel to act as his temporary housekeeper until yet another valet could be found. She would stay for the rest of his life. Theirs would become one of the most storied friendships in literary history.
That summer, Proust stood on the precipice of Paris, just as his father had, watching an army approach. Desperate to stay home, he convinced himself to travel back to the family’s seaside resort in Cabourg. Accompanied by the enterprising Céleste, whose offer to dress in boys clothing for the journey was gently rejected by an amused Proust, the unlikely pair set out for the coast. The four hour train journey took nearly a day. When they arrived, rather than escaping the war, they found themselves in an auxiliary branch of it: the Grand-Hotel was now a military hospital. There were almost no guests. He walked along the promenade, staring out at the same sea he had known as a child. As he would later describe in In Search of Lost Time, “The sight of a ship that was moving away like a nocturnal traveler gave me the same impression that I had had in the train of being set free from the necessity of sleep and from confinement in a bedroom…I threw myself down on the bed; and, just as if i had been lying in a berth on board one of those steamers that I could see quite near to me and which at night it would be strange to see sailing slowly out into the darkness, like shadowy and silent but unsleeping swans, I was on all sides surrounded by images of the sea.” Marcel spoke with Céleste about his travels, and the beautiful landscapes he knew from his past. “Perhaps, one day…if I’m better…” he would say. “And I’ll take you. You absolutely must see it.” “And in his voice,” Céleste remembered, many years later, “there was an almost childlike wistfulness for scenes he longed to see again.”
On October 13th, Marcel and Céleste boarded the train back to Paris. Marcel was not his father, and this was not his war. To everyone’s surprise, the German army had been repelled at the Marne, and Paris would not face another siege. After this brief excursion outside, Proust was desperate to return to his dark apartment. Proust had satisfied himself that he could envision the sea as well on the beaches of Cabourg as in the beds of the hotels in Cabourg. His memory and his imagination contained the whole world, and now it was his duty to put his mind to use. That afternoon, on the train journey home, disaster struck: Marcel suffered an terrible asthma attack. “I was almost out of my wits” Céleste recalled, “not knowing any better I’d put his medicines and fumigation powder in the valise with his papers.” For nearly 100 miles, Proust coughed and hacked. Finally, Céleste tracked down a railway officer to retrieve the medicine from their luggage, and for the rest of the journey home, Marcel burned fumigation papers and filled their train car with thick black smoke. When they finally made it home, 102 boulevard Haussman was filled with workers, taking advantage of his trip to Cabourg to vacuum the apartment. Dust was everywhere. “I can still see him,” Céleste remembered, “streaming with sweat and still choking as he bent over the fumigation powder. I was terrified, convinced I’d never see him alive again.” But slowly, Marcel recovered – in a way. In the days that followed the dreadful journey, as the suitcases were stored back in the closets and the clothes carefully hung back in the closets, Marcel made up his mind. All he had seen in the past few months: the deaths and departures of those he loved, the emptying streets of Paris, and above all, the disappearance of the Belle Epoque into the jaws of mechanical warfare – the world Proust knew was melting away. His life’s grand work revealed itself at last: he would bear witness to his beloved fin-de-siècle Paris, capturing its fragile, glittering, transient beauty, to see whether he could conquer the old enemy: Time. Retreating once more into his dark bedroom, muffling the sounds of tanks, closing the shutters against the vision of tanks and armies on the march, blocking out the smell of gunpowder, Proust’s room would become a fortress all its own. “My dear Céleste,” he beckoned to his housekeeper and confidant, “there’s something I must tell you. I’ve just been to Cabourg with you, but that’s all over. I shan’t ever go out again, to Cabourg or anywhere else. The soldiers do their duty, but since I can’t fight as they do, my duty is to write my book, do my work. I haven’t the time for anything else.”
Thanks for listening to The Land of Desire. Next week, I’ll conclude the story of Marcel Proust’s bedroom. Once again, welcome to the newest listeners of this show, and if those of you who are already subscribers listen to my guest appearance on the Dear Prudence podcast, thank you as well! You can follow The Land of Desire on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, and subscribe to my newsletter on the show’s website at www.thelandofdesire.com Until next time, au revoir!
Sources:
The two biggies:
- Marcel Proust: A Life, William Carter, 2013.
- Monsieur Proust, Celeste Albaret, 2003. (Screw those reviewers, reading this book was a joy, I loved it.)
The rest:
- “Marcel Proust and the medicine of the Belle Epoque” pamphlet, the Royal Society of Medicine: proust-exhibition-booklet.pdf">https://www.rsm.ac.uk/media/2060/marcel-proust-exhibition-booklet.pdf
- Lamont, Rosette, and Céleste Albaret. “Interview Avec Céleste Albaret.” The French Review, vol. 44, no. 1, 1970, pp. 15–33. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/385924. Accessed 25 Mar. 2021.
- “In the Footsteps of Marcel Proust” William Friedkin, The New York Times, friedkin-marcel-proust.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/15/t-magazine/william-friedkin-marcel-proust.html
- Boym, Svetlana. “Nostalgia and its discontents.” The Hedgehog Review, vol. 9, no. 2, 2007, p. 7+. Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A168775861/AONE?u=sfpl_main&sid=AONE&xid=9c209110. Accessed 25 Mar. 2021.
- Manley, Janet. “Longing for a Distant Home Amid a Pandemic.” New York Times, 14 Sept. 2020, p. B6(L). Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A635356510/AONE?u=sfpl_main&sid=AONE&xid=115d21c9. Accessed 25 Mar. 2021.
- “these were the days; OPINION.” Globe & Mail [Toronto, Canada], 11 July 2020, p. O1,O6,O7. Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A629146415/AONE?u=sfpl_main&sid=AONE&xid=6f8acd35. Accessed 25 Mar. 2021.
Further reading:
- “How I Came to Love My Epic Quarantine Reading Project”, Oliver Munday, The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/11/reading-proust-in-search-of-lost-time-during-pandemic/616850/
- “Analogue Ambles: Marcel Proust’s Dark Room”, Adam Scovell, February 10 2019, https://www.caughtbytheriver.net/2019/02/marcel-prousts-dark-room/
- Kear, Jon (2007) Une Chambre Mentale: Proust’s Solitude. In: Hendrix, Harald, ed. Writers’ Houses and the Making of Memory. Routledge, New York/Oxon, pp. 221-235. ISBN 978-0-415-95742-7
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The post 66. Marcel & Celeste, Part I appeared first on The Land of Desire.
Feb 25, 2021
65. A Trip to the Spa
“The waters of Vichy…gave me back my strength.” – Madame de Sévigné
The darkest days of winter are here, and I think it’s time we all indulged in a little self-care, non? My own quarantine hobby, skincare, set me down a particular path. Why was I spraying my face with thermal spa water from France? What is thermal spa water? Why do we drink thermal spa water? Does any of it really do anything? France loves her thermal spas, no matter what form they take: rustic watering hole, glamorous resort, or rigorous medical establishment.
Episode 65: “A Trip to the Spa”
The history of French thermal spas:
19th century postcard from Evian-les-bain, one of the premiere thermal spas of France
Classic Belle Epoque poster for a thermal spa – note the scantily clad ladies in their alluring gowns, oh la la.
1.jpg?resize=1100%2C759" alt="16th century depiction of rudimentary thermal spas at Bourbon L'Archimbault" width="1100" height="759">The rudimentary mud pits of Versailles courtiers’ favorite thermal spas at Bourbon L’Archimbault. We need a baigneuse on duty – there’s some funny business..
Transcript
Bienvenue and welcome back to The Land of Desire! I’m your host, Diana, and here’s a little quiz to see whether any of you have spent the last oh-my-god year of the pandemic with the same hobby I have. Can you guess what this list has in common? Vichy. La Roche-Posay. Uriage. Avène. Caudalie. I can already feel a lot of you nodding along because you’ve already guessed the answer. Yeah, I wear sweatpants all day every day and I haven’t worn makeup since March 2020, but my skin? My skincare is glaaaaamorous, darlings, I am absolutely babying it. I just listed off a bunch of the most well-respected – and widely distributed – skincare brands in France. But that’s not all. If you’re very clever, you may also notice that all of the names I listed have something else in common. Every single one of those brands traces its origins back to a natural water source – whether it’s a world-famous spa town frequented by royalty, or a very picturesque babbling brook on some mythical farmland. All of these brands boast about their very special eau thermales, all of which are supposed to have very special and distinct healing properties. A few nights ago, while I was halfway through my night routine, I found myself wondering about those spa towns. The French really go crazy for hot springs – I personally associate hot springs with, like, a bunch of outdoor hot tubs, maybe a weekend getaway with the girls. For thousands of years, natural springs have provided the French with relief from major and minor physical ailments, tons of society gossip, a respite from the bustle of city life, and maybe, just maybe, a miracle or two. So this week, maybe it’s time to fill up the tub and enjoy this episode during a nice, warm soak in some hot water, because we’re taking a trip through the history of the spa.
Take a stroll down the Boulevard Saint-Germain today, and you’ll pass any number of high-end pharmacies and drugstores, advertising a dazzling assortment of creams, lotions and potions to cure what ails you, whether it’s eczema, acne, indigestion, athlete’s foot or simply the inexorable march of time. Starting at Les Deux Magots, you could walk past the Pharmacie de Saint-Germain de Pres, the Pharmacie Beauté, Pharmacie Saint-Sulpice, and the Pharmacie Odeon within the space of a few blocks. But continue on a few more feet and you’ll encounter a different sort of dispensary altogether: the most ancient source of medicine in the city of Paris. Here on the corner of the Boulevard Saint-Germain and the Boulevard Saint-Michel is the famous Musée de Cluny, home of the city’s most ancient Roman baths.
Built approximately 2200 years ago, the baths were enormous in their day, stretching over 6,000 square meters of valuable real estate. Back then, the ancient Roman outpost called Lutetia required constant guarding, and this part of town held a host of administrative buildings – and military outposts. In Ancient Rome, wherever troops traveled, public baths followed, for rather obvious reasons. While rich Romans might build private baths in their homes, the general public was welcome and encouraged to take part in a public dip, where they could scrub themselves clean, exchange gossip, maybe broker a few deals, and even get a little workout in. Men and women both enjoyed use of the public baths, and free admission meant there was a genuine cross-section of society present in the pools. The ruins at Cluny are pretty typical Roman bath architecture: the complex was divided into three sections, in which water was available at different temperatures. First, you’d enjoy the piping hot water straight outta the ground in the calderia, sweating out your impurities. Then, you’d move into the tepidarium, where the naturally hot water had been allowed to cool off a bit. Here, you might get a massage with some essential oils. Finally, you’d step into the frigidarium, which is exactly what you think – a nippy environment to close the pores and finish off your day before going into the locker rooms to pick up your clothes. Even today, visitors to Cluny can see the sophisticated pipes which carried water around to the different chambers, and step inside the enormous frigidarium which remains in great condition for a 2000 year old YMCA. The golden age of the Cluny bathhouse lasted for about 200 years, after which point a roving band of barbarians sacked the baths along with the rest of the city. After that, bathhouses which survived invading hordes acquired a seedier reputation, and most of them fell into disuse or disrepute for the next thousand years.
The next thousand years are extremely dirty and smelly, so let’s time travel all the way up to the year 1571. All over Europe, philosophers, scientists, artists and politicians were rediscovering Ancient Greece and Rome, experiencing a rebirth – a renaissance, if you will, eh, eh – of classical culture and thought. Early scientists had developed a bunch of very early lab equipment, and they were always excited when they came up with new ideas about how to use it. At some point early on in the Renaissance, someone thought it might be a good idea to figure out just what, exactly, was in natural spring water. After all, some natural waters smelled like rotten eggs, some of them made you feel sick when you drank it, and some of it had a special color. For the next two hundred years, whenever anyone with a 16th century beaker had an afternoon to kill, he’d trudge up the hill to the nearest natural spring, distill the water, and try to figure out what what the sediment was made out of. After about 200 years of this tinkering, a man named Andrea Bacci decided somebody needed to write the book on natural springs, and look, he was just such a man! His work, De Thermis, was a culmination of nearly 200 years of European men trudging up the hills with a canteen, and it was a pretty monumental work. For 497 pages, Bacci’s encyclopedic work declared that no man could consider himself classically trained in medicine without understanding the healing properties of natural waters – if no less than the Ancient Romans were out there building baths everywhere they went, surely there was something of merit in them? All of a sudden, that weird little steaming watering hole up in that obscure little village was more than a local curiosity or a laundry site – suddenly, it was a direct link to a glorious past, and perhaps a key to optimal health. As he wrote in a sequel later in his career, “these waters were known to the ancients but overlooked for hundreds of years, and had now been brought back to light for the good of all.” Bacci’s book wasn’t just a press release for the magic of thermal baths – it was also a rallying cry. For one thousand years, the baths had gurgled along, right under their noses. Oh, it wasn’t that people had forgotten about the baths. Sitting in a hot tub on a cold night is a pretty instinctive endeavor, and the locals certainly enjoyed their local watering holds. But the people weren’t taking the baths seriously enough. These were very serious matters, and they ought to be overseen by doctors, not just the rough and tumble public. With that in mind, Bacci laid out a long discourse about the incredibly complex world of water therapy – and a guide to the most reputable baths in Europe. Here’s where the problem comes in: France, according to Andrea Bacci, lacked any hot springs worth a road trip. In the 16th century, the discerning hydrotherapy enthusiast would recommend hot springs in Italy, Greece, Germany, and one particularly famous Belgian hot spring in the town of Spa. But France? Why? All the once great Roman baths had crumbled into disrepute, and what was left was of questionable medical potency. All throughout the 1600s, the royal families of Europe traveled to the natural springs of their nation, and returned home with tales of wonder cures, and their pleasing odors alone must have seemed proof that miracles really do happen. Yet in France, with no respectable bath houses to speak of, the French court sat around, stewing and sweating, turning their noses up either out of snobbery or desperation to escape the smell of their neighbors. But then, in 1580, an old, familiar tune began playing at court: the king and queen had yet to produce an heir. What France may have lacked in deluxe spas, she made up for with her number of quack doctors. Royal doctors packed up Henri III and his wife and dispatched them to the the natural springs at Bourbon-Lancy. It was the first great spa day of the French nation. Kind of.
The thing is, in 1580, Bourbon-Lancy was a noble, ancient…pile of rubble. The waters were definitely hot, but none of the water nerds of the previous century had ever bothered to study what was in the water, or what curative properties it might hold. But good news for Henry: he was the king, and if he and his lady wanted a luxury spa trip, by god they were going to get one. Henri’s crew sent no fewer than 150 men ahead to transform the big pile of ancient rubble into a resort fit for a king. They cleared the rubble, restored the flow of thermal water to a more robust current, and even built a lodge for guests to stay – good thing, too, since the king and queen arrived with a bunch of sick courtiers in tow. Unfortunately, the queen did not get pregnant on the trip. On the other hand, one of her courtiers, the Comtesse de Fiasque, did get pregnant on the trip. The Comtesse de Fiasque was 54 years old at the time. So maybe there was something in the water after all.
The first French royal visit to a thermal bath kicked off a national frenzy to discover the waters, promote the waters, and then take the waters. Any waters. It was a boom time for French doctors, all of whom insisted that their little spring would cure warts and soothe athlete’s foot. By 1600, every puddle in France seemed to have at least one curative property, and one local champion. Like cupcake shops in New York City in 2005, most of them were doomed to fail after the craze passed, but those which had been lucky enough to secure the patronage of royals and the rich secured themselves a lasting legacy. Bourbon-l’Archambault was the favored spa of Madame de Montespan, the mistress of King Louis XIV, which meant Bourbon l’Archambault was the favored spa of every other fawning courtier at Versailles. Others in search of specific relief for specific maladies might read through a 17th century guidebook to find an appropriate treatment center. Those with bad nerves or infertility took the waters at Forges, while those with the shakes went to Vichy. The eminent Madame de Sevigne believed so strongly in the curative powers of Vichy waters that she made the difficult eight day journey multiple times, well into her old age, to treat the arthritis which left her unable to hold a pen – a fate worse than death to the famous writer.
