The Birth of Celebrity Culture in the City of Lights
by
Sarah Sik, Ph.D. Art History
2007
Charles Léandre, La Femme-Torpille,
published in L’Assiette au beurre (4 October 1902).
The power of celebrity is one of the most prominent hallmarks of modern culture, yet the mediacentric industry that captivates the public with stories of stars and scandals is a relatively recent historical
phenomenon. The Birth of Celebrity Culture in the City of Lights examines the print culture of fin-de-siècle
France to highlight a number of the earliest examples of the dynamic intersections of charisma with an era
of mass consumption1 and of caricature with the emergence of the cause célèbre. In examining the
journals that catapulted individuals to the realms of both gloried and scorned legend, issues of gender and
race take on unexpected significance—particularly as figures who were perceived to be the most unFrench, untraditional, or unnatural often became the subjects of the most intense public interest. The
celebrities whose lithographic likenesses plastered the walls of Paris, whose activities and scandals were
eagerly dissected in the popular press, were rarely perceived to conform to traditional gender roles or to
Third Republic models of impeccable citizenry. The cultural imagination of Parisians, as well as the many
foreigners who were drawn to what Walter Benjamin once termed “the capital of the nineteenth century,”2
was transfixed by such visions of loveliness and eccentricity as the actress Sarah Bernhardt, the ballerina
Cléo de Mérode, the Spanish courtesan La Belle Otero, the American dancer Loïe Fuller, and the waspwaisted, Algerian-born singer Polaire, all of whom strayed spectacularly from the boundaries of
conventional French femininity. Furthermore, the two most prominent cause célèbres of the 1890s—the
women’s rights movement and the Dreyfus Affair—centered upon issues that were divisive precisely
because they were perceived as undermining the integrity and (male) military strength of the French nation.
In featuring primary research material drawn from journals including Le Rire, Le Courrier français,
L’Assiette au beurre, L’Art décoratif, Revue illustrée, and L’Illustration, as well as a number of individual
books, this exhibition seeks to advance a twofold understanding of the origins of celebrity culture in fin-desiècle France. In its nascent stages, celebrity culture tended to thrive not upon that which was synecdochic
of the masses, but that which was eccentric and even threatening—figures who were strongly individualistic
and were often perceived to represent values counter to mainstream society. While propelling individual
figures to the realms of legend, however, media-centric celebrity from its inception also tended to erode the
integrity of its subject’s existence—to trade, as Walter Benjamin analyzed of the nature of the mechanically
reproduced image upon which celebrity culture is dependent, “a plurality of copies for a unique existence.”3
While the savvy star could turn the publicity engines to his or her own benefit (as Bernhardt in particular
demonstrated time and again), the image that formed in the cultural imagination was ultimately one over
which the celebrity had little control (a fact that Bernhardt also frequently lamented throughout her life). To
become a legend, the celerity was forced to sacrifice the construction of his or her image to the hands of
the media, which catered, as Bruce Wilshire has observed of the traditional theater, to “persons seeking
diversion in fantasy on a high and artificial level of society.” 4
1
The significance of this meeting of individual and mass forces was suggested by Christopher Pinney in
his comments as chair of a panel entitled, “Gandhi and Culture” at The 35 th Annual Conference on South
Asia (20 October 2006).
2 See: Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1999, pp. 3-26.
3 Walter Benjamin. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” excerpts reproduced in Art
in Theory 1900-1990: an anthology of changing ideas, eds. Charles Harrison & Paul Wood. Oxford;
Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992, p. 514.
4 Bruce Wilshire. Role-Playing and Identity: the limits of theatre as metaphor. Boston: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1981, p. 4.
1
“An Octopus of Innumerable Tentacles”5—Sarah Bernhardt and Modern Celebrity
In 1878 an aerial adventure made by the notoriously free-spirited actress Sarah Bernhardt set off a
maelstrom at the Comédie-Français. Francis Perrin, the director of the prestigious national theater of
France, had spotted a hot-air balloon high above the city of Paris, which, he was informed by a passerby,
contained one of the most popular members of his troupe of actors.6 The fellow onlooker, an acquaintance
of Bernhardt, could not restrain himself from jibing the eminent director. “[L]ook up in the sky,” he quipped.