No matter which site they chose, the rich and ailing were in for a quite a ride. One can only imagine the field trip from hell, with all of Versailles struggling with their best resort wear only to spend two weeks on muddy roads, trudging through terrible weather, in the middle of nowhere. As Madame de Sevigne recalls about one journey, “we walked from daybreak until nightfall, without stopping, just two hours for dinner, a continual rain, devilish paths, always on foot, for fear of falling into terrible ruts.” Once they arrived, it wasn’t exactly rainbows and kittens. While things had improved since King Henry III’s time, most of the spa towns were just that – towns. Compared to the gilded splendor of Versailles, it was hardly luxurious to spend three weeks in a town of 2000 peasants, renting a room from a pig farmer. The spa facilities were no better: even the famous Bourbon l’Archambault, favorite of the king’s mistress, was little more than a mud pit in the ground. Whatever the spa towns may have become later, 17th century spa-going was about two things and two things only: sticking close to the king, and finding something – anything – to fix what ailed you. Even if the medicine was a hell of a pill to swallow.
If Andrea Bacci was worried about one thing, it was people having too much fun at the spa. As Europe entered the Enlightenment, ‘a good soak’ became ‘a dose of hydrotherapy’ and ‘taking the waters’ meant a rigidly monitored 18 part regimen. No matter where you went, everyone’s spa trip began the same way: bleeding and purging. Yum. As soon as you’d thoroughly emptied out your body, it was time to refill at the closest drinking fountain, where you’d drink as much magical thermal water as you possibly could. You’d drink and walk around the room, and then refill your glass, and drink, and walk around the room, making polite conversation with your other hydro homies until nature called, at which point you’d duck discreetly into a back alley to, ah, well I’ll let Madame de Sevigne explain it: “At six o clock we go to the fountain. Everyone is there, and we drink while making a face, the water is boiling hot and tastes unpleasantly of saltpeter. We turn, we go, we come, we walk, we hear mass, we make water in the alley, we talk discreetly about how our water making went.” Fun!
If you were there for a specific ailment, you’d proceed to all manner of hydrotherapies, most of which are pretty familiar today: sitting in a hot tub, sitting in a steam room, and so on, before you’d be swaddled in blankets and set in a dry sauna, maybe even a mud pack. Every day you’d repeat the process, or some variation, for at least two weeks, after which you waddled out resembling a California raisin. At every step of your journey, you would be supervised by a medically-qualified intendant, who reported to the king’s own physician. Working alongside the intendant was the baigneur, aka the fun police, who made sure everyone wore their modesty gowns, intervened whenever he saw horse play, and kicked out any riff-raff. When you weren’t soaking, steaming or sweating, you were eating a light, boring lunch and enjoying quiet card games and conversation, before having another light, boring dinner and going to bed by 10 PM. If you’re struggling to imagine the court of Versailles going to bed by 10 PM, I don’t blame you, but on the other hand, perhaps for the perpetually hungover and gouty courtier, it was a nice break. Whatever else may have happened, you emerged after two weeks feeling well-rested, well moisturized, with some fresh country air in your lungs. No wonder everyone sang the praises of the spa doctors upon their return. And praise wasn’t all they brought back as a souvenir: by the end of the 17th century, the nobles began bringing back the water itself – a prelude to the distribution networks to come, and the new wave of spa mania which would sweep the nation.
If the cheerleaders of the 17th century spa towns were doctors, the 18th century cheerleaders were hotel owners. With every body of hot water in France getting marketed to the rich, each enterprising up-and-coming spa had to set themselves apart. Instead of writing about the specific curative properties of their water, hotel owners, town mayors, and other enterprising locals would describe the charming sentiments of their village. But many of the most prestigious guests of the late 1700s were underwhelmed with what they found at the end of long, exhausting journeys. In 1761, the daughters of the king visited Vichy, and came back complaining that the famous waters were muddy, inaccessible pits. In 1787 their nephew, Louix XIV, constructed a series of more luxurious bathhouses, but probably never had time to visit them himself. For spa towns and spa goers alike in late 1700s France, it was survival of the fittest. Even one of the directors of the Vichy facilities was executed in the Terror. After the chaos of the Revolution – and the beheading of their most loyal customers – hundreds of smaller spa facilities closed their doors. Fittingly enough, any spas lucky enough to survive the French Revolution were probably renovated by Napoleon, who found time in between planning invasions to order the expansion and improvement of French spa resorts. Always a fan of efficiency, Napoleon saw French spas as an excellent way to keep his enormous armies clean and free of disease. No doubt the baigneuse gave up on any attempt to keep things refined and genteel. But soon, soldiers weren’t the only ones experiencing the wonders of hot rock water for the first time.
If the cheerleaders of the 17th century spas were doctors, and the 18th century cheerleaders were hotel owners, the 19th century cheerleaders were travel bloggers. It was the golden age of travel writing, in which writers like Alexandre Dumas would use a flimsy plot as an excuse to describe in tantalizing detail all the interesting places of the world. Others embarked on a Grand Tour and returned to write memoirs – or guidebooks – to sell to hungry audiences. Thermal spa towns were no longer just for the elderly and infirm – they were a destination for adventurous travelers in need of a little pampering. The tour guides of the age shaped the popular idea of the spa town as either a rural oasis set in a bucolic landscape, or a glamorous getaway for the in-crowd. In other words, what had once been the Mayo Clinic was now either Monte-Carlo or a glamping yurt. The travel guides and stories spend much less time talking about peeing in the alleyway or curing eczema, and much more time bragging about the golf courses and the beautiful rowboats. Where Madame de Sevigne may have taken a brisk after-dinner stroll, now French men and women found themselves playing a hearty game of tennis.
Or so the brochures said. Reality took a long time to catch up with PR – the spa towns needed visitors first so they’d have money to build luxury properties second. Even after centuries of elite spa tourism, Vichy still didn’t offer a hotel suitable enough for a high status visitor. The hotel owners of the 1700s had made sure that there were plenty of reasonable rooms for the undiscerning visitor willing to bunk up above the local tavern, but there was nowhere for the genteel European classes to stay. In 1836, the writer Auguste Luchet wrote that Vichy was “one of the two best summer quarters of Parisians” full of “elegant villas” amidst a “picturesque countryside”. But nearly 30 years later, in 1861, Napoleon III traveled to Vichy in search of a cure for his ailing liver. His retinue was horrified at the state of the hotels and amenities – whatever the writers might have said, this was not a town fit for an emperor.
The spa towns were too important to be regulated by mere doctors – they were a civic affair, and soon spas weren’t overseen by royal physicians but what was essentially the chamber of commerce. After Emperor Napoleon’s disappointing first visit, for example, the leaders of Vichy gathered together to formulate a plan – Vichy must upgrade, and soon. Napoleon III helped foot the bill, considering the spa a public utility, and within five years the summer population of Vichy had grown by 25%. In every major spa town, civic leaders raised funds for widespread advertising – in the Belle Epoque, customers weren’t just found in Versailles – they could be found as far away as Manhattan! Spa towns created tourism offices to do a full court PR press, putting out flyers, newsletters, newspapers, newspaper ads, and then, eventually, radio spots. The advertisements were hardly touting images of grandmothers with arthritis able to walk again: instead, advertisements depicted beautiful young women in thin white gowns, about to dip into a pool of steaming water. She’s young and healthy and, well, damp. You get it? You get it. In classic 19th century orientalist nonsense, the new luxury hotels often evoked the exotic fever dream of the Turkish bath: curved arches, minaret towers, painted tiles, and the promise of beautiful women hidden somewhere off-screen. The ploy worked: investments rolled in, luxury hotels went up, and before long, French spa towns offered a world of alluring, expensive entertainment.
By the 1890s, French guests could stay in brand new hotels, and spend their time in between treatments playing at the in-house casino, or watching a performance at the town theater. New railroad tracks made it easier and faster than ever to reach even the most remote hot springs, and spa towns began to feel less like a nursing home and more like a resort. All across Europe, the rudimentary spas became big spas, the big spas became grand spas, and the grand spas became international hotspots, drawing artists, socialites, world leaders and more together for food, fun, and oh yeah, some hot rock water. The frigid, monastic retreats of the 1600s were now the playgrounds for the idle, wealthy, and scandalous. What happened in Vichy, stayed in Vichy. Before long, society even had a name for the phenomenon afflicting those gathered at spa towns or beach resorts: seaside morals. Sometimes the flirtation worked out: women began bringing their eligible daughters to the fashionable resorts, in hopes that steamy environments would help them secure a wealthy husband. If men weren’t willing to make such a lifelong commitment, spa towns soon crowded with a new type of visitor: sex workers and courtesans. Madame de Sevigné and Andrea Bacci would have been shocked – but in the years leading up to World War I, the bright young things of Europe couldn’t get enough. When Napoleon first began upgrading the nation’s facilities, fewer than 10,000 people visited a French spa each year, to spend two weeks bored out of their minds. By the end of the same century, nearly one million people trekked out to the oases of entertainment for thrills, theater, and maybe, if time allowed for it, a little water therapy.
By the dawn of the 20th century, French spa resorts were the geese that laid golden eggs. They simply could not fail to turn a profit, year after year, decade after decade. By 1900, French spas employed half a million people, generated 300 million francs of revenue, and entertained anyone who was anyone. Long gone were the days when a dozen exhausted courtiers would spend a quiet week or two in a mud hut. With the completion of the railroads making travel easier than ever, an unprecedented type of tourist arrived: the middle classes. The entire middle class, it may have seemed: from 1900 to 1930, the number of annual visitors in Vichy alone doubled. Conditions only grew more crowded by the end of the 1920s. French military officials were granted six month sabbaticals after 10 years of service, so the thousands of men who enlisted in World War One and stuck around all began qualifying for a little R&R at the same time. Another earthquake arrived in 1936, with the introduction of paid vacation. If you listened to episode 26, “Hitler in Paris” you’ll remember that state subsidized vacations were all the rage in Europe in the 30s and 40s. The French government arranged for standardized hotel prices, rail packages, and chartered group tours. Within the year, tens of thousands of French workers used their benefits to visit a thermal spa. Business was booming – but the party was almost over.
France’s grand spas had committed the unforgivable offense: they’d let poor people in. The same railroads which ferried the middle class to the spas could ferry the upper classes away – towards new hot spots like St Tropez and Biarritz. As discussed in episode 31, Le Train Bleu offered the rich and idle a pampered pathway to the coast, but most importantly, it offered exclusivity. No need to worry about running into a colonial official or a soldier in the spa, or god forbid, an office worker – the hotels at Cannes were grand, glitzy and inaccessible.
But that wasn’t all. If French resorts were entering a new age, so was French medicine. As we learned last month, Louis Pasteur revolutionized the way French people thought about hygiene. So many of the mysterious ailments which had sent desperate travelers to thermal waters for three hundred years could be treated with effective techniques by any respectable physician across the country. Pasteur himself was actually a fan of water therapy, so long as it was performed the old fashioned way: that is to say, under the watchful eye of a trained doctor. For one hundred years, water therapy had undergone a process of demedicalization – suddenly, the process reversed itself. Patients seeking serious relief skipped out on the luxury hotels and headed to new, scientifically minded medical spas. By the end of the 1930s, fewer than 1 in 5 spa visitors were there to seek treatment for an ailment. If the management had been a little savvier, they might have recognized this as an existential threat.
Entertainment and glamour are passing whimsies, doomed to instability. But suffering? Is forever. As long as thermal spas catered to the unwell, there would be a dependable trickle of customers making a pilgrimage every year. But the grand spas of the 1930s were one big party – and the party was about to come to an end.
In 1913, Vichy had 108,963 visitors. In 1921 the town offered 26 first class hotels and 48 second class hotels.
Just before WWII, there were 14 major spas in France, receiving more than 14,000 visitors a year.
In 1940, France fell to the invading German army. As Nazis streamed into the capital, the national government packed up and hit the road, and after a few weeks the administration settled in none other than the spa town of Vichy. There were good reasons for this: Vichy was a quick, easy train ride away from Paris, but far enough away that it was outside German territory. Vichy’s status as a spa town meant there were thousands and thousands of hotel rooms available to house the officials and bureaucrats pouring off the getaway trains, along with every modern technology: phone lines, telegraph lines, central heating, and needless to say, plumbing. For locals, 1940 felt like an invasion of its own: the population of Vichy swelled from 30,000 to 130,000, with the original residents squeezed out by their own disgraced leadership. Locals distinguished between the Vichyssois, victims of the war like everyone else, and the Vichystes, who served the shameful administration during the next four years. After the German collapse in 1944, the Vichystes pulled up stakes again, leaving Vichy behind, stripped bare, desolate and barely functional. The formerly glamorous spa town was now a byword for national shame, and the locals set about erasing any traces of the Vichy regime from their city streets. But the biggest threat to Vichy – and every other French spa town – actually came from within.
In 1958, the French national health insurance system dramatically reduced its subsidies for medically prescribed thermal spa cures. In the modern world, patients sought relief from doctors, pills, creams, and surgeries, not hot rock water. The elites had moved on to the Cote d’Azur, the middle class were recovering from wartime devastation, and medical patients were now steered towards their local doctor’s office. The savviest French spas knew they had to get innovative if they were going to survive – and the solution, so to speak, was right in front of them the whole time.
TWENTIETH CENTURY SPA CULTURE: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3080730
[WHERE DOES THE SKINCARE COME FROM]
You’ll remember that aristocratic ladies shipped bottled thermal water to their homes as early as the 17th century. By the early 20th century, during the golden age of spa tourism, bottled water took on a new life of its own. Part souvenir, part diffusion line, bottles of thermal water allowed you to bring home a memory of a great trip, a visual signifier to your social circle that you’d taken the waters, and a cheap way to pretend that you’d taken the waters even if you’d never left city limits. By the 1930s, even when spas were packed with throngs of tourists, bottled thermal water yielded as much profit as the tourists did. In the postwar economy, bottled water transformed from a side hustle to a lifeline.
The French love their water bottled. Between World War II and today, the French population grew 60%. The French consumption of bottled water grew 2,350%. It’s a long story unto itself, involving complicated water law, and don’t worry, I’m not going to go into it. What matters is that the spa towns pulled off a neat marketing trick. For centuries, European thermal spas convinced customers that you had to experience the water right at the source to get any of those juicy benefits. You couldn’t just pour it into your bath or your own kettle, it was crucial that you make the 24 day trip by horse-drawn carriage over bad roads to stay in a twin bed over a brewery for the privilege of drinking the hot rock water straight from the rocks. All of a sudden, those very same resorts declared the opposite: turns out, you could totally get the benefits of thermal water even if it had been poured into a plastic bottle and shipped 9,000 miles away! Today, France spends 4 billion euros on bottled water, and four out of the five most consumed brands are former spa towns: Evian, Perrier, Badoit, and Vittel.
But they didn’t stop there. If thermal water could maintain its curative properties when bottled and consumed across distance and time, could it be incorporated into creams and treatments as well? Those wily businessmen of the Belle Epoque were way ahead of the curve. As early as 1931, a perfumer and a physician co-founded a cosmetics company which incorporated Vichy water into its skincare products – you still know it as Vichy, and you can find it in any drugstore in America. An enterprising doctor in the 1950s infused moisturizer with the unique plankton found in his local thermal springs and founded Biotherm. La Roche-Posay, once a hydrotherapy facility for Napoleon’s soldiers, now home to one of the world’s most prestigious treatment centers for dermatologic diseases, launched a spinoff line of skincare products in 1975. These spinoff lines, like bottled water, turned out to be an enormous success. Anyone on skincare TikTok sees these brands recommended by teenagers and dermatologists alike, without having any knowledge of their origins in 19th century wellness retreats. As with any skincare products, the big question is, of course, does it work?
The short answer is: jury’s still out. But the interesting answer is: maybe. As much as I joke about hot rock water, thermal spas may well offer significant benefits for a number of painful conditions and rheumatologists, dermatologists and others continue to refer thousands of patients every year. I wouldn’t be surprised if actual thermal spas provide significant health benefits – just as with bottled water, what happens when that thermal water is mixed into a face cream and shipped around the world? Most of the peer reviewed publications out there were funded by the thermal water companies, so take it with a sip of salty water. In the meantime, it’s a gentle, fun step in a skincare routine, so sales have been through the roof over the past year of quarantine. And that includes my house, where I have a can of Avène thermal water that I spray on my face, in hopes that it’ll get my rosacea to chill out. I have no idea if it works, but I do know this: Avène has the most ridiculous origin story of any skincare brand. During my research, I expected to see a long flowery story about ancient mineral springs in which ancient French kings healed from battle and beautiful French women never aged, and everyone lived to age 100 after drinking a glass. Instead I found this, and I swear to you, I am quoting directly from their website: “The therapeutic properties of Avene Thermal Spring were first discovered when a horse belonging to the Marquis de Rocozels, suffering from alopecia, rolled in the water regularly to soothe its itching skin. It’s been told that the horse’s coat was restored to its original shiny and healthy condition.” Well, if it’s good enough for the alopecia of a nobleman’s horse, I guess it’s good enough for my dumb old face. From ancient Roman baths, to royal infertility, to military convalescence, to elite nightlife to mass market relaxation all the way to fancy water bottles and undereye cream, the humble hot rock waters of France have had quite the journey. So let’s raise a glass of mineral water and give a toast: to hydration!
Thanks for listening to The Land of Desire. Make sure to sign up for the show’s newsletter at thelandofdesire.substack.com – I’ll be sending out this month’s update on Friday! You can also follow the show on Twitter or Instagram, which is honestly the easiest way to say hi. I’d like to send a thank you and an apology to anyone who emailed me in, oh god, the last few months. It’s been a very, very, very busy quarter between my job and this show and a lot of other personal things, and something had to give – my personal inbox was definitely the thing that gave! I apologize if I haven’t responded to your email, but I hope you know I appreciate you writing it. Thank you to everyone who listened to today’s episode, and until next time, au revoir!
Sources:
- Weisz, George. “Spas, Mineral Waters, and Hydrological Science in Twentieth-Century France.” Isis, vol. 92, no. 3, 2001, pp. 451–483. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3080730. Accessed 24 Feb. 2021.
- Tilton, Elizabeth Meier. “Mineral and Thermal Spas in France.” The French Review, vol. 54, no. 4, 1981, pp. 566–572. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/391139. Accessed 24 Feb. 2021.
- Brockliss, L.W.B. “The Development of the Spa in Seventeenth-Century France.” Medical History, Supplement No. 10 1990, pp. 23-47. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/85a4/4c6b9caab12ded2f94ae0a354da2e1e372d4.pdf
-
van Tubergen A, van der Linden S. “A brief history of spa therapy.” Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases 2002; 61:273-275.
- Palmer, Richard. “‘In This Our Lightye and Learned Tyme’: Italian Baths in the Era of the Renaissance.” Medical History, vol. 34, no. S10, 1990, pp. 14–22., doi:10.1017/S0025727300070964.
- Erfurt, Patricia J. “An assessment of the role of natural hot and mineral springs in health, wellness and recreational tourism.” PhD thesis, James Cook University, 2011. https://researchonline.jcu.edu.au/31110/1/31110_Erfurt_2011_thesis.pdf
- Debus, Allen G. “Solution Analyses Prior to Robert Boyle.” Chymia, vol. 8, 1962, pp. 41–61. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/27757217. Accessed 24 Feb. 2021.
- Gordon, Bertram. (2012). Reinventions of a spa town: the unique case of Vichy. Journal of Tourism History. 4. 35-55. 10.1080/1755182X.2012.671377.
- Lagrange, Joel. “Aix-les-Bains, the creation of the City of Water and publicity.” Histoire Urbaine, vol 3, 2019, pp 129-152.
- Marie-Eve Férérol, « Lust, tranquillity and sensuality in French spa towns in the heyday of balneotherapy (the belle époque and the roaring twenties) », Via [En ligne], 11-12 | 2017, mis en ligne le 14 mai 2018, consulté le 24 février 2021. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/viatourism/1763 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/viatourism.1763
- Mackaman, Douglas P. “Competing Visions of Urban Grandeur: Planning and Developing Nineteeth-Century Spa Towns in France.” New Directions in Urban History, 2000, pp 41-64.
- Brei, V.A. (2018), How is a bottled water market created?. WIREs Water, 5: e1220. https://doi.org/10.1002/wat2.1220
- Cacciapuoti, Sara et al. “The Role of Thermal Water in Chronic Skin Diseases Management: A Review of the Literature.” Journal of clinical medicine vol. 9,9 3047. 22 Sep. 2020, doi:10.3390/jcm9093047
- “Our Rich History.” Avène website. https://www.aveneusa.com/history
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Jan 21, 2021
64. Louis Pasteur and The History of the Vaccine
“I think my hand will tremble,“ – Louis Pasteur
Happy New Year! The Land of Desire is BACK with an exciting – and hopeful – story to set us off on the right track in 2021. Your happy host gets to indulge her love of epidemiology a little bit without leaving you depressed in the middle of a pandemic (she swears). This week, we’re taking a look at one of the greatest French inventions of all time. Along the way, we’ll encounter Catholic masses for dogs, the worst cruise you’ve ever heard of, and a man who came a bit too close to becoming a true mad scientist, Louis Pasteur. We’re at a turning point in medical science, so what better time to look back at how far we’ve come? This week, join me for a closer look at the history of the vaccine.
Episode 64: “Louis Pasteur and the History of the Vaccine”
Transcript
Bienvenue and welcome back to The Land of Desire! I’m your host Diana, and I’d like to start by wishing all of you a very, very happy New Year! I know it’s been a tough winter, but there are better days ahead of us. As many of you know, I’ve always been a huge epidemiology nerd, and I’ve struggled to restrain myself in the past because I know that most of my audience really doesn’t want to hear about diseases even when we aren’t going through a major pandemic. Fair enough. So I’m excited for an excuse to turn back to my favorite subject, but I promise, in a happy, optimistic way. If 2020 was the story of a disease, 2021 is looking like the story of its cure. This week, we’re taking a look at one of the greatest French inventions of all time. Along the way, we’ll encounter Catholic masses for dogs, the worst cruise you’ve ever heard of, and a man who came a bit too close to becoming a true mad scientist, Louis Pasteur. We’re at a turning point in medical science, so what better time to look back at how far we’ve come? This week, join me for a closer look at the history of the vaccine.
On July 4, 1885, a nine year old boy named Joseph Meister was attacked by a dog near his home in the city of Alsace. As he cowered and shielded his face with his tiny hands, the dog lunged at him again and again, biting him. A nearby bricklayer heard the screams and managed to beat the dog back with a pair of crowbars, but not until Joseph sustained fourteen bites on his thighs, legs and his hand. Joseph’s mother rushed him to the local doctor, who applied carbolic acid to the wounds, but the two adults looked at one another with a terrible fear. Joseph was at risk for one of humanity’s deadliest diseases, a disease scary enough to inspire not one but two terrifying mythical monsters, a disease with a nearly 100% fatality rate, a disease which guaranteed the worst of all 19th century fates: an ugly death. Joseph was at risk for rabies. Joseph’s mother, beside herself with worry, asked the doctor what else could be done. The doctor must have known Joseph was in dire straits, because he made a radical suggestion: take the boy to Paris, he said. There’s a scientist there, a famous scientist, who thinks he may have a solution. Joseph, still in unbearable pain, accompanied his mother to the train station at once, and within 48 hours of the attack, they found themselves in one of the strangest buildings they’d ever stepped inside: this was the laboratory of the great Louis Pasteur, and it was filled with rabid dogs.
In the long, strange cultural history of humans and diseases, rabies has always held a unique space in our minds – more specifically, in our amygdala, which controls fear. We’ve had rabies for just about as long as we’ve had domesticated dogs, and just about every ancient set of laws we can find has some sort of rule about how to handle wild dogs, rabid dogs, dogs who bite, and people who are bitten by dogs. The first known victim of rabies appears in a cuneiform tablet from ancient Mesopotamia, written about four thousand years ago. The ancient Greeks referred to lyssa, or a wild violence, while the Romans spoke of rabere – or “rage” from which we may get the word “rabies”. Over the centuries, across civilizations, the same disease appears again and again, and one thing in particular stands out: humans have always, it seems, known exactly where rabies comes from. Take a moment to appreciate that. Even during periods of time when diseases were the whims of god, justice for your sins, or the mysterious and unknowable slights of fate, rabies alone had a clear cause and effect. We didn’t have germ theory, we didn’t have microscopes, but there was one infection pathway that humans have pretty much always understood: mad dog bites man. Man goes mad. Mad dog and mad man die. The end. As it turns out, that wasn’t the entire story – it looks like rabies first made its way into bats, and then the bats found their way to the dogs, but again, in a world where you got smallpox because Zeus was in a bad mood or you lusted after your neighbor’s wife, let’s give the ancients credit where it’s due.
Over the centuries, the preventative measures and treatments for rabies grew accordingly sophisticated and complex. In ancient times, a bit of fur from the dog in question would be laid on top of the bite wound – remember that next time you fix yourself a mimosa because you need a little “hair of the dog” to cure what ails ya. By the middle ages, an apothecary would put together a salve of salt, vinegar, garlic, nettles, leeks, chives, and olive oil. It was utterly useless but I bet it tasted spectacular. But as always, when you want something to be done in an unnecessarily elaborate way, nobody can do a better job than the kings of France. Obsessed with la chasse, or ‘the hunt’, French kings and aristocrats spared no expense when it came to their game animals – and the dogs they used to track them. Each year, aristocrats would have their new hunting dogs shipped to the Church of St. Menier les moret, where the very confused canines would find themselves surrounded by monks chanting prayers, singing masses, and lighting candles in hopes that the dogs would be protected from “the madness of the blood.” If you think a candlelit mass for dogs sounds eerie and macabre, wait until you see what humans come up with next.
Take a moment to consider the progression of rabies in a human victim. At first, there might not be any symptoms at all. Rabies is unlike most diseases in that it avoids the superhighway of the human bloodstream, which moves germs around efficiently – but is monitored by the highway patrol officers of the immune system. Instead, rabies takes a different approach, traveling through the human nervous system. This takes awhile, and in the days and even weeks after a victim is bitten, they may experience nothing worse than a bad flu. But once rabies reaches the brain stem, the terrible collapse begins: patients lose their minds. They’re delirious, they’re scared, they’re hallucinating. Above all, they’re furious, raging and pulling at their restraints. Patients don’t sleep. They don’t understand human speech. And most spectacular of all, they develop hydrophobia: an agonizing fear of water. Within days of the symptoms’ arrival, the patients die. They always die. It was and is a horrifying disease. Even today, fewer than 20 patients have ever recovered from rabies after the symptoms show up, and you don’t want to know how doctors have to treat them. But keeping those facts in hand, think about this:
A human receives a bite from a bat, and soon he finds himself transformed. He doesn’t sleep at night. He becomes afraid of irrational things. The villagers call him a vampire, and the only way to kill him is to cut off his head.
What about this: a human receives a bite from a wolf, and soon he finds himself transformed. It can take weeks for the changes to show. He doesn’t sleep at night. He is beset with fits of rage, and when he’s consumed with his madness, he’s no longer human but a wild animal. He must be hunted down and killed.
If you thought the Twilight books were ubiquitous, that’s nothing on the vampire and werewolf culture of 16th, 17th and 18th century France. You may think of the period of time between the Renaissance and the Revolution as a golden age of discovery and knowledge, but it was also a golden age for mythological monsters. Between 1520 and 1630, as many as 30,000 French men and women were accused of being werewolves. In 1530, a group of young men were attacked by wolves, and one man managed to slice the ear off of one of the beasts. The next day, the local tavern wench showed up missing part of her ear – you can see where this is going. Nearly fifty years later, on the other side of the country, one town formally authorizes its residents to track down a werewolf using “pikes, halberts, arquebuses and sticks”. Meanwhile, the hysteria was fueled by actual rabies outbreaks, mostly concentrated within the remaining wolf populations of France. In 1749, a rabid wolf bit 70 people. Ten years later, another wolf bit 17 people. Ten years later, another wolf bit 40 people. No wonder the werewolf and vampire fads stayed fresh in everyone’s imaginations. At no point in the following century did this mania die down, continuing on into the 18th century when, as Voltaire wrote, “nothing was spoken of but vampires, from 1730 to 1735.” Time had done little to curb France’s fears of rabies – they’d only changed shape in the imagination. By the 19th century, vampires and werewolves were a thing of the past, but that didn’t mean social attitudes had entered the so-called “Age of Reason.”
In an age where you could be killed by smallpox, polluted air, getting run over by streetcars, getting run over by carriages, getting run over by horses, duels, or childbirth, French people in the 1800s were completely obsessed with rabies. Rabies felled about 25 French people each year back then, which means you literally have a better chance of getting killed by lightning than rabies. But the civilized men and women of 19th century France couldn’t abide the thought of descending into an animal state – of losing control over your limbs, your hunger and thirst, your sexual urges, and finally, your mind. Rabies was filed away with other notorious conditions like nyphomania – terrifying and titillating in its base nature. As one historian phrases it, “It was a concern with the effects of bourgeois repression that went into the articulation of the illness, its symptoms as well as its etiology.” The line between man and nature seemed thin, and one trend of the age seemed to erase that line even further.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, something shifted in European domestic life: dogs became pets. Oh, the aristocrats loved their hunting dogs, but they were dogs with jobs, the loyalty and affection was a bonus. But by the 1700s, even middle class families might keep lapdogs, which lived inside, ate inside, climbed up on furniture, climbed up on laps, even licked humans on their faces! Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that right at the same time we were getting closer to dogs than ever before, we became hyper-aware of the danger that could always be hiding right inside their adorable furry bodies. Oftentimes, owners were unwilling to admit that danger even when it stared them in the face. They’d bring their beloved laptogs to the vet, snarling and foaming at the mouth, all while the owners insisted that their beloved Fifi never left their third floor apartment. Soon, the French began forgetting the oldest known truth about rabies – that it spreads through bites. “Mais non,” the owners would sniffle. “It is not possible, she has never left the salon!” They began to insist on a phenomenon called “spontaneous rabies”. Recalled one veterinarian: “Madame owned a dog of an exceptionally small breed…He became rabid; she brought him to see me. The lady in question never took her cheri outside, except in her arms; his little paws had never tread the pavements of Paris.” Naturally, it soon turned out that Madame had been leaving her little dog in the courtyard on a regular basis to do his business, during which time he’d been attacked by a local terrier. Over and over again, Parisian pet owners found their tame little Pekineses and pugs transformed into snarling beasts. Rabies was no longer a disease of the huntsman or the peasant, doomed by their low class stature to live in the wilderness, close to animals. With the widespread adoption of pets, rabies was now a disease of the bourgeois – and it went from an ancient taboo to a modern hysteria. In the midst of national panic, the French turned to their greatest hope: the nation’s preeminent scientist, Louis Pasteur.
By the 1880s, Louis Pasteur enjoyed national fame in multiple scientific disciplines. He had a wide range of interests, but the one common trait among them? Tiny things. Louis was one of the world’s first microbiologists, though the world hadn’t come up with that term just yet. He knew the world was full of organisms and molecules too small to see with the naked eye, and he wanted to know how deeply they shaped the world around us. His research into food spoilage was so groundbreaking, the milk and eggs in your fridge right now are probably labeled “Pasteurized”, meaning they’ve been heated enough to kill bacteria. He also figured out that bacteria was responsible for a silkworm disease which was hobbling the French silk industry. After his experiments in industrial sanitation, Pasteur wanted to take his career in a new direction, focusing on the most mysterious – and important – tiny things known to the world at that time: germs.
Scientists and philosophers kicked around the idea of germs since the Middle Ages, but it wasn’t until Louis Pasteur came along that germ theory really got put to the test in a rigorous, repeatable way. As my fellow epidemiology nerds will know, a famous cholera outbreak in London in 1854 pit ‘germ theory’ scientists against those who believed in ‘miasma theory’ – that bad air was itself the cause of disease. According to miasma theorists, a bad smell didn’t just indicate that something dangerous might be nearby, the bad smell was the dangerous thing. In the 1850s, Louis Pasteur conducted a series of experiments to disprove miasma theory once and for all, showing how so-called “spontaneous” bacterial growth was impossible. Boiled broth would never grow bacteria, no matter how much air you passed in front of it. The germ theory showed that diseases were caused by things – as the veterinarian had discovered, dogs didn’t spontaneously become rabid. If tiny things could induce infection, could other, similar tiny things prevent infection? To learn more, Pasteur turned his attention to one of the more puzzling breakthroughs of the previous century: Edward Jenner’s smallpox preventative.