“There is your star shooting away.”
Perrin, Bernhardt’s friend told her, stormed off in a rage, muttering, “That’s another of her freaks,
but she shall pay for this one.”7 When she returned to the ground, Perrin summoned Bernhardt to his office,
where he smugly informed her that she had been charged a fine of 1,000 francs for leaving the city without
consent.8 Bernhardt recalled in her memoirs that she broke into laughter at the ridiculous judgment, refused
to pay the fine and tendered her resignation.9 While friends and theater members smoothed out the conflict
so that Bernhardt could withdraw her resignation, the event was, in her words, the beginning of the end of
her career at the Comédie-Français.
Fig. 1. Georges Clairin, Illustration from Dans les Nuages, c. 1878.
Rather than allow the conflict to blow over, Bernhardt wrote a short story about the adventure,
illustrated by her good friend Georges Clairin, who had joined her for the balloon ride. The narrative and,
even more so, the illustrations of Dans les nuages (In the Clouds) transfigured the dangerous jaunt from a
much-publicized stunt into an artistic ascent (fig. 1). Rising above the city in the Dona Sol, named after the
5
This phrase was used by Sarah Bernhardt in a lament over the stories printed concerning her in the
press. Bernhardt. The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt: early childhood through the first American tour; and
her novella In the clouds. New York: Peebles Press; Indianapolis: distributed by Bobbs-Merrill, 1977, p.
134.
6 One of Bernhardt’s earliest biographers, Jules Huret, remarked of her popularity in the late 1870s: “She
appeared in Hernani on November 21, 1877, with considerable success. She was now unmistakably the
spoilt child of the public. She had vanquished almost all her adversaries, and practically every theatregoer was an admirer of her talent. She realized this and profited by it.” Jules Huret. Sarah Bernhardt,
trans. G.A. Raper. London: Chapman & Hall, Ld; Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1899, p. 55.
7 Bernhardt. The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt. Op. cit., p. 69
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid., p. 70.
2
role she played in her triumphant performance in Victor Hugo’s Hernani,10 Bernhardt’s serene ascent was a
symbolic, self-orchestrated apotheosis for the frail star who longed to breathe the rarefied air above the
mundane city.
Yet while the jaunt was exhilarating, it was also an apt metaphor for the precarious business of
being a “shooting star.” The illustrations by Clairin reaffirmed many aspects of Bernhardt’s personality that
had been chronicled in the popular press—her daring spirit, her love of staring death in the face, her free
association with male friends, and her refusal to be tethered to convention. Yet it was her very ambitious
nature, second only to her birth to a Jewish mother, that inspired the most stinging bile in the press.
Among Clairin’s illustrations were two elaborate engravings depicting Bernhardt in her artist’s studio,
referring to recent forays the actress had made into the traditionally male realm of the fine arts. Discontent
with the roles she was often offered at the Comédie-Française, Bernhardt had turned in the mid 1870s to
learning sculpture and painting in her free time. Her first sculptural composition After the Storm garnered an
honorable mention at the Salon of 1876, a prize which Bernhardt recalled had made her “wild with joy.”11
Fig. 2. Melandri, photograph of
Sarah Bernhardt in her studio with a
bust of Louise Abbéma (1878).
`
Fig. 3. Georges Clairin, Illustration
from Dans les nuages, c. 1878.
Fig. 4. André Gill, Sarah
Bernhardt as a Sphinx,
published in La lune rousse
(6 October 1878).
NEED PERMISSION TO PRINT.
A series of photographs of Bernhardt in her studio in 1878, self-commissioned from the portraitist
Melandri, attracted far more attention than had her salon entries. Dressed in a white silk pants suit
designed by the couturier Charles Frederick Worth, complete with matching slippers adorned with large silk
bows,12 Bernhardt posed in her atelier with her sculptures as well as at work on a painting (fig. 2). The
concept of Bernhardt challenging male artists in her frilly transvesti suit became the subject of much ridicule
in the popular press. André Gill’s caricature (fig. 4) published shortly after the photographs appeared is
typical of the ridicule to which Bernhardt was subjected. In Gill’s print, Bernhardt appears as a hybrid
creature with the feet of a lascivious lapin, a tail like the monkey named Darwin which she was known to
keep among her menagerie, 13 and a stereotyped Semitic nose protruding from under the classical mask
she wore as an actress. When she finally left the Comédie-Française the following year, Bernhardt
10
Sarah Bernhardt. My Double Life, trans. unknown. London: Peter Owen, 1977, p. 282.