Before the 18th century, there was only one way to protect yourself against smallpox: give yourself a smallpox infection, pray for the best, and survive it. Once you made it through, people knew, you wouldn’t get infected a second time. Throughout Asia and the Middle East, people practiced inoculation, in which you’d scratch someone’s skin a bit and rub it with some pus from a smallpox victim. By rubbing the pus onto a superficial wound, the infection was more likely to be mild, and you were more likely to survive it. But it was more or less the same idea: to survive smallpox, you had to get smallpox, and you had to live. It was by no means foolproof, and many people did not survive the treatment, including one of the heirs to the British throne. Still, it was a 2 percent fatality rate instead of a 30 percent fatality rate. But it was very expensive, and mostly off limits to anyone besides aristocrats. In the 1790s, a British scientist named Edward Jenner noticed that milkmaids seemed naturally immune to smallpox, and wondered whether it had anything to do with the fact that cows suffered from a similar disease named (you guessed it) cowpox. Maids who survived cowpox didn’t contract smallpox. Jenner tested his theory on an 8 year old boy by deliberately infecting him with cowpox, which produced a gnarly fever but that was about it. Later, when Jenner tried inoculating the boy using the traditional method, he was completely immune to smallpox. It was a huge medical breakthrough – a relatively safe, genuinely preventative measure against smallpox! The only thing was…nobody knew why it worked. For that, the world would need to wait the length of 100 years and one very fortuitous vacation.
In 1879, Louis Pasteur found himself surrounded by a group of unbelievably healthy chickens. He was in the middle of researching chicken cholera, a disease which is just as fun for chickens as it is for humans. He’d been growing the cholera cultures in chicken broth, and then, in a rather cannibalistic way, he’d injected the chicken-broth cultures into the chickens to infect them with cholera. Ironically enough for a man who’d figured out why things spoiled, one of Pasteur’s chicken broth cultures went bad, and the chickens he injected never got sick. A few days later, he tried again with a fresh new batch of cholera germs, but no matter what he did, the chickens who had received the so-called “bad batch” never came down with cholera. The spoiled cultures were weak enough to keep the chickens from getting seriously sick, but still enough for their immune systems to figure out how to fight off cholera. This was Pasteur’s first clue.
You know when you come back from PTO and realize you completely forgot to do that important thing for your boss before turning on your out of office? Sometimes that turns out for the best. In 1879, Pasteur told his assistant to infect a new batch of chickens, he was on his way out for a holiday. The assistant forgot, and then he went on holiday. When the assistant got back to town, he realized what he’d done, freaked out, and hastily injected the chickens with the cholera cultures. But lo and behold, the chickens got a little sick, made a full recovery, and displayed complete immunity afterwards. Before long, Pasteur was able to produce a reliable preventative treatment for chicken cholera, to the gratitude of poultry farmers across the country. In tribute to the cows, or vacca, who had inspired Edward Jenner’s similar discovery, Louis Pasteur gave a new name to this treatment: vaccine.
It was one of science’s great lightbulb moments. Diseases were caused by bacteria, and if you could weaken the bacteria just enough, it would teach your body how to fight off that disease at full strength. That was why Edward Jenner’s cowpox treatment worked. The only question was, how could you reliably produce weak enough germs? For the next few years, Pasteur continued working on other livestock diseases, but eventually, he knew it was time to tackle the big one: could he come up with a reliable way to prevent all kinds of different diseases in humans? He knew where to begin. After all, this was 19th century France! If there was one cure that everyone wanted, it was a cure for that dreaded disease: rabies. Pasteur’s assistant, Emile Roux, wrote that “If Pasteur chose it as an object of study, it was above all because…to everyone’s mind rabies is the most frightening and dreaded malady.” But that might not have been the only reason for his focus. As an eight year old boy, Pasteur witnessed the horror of rabies himself. Living in a quiet village near a large forest, one year reports of a wild wolf began circulating, and the men of the village went out to hunt it down. Little Louis saw one victim brought back to the village blacksmith. The blacksmith picked up a red-hot poker and with a sizzle of hot iron against flesh and dog saliva, he cauterized the poor man’s wounds. It wasn’t enough: all in all, no fewer than 8 of young Louis’s neighbors died of rabies in that outbreak. Little wonder that he was willing to devote so many years to finding a cure.
In 1880, Pasteur and his assistant, Emile Roux, began researching possible rabies treatments for dogs. They began culturing rabies not in chicken broth, but in live rabbits. He’d use a rabbit to infect another rabbit, on and on, twenty times, until he could consistently infect rabbits with rabies in their spinal cords. Remembering the chicken broth left out before that fateful vacation, Pasteur took fragments of rabies and exposed them to air for varying lengths of time, letting the cultures dry out. The more the cultures dried out, the less virulent they became. Normally, when he was working on chicken cholera, Pasteur could stick the culture on a slide and look through a microscope to see just how much bacteria was still kicking around after exposure. Rabies, as it turned out, didn’t work that way. What Pasteur didn’t know was that rabies is not caused by bacteria at all – it’s caused by a virus, ten million times smaller than a bacteria, and much too small to see with a 19th century microscope. He had to rely on cause and effect and consistent results to figure out what worked. Now that he’d figured out how to create weakened rabies, he had to test it out. For this, the mad scientist was going to need dogs. A lot of dogs.
M.J. Bourrel, a former army veterinarian who was also probing the mysteries of rabies, had a lot of mad dogs to spare. He’d been studying rabies for nearly two decades, in which time he’d been able to figure out that dogs transmitted rabies through their saliva, which infected the wounds left by their teeth. He began filing down the dog’s teeth so they couldn’t break the skin, but that was as much progress as he’d made. In 1880, Bourrel’s own nephew got bit by one of the dogs, and died in rabid agony a few days later. Bourrel sent over a pair of rabid dogs, and I do not envy that delivery driver’s task one bit. Pasteur and Roux would have plenty more where that came from – 1880 saw a huge outbreak of rabies among Parisian dogs, and soon veterinarians and kennel owners across the nation knew to send any suspect animals to the crazy distinguished Monsieur Pasteur. For years, the men operated on the dogs, taking samples from mad dogs, infecting healthy dogs, and trying desperately to stay out of harm’s way. Not wishing to follow the example of M.J. Bourrel’s unfortunate nephews, Pasteur and Roux knew they had to be careful. As Roux’s niece remembered, “They bent down around a table. A large dog was tied down on it, its muscles contracted and its fangs bared. If the animal…caused them to make a false move, if one of them had cut himself with his scalpel, and if a small piece of the rabid spinal cord had penetrated into the cut, there would have been weeks and weeks filled with the anguished question: will he or will he not come down with rabies? They were no longer just researchers absorbed in the meticulous work of their laboratory; they were pioneers, adventurers of science.” One Swedish physician watched as Pasteur held a glass tube in his mouth and two laboratory assistants wearing gloves held a rabid bull-dog down so Pasteur could get his face closer. As Emile Roux’s niece remembers, “At the beginning of each session a loaded revolver was placed within their reach. If a terrible accident were to happen to one of them, the more courageous of the two others would put a bullet in his head.” Through these brave attempts, Pasteur and Roux eventually developed a treatment protocol for dogs which satisfied them. By administering weak, aged cultures first, and then following up with stronger and fresher cultures over the course of the next two weeks, dogs could develop immunity to rabies. That wasn’t all – using the same treatment, even dogs who had already been bitten could be saved from rabies, as long as they received the shots quickly enough. Pasteur had already performed this protocol on over 50 dogs, when he received a letter from the emperor of Brazil, wondering whether he would ever have a treatment for humans:
“Until now I have not dared to attempt anything on men, in spite of my own confidence in the result and the numerous opportunities afforded to me…I fear too much that a failure might compromise the future. I think my hand will tremble when I go on to Mankind.” One year later, Pasteur would have his chance, and his hand would not shake.
On July 6, 1885, Joseph Meister limped into the office of Louis Pasteur. Joseph’s mother was beside herself – with fourteen bites, surely her son was doomed. If Monsieur Pasteur had any treatments, no matter how dangerous, anything was better than the fate he now faced! This wasn’t enough to convince Emile Roux, who noticeably opted out of the human experiment. Pasteur was nervous too, and not just for little Joseph’s sake. Pasteur may have been an eminent scientist, but he was no physician, and treating the boy himself would result in fines and perhaps prison. Instead, he consulted with two nationally renowned physicians, who agreed that any experimental treatment was justifiable in light of the alternative, and agreed to assist. While Louis Pasteur prepared the cultures, the two doctors performed the injections. “On 6 July, at 8 o clock in the evening, sixty hours after the bites of 4 July, and in the presence of the doctors, we inoculated into a fold of skin over young Meister’s right hypochondrium half a syringe of the spinal cord from a rabbit dead of rabies, dried for fifteen days.” Over the next ten days, the doctors administered a total of 13 injections. When Joseph wasn’t getting poked and prodded, he spent his time playing with the laboratory menagerie of chickens, rabbits, guinea pigs and mice. But Pasteur himself was nervous. As the treatments continued, the doses grew stronger and stronger. “My dear children,” wrote Pasteur’s wife in a letter, “your father has had another bad night; he is dreading the last inoculations on the child. And yet there can be no drawing back now! The boy continues in perfect health.”
On July 16th, Pasteur administered the final, fateful dose. This culture was only one day old – dangerous enough to infect any healthy person. As Pasteur’s father-in-law remembered, “Cured from his wounds, delighted with all he saw, gaily running about as if he had been in his own Alsatian farm, little Meister, whose blue eyes now showed neither fear nor shyness, merrily received the last inoculation, in the evening, after claiming a kiss from ‘dear Monsieur Pasteur’ as he called him, he went to bed and slept peacefully. Pasteur spent a terrible night of insomnia; in those slow dark hours of night when all vision is distorted, Pasteur, losing sight of the accumulation of experiments which guaranteed his success, imagined that the little boy would die.”
But Joseph Meister lived. One full month passed since his attack, without a single symptom. And a few months later, when a 15 year old shepherd received a bite from a rabid dog, he traveled to Monsieur Pasteur’s laboratory, and he lived, too. Just like the dozens of dogs before them, the boys were immune to rabies – even after being bitten. That fall, Louis Pasteur and his team presented their findings to an astonished Academy of Sciences. As one of the two eminent physicians reported to the crowd that day, “Hydrophobia, that dread disease against which all therapeutic measures had hitherto failed, has at last found a remedy.” They hadn’t simply created a treatment to help victims recover – they’d created a way to prevent a disease altogether, a way that could be applied to endless other diseases just as terrible and deadly. Louis Pasteur had created the world’s first live human vaccine.
Pasteur’s achievement went even further than that. His vaccines were the last irrefutable proof that germ theory – not miasma – was responsible for human diseases. His results were so spectacular, the opposition could only tip their caps. As one doctor wrote shortly after Pasteur’s presentation to the Academy, “From the heights of our settled situations, we should no longer laugh at bacilli and culture media. Those who cultivate them already deserve our respect for the services that they have given mankind; for us, the old guard of the medical profession, they must also inspire salutory fear and a determination to be useful. We must march with the times. The coming century will see the blossoming of a new medicine: let us devote what is left of this century to studying it. Let us go back to school and prepare the ground for an evolution.”
If there’s one thing we’ve all come to understand on a personal level these past few weeks, it’s that it’s one thing to make a vaccine, and another thing entirely to administer it. Vaccine supply chains have always been a problem – they’re finicky, fragile, and prone to disruptions. Back in 1803, Spanish officials desperately wanted to get Edward Jenner’s cowpox vaccine to their colonies in South America. Smallpox was having an apocalyptic impact on indigenous populations, with a fatality rate of up to 50 percent. But any cowpox samples dried out over the course of the long ocean journey. Spanish officials came up with a creative, macabre solution. Rounding up 24 young orphans and a few physicians, the Spanish government turned a ship into a petri dish. They infected two of the orphans with smallpox before setting off on their journey. After a few weeks, the boys developed sores, which the onboard physicians would then use to infect the next pair of boys, and on and on. In exchange for food, passage, and a chance at a better life, not to mention immunity from a terrible disease, the orphans became drug mules of a sort. The supply chain was incredibly tenuous, and it only barely worked: by the time the ship landed, only one boy had only one sore left – but that was enough. Within two months, the team of physicians had vaccinated 12,000 people in Venezuela, before branching off to Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia to vaccinate 200,000 more.
Nearly 100 years later, back in Paris, Louis Pasteur’s office faced the opposite problem: instead of venturing out into the world, the world came to them. All of a sudden, as word spread that the famous doctor had a cure for rabies, every anxious Parisian knocked on their door, begging for a vaccine. Pasteur’s laboratory was hardly a waiting room, but he managed to vaccinate 80 people by the end of that first year. Meanwhile, his assistants created a rudimentary production line, arranging their vials into a meticulous order to ensure every vaccine dosage was consistent and accurate. One morning, Pasteur received word that a boat of recently bitten American children had just arrived in town. Back in New York, a famous doctor had written a editorial, announcing that “were it my misfortune to be bitten by a rabid dog, I would board the first Atlantic steamer, go straight to Paris and, full of hope, place myself immediately in the hands of Pasteur…Let us prove to the world that we are intelligent enough to appreciate the advance of science and liberal and humane enough to help those who cannot help themselves.” When the boys returned to America, successfully vaccinated, they were miniature celebrities, and everywhere they went, Pasteur’s vaccine grew more and more legendary. As one historian writes, the vaccine was a breakthrough in the way Americans thought about medicine altogether: “It created a new expectation that medicine can and should change, that progress is to be expected.” But that progress needed infrastructure, and Pasteur’s little laboratory was bursting at the seams.
In 1887, Louis Pasteur launched the ultimate healthcare GoFundMe: a fundraiser for the establishment of an institution which would provide ongoing rabies treatment, and continue research into the development of future vaccines. Around the world, donations poured in, including one from none other than little Joseph Meister. On November 14, 1888, he finally opened the doors of the Pasteur Institute. For more than a century, the research staff of the Pasteur Institute made their own contributions, including cures for diptheria, snakebites, the plague, and more. Meanwhile, the hospital wing of the Pasteur Institute carried on the work of rabies vaccinations and treatment, Also working within those walls was Joseph Meister, who spent his life in the company of the laboratory animals he’d loved as a child, working as a janitor until his death at the outbreak of World War II. Today, post-exposure prophylaxis regimens, like those given to Joseph Meister, are administered to over 20 million people around the world each year. There hasn’t been a case of rabies in France since 1998. Today, France is officially declared “rabies-free.”
As we look forward to the year ahead, know that the COVID-19 vaccination campaigns won’t be smooth or steady – they never are, and there’s never been one conducted at this scale before – not even close. But whether it’s 24 brave boys crossing the sea and saving a quarter of a million lives on the other side, or whether it’s an assembly line of scientists painstakingly measuring thousands of vials with 19th century technology, or whether it’s an international consortium of state of the art factories operating at max capacity, the results are worth the wait. Rabies is preventable. Smallpox is gone. And soon, COVID-19 will be another disease we can guard against, antibodies circulating quietly and steadily while we walk out the door, to go to work, see our friends, and hug our families. I look forward to that day. It is coming soon.
Thanks for listening to The Land of Desire. You can follow the show on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and sign up for the free newsletter at http://thelandofdesire.substack.com Be safe, my dear listeners, we’re almost through this. I wish all of you a happier, healthy new year. Until next time, au revoir.
Further reading:
- “Louis Pasteur’s risky move to save a boy from almost certain death” Dr. Howard Markel, PBS Newshour.
- scientist.com/news-opinion/the-promise-of-mrna-vaccines-68202">“The Promise of mRNA Vaccines” Diana Kwon, The Scientist.
Sources:
- Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus – Bill Wasick, Monica Murphy
- Illness as Metaphor and AIDS And Its Metaphors – Susan Sontag
- “The first live attenuated vaccines” Caroline Barranco, Nature Research.
- Alberer M, Gnad-Vogt U, Hong HS, Mehr KT, Backert L, Finak G, Gottardo R, Bica MA, Garofano A, Koch SD, Fotin-Mleczek M, Hoerr I, Clemens R, von Sonnenburg F. Safety and immunogenicity of a mRNA rabies vaccine in healthy adults: an open-label, non-randomised, prospective, first-in-human phase 1 clinical trial. Lancet. 2017 Sep 23;390(10101):1511-1520. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(17)31665-3. Epub 2017 Jul 25. PMID: 28754494.
- “22 Orphans Gave Up Everything to Distribute the World’s First Vaccine” Sam Kean, The Atlantic.
- Velasco-Villa A, Mauldin MR, Shi M, et al. The history of rabies in the Western Hemisphere. Antiviral Res. 2017;146:221-232. doi:10.1016/j.antiviral.2017.03.013
- Kete, Kathleen. “La Rage and the Bourgeoisie: The Cultural Context of Rabies in the French Nineteenth Century.” Representations, no. 22, 1988, pp. 89–107. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2928412. Accessed 21 Jan. 2021.
- Historical Perspective of Rabies in Europe and the Mediterranean Basin A.A. King, A.R. Fooks, M. Aubert, A.I. Wandeler (Eds.). OIE, Paris, 2004.
- scientist.com/foundations/the-rabies-vaccine-backstory-33441">“The Rabies Vaccine Backstory” Catherine Offord, The Scientist, June 1 2016.
- Smith, Kendall A. “Louis pasteur, the father of immunology?.” Frontiers in immunology vol. 3 68. 10 Apr. 2012, doi:10.3389/fimmu.2012.00068
- The first rabies vaccination in humans, Rino Rappuoli, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Aug 2014, 111 (34) 12273; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1414226111
- Hansen, Bert. “America’s First Medical Breakthrough: How Popular Excitement about a French Rabies Cure in 1885 Raised New Expectations for Medical Progress.” The American Historical Review, vol. 103, no. 2, 1998, pp. 373–418. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2649773. Accessed 21 Jan. 2021.
- Rappuoli, Rino. “Inner Workings: 1885, the first rabies vaccination in humans.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America vol. 111,34 (2014): 12273. doi:10.1073/pnas.1414226111
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Oct 29, 2020
63. Jeanne de Clisson and the Black Fleet
“If I don’t kill a man every now and then, they forget who I am.” – Blackbeard, 18th century English pirate
BOO! It’s spooky season, so I’m bringing you a chilling tale of piracy, treachery, and blood-soaked revenge. This week, we’re digging into the very beginning of the Hundred Years’ War, when a bunch of scheming men had their plans ruined by scheming women. We’ll learn about the War of Breton Succession, a.k.a. a teensy conflict that managed to explode into an international proxy war. Despite the strictures of medieval society, Breton women were claiming thrones, leading armies into battle, and taking to the high seas. Jeanne de Clisson, furious widow, turned her rage into a lifelong search for vengeance, and we are definitely going to dig into the gory details.
Episode 63: “Jeanne de Clisson and the Black Fleet”
Jeanne de Clisson, lady pirate:
Medieval portrait of Jeanne de Clisson
See the organizational splendor of the Hundred Years War.
Transcript
Bienvenue and welcome back to the Land of Desire. I’m your host, Diana, and I have to make a confession: I am a scared little baby. Whenever Halloween comes back around, I remember how much I hate scary movies, scary stories, and generally anything that causes anxiety in any way. My most sacred October ritual is watching Practical Magic while giving myself an autumnal manicure. If you’re the kind of person watching movies like The Exorcist, Get Out, or Night of the Living Dead, I salute you, I respect you, but I do not understand you! But this year, I’m going outside my comfort zone to bring you some genuinely spooky content, starring one of the wildest ladies in the French history books. I don’t know about you, but I could do with a little angry vengeance right now, a little hellraising. So today, change out of your day pajamas and into a black veil, light a pillar candle and sharpen your swords. Piracy is our only option.
In 1328, the French King Charles IV did a very inconsiderate thing: to the great inconvenience of everyone in Western Europe, he died without leaving a male heir. No sons, no brothers, not even any useful old uncles. It’s never a good idea for a king to die without a line of succession, but Charles really couldn’t have chosen a worse time. He’d spent his entire reign squabbling with his mortal enemies, the English, and now they’d be making a play for his throne. The fight for Charles’s crown would waste everyone’s time, money, and lives for the next five generations, with everyone picking sides, double-crossing one another, then picking the other side, and then double crossing one another again. The fight was so epic, so complicated, and ultimately so, so stupid that George R.R. Martin would use it as the inspiration for Game of Thrones. And just like Game of Thrones, it has a sad trombone sound of an ending. The Hundred Years’ War eventually became something like white noise: a constant clash going on in the background, all while Europe lurched its way through the Middle Ages, wrestling with big questions about God, death, and what it means to be human. One of the most important questions Europe tackled during this time had grave implications for the war itself: what to do about women? Can’t live with ‘em, can’t make heirs if you send ‘em all to a nunnery. Throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, rascally women kept scuppering the plans of powerful men. They were claiming thrones, leading armies into battle, sleeping with the enemy, dying in childbirth when men needed them to live, surviving the bubonic plague when men needed them to die, and in at least one extremely memorable occasion, taking to the high seas for a blood soaked reign of terror. This week, join me for an extra-spooky examination of the life of the lady pirate, Jeanne de Clisson, the Lioness of Brittany.
In the year 1322, Charles IV inherited his older brother’s crown and his older brother’s nemesis. In the 14th century, the area we know as “France” was a motley assortment of territories, some of them more obedient to the crown than others. Ever since Guillaume, duc de Normandie, sailed across the Channel to conquer England in 1066, the kings of England had laid claim to various duchies and land holdings too close to Paris for comfort. For example, the beautiful, profitable duchy of Aquitaine used to belong to the French crown, until Eleanor of Aquitaine divorced the king of France and married the king of England. But the English kings were getting uppity. As the duke of Aquitaine, the King of England was supposed to bend the knee to the King of France, or so the King of France said, conveniently enough. In 1291, the English king, Edward I, stopped paying tribute to Charles’s father, Philip. Philip insisted on treating Edward like a duke, not a fellow king. If you can believe it, this caused offense. After a bunch of fighting, it was agreed: King Philip would allow Edward I to marry Philip’s sister, Margaret, in exchange for Edward returning the territory of Gascony to France for a little while, as a show of obedience. After a while, the king of France would return Gascony, and all would be well. But it was a trick! Edward handed Gascony over to Philip, and Philip refused to hand it back. As you can imagine, Edward I didn’t take it well, and England began sharpening her swords against the French. But Philip’s victory was short-lived: while he racked up victories against his overseas enemies, trouble was brewing back home.
On paper, at least, Philip’s dynasty appeared secure: he had three adult sons, and one adult daughter. As good noble boys and girls, they were all four expected to marry for political advantage, and they all four did so. All three sons married girls from the houses of Burgundy, a rich and prosperous duchy which Philip was determined to bring under French control. Meanwhile, Philip attempted to patch things up with England by marrying his daughter Isabella off to Edward I’s son. So far, so good. But in 1314, Philip’s house was rocked by scandal.
For poor Isabella, cast off across the English Channel, life was pretty miserable. Shunted off to the land of her enemies at the age of 12, Isabella found herself married to a young man who was definitely uninterested and probably homosexual. Whether she was bored or in the mood for a little family revenge, at the age of 19, Isabella decided to set her family’s reputation on fire. That year, Isabella, her husband, and her father-in-law, King Edward I, set sail for France. It was supposed to be a moment of reconciliation between the two rival countries, embodied by Isabella herself, the bridge between the families. As any good guests might, the English brought gifts. Isabella brought a number of beautiful embroidered purses, which she gave to her sisters-in-law, the lovely ladies of Burgundy. But later in the visit, Isabella noticed something curious: the purses which she had given to her sisters-in-law were now being carried around by a couple of handsome young knights. Isabella wasted no time informing her father, and before long, King Philip had his own daughters-in-law under surveillance. Eventually, to the astonishment of the nation, King Philip broke the news that at least two of his sons had been cuckholded – the heir to the throne, Louis, and the youngest son, Charles. Jury was still out on his other daughter-in-law, Joan. The two adulterous princesses were locked in the Tower of Nesle (NE-LLE). The handsome young knights were tortured and hanged. By the end of 1314, Philip himself was dead, possibly from embarrassment. The eldest son, Louis X, ascended to the throne, with his wife still locked in a castle. Before long, Louis’s wife died under mysterious circumstances – some say she was strangled, others say she was smothered by a mattress. Whatever the case, Louis didn’t celebrate his freedom for long – soon afterwards, he died playing tennis. His second wife gave birth to his only son a few months later – just in time, right? But Louis’s posthumous heir died five days later. Now the French throne passed to the late King Philip’s middle son, Philip V. But it didn’t pass to him without a fight: poor dead Louis had an elder daughter, Joan, who claimed the throne for herself. All across France, legal scholars grappled with the question: could a woman inherit the throne?
After the scandal of the two princesses and their infidelity, legal scholars felt confident in their answer: no, the throne could never pass through the female line. If the heir to the French throne’s wife could cheat on him, the way Louis’s wife seemed to have done, there was no way of knowing whether her children were really his. It’s an interesting counterfactual: would the French have allowed the throne to pass through the female line if it weren’t for that specific scandal happening at that specific moment? Who knows. Philip V inherited the throne over his niece, but once again, his reign would not last for very long. Only six years later, Philip died from dysentery and the throne passed to the youngest son, Charles IV. Like Louis, Charles’s wife was locked up in a tower during his reign, and he made no moves to let her out. Instead, he annulled their marriage and sent her into a nunnery, after which point he remarried a woman who promptly died giving birth to a child. By the end of his reign, Charles had only one living child – but whoops! It was a daughter. The same legal decision which had given the throne to Charles’s older brother now prevented the throne from passing to Charles’s daughter. Which brings us back to the year 1328. In the span of only a few years, the French throne had gone from ‘totally secure and stable for generations’ to a game of capture the flag, and France’s old nemesis, England, was ready to play.
—
Back across the Channel, good old Isabella had been getting into mischief once again. Not content with ratting out her sisters-in-law, apparently, Isabella returned home intent on destroying her husband. Joining forces with her lover, Isabella encouraged her son, Edward, to take up arms against his father. The plan worked, and Edward III assumed the English throne in 1327, just in time to see his rival across the Channel kick the bucket. With Charles’s daughter unable to inherit the throne, the French crown would instead pass to Charles’s male cousin, Philip the Fortunate. Young Edward saw his chance: “Okay,” he told European nobility, “of course a woman can’t inherit a throne. Obviously. Duh. That would be ridiculous. But what if – go with me here – what if a man could inherit the throne through a woman? You know, come to think of it, I really think I should be the king of France.” And with that, the Hundred Years’ War was born.
Without getting into the nitty gritty of the Hundred Years War, because even in quarantine, none of us really have that kind of time, here’s what matters most for our story today: the Hundred Years War is always portrayed as a war between the French and the English, but who, exactly, is that referring to? The English kings were descended from French nobility and held a bunch of territory across the Channel. The land we now call “France” was then composed of a bunch of different duchies, only some of whom considered themselves “French” in any sense of the word. The battle lines weren’t clearly drawn, and over the next hundred years they often shifted one way and then another. And there’s no better example of these shifting loyalties than the subject of this week’s story, Jeanne de Clisson.
—
Jeanne de Clisson was born Jeanne de Belleville, in a castle on the coast of Brittany. For centuries, England and France fought over who got to claim Brittany. As the name implies, the British had a heavy influence in the region. The Breton language, derived from Celtic tongues, has more in common with Gaelic than French. The lords of Brittany were the first to help William the Conqueror invade England, and were rewarded with territories there. But Brittany was across the Channel from England, she shared a border with France, and her people were divided in their loyalties. In truth, if you asked most residents of Brittany whether they felt they were English or French, most of them would tell you, “I’m Breton.” Young Jeanne was no different. Jeanne’s parents married her off to a local nobleman at the age of 12. She gave birth to two children by the age of 15 before her husband died. Suddenly, Jeanne was the hottest widow in town.
Two years later, just as King Charles was kicking the bucket, Jeanne married Guy de Penthievre. It was a hell of a match – he was the second son of the duke of Brittany himself. Right from the start, Guy’s family complained that Jeanne was a gold digger, out to steal his titles and fortune. If you’re wondering “isn’t that the point of rich people marrying one another” the truth is, I don’t get it either, but Guy’s family carried the day. After a few years, Jeanne’s marriage was annulled. Guy’s family would really regret this move later on. Jeanne, meanwhile, was the hottest widow in town again.
She was exceedingly eligible: a rich teenager, bestowed with valuable property from her late husband’s estate, demonstrably fertile with years of childbearing ahead of her, it’s a surprise she managed to squeeze in any more single living before she married again. This time, Jeanne married Olivier de Clisson, another very rich member of the local Breton nobility. Jeanne and Olivier seemed well-suited to one another. They were the same age, they’d both been married before, they both owned lots of property, and by all accounts they appear to have genuinely loved each other. Together, Jeanne and Olivier had five more children, and things seemed to be going pretty well – until 1341, when Jeanne and Olivier found themselves embroiled in the biggest battle to hit Brittany in centuries.
The duke of Brittany, Jeanne’s ex-father-in-law, had three sons with his first wife, including Guy de Penthievre. Then, after his first wife died, the duke remarried and went on to have one more son with his new wife. The duke’s sons from his first wife hated their stepmother, and they hated their half-brother even more. But as the saying goes, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” By 1341, all three of the duke’s sons from his first marriage were dead, including Guy. As the French scholars had insisted only a few years earlier, French titles had to pass from man to man, right? That meant the dukedom of Brittany was set to pass into the hands of the dreaded fourth son, John de Monfort. This was a real problem. Not only did the local families hate John de Montfort, the French king, Philip the Fortunate, did too. John de Montfort was considered a sneaky, dubious fellow, and England supported his claim to the throne. Who wants to support the guy that England is rooting for? Then, just as John was getting ready to assume control of Brittany, a new challenger appeared: Guy de Penthievre’s daughter, Jeanne.
(If you’re subscribed to my newsletter, you probably saw my recent issue about how everyone in France is named one of four names. Since this is going to be a confusing episode otherwise, I will now refer to Guy de Penthievre’s daughter as L’il Jeanne.)
This is where things got wild. What should have been a regional dispute turned into an international proxy war, with England and France both wanting their guy in charge of Brittany, both because it was territorially useful and because it would make their enemy just so mad. In order to thwart England’s candidate for the dukedom of Brittany, L’il Jeanne used England’s own argument against them. “Following the same logic of your king, Edward III, the duchy should not go to John de Montfort,” L’il Jeanne said. “If a title can pass through a woman, the way Edward III says it can, then the rightful heir isn’t the duke’s weird fourth son that nobody likes, it’s me, the daughter of the duke’s second son, and my husband. Charles de Blois.”
Then, before John de Montfort could so much as put down a deposit on an event planner for his succession, L’il Jeanne and her husband claimed the duchy of Brittany for themselves. Truly honoring the spirit of “fake it til you make it” L’il Jeanne and her husband simply moved in to the capital of Brittany and said “Okay, we’re in charge now.” and then dared anybody else to call their bluff. It was like the Hundred Year’s War on a teensy tiny scale: everybody, pick your side.
The whole thing was insane and topsy turvy. If you supported the English king’s claim to the French throne, following his logic, you couldn’t support his choice for the Breton dukedom. If you supported the French king’s claim to the French throne, following his logic, you couldn’t support his choice for the Breton dukedom. The same question that had been raised a few years ago was raised again, but now everybody who had answered one way had to answer the opposite way. Could a woman pass a title on to her son or her husband? or did everything have to pass through a man? Darn those pesky women, with their pesky wombs, making everything complicated!
For Jeanne and Olivier de Clisson, the choice was simple. They supported the French king over the English king. Supporting the French king meant you had to accept his argument that the crown couldn’t pass through a woman. But supporting the French king’s choice for duke of Brittany meant you had to accept his argument that a title could pass through a woman. No wonder this stupid war lasted for a hundred years. If you’re confused, don’t worry, everyone back then was confused too. Jeanne and Olivier de Clisson supported L’il Jeanne, not only out of solidarity with other women named Jeanne, and not only because Jeanne de Clisson used to be married to L’il Jeanne’s dad. They pledged loyalty to L’il Jeanne’s husband, Charles de Blois. Within a few years, their loyalty would be put to the test: King Edward III was coming to town.
After Charles de Blois and Jean de Montfort both claimed the territory of Brittany for themselves, the French King Philip VI summoned everyone to Paris for a big formal proceeding. “We’re going to sort this out, and I, the king of France, along with my official tribunal, will issue a ruling once and for all.” John de Montfort knew the score. His rival, L’il Jeanne’s husband, was King Philip’s nephew. There was no way this tribunal would work out in his favor, so John de Montfort skipped town, captured the capital of Brittany and invited the nobility to come pay tribute to him, their new leader. Unfortunately for John, all of the Breton nobility knew which side their bread was buttered on and stayed home. Fine, John de Montfort said, time for a publicity tour. One of the first cities in Brittany to give John de Montfort its support was Vannes, a decision they’d probably come to regret. Before long, Charles de Blois was knocking on the city gates. “Oh, I wouldn’t bother asking your neighbors to help you out,” he informed the city officials. “I’ve burned all your neighbors to the ground.” The governor of Vannes bravely ran away, escaping to a nearby castle. While the governor met up with John de Montfort’s army and plotted a way to break back inside his own home, Charles de Blois’s men took control of Vannes. Chief among his military leaders was none other than Olivier de Clisson. Back and forth and back and forth, Vannes passed from English hands into French hands into English hands into French hands. In one particularly spectacular moment, John de Montfort’s own wife, who is, if you can believe this, also named Jeanne, led her very own army to besiege the city gates – successfully, I might add. In December 1342, Olivier de Clisson stood in charge of the city of Vannes, guarding it on behalf of Charles de Blois. One night, the English attacked, captured Olivier, threw him in prison, and took back the city of Vannes for themselves. But all of a sudden, the English ..just…released Olivier back to Charles de Blois in exchange for a small ransom and the release of one of their own men, just some English guy. It didn’t make any sense. Olivier de Clisson was an important guy! He was the military general leading this army! Why should the English give up such a valuable prisoner for so little? Charles de Blois smelled a traitor. Charles de Blois consulted with his ally, uncle King Philip, to ask for advice. Could Olivier be trusted? Was he a spy? What should I do?