Ibid., p. 278.
12 Carol Ockman, et al. Sarah Bernhardt: the art of high drama. New York: Jewish Museum; New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2005, p. 43.
13 Bernhardt. The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt. Op. cit., p. 93.
11
3
lamented how this image as a silk-swathed man-eater had come to preoccupy the press. She wrote in her
memoirs of the rumors she endured:
It was said that for a shilling anyone might see me dressed as a man; that I smoked huge
cigars leaning on the balcony of my house; that at the various receptions where I gave
one-act plays I took my maid with me as a prompter; that I practiced fencing in my garden,
dressed as a pierrot in white; and that when taking boxing lessons I had broken two teeth
of my unfortunate professor.
Some of my friends advised me to take no notice of these vile attacks, assuring me that
the public could not possibly believe them. They were mistaken, however, for the public
likes to believe bad things about anyone, as they are always more amusing than the good
things.14
While advising her to pay no heed to the press, Bernhardt’s friends rallied to her support. Clairin’s
illustrations for Dans les nuages portrayed her endeavors in the realm of fine arts as sophisticated rather
than absurd, depicting her in her studio contemplating human skulls (fig. 3) similar to a real memento mori
that Victor Hugo had given her inscribed with lines from Hernani.15 Émile Zola similarly stepped forward to
defend her, concluding his biting repartee with the sarcastic comment, “We had better pass a law at once to
forbid the plurality of talents’”16
In 1880 Bernhardt left the Comédie-Française to undertake a series of entrepreneurial theatrical
engagements. Embarking upon world tours and opening a theater in Paris under her name, Bernhardt fully
realized that her continued success depended upon her ability to master the art of keeping the public’s eye.
One savvy reporter quipped that “It is for this reason that the Sarahs of the world let us know little by little
about their dogs, their cats, their parakeets, their monkeys, their house, their salon, their sculpture and their
friends.”17 As a recent exhibition held at the Jewish Museum in New York City has pointed out, Bernhardt
used, and was used by, a new type of “media-based celebrity.”18 Like many other celebrities, Bernhardt
admitted in her memoirs that the first blush of celebrity was as exhilarating as her success at the Salon.
She recalled that at her first interview, she had been “wild with pride and excitement.”19 Her experience with
an invasive press, concerned with detailing, and often grossly mischaracterizing, every aspect of her
personal life, however, led her ultimately to write in her memoirs:
We are victims of the said advertisement. Those who know the joys and miseries of
celebrities when they have passed the age of forty know how to defend themselves. They
are at the beginning of a series of small worries, thunderbolts hidden under flowers, but
they know to hold in check the monster of advertisement. It is a sort of octopus with
innumerable tentacles. It throws out to right and left, in front and behind, its clammy arms,
and gathers in, through its thousand little suckers, all the gossip and slander and praise
14
Ibid., pp. 130-31.
Ockman, et al., Op. cit., p. 13.
16 Huret, Op. cit., p. 74.
17 Quoted in: Mary Louise Roberts. Disruptive Acts: the new woman in fin-de-siècle France. Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 2002, pp. 170-171.
18 Ockman, et al., Op. cit., p. 24.
19 Bernhardt. The memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt. Op. cit., p. 134.
15
4
afloat, to spit out again at the public when it is exuding its black gall. But those who are
caught in the clutches of celebrity at the age of twenty know nothing.20
Despite, and to a large degree due to, her conflicted relationship with the press, throughout the
1880s and ‘90s Bernhardt became the first grande dame of modern celebrity culture. On December 9th,
1896, Paris celebrated “Sarah Bernhardt Day,” granting to the actress a living apotheosis. The status
Bernhardt had achieved as the first modern celebrity was captured in Jean Rameau’s wish, “that the
nineteenth century will be called the century of Sarah Bernhardt, given the extravagant play-acting that
distinguishes our belle époque.”21
Skirt Kicking, Feminism, and the New Woman
Fig. 5. f. von Reznicek,
Saharet, published in
Simplicissimus (1904).