In January 1343, England and France signed a truce. Spoiler alert: it’s called the Hundred Year’s War, don’t get too excited. That month, Olivier and fifteen other local noblemen from Brittany received invitations to a tournament. When they arrived, the men found themselves surrounded by armed guards, and were taken prisoner by the French King Philip himself. Transported to Paris, Olivier and his fellow noblemen sat through an absurd show trial, which didn’t take long to reach a shocking conclusion. On August 2nd, Olivier de Clisson, lord of Brittany, knight, presumed defender of the king, received a conviction for treason. As the record states: “And there, on a scaffold, had his head cut off. And then from there his corpse was drawn to the gibbet of Paris and there hanged on the highest level; and his head was sent to Nantes in Brittany to be put on a lance over the Sauve-tout gate as a warning to others.”
Now, if you’re a king struggling to maintain a grasp over your nation’s loosely held territories and duchies, the idea is to appease your powerful lords, not behead them. Edward III knew this well – his predecessor King John had been forced to sign the Magna Carta nearly 150 years earlier. King Philip needed his lords and dukes, they didn’t necessarily need him. If England and France were fighting for Brittany’s loyalty, executing the locals was a hell of a PR move. Even in 1343, you had to give a decent trial to a lord. You couldn’t decapitate a lord. You couldn’t stick the head of a lord on a pike for the crows. And for that matter, who was the king of France to behead a nobleman of Brittany? They could support who they wanted! Brittany isn’t France! Olivier de Clisson was truly the Ned Stark of his day. In one fell swoop, King Philip – and by extension, Charles de Blois, made himself a whole bunch of enemies. None of them would exact such a merciless revenge as Olivier’s wife, the furious, newly widowed Jeanne de Clisson.
That summer, Jeanne de Clisson took her two sons, Olivier and Guillaume, on a family road trip from hell: a trip to Nantes, to see their father’s head on a spike. That endless drive with your parents to the Grand Canyon is probably looking a lot better in hindsight. Jeanne, Olivier Jr. and Guillaume stared at Olivier Senior’s deteriorating head, letting the rage flow through them, building the kind of grudge that lasts a lifetime. Screw Charles de Blois. And screw the king of France. Jeanne vowed revenge against her late husband’s enemies, and to get it, she was willing to do anything – even align herself with her natural foe: the English.
Returning home, Jeanne de Clisson found herself declared a traitor, and her estate stripped almost bare. Not content with claiming her husband’s life, the king of France claimed his property, too – he’d need those estates to pay for his endless war. Oh yeah, that so-called truce with the English? It was already over. Jeanne was wealthy in her own right, however, and she sold her jewelry and fine furnishings for cold hard cash. Better yet, the English king, Edward III, recognized a powerful potential ally, and offered the widow the income from England’s own property in Brittany. First, Jeanne used the cash to raise an army. She’d take her battles offshore eventually, but first she’d make a hell of an impression on land.
Whether attracted by Jeanne’s cash or out of loyalty to Breton independence against the French king, Jeanne’s army swelled with troops. Before long, Jeanne marched down the coast to the castle of Galois de la Heuse. Galois was an old family friend, and he’d fought alongside Olivier on behalf of Charles de Blois. We don’t know why Jeanne singled him out for revenge, all we know is that Galois didn’t suspect a thing. Galois opened the gates to Jeanne and her men, who promptly slaughtered everyone inside. Well, almost everyone: Jeanne deliberately spared one person as a witness. “Tell them Jeanne de Clisson sent you.” With that, Jeanne promptly ransacked the castle for all its valuables, sold them, and used the funds to buy three warships. Turning her heels on her coastal carnage, Jeanne boarded her new ships and set sail, launching a career in piracy which extended for 14 years.
For French sailors, it was like something out of a nightmare, the stuff of tall tales and folklore: a foggy night, a calm sea, and suddenly, the Black Fleet. These were no English sailors, these ships sailed no English flag. Jeanne painted her ships black with pitch, and dyed her sails blood red. Jeanne led the way on her flagship, named “My Revenge”. The Black Fleet sailed up and down the French coast, sowing terror and revenge, offering no mercy, leaving almost no survivors. Again and again, a lone man or woman would turn up at a tavern, covered in blood, speaking of a massacre, whispering a name: The Lioness of Brittany.
Sailing with her sons, the Tragic Widow, as she came to be known in Paris, sailed from the Bay of Biscay to the ports of Flanders, sinking any ship that crossed her path. Others called her “the bloody lioness” after her shield, featuring the sigil of the house of Clisson. Rumors swirled about her bloodthirsty nature. In some of the tales, Jeanne and her children personally oversaw the execution of the captured crews. In other tales, Jeanne swung the axe herself. As one scholar puts it, “the only thing certain was that every day the number of ships that did not reach their destination increased.” Jeanne’s ferocity turned in particular towards any captured French nobility. Their noble bloodlines were supposed to protect them from butchery – but so was Olivier’s, and his head had ended up on a spike. One after another, Jeanne delighted in murdering gentlemen, especially, the rumor went, those gentlemen unfortunate enough to be named Philip.
On December 1, 1343, King Philip had had enough. That day, French parliament formally declared open season on the Bloody Lioness. The French navy gave her their full attention. Still, it would be years before they finally tracked it down. In 1346, long after Parliament’s declaration, English and French forces clashed at the Battle of Crecy. Who arrived to provision English troops with fresh supplies but Jeanne de Clisson and her Black Fleet? Once again, she eluded capture. But finally, some time around 1348, the French Navy caught up with the Black Fleet at last.
Long into the night, the Black fleet fought back. Holding out on My Revenge, Jeanne refused to give up until almost all of her pirate fleet was dead. Finally, the French sailors boarded the flagship, making their way to the captain’s cabin. But a lioness, like all cats, has nine lives. Jeanne de Clisson had disappeared.
While the French fleet was making its way through the ship’s interior, Jeanne, her sons, and a crew of six pirates had escaped on a tiny boat, heading out into the open English Channel. For six days, the boat drifted through freezing water as the passengers edged closer to death. They had no food. They had no water. Their wet clothes froze in the winter air. Finally, at some point in their desperate escape, Jeanne’s youngest son Guillaume died. After seven days adrift, the crew finally landed. To their amazement, they’d washed ashore on a friendly stretch of the Breton coast, where they found supporters of John de Montfort to supply them with food, water, warm clothes and a decent burial for poor little Guillaume. But they couldn’t stay for long – Charles de Blois’s forces were patrolling the coast, so Jeanne and her remaining son Olivier Junior boarded another ship and retreated to England. Perhaps the French navy would have pursued her, but all of a sudden, they found themselves terribly distracted. Jeanne de Clisson was no longer the deadliest force to arrive in a port. The Black Death had come to town.
If the French thought Jeanne de Clisson was bloodthirsty, she was nothing compared to the bubonic plague. While Jeanne and Olivier Jr. kept their heads down in England, France shuddered through an incomprehensible wave of death. England lost 25% of her population, but that was a blessing compared to the tragedy across the Channel: one half of the French population succumbed to the Black Death.
By 1350, Olivier’s executioner, King Philip VI, was dead. Jeanne had vowed revenge against France, and now half of France was dead. Perhaps she finally felt her oath was fulfilled. Whatever the case, in 1356, Jeanne de Clisson married one last time to an English military leader named Walter Bentley. Jeanne sent her son, Olivier Jr, to live at the court of King Edward III. Here, Olivier Jr made friends with a pivotal figure in the War of Breton Succession: John de Montfort Jr. The son of a ruthless lady pirate and the son of a woman who had strapped armor on herself and led an army into battle probably had a lot to talk about, and they became friends. Meanwhile, Jeanne de Clisson and her new husband returned to Brittany at long last. They settled in the castle of Hennebont (HENN-BON), the very same castle where John de Montfort Jr’s mother had led her famous charge. For an ex-lady pirate shopping for real estate, I guess you can’t beat those vibes. After a few years together, Jeanne de Clisson finally died in 1359. She’d outlived her first husband, her kind of second husband, her third husband, her third husband’s murderer, her youngest son and half of France. Most pirates didn’t make it to sixty. But most pirates weren’t The Lioness of Brittany.
French historians liked to refer to this time period as “The War of the Three Jeannes”: Jeanne de Montfort, leading an army into battle on behalf of her husband and then her son; Jeanne de Penthievres, leading a rallying cry on behalf of her husband, Charles de Blois, and Jeanne de Clisson, terror of the high seas. These three women are notable not only for their exploits, but for the way those exploits are remembered. At the time these three women were born, baby girls faced a thrilling set of life choices: you can die young, you can marry and die in childbirth, you can join a nunnery, or, best case scenario, you can marry and have a bunch of kids and somehow survive their birth and maybe also a plague. These three women were all, shall we say, bold. They shattered the expectations – and sometimes the legs – of French society. But it turns out, the French loved them for it. Jeanne de Montfort became so iconic, she may have inspired most of the legends surrounding yet another woman named Jeanne (oh my god, France, can’t you have any female iconoclasts named, like, Violette?). Jeanne d’Arc and Jeanne de Monfort share a LOT of overlapping mythology. It’s hard to pick apart the influences. Jeanne de Penthievres ultimately lost, her husband Charles de Blois did not become the Duke of Brittany, but hey, she ended up a Countess. Not too shabby. And of course, Jeanne de Clisson managed to go on a murderous rampage across the high seas, living the pirate’s life for a decade and a half, and then, somehow, managed to live out a peaceful retirement and die of natural causes. As time went by, Jeanne’s legendary exploits faded from memory. But Jeanne had something special, something that almost none of the recent kings of France or dukes of Brittany had had: a living heir. His name was Olivier de Clisson. One day, he would be known as…”The Butcher.”
Thanks for listening to The Land of Desire! I’m your host, Diana, and I’m going to go turn on all of the lights and watch Practical Magic and count down the days until it’s culturally acceptable to start putting up my Christmas tree. For those of you in the United States, and frankly, those of you who aren’t, well done on taking a little time away from the news. It’s hard! Don’t doomscroll! Instead, check your inboxes for the new, free issue of the Land of Desire newsletter, with all kinds of soothing distractions to carry us through. You can sign up for the newsletter at thelandofdesire.substack.com. Until next time, au revoir!
Sources:
- Vázquez, Germán. Mujeres Piratas. Spain, Editorial Edaf, S.L., 2004.
- Pirate Women: The Princesses, Prostitutes and Privateers Who Ruled the Seven Seas, Laura Sook Duncombe
- Visser, Nils, and Willeke Snijder. “The Flame of Britanny: Jeanne De Flandres.” Medieval Warfare, vol. 4, no. 2, 2014, pp. 33–38. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/48578335. Accessed 29 Oct. 2020.
- Petot, Pierre. “Le Mariage Des Vassales.” Revue Historique De Droit Français Et Étranger (1922-), vol. 56, no. 1, 1978, pp. 29–47. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43847859. Accessed 29 Oct. 2020.
- Chronicles, Jean Froissart
- Jones, Michael C. E.. Ducal Brittany, 1364-1399: relations with England and France during the reign of Duke John IV.. London, Oxford U.P., 1970.
- Woman: Women of mediœval France, by P. Butler. United States, subscribers only, G. Barrie & Sons, 1908.
- Vencel, Wendy, “Women at the Helm: Rewriting Maritime History through Female Pirate Identity and Agency” (2018). Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection. 452.https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/ugtheses/452
- Women Pirates and the Politics of the Jolly Roger, ed. Ulrike Klausmann, Gabriel Kuhn & Marion Meinzerin, trans. Nicolas Levis, Black Rose Books, 1997
- A History of Piracy, Robert de la Croix, trans. Michael Ross, Manor Books, New York, 1978
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The post 63. Jeanne de Clisson and the Black Fleet appeared first on The Land of Desire.
Sep 24, 2020
62. Surya Bonaly
“Please, try to be fair.” – Surya Bonaly, 1994 World Championships
At long last, I get to combine two of my great passions: French history and 1990s women’s figure skating! Let’s face it, France hasn’t produced that many great female skaters over the decades. Male skaters like Alain Calmat and Pierre Péra made their way to the champion’s podium, but as the end of the 20th century approached, French women had yet to clinch a single individual medal. At the beginning of the 1990s, however, a once-in-a-generation talent arrived, giving France its first shot at a women’s medal in 40 years. You’d think France would be thrilled, right? But Surya Bonaly was not the skating talent they’d expected: eccentric, defiant, athletic – and black. In the age of “ice princesses”, Surya was an anomaly, and the figure skating world feared the kind of future she represented. Frustrated at every turn, she faced disappointment after disappointment until at last, with the whole world watching, Surya decided to make figure skating history – on her own terms.
Episode 62: “Surya Bonaly”
Surya Bonaly at the Olympics:
1992 Albertville Olympics:
1994 Lillehammer Olympics:
1998 Nagano Olympics:
Transcript
Bienvenue and welcome back to The Land of Desire. I’m your host, Diana, and I’m really excited about this month’s episode, because I get to combine two of my biggest passions: French history, and women’s figure skating of the 1990s. Like so many other Millennial babies, I grew up watching the sport at what was maybe its peak: Kristi Yamaguchi, Oksana Baiul, Tara Lipinski, Michelle Kwan, Nancy Kerrigan, and more. It was a golden age and the whole world was watching – especially at the Winter Olympics. Every four years, everyone dropped what they were doing to watch the so-called “ice princesses” take to the rink with their axels, toe loops, and spins that seemed to go on forever. But there’s one skater whose talent was a bit harder to measure. Those who watched her skate at the time still remember what she accomplished, but she isn’t often included in the highlight reels, and the jury is still out on her career’s narrative arc. Was she a fierce innovator who focused on athleticism over grace? Or was she simply a poor skater with an attitude problem? Was she the victim of institutional racism, or just ahead of her time? This week, we’re reexamining the unusual and uncertain legacy of one of France’s greatest female figure skaters ever, Surya Bonaly.
“She lacks artistic refinement. She’s a sore loser. History will forget her unless she wins the worlds or Olympics. She and her omnipresent mother flub the big things, and they evince godawful taste in hairstyling, costumes, music and choreography. Plus, they don’t play the game by kowtowing to judges and skating officials.” So wrote Sports Illustrated, and if you asked 100 people to identify the figure skater in question, I think 99 of them would give the same answer: Tonya Harding. But they would be wrong: the skater in question was Surya Bonaly, then a 22 year old skater and France’s greatest hope for an Olympic figure skating medal in over 40 years. Surya and Tonya had a lot in common, it’s true: they both came from lower income, eccentric families, they were famous for their powerful moves – and awkward landings, and they were definitely cultural outsiders in the rich, white world of women’s figure skating. Tonya Harding’s career has received a lot of attention in the last few years, leading other 90s figure skating fans asking, “Where’s the story of Surya?” But when Sports Illustrated wrote those words in 1995, nobody knew how Surya’s story would end. “Depending on the beholder,” the article went, “Surya Bonaly is the most gifted and athletic figure skater in the world today, or she is a unique but squandered talent whose career seems destined to stall at also-ran status if she fails.” Nobody knew if Surya was destined for greatness – or obscurity.