Fig. 6. Gerschel, photograph
of Séverine. Published in
Louis Rogès, L’Affaire Dreyfus:
Cinq semaines à Rennes (1899).
In the spring of 1896, feminists from around the world gathered in Paris for an International
Feminist Congress. 22 Among the assembly that convened on the first day was a thirty-two year old
reporter23 from La Figaro named Marguerite Durand (fig. 7), who had been sent to write an amusing
account of the feminists’ efforts.24 Although Durand did not consider herself a feminist when she attended
the conference,25 she was impressed by what she heard. With a journalistic instinct to make use of mass
media to provide a wider forum for women to express their views, Durand founded a daily newspaper the
following year entitled La Fronde (The Slingshot). 26 Durand remarked in an interview given to another
Parisian daily Gil blas shortly before the first issue of La Fronde appeared that she desired to bring publicity
to the debates she had heard voiced at the Feminist Congress, commenting, “I decided that these women
(who admittedly do not always defend their ideas with great skill) were not known by the public, which was
20
Ibid., pp. 134-35.
Quoted in: Roberts, Op. cit., p. 221.
22 Ibid., p. 23.
23 Jean Rabaut. Marguerite Durand (1864-1936) : ‘La Fronde’ féministe, ou, ‘Le Temps’ en jupons.
Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996.
24 Roberts, Op. cit., p. 59.
25 Ibid., pp. 49; 59.
26 Ibid., p. 74.
21
5
getting false ideas concerning them.”27 While not strictly a feminist paper in the breadth of issues it
covered,28 La Fronde was unique for employing a staff consisting entirely of women, with the exception of
the janitor.29 The frondeuses, as the female reporters and staff were called,30 comprised an impressive
roster of progressive female professionals. Among the high-profile Davidian team Durand assembled to
confront the Goliath of chauvinistic French nationalism, were Séverine, the first female French journalist
(fig. 6); Clémence Royer, the first translator of the writings of Darwin into French;31 Jeanne Chauvin, one of
the first female French lawyers, and Daniel Lesuere, among the first women to be awarded the Légion
d’honneur.32
While the women employed by La Fronde aggressively forged into male professions, Durand was
particular that the conventional trappings of femininity not be cast aside by herself or her staff. Mary Louise
Roberts argues in her study Disruptive Acts: the new woman in fin-de-siècle France that Durand believed
feminine beauty could be used as a powerful political asset. In discussing the history of journalistic critiques
of feminists’ shortcomings, Roberts points out that, “As Durand was quick to notice, these journalists
objected to feminism on primarily aesthetic grounds. They criticized the feminists not for their ideas but for
their unfortunate lack of charm or ‘interest.’”33 Like Sarah Bernhardt who was famous for a repertoire of
tranvesti roles onstage, but cultivated an ultra-feminine image in her everyday life, the social power of
feminized beauty to attract attention was put to use by women such as Durand who sought to expand the
realms of professional, intellectual, and creative possibilities available to them. Durand, also a veteran of
the Comédie-Française34 and a friend of Bernhardt,35 believed in the importance of costume and setting to
the effective delivery of dialogue. In designing the premises of La Fronde, Durand decorated the offices in a
conventionally feminine palette and provided a large powder room in which she expected her staff to
preen.36 Durand’s own beauty was much commented upon, and in 1903 she responded to critics of her
approach with the tart words, “Feminism owes a great deal to my blond hair. I know it thinks the contrary
but it is wrong.’”37
27
Quoted in: Ibid., p. 59.
Ibid., p. 49.
29 Ibid., p. 73.
30 Ibid., p. 5.
31 Joy Dorothy Harvey. “Almost a Man of Genius”: Clémence Royer, feminism, and nineteenth-century
science. Rutgers University Press, 1997, p. 1.
32 This list of frondeuses and the descriptions of their achievements (unless otherwise noted) is taken
from: Roberts, Op. cit., p. 5.
33 Ibid., p. 60.
34 Ibid., p. 49.
35 Ibid, p. 167.
36 Ibid., pp. 66.67.
37 Ibid., p. 49.
28
6
Fig. 7. Walery, photograph of Marguerite Durand.