In 1985, a small crowd gathered on the ice of the Jean-Bouin ice rink in Nice. Didier Gaihauguet surveyed the men and women in front of him as he began preparing drills and exercises for the day. While the skaters may have impressed and awed local spectators with their smooth warmup laps around the rink, Didier was frustrated. This was the French national team, gearing up for another year on the European championship circuit, and once again, it looked to be a disappointing bunch. While France boasted a number of champion ice dancers and pairs skaters, women’s figure skating was not exactly a source of national pride. Worldwide interest in women’s figure skating seemed to get bigger every year, but attention always focused on the biggest and best competitors: the United States, Japan, and of course, the Soviet Union. The team assembled in front of him had grace and talent, but they lacked spirit. He struggled to push them beyond their limits. While he might see a few medals from the European Championships, maybe a few competitors at Worlds, Didier had few hopes for the next Winter Olympics, three years in the future. While he put his skaters through their paces, a young girl carefully stepped onto the ice. This little girl was about ten years old, with dark black skin and lively eyes. As the girl made her way onto the ice, a woman from the stands motioned to Didier. Suzanne Bonaly, she introduced herself. My daughter wants to practice, but your group is taking up every space on the ice. Could she have an hour on the ice this afternoon? Amused, Didier watched the girl skate around the ice. Faster and faster, the young girl lapped the ice rink, while Suzanne told Didier her daughter’s story.
In 1974, Suzanne and Georges Bonaly adopted an eight month old girl from an orphanage here in Nice. Suzanne, a PE teacher, and Georges, a draftsman, were eccentric, bohemian types who’d spent the past few years road tripping all the way from Europe to India. They named their daughter “Surya” – Sanskrit for “the sun”. The three moved into a ramshackle shepherd’s hut in the outskirts of Nice, without running water or electricity, where they raised Surya and 26 goats. “I lived in the countryside,” Surya recalled in an interview. “We did not have television. ..We made our own honey, and our own goat cheese. I loved this life so much.” Surya had responsibilities on the farm, but she also had freedom to pursue wide ranging interests, including the flute, diving lessons, and above all, gymnastics. Surya was uncommonly talented for her age, and by the time she and her mother drove up to the skating rink that day, she’d already participated in junior championship tumbling competitions. But her gymnastics training carried over onto the ice: she was strong, she was flexible, and she was fearless. While gymnasts practiced over padded mats, Surya had no hesitation about attempting the same moves over rock-solid ice. In 1984, Surya first became interested in figure skating after watching the great German skater Katarina Witt perform at the Sarajevo Winter Olympics. Inspired by Witt’s routine, Surya attempted a double Axel at the age of nine, and promptly broke her ankle. She’d spent the whole summer in a cast, Suzanne said, practicing her flute. Today would be one of Surya’s first days back on the ice.
As Didier watched, the young girl gathered speed, spinning and leaping across the rink. Suddenly, to his astonishment, Surya leapt into the air and attempted another double Axel. While it was unsuccessful, Didier was stunned to see a little girl try a double Axel on a broken ankle caused by another double Axel! This was the kind of spirit his team needed, he knew. “France,” he recalled in a recent documentary, “had no hard fighters.” Didier leaned in towards Suzanne. The French national team would be here practicing for the next three weeks. Surya should come and practice with them. It was an absurd request to make of a young girl, but Surya and Suzanne showed up every single day, and by the time the national team left Nice, Surya landed a double Axel and a triple jump. Didier told the Bonalys in no uncertain terms: move to Paris. Train with me. You could be great.
As Surya remembers, it wasn’t an easy decision. She was still training in gymnastics, still learning how to fence, still enjoying the bucolic splendor of her countryside home. But the next year, Surya made the decision: The Bonaly family was moving to Paris. By the age of 12, Surya was training with the national team. “The first two years were rough,” she remembers. “The reception in Paris was not nice, and the other girls envied me a bit because I knew how to do a lot of different sports. But when you’re stuck in one gear, you can’t shift out of it.”
In 1987, a curious sight began popping up at European figure skating competitions. Making their way through the parking lot, figure skating fans saw a raggedy RV, covered in dirt. Sometimes the door would open, and out would a hippie man and woman with matching long grey hair, a young black pre-teen girl and five enormous, slobbering Great Danes. Surya, her parents and their traveling menagerie drove all over the continent, recalling her parents’ road trips around the world. But as Surya’s talent grew, there were more and more competitions to win. Under Didier training and Suzanne’s watchful eye, Surya ascended through the ranks of French figure skating until in 1989, she made her debut at the World Championships. The media took one look at Surya’s skin, her RV full of Great Danes and her bravery on the ice and knew they had a great story on their hands. But exactly what story did they have?
Who was Surya Bonaly? According to TV and radio, this young phenom apparently traced her origins back to the tiny island of Reunion, near Madagascar. Far away from ice and snow, Surya had been born on a beach full of coconuts. After the Bonalys adopted her, Surya’s life became a bizarre bohemian experiment: she ate a macrobiotic diet, including bird seed. She never cut her hair. If you’re thinking these rumors sound suspiciously racist, like the exotic fantasies of some weird white person…you’re not wrong. These stories were fed to the press by none other that Surya’s coach, Didier Gauhauguet. “I made them up,” he told Sports Illustrated a few years later. “They wrote that Reunion thing like crazy. Because that’s what you want to hear, no? It’s a good story. We did that together, me and Suzanne. We said Surya came from Nice, but her biological parents came from Reunion. Really, we had no idea.” A white coach telling reporters that the only black woman in figure skating was born on a beach full of coconuts is some truly old school, Josephine Baker in a banana skirt racism, and if you think people have written whole theses on this media moment, you are correct. But whatever the rumors swirling about her ethnic heritage, Surya controlled the narrative that year by taking 10th place at Worlds. Her career was about to explode – and everything seemed to be within her reach.
By the dawn of the 1990s, Surya Bonaly was the most exciting female figure skater in France. She was sensational in every way, her routines offered a spectacle for the eyes, with brightly colored costumes inspired by the sprinter Flo-Jo, and routines that offered more jumps and tricks than anyone else’s. In 1990, Surya moved into ninth place at Worlds, and the next year she made it to fifth. In 1991, Surya took home the gold medal at the European Championships, the first French woman in history to do so. She was only getting better with every major competition, and the biggest test of her career was around the corner.
In 1992, France couldn’t believe its luck: the best female figure skater the nation had produced in decades arrived just in time to compete in the first Olympics hosted on French soil since 1968. It had been 40 years since a French woman had had a real shot at an Olympic figure skating medal. It seemed like destiny: Surya was the hometown hero. She was given the honor of taking the athlete’s oath on behalf of all the competitors during the Opening Ceremony. Spectators crowded the stands during her practice sessions, where she tested out tricks too risky to be allowed in regular competition. To the crowd’s shock and delight, during one of her warmup routines, Surya dug her toe into the ice and flipped backwards, her head only inches from the ice. She’d been performing the trick at exhibitions for years, a legacy from her days as a champion gymnast. It was easy to do the same backflip on the ice as she’d done on the mat, so long as she didn’t think about what might happen if it went terribly wrong. And from the judges podium, it almost did – Surya performed her backflip only a few feet away from the Japanese star, Midori Ito. A referee skated over to Surya and told her in no uncertain terms, she was not allowed to do a backflip during warmups ever again – and why should she, when backflips had been banned from competition since 1976?
Why were backflips banned from competition? It depends on who you ask. Some say it’s just too damn dangerous. Others say it was too tacky, turning world-class figure skating into a Vegas act. Another reigning theory argues that all figure skating jumps must be landed on one foot, and all the backflips performed in competition before the ban had been landed, with a bit of a thud, on both feet. Regardless of the reasons, Surya’s backflip drew cheers from the crowds and glares from the judges. As the referee said to the New York Times that day, “Of course it was intimidation. Whether it was intentional or not, I don’t know. But these people have enough problems putting their mental state in order without this kind of bashing going on.” Even without a backflip, however, Surya’s program seemed like a knockout – eight triples, more than anybody else on the ice, and the ace up her sleeve: a quadruple toe loop. No woman had ever landed a quad in competition. But the same little girl willing to attempt a double Axel on a broken ankle was now an 18 year old determined to make figure skating history. But could she pull it off in competition? And more importantly – was it enough to please the judges?
On February 22, 1992 Surya prepared to step out onto the rink. As she prepared her body and mind, Didier warned her: don’t do the quad. You’re not ready, it’s too risky.” But Surya was determined. Everyone favored the two American champions, Kristi Yamaguchi and Nancy Kerrigan, who combined technical precision with grace and elegance. When it came to Surya’s own routines, she knew she lacked a certain finesse, that special something, what the French might call a je ne sais quoi. Like Tonya Harding, warming up on the sidelines, Surya knew the judges looked down on her idiosyncratic background, her eccentric parents, her outsider status. The judges hated her Flo-Jo inspired costumes, so to please them, Surya wore a beautiful costume designed by none other than French designer Christian Lacroix. No one could fault her appearance – except, of course, there was the unspoken question of her skin. Though Surya has always denied she was treated unfairly because of her race, she was without doubt the only black figure skater in elite competition, in a sport famously predominated by white, rich girls from good families. Under the scoring system of the time, everyone was graded out of 6, regardless of the difficulty of their routine. There was nothing to say that doing eight pretty good toe loops instead of seven would earn her higher scores than someone else doing six toe loops to perfection. The only way she’d have a shot at the medal, Surya figured, was to knock the judges socks off. If she landed the quad in competition, she’d be too good to ignore.
Rattled from her argument with Didier, Surya sought out her other most important mentor: Suzanne. But to her surprise, the officials said no. “I was very disturbed,” Surya told reporters that night, “that my mother was not allowed by the ice. I am used to seeing her. I lost my concentration.” That night, Surya launched into the air, rotating into a quad – and landed only a triple. She didn’t realize it at first, raising her fists in victory while Didier jumped for joy. But the judges were already docking her for underrotation when suddenly she fell on one of her loops. Then another. Attempting a triple lutz, she landed with a clumsy thud on both feet. Surya skated her way out of contention. Kristi Yamaguchi clinched gold. If Surya’s warmup backflip had indeed been meant to intimidate Midori Ito, the move backfired: Ito took home silver, while Surya left empty-handed. The hometown hero was a flop. The 18 year old Surya was devastated, and before long, she parted ways with Didier. The coach who had discovered her, nurtured her, and trained her all the way to the Olympics had now let her down, she thought. He’d shaken her nerves at the worst possible moment. She needed a change.
Surya acquired a new coach, the well-respected André Brunet, in time for the 1992 World Championships in Oakland. For the past three years she’d climbed steadily up this ladder: tenth, ninth, then fifth place – but that year, she capped off her disastrous Olympics appearance with an 11 place finish at the World Championships, her worst ever. Within a week, André resigned, declaring the experiment a failure, and leveling blame at one culprit in particular: Suzanne Bonaly.
“With Mrs. Bonaly,” Brunet told the press rather ungallantly, “work is impossible. We cannot move forward with two coaches.” Every day, Suzanne and Surya had been an inseparable duo, with Suzanne contradicting and countermanding Brunet’s coaching. “Her mother didn’t leave her alone for a moment during the warm-up” at Oakland, Brunet declared. That month, an editorial in L’Humanité commented with a sign, “Brunet only confirms, alas, what we knew for a long time: the entourage of the champion of Champigny-sur-Marne is decidedly not compatible with a life of an elite athlete, competing for the highest steps of the podium.” Brunet’s criticism was harsh, but hopeful. In remarks which would be repeated over and over by others in the years ahead, Brunet warned his ex-student: “Her possibilities are immense, we can make her a great champion. But you have to work with professionals, and with no one else.”
Following Brunet’s swift departure, Suzanne Bonaly assumed the role of her daughter’s full-time coach. Things seemed to be turning around – in 1993, Surya Bonaly won her third straight gold medal at the European Championships, and consistently landed more combinations than her competition. That year, at the World Championships in Prague, Surya faced off against the Ukranian champion, Oksana Baiul. Surya performed a program of exceptional difficulty, landing all seven triples, along with multiple complex combination jumps. Oksana Baiul delivered a beautiful routine, but a simpler one, with only five triples and no combination jumps. But once again, Surya’s technical bravado lost out to elegance – Oksana took home the gold. Still, Surya achieved 2nd place, her highest ranking yet – and her timing was perfect. In a move that left the figure skating world scrambling, the International Olympic Committee moved the Winter Games, so they would no longer happen the same year as the summer games. Instead of being held in 1996, the next Winter Olympics would take place in just a few months, in Norway. Didier Gailhaguet, Surya’s former coach, was now the director of the French national Olympic team, and he warned Surya again – leave your mother behind, or you’ll repeat history.
In 1994, the entire world focused its attention on women’s figure skating. At the beginning of the year, Tonya Harding’s idiot husband paid someone to attack her rival, Nancy Kerrigan. The drama was irresistible: America’s ice queen crying “Why me?” while the rough and tough Tonya pleaded innocence. Back in France, however, the focus was on Surya – could she pull it off this time? Could a French woman actually take home a figure skating medal for the first time in half a century? After Tonya Harding exited in disgrace during the preliminary round, there were three skaters in medal contention: Nancy, Oksana and Surya. The LA Times declared Oksana and Surya “both eminently capable of winning her country’s first gold medal in this event.” But the same criticism that dogged Tonya Harding attached itself to Surya – they were too gauche, too athletic, too much. As the New York Times noted, “the International Skating Union prefers a more traditional, classical style of skating to an athletic style. That approach would seem to favor the elegance and completeness of Kerrigan and Baiul over the muscular jumping of Harding and Bonaly.”
Sure enough, Oksana and Nancy skated the routines of their lives: all long limbs and elegant hands, beautifully executed jumps and swelling violin music. Surya failed twice at the triple Lutz, her signature move, and knew at once she’d once again knocked herself off the podium. She left Lillehammer in fourth place. It was a crushing blow – Surya had been a real gold medal contender, until all of a sudden she wasn’t. In the month between the Winter Games and that year’s World Championship, Surya retreated from the public eye, practicing in a private rink and avoiding the press. But while Surya trained, the French press went into overdrive. The media wanted blood, and they knew who they wanted it from. Once again, a narrative took shape around an old villain: Suzanne Bonaly.
As early as 1992, following Surya’s disappointment at the 1992 Games, the media bestowed a nickname on Suzanne Bonaly: “The Dragon Lady”. The Seattle Times wrote shortly after Surya’s disappointing routine that Suzanne was “the ultimate stage mother, and has made enemies in every camp from the French press to her daughter’s own coach.” Long after Surya and Didier parted ways, Didier continued to trash Suzanne in the press. As he oh-so-helpfully told newspapers before her skate in the 1994 Olympics, “Suzanne is putting a lot of pressure on her kid. Sometimes too much pressure. It is stupid. It doesn’t really help her. It has been a problem the last two years…we need not to have the mother in the way.” He may have been right, but it wasn’t exactly the gallant thing for an ex-mentor to do. By the time of Surya’s fourth place finish in Lillehammer, Suzanne was a dreaded figure in the French figure skating community. The official French figure skating federation searched for yet another new coach for Surya, and almost everyone they approached said they’d be honored to coach the promising young star – as long as her mom butted out. But Surya refused. Once again, Didier was available for media commentary that nobody asked for: “It’s a scandal. I have seen Suzanne yell. Miss the program, she slaps her. Hits her in the face with hockey sticks.” Physical abuse? That’s a hell of a claim to make, and Surya was torn between outrage and laughter when asked about it. “You’re joking right? This is NOT true!” No one else has ever corroborated Didier’s accusations, Surya has always denounced them, and considering his long history of flamboyant lies, I’m inclined to believe her. “Though we are like two,” she protested, “we are really like one.” Even in the gossip circles, Didier’s comments seemed to have crossed a line. “Gailhauguet’s remarks were extraordinary” Sports Illustrated wrote, “coming from a man who should be willing to do anything to ensure Bonaly’s success.” But why help Surya when you could attack her mom in the press? One particularly hysterical French TV show accused Suzanne of using coded sign language to override the instructions of Surya’s coaches. But time and again, Surya defended her mother, and insisted on her close presence.
Meanwhile, Suzanne defended herself from Didier, the press and the world of women’s figure skating. In 1992, when she was first dubbed the “Dragon Lady” Suzanne didn’t understand what she was doing wrong. Surya, after all, had only just turned 18. Surya was young, under a lot of pressure, and was always the only black person in a room, ever. Wasn’t it natural for a mother to want to be a constant source of support for her daughter during vulnerable moments?