Stars of the cabaret stage, who often engaged in routines that were not merely feminine but were
also overtly provocative, raise a separate set of questions regarding celebrity and the position of women in
fin-de-siècle France. Roberts argues that the creative outlet as well as the prospect of an independent
living wage offered by the theatrical and journalistic professions were among the chief reasons that women
of the era were particularly drawn to these lines of work. 38 For women whose sexuality was the primary
focus of attention on stage, however, such as the Australian dancer Saharet (fig. 5) or the French diseuse
Yvette Guilbert, one must question whether these female celebrities were made independent or merely
further objectified by their activities. Should these performers be historically rescued from the presumed
pack of bourgeois wolves who populated their audiences? Or did these theatrical spaces validate a
liberated female sexuality that was often suppressed behind layers of feminine corsets and petticoats in
“good” society? There is no simple answer to these questions, although in the majority of their memoirs,
cabaret stars of Montmartre rarely expressed resentment over the sexualized nature of their performances.
La Belle Otero, a Spanish dancer and famous Parisian courtesan, concluded her memoirs with the lines:
“Ever since my childhood, I have been accustomed to see the face of every man who passed me light with
desire. Many women will be disgusted to hear that I have always taken this as homage. Is it so despicable
to be the flower whose perfume people long to inhale, the fruit they long to taste?”39
Yvette Guilbert similarly expressed no discomfort over the bawdy songs she was famous for
singing, but rather complained in her memoirs, The Song of My Life, of having become typecast in the
risqué role. “My repertoire of ‘risky’ songs in my early days brought me fame,” she recalled, “that special,
artificial fame of the footlights, which has its Court, its kings, its queens and princesses, without pedigree or
lineage.”40 Conceiving of herself as an artist and not merely a seductress, Guilbert expressed her mounting
frustration to a close friend:
Now, Kerveguen, you are a sculptor. Would you model the same statuette every day of
your life without ever getting bored? Is it possible for an artist—I don’t say a singer, but an
‘artist’—to limit the joy of her art, and to care more for her success than for her art? For five
38
Ibid., p. 11.
Caroline Otero. My Story. London : A. M. Philpot, 1927, p. 264.
40 Yvette Guilbert. The Song of my Life: my memories. London: G.G. Harrap & Co., 1929, p. 171.
39
7
years I have had a success with risky songs. Five years, my friend! For five years I’ve
been playing the same role, the same character, sexually suggestive. I’m sick of it!41
What cabaret stars such as Guilbert often express resenting the most, like their New Woman counterparts,
was not sexual attention, but rather the inability to escape the confines of roles dictated by the desires of
men.
The Dance Around the Golden Calf
Fig. 8. Adolphe-Léon Willette,
“La Veau d’Or” (“The Golden Calf”) design for a stained glass window at the Chat Noir, c. 1885.
NEED PERMISSION TO PRINT.
The human impulse to read outward appearances as an index of inward qualities, an impulse
honed by the materialism and image consciousness which have characterized the modern age, was not
only directed in fin-de-siècle France to figures of celebrity and toward the fracturing myth of the “eternal
feminine,” but was also intensely focused upon caricatures of French Jews circulated in the press. While
such imagery does not find its origins in fin-de-siècle France, during the Dreyfus Affair entire publications
were viewed as being strongly Dreyfusard (perhaps most notably La Fronde42) or adamantly antiDreyfusard, and by extension anti-Semitic (the sole purpose of the journal Psst … ! founded in 1898 by the
graphic artists Caran d’Ache and Jean-Louis Forain).
Although the cause célèbre that developed around the figure of Dreyfus caused the number of antiSemitic caricatures to spike at the turn of the century, such imagery had been a component of French
cultural consciousness prior to the Dreyfus Affair. Throughout her career, Sarah Bernhardt was the victim
of numerous anti-Semitic attacks in the French press as well as the recipient of violent and degrading
threats from members of the public. In 1873, in the extremely sensitive period immediately following the
Franco-Prussian war, Bernhardt became so outraged at reports disparaging her nationality by claims that
she was German Jewess parading in disguise, that she felt compelled to write publicly to one of her most
vicious assailants:
41
42
Ibid., p. 108.
Roberts, Op. Cit., p. 108.
8
I should be really very much obliged if you would include in your next feuilleton [serial] a
few words to correct the mistake you made in your article on the revival of Dalila at the
Comédie Française. Since that day I have received a perfect avalanche of insulting and
threatening letters. Nothing less than this could have induced me to write to you. I am
French, absolutely French. I proved it during the siege of Paris, and the Society for the
Encouragement of Well-doing awarded me a medal. Would it have done so if I had been a
German? All my family come from Holland. Amsterdam was the birthplace of my humble
ancestors. If I have a foreign accent—which I much regret—it is cosmopolitan, but not
Teutonic. I am a daughter of the great Jewish race, and my somewhat uncultivated
language is the outcome of our enforced wanderings. I hope your sense of justice will lead
you to rectify a mistake which may not only affect my son’s future but is painful to me as a
Frenchwoman. I thank you in advance, and am, etc.,
Sarah Bernhardt.43
Bernhardt’s experiences with the press and public were symptomatic of the xenophobia that
pervaded France during the Third Republic. As France, humiliated at the Battle of Sedan, nursed its
national ego, the urge to prop up a Jewish scapegoat intensified. Throughout the 1880s and ‘90s the press,
along with artists such as Adolphe-Léon Willette (fig. 8), constructed the idea of a wealthy and powerful
Jewish syndicat, leeching the resources of France and infiltrating French culture at the highest echelons.
Roberts argues that throughout this period anti-Semites believed the perceived undermining of nationalist
French values in the theater and in the journalism supporting Dreyfus and the women’s rights movement
could be explained by insidious Jewish financing of these public French arenas.44 When Bernhardt
embarked on her international tour, rumors circulated that she had been backed by the syndicat.45
Similarly, Marguerite Durand was plagued by accusations, which she refused to confirm, that La Fronde
was underwritten by the powerful Jewish banking partnership of Alphonse and Gustave de Rothschild.46
The anti-Semitic feelings that simmered in the press—of which Bernhardt’s experiences throughout
her early career are ample testimony—erupted into a fully developed national crisis in the 1890s with the
explosive trial, retrial, and eventual pardon of Captain Alfred Dreyfus. Dreyfus, a naturalized French Jew
who was falsely accused of selling state papers to Germany, was convicted in December of 1894, publicly
stripped of his military honors, and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island.47 While the military
degradation was a public ceremony (fig. 9) which counted Bernhardt among the spectators,48 the
controversy surrounding the case did not become a full-blown cause célèbre until January 13th, 1898, when
the newspaper L’Aurore published an open letter from Émile Zola to the president of France charging the
military of a cover up, under the bold headline “J’accuse.” The letter divided French society into those who
believed Dreyfus had been grossly wronged and deserved a retrial and those who bitterly opposed him.
The amount of public attention the Affair received in the press is suggested by Félix Valloton in his print
L’Age du Papier (The Age of Paper) for the cover of the January 23rd, 1898 issue of Le Cri de paris which
features Zola’s headline prominently in the foreground (fig. 10).
43
Huret, Op. cit., pp. 36-38.
Roberts, Op. cit., p. 13.
45 Ibid., p. 204.
46 Ibid., p. 120.
47 Eugen Weber, Foreward to The Dreyfus affair: art, truth, and justice, ed. Norman L. Kleeblatt.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987, p. xxv.
48 Roberts, Op. cit., p. 166.
44
9
Fig. 9. “The Degradation of Captain Dreyfus,
Published in
L’Illustration 53.2707 (12 January 1895).
Fig. 10. Félix Vallotton, L’Age du Papier,
(The Age of Paper), published in
Le cri de paris (23 January 1898).
NEED PERMISSION TO PRINT.