American journalists noted that Suzanne was maybe guilty of nothing more than being a hippie. “In a materialistic, high-fashion world where even the Zamboni driver wears a tuxedo, Suzanne Bonaly prefers blue jeans and a face unadorned by makeup.” Perhaps the biggest sin of all to the French hearts and minds? Suzanne and the entire Bonaly family were vegetarians. Surya’s father defended his wife in the press: “Everyone criticizes her for being too present, but is she her mother? Yes or no? Do you think that other coaches are not that present? Ask other skaters what their life is like and you will see that they are never left alone.” Just as Tonya attracted attention for her chain-smoking, rough-edged mother, Surya’s career was often overshadowed by the obsession with her Zen-minded, bohemian mom. As Surya departed from the Olympic village, she was already looking towards the 1994 World Championships. This time, she decided, things would be different. Much like Tonya Harding had done a few years earlier, Surya vowed to give the judges whatever they wanted. If they wanted graceful, she’d give them graceful. If they wanted demure and feminine, she’d given them demure and feminine. Only a few weeks earlier, Surya watched from the stands as Oksana Baiul, Nancy Kerrigan and Chen Lu took home Olympic medals. Exhausted and triumphant, all three medalists opted not to compete in the World Championships halfway around the world in Chiba, Japan. To Surya’s eyes, no one stood between her and the gold medal now.
In Chiba, Surya skated to perfection. She gave up on her most muscular, powerful movements, including the quad. No backflips, ever. In perhaps the most obvious moment of racial subjugation in her career, Surya cut off her signature thick braid, because the judges didn’t like it. Her routine was clean, a traditional combination of well executed jumps and graceful transitions. She nailed the triple lutz, and no fewer than six triples. Her scores ticked in, ranging from 5.5 to 5.9 out of 6. Surya was tied with the hometown favorite: Yuka Sato. She’d done everything she could, she’d landed her jumps, she’d adapted her style, her clothes, even her hair, and now everything came down to a tie-breaker vote.
It was 5-4.
Surya lost.
Could it have ever gone another way? Yuka Sato was the local pride and joy. She was also the “right kind” of skater. Every piece of sports journalism from 1994 describes Surya’s competition as though they were genetically predisposed to victory. In February, during the European Championships, the New York Times had called Oksana Baiul “innately graceful” while criticizing Surya’s “artistic weakness” – and this was describing a competition that Surya won. “Grace” was something Oksana Baiul was simply born with, gifted at birth, rather than something Oksana Baiul presumably trained very, very hard to obtain. If “grace” was innate, there was simply no way that someone like Surya would obtain it, and oh boy, do I wonder why they might think that. Now, Yuka Sato was praised and arbitrarily awarded a gold medal after performing an easier routine than Surya’s.
Surya had had enough. During the awards ceremony, she stood next to the podium rather than on it. When she was bestowed the silver medal, she quickly removed it, at which point the stadium erupted with boos. Mobbed by reporters on her way back to the locker rooms, Surya protested: “It’s not right…I don’t know what I have to do. It’s crazy.” To a world which had just gone through an exhausting year of ice princess drama, the protest was nothing more than a temper tantrum – or worse. Surya’s protests brought more comparisons with Tonya Harding, who was then pleading guilty to hindering prosecution, as though protesting a judging decision was somehow comparable with assault. The news articles were dripping with racial dogwhistles, including this astonishingly offensive quote from the Associated Press, which I will repeat in full because you won’t believe it otherwise:
“More training money means…you don’t have to be well-heeled to participate.” said Michael Rosenberg, an agent who represents top figure skaters. “These changes are bringing more “diversity” to the sport…’The sport of figure skating has a higher percentage of well-educated, intelligent, nice people from nice families in it…With the big TV money and big federation money, that means a broader spectrum of people in it. There will be kooks, rebels, interesting people.”
Here that? Figure skating used to be for well-educated, intelligent people from nice families before you people got into it. Here’s hoping someone accidentally threw a skate at that guy’s head somewhere along the way.
After her protest at the 1994 Worlds, Surya’s future was cloudy. She considered dropping out and turning pro. She picked up her backflips during practice again, getting them ready for the pro exhibition circuit, where she might dazzle the crowds with the so-called “showbiz move” the judges hated so much. In 1995, Surya won her fifth straight European championship despite having a broken right toe – an achievement which went mostly unnoticed in a country which had never won a European championship ever before Surya came along. At the moment Sports Illustrated published its article about Surya and her “unique but squandered talent”, she stepped up her training in preparation for the World Championships. For the third year in a row, Surya had a real chance at gold. And for the third year in a row, she came in second place. For the third year in a row, Surya lost by one judge, and one tenth of a point. It was so arbitrary. All of the attention that year went to a young breakout star, Michelle Kwan, who drew standing ovations and column inches despite coming in fourth place. None of the articles say anything about Surya’s program, only mentioning the fact that she accepted her silver medal with a smile this time. Michelle Kwan received a new moniker: the future of figure skating. Only a few years after she’d launched her elite career, Surya was fading into the past.
The following season marked the beginning of the end. For the first time in her life, Surya came in second at the European Championships, and fifth at the World Championships. The next year, Surya tore her achilles tendon during a training session. Unable to walk for four months, Surya resolved to train on one foot. The figure skating federation didn’t even want to send her to the European championships, but Surya managed to argue her way on, where she had a 9th place finish. In 1997, she didn’t even go to the World Championships. As Surya looked at the the 1998 season, and the upcoming Winter Olympics in Nagano, she knew it was her last chance, her swan song. This time, she was going to compete on her terms.
Armed with two new coaches, Surya built her way back from injury and managed to qualify for one final Olympic games by the skin of her teeth. On her way to Nagano, Surya knew she didn’t have any chance at a medal. She was too injured, too notorious, and now, at the age of 24, she was too old. Everyone understood Nagano would be a showdown between the two teen sensations – Michelle Kwan and Tara Lipinski. As the LA Times put it so delicately, skaters like Surya “have no real chance for the top prize but are invited along anyway to help pad out the evening’s entertainment, like old-timers’ games held before the Dodgers host the Giants.” Nevertheless, during the short program, Surya landed a beautiful routine. She was the only woman on the ice that night to land a triple-triple combination. But once again, the judges seemed to find faults, and she didn’t receive any scores higher than a 5.3. How did she get such low scores after landing one of the hardest routines? “Because I’m French and they prefer other ones? I don’t know…” Surya shrugged her shoulders, wearily. “After 10 years, I am used to it. I’m tired of crying, crying, crying.” Surya went into the final night of competition in 6th place. Friday night, the long program, would be the final amateur program of her career.
[CUE THE FOUR SEASONS BY VIVALDI IF I CAN]
Wearing a sparkling ice blue costume and the thick braid of her early career, Surya stepped out onto the ice to the sound of her signature tune, Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons”. As millions of viewers watched around the world, Surya slid across the ice one last time, spinning, stretching, gliding and leaping into the air. She was a little clumsy that night, her old foe ‘gracefulness’ sometimes deserting her when she needed to move within a combination. Her right leg, so recently recovered, throbs with pain only a few seconds into her routine. The crowd was lackluster, offering tepid applause. Early into the program, unable to overcome the pain of her weak Achilles tendon, Surya fell during what was supposed to be her signature move, the triple Lutz. But she shook it all off and continued skating: after tonight, she would have a new signature. After more than ten years of competition, Surya knew she would never beat the Michelle Kwans and Nancy Kerrigans at their own game. She wasn’t graceful, and perhaps she couldn’t be, perhaps that had been denied the moment she’d been born black, or the moment her mom showed up to competition in a dog-filled RV, or the moment someone first murmured the word “coconuts” to the press. But maybe someday, another day, the world would be different. Maybe figure skating would be different. Maybe there would be room for a skater like Surya: strong, muscular, fearless. Maybe the rules would be different someday, and more women would be able to skate the way Surya did. Just in case that day came, Surya knew, she wanted to be the first. With thirty seconds left in her program, skating backwards across the rink, Surya dug her toe pick into the ice. Ignoring the pain in her legs, launching herself into the air, Surya flung herself backward, her head sweeping inches away from the ice, before landing, with confidence, courage, and yes, grace, on one defiant left foot. It was a milestone in figure skating history, broadcast live around the world: the first one foot landing backflip. Was it banned? Yes, but maybe one day it wouldn’t be. The judges had said it was showbiz – well maybe she was showbiz. The judges had said it was dangerous – well, didn’t that come with the territory? The judges had said it wasn’t a jump if she landed on both feet – well, fine, she’ll land it on one. Sailing around the rink as the crowd leapt to their feet, Surya smiled wide, before drawing her body into one last infinite spin. Slowing to a finish, Surya raised her hands high over her head, as flowers rained down on the ice.
Resting on the sidelines between her coach and her mother, Surya watched the scores roll in. She’d hoped that maybe, maybe if she landed her backflip on one foot, the judges would count it, but they rejected the backflip and deducted points from her score. That day, the French judge was approached by another delegate, who complained that Surya had behaved unacceptably. The judge replied, “Ah, but she did so well, for all these years.” Consigned to tenth place, Surya shrugged her shoulders. At the end of the Nagano Games, she announced her retirement from amateur competition. She was done playing the judges game. It was time to turn pro, and do the kind of skating she wanted to do – the kind of skating the world wanted to see.
When I, Tonya came to theaters in 2017 – a terrific movie by the way, two thumbs up – Surya’s name began popping up in thinkpieces abou the film. Surely if we’re going to be out here rehabilitating the reputations of misunderstood underdogs, we could start with the one who isn’t famous for maybe kneecapping her opponent? Why not focus on Surya, whose most infamous career highlight was not an act of violence, but an act of courage, when she channeled her frustration and desperation into a moment so transcendent, no one has ever attempted it since. What’s more, while Tonya fled the world of figure skating in disgrace, Surya’s transition into exhibition skating simply launched a new phase of her life. She spent 15 years as a consummate professional, touring with Champions On Ice and performing in front of crowds at Madison Square Garden. On the exhibition circuit, Surya’s so-called showbiz moves delighted audiences, and her colleagues estimate she completed over 500 of her infamous backflips over the course of her career. Over the years, America’s frenzy for figure skating died down, and there wasn’t as much money to be had doing gigs like Champions On Ice. At the age of 40, Surya performed her final backflip on ice, and then hung up her skates for good.
While Surya dazzled the crowds, changes were brewing back in the world of French figure skating. After ten years of suffering under arbitrary, inscrutable judging, Surya got an indirect form of revenge when her old enemies ended up in a scandal of Olympic proportions.
In the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, the first since Surya’s backflip into retirement, in the pairs figure skating final, the Canadian competitors outskated the Russians so much that their victory was declared before they’d even finished their routine. When the judges announced their scores, everyone was outraged – the TV commentators, the crowds, even world leaders. Despite performing a more difficult routine, the Canadians lost by one judge, one fraction, because of the artistry of their routine – a familiar story to anyone who’d followed Surya’s career. This time, though, everyone smelled something fishy. Before long, the French judge broke down. “It was a deal with the Russians!” she said. She’d been pressured to vote for the Russian pair to win. In exchange, the Russian judge would vote for the French favorites in that week’s ice dancing finals, giving France a shot at a figure skating medal. But the most shocking part of the judge’s confession was her revelation of the person pressuring her to make the deal: none other than the president of French figure skating, Surya’s old coach, good old Didier Gailhaguet.
After the Olympics, Didier and the French judge resigned in disgrace. He was stripped of his leadership of the French ice sports federation and barred from the 2006 Winter games. Somehow, he managed to get himself reelected into the same presidency in 2007, where he’s been ever since. But in 2020, French figure skating dissolved into a new scandal. Dozens of French skaters stepped forward to accuse their coaches of abuse, and once again, Didier was assumed to be at the heart of the coverup. Didier resigned in disgrace again this summer, though he is now suing the French Ministry of Sports for lost wages. It remains to be seen whether anything can pry that barnacle out of figure skating for good.
In the fallout of the 2002 judging scandal, The International Skating Union worked frantically to repair trust in their sport by introducing a new scoring system. In the new scoring system, arbitrary decisions about ‘gracefulness’ would be scrapped in favor of a points system that rewarded skaters for attempting technically complex routines. Lots of traditional fans worried this spelled the end of the sport: will we never have elegant skaters like Michelle Kwan again? Will figure skating turn into glorified tumbling-on-ice? Wherever you stood on the matter, one thing was clear: Surya had been ahead of her time. The new system favored everything Surya was good at – athleticism, bravery, innovation, and disfavored everything Surya was bad at – “innate gracefulness”. We can only wonder how Surya’s career might have turned out if she’d only started a few years later.
But Surya herself has no regrets. Now splitting her time between Las Vegas and Minnesota, Surya is a coach and mentor. She continues to give terrific interviews and makes guest appearances on podcasts, where she reexamines her own career with the accumulated wisdom of the years. Surya is now engaged to Pete Biver, a five time U.S. Nationals gold medalist pairs skater, who figured out an excellent way to her heart – start by winning over Suzanne. In the past few years, Surya has been busy traveling the world, undergoing surgery to treat years of accumulated skating injuries, and even accepting a stint on France’s Dancing With The Stars. Last year, Surya got an hour in the spotlight with an episode of the Netflix series, Losers, where new generations discovered her backflip for the first time. In 2019, Surya received the Legion of Honor. She remains the only French individual skater to have won the European Championship, and with her 3 consecutive silvers, she still has more World Championship medals than any French individual skater, ever. Surya Bonaly remains the only skater in history to land a one-footed backflip in competition.
Thanks for listening to The Land of Desire! For those about to disappear into a YouTube wormhole watching womens’ figure skating from the 90s, I salute you. I also really recommend watching Surya’s episode on Netflix’s miniseries, Losers. Surya is active on social media, and I get a kick out of her Instagram account. I am proud to say that I think I can bake a better madeleine than she can, but in just about every other aspect of life, I think it’s safe to say she is beating us all. Living well is the best revenge, n’est-ce pas? Keep an eye out for the next edition of The Land of Desire newsletter, and until next time, au revoir!
Sources:
- “Surya And The Dragon Lady: France’s Skating Soap Opera” Jere Longman, The Seattle Times, January 12, 1992.
- “French investigation exposes more than 20 skating coaches” Associated Press, August 3, 2020.
- “Patinage: Didier Gailhaguet, attaque le ministère des sports en justice” Le Monde, June 12, 2020.
- “French ice federation boss steps down amid sexual abuse scandal” Reuters, February 8, 2020.
- “Les bons mots de Georges Bonaly, père de Surya” L’Humanité, February 25, 1994
- bonaly-sans-backflip-has-the-jump-on-ito.html">“ALBERTVILLE; Bonaly, Sans Backflip, Has the Jump on Ito” Michael Janofsky, The New York Times, February 21, 1992.
- “French skater comes close in bid for first quad toe loop” Toledo Blade, February 22, 1992.
- “SURYA S’ECLIPSE” L’Humanité, March 31, 1992.
- xpm-1994-02-24-sp-26759-story.html">“LILLEHAMMER / ’94 WINTER OLYMPICS: After Harding Stumbles, Baiul, Bonaly Contend” Mike Downey, Los Angeles Times, February 24, 1994.
- olympics-a-pause-in-scandal-now-they-will-skate.html">“WINTER OLYMPICS; A Pause in Scandal: Now They Will Skate” Jere Longman, The New York Times, February 23, 1994.
- skating-cheers-for-sato-of-japan-tears-for-bonaly-of-france.html">“FIGURE SKATING; Cheers for Sato of Japan; Tears for Bonaly of France” Associated Press, March 27, 1994.
- “Figure skating’s bad-girl star Surya Bonaly makes new life in Minnesota” Susan Du, City Pages, September 7, 2016.
- of-style-for-european-champions.html">“Questions Of Style for European Champions” Christopher Clarey, The New York Times, February 6, 1994.
- xpm-1994-03-27-sp-38975-story.html">“Silver Isn’t Enough for Bonaly: Figure skating: She objects to decision giving Sato the gold medal. Kwan finishes eighth with strong freestyle performance.” Randy Harvey, Los Angeles Times, March 27, 1994.
- “Figure Skating Has Earned Some Low Marks in 1994” Wendy E. Lane, Associated Press, April 2, 1994.
- xpm-1995-03-12-sp-41837-story.html">“Young Kwan Learns Older Is Better in World Championships” Mike Penner, Los Angeles Times, March 12, 1995.
- “Chen is on top of world; Bobek falls into third” Tampa Bay Times, March 12, 1995.
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The post 62. Surya Bonaly appeared first on The Land of Desire.
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71. Marie Bonaparte, Part I
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70. Fifth Anniversary! Listener Q&A
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69. The Boy Who Solved Vanilla
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68. Antoine Parmentier & The History of the Potato
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67. Marcel & Celeste, Part II
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66. Marcel & Celeste, Part I
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64. Louis Pasteur and The History of the Vaccine
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63. Jeanne de Clisson and the Black Fleet
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62. Surya Bonaly
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