Although she had been feted by the Parisian public little more than a year prior to the explosive
publication of Zola’s letter, Sarah Bernhardt believed her own celebrity as a popular actress would be of
little aid to Dreyfus, and even feared that her opinion might be used to discredit the actions of men who
spoke out in his defense. It is at this juncture of Bernhardt’s life that the inability to separate herself as an
ethical citizen from her image as a notoriously transgressive celebrity is perhaps most clearly seen. While
Zola’s public letter lit the fire under the Dreyfus Affair, Bernhardt only dared to express her sentiments of
support to Zola privately:
Cher Grand Maître,
Allow me to speak of the inexpressible emotion I felt when I read your cry for justice. As a
woman I have no influence. But I am anguished, haunted by the situation, and the beautiful
words you wrote yesterday brought tremendous relief to my great suffering.
I thought of writing to thank [Auguste] Scheurer-Koestner [vice-president of the Senate,
and an ardent Dreyfusard] but knowing that everything that admirable man does is
considered criminally suspect, I thought that if an artiste—what am I saying?—an actress
was known to admire his courageous deeds, that discovery would be used to crush him.
To you whom I have loved so long, I say thank you with all the strength of a melancholy
instinct which cries out to me: ‘It’s a crime! A crime!49
49
Translation and notes published in: Ockman, et al., Op. cit., p. 84.
10
Fig. 11. Gerschel, photograph of Marguerite
Durand in Rennes. Published in Louis Rogès,
L’Affaire Dreyfus: Cinq semaines à Rennes (1899).
Fig. 12. Caran d’Ache, “Une dame rédactrice."
("A Female Editor.") Published in Psst… !
(17 June 1899)
Marguerite Durand and her staff at La Fronde espoused similar sentiments as Bernhardt, and had
the organ of a newspaper in which to write at length as professional journalists. When a retrial for Dreyfus
was eventually won in the summer of 1899, Durand attended the high-profile proceedings at Rennes as did
the frondeuse Séverine. Their presence, however, did much to reignite accusations that they were merely
the kept women of the Jewish syndicat, paid to espouse Dreyfusard views.50 Roberts further argues that
the female editor caricatured in a summer 1899 issue of the vehemently anti-Dreyfusard rag, Psst…! (fig.
12), is a reference to Durand’s presence at the proceedings, a presence which Roberts points out was
additionally documented in photographs (fig. 11). The attendance of the frondeuses as well as the reaction
to their attendance at the trial was indicative of the very theatrical nature of the proceedings and of the
journalism that sold extra editions of newspapers throughout the summer of 1899.51 Reports of the
proceedings became so sensationalized that by the fall of 1899 a journalist for Le Grelot sighed, “You
realize that we are entering the realm of fantasy.” 52
Legend and the Loss of the Real
Fig. 13. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Album Cover, c. 1894.
50
Roberts, Op. cit., p. 118.
Weber, Foreward to The Dreyfus affair. Op. cit., p. xxvi.
52 Quoted in: Roberts, Op. cit., p. 139.
51
11
NEED PERMISSION TO PRINT.
For the actress, dancer, chanteuse—or even journalist or artist—portrayed in the pages of fin-desiècle journals, celebrity was purchased at a cost. As their images and routines became popular with a
mass audience, stars frequently found themselves quickly typecast and unable to separate themselves
from publicly constructed legends. After years of performing successfully on the stage, immortalized by
Toulouse-Lautrec in his lithographs, Yvette Guilbert felt the full weight of modern celebrity. “I had to say to
myself,” she recalled in her memoirs, “‘Then after all it was my repertoire that made my reputation—my
gloves and my dress, and not my talent, that made me famous. Not my interpretation—not my gifts? I have
no talent then. I’ve been deceived, deceived!’”53 The ebbing of Guilbert’s personal presence from the
symbols of her celebrity was perhaps sensed by Lautrec, who chose for her album cover (fig. 13) not a
representation of Guilbert herself, but a simple sketch of her fan and long gloves—deflated icons of her
celebrity.
T.S. Eliot once wrote, “The progress of an artist is a continual self sacrifice, a continual extinction of
the personality.”54 Modern celebrity culture, as Guilbert observed, threatens to drain the star of meaning,
producing for the masses flat, saleable images that admirers and critics invest with their own desires and
fantasies. Involuntary celebrities, such as Dreyfus, who were both heroicized and vilified in the press,
further illustrate the very selective and media-governed nature of celebrity culture, a culture which deflects
public understanding of an essential or authentic individual. Rather celebrity has served in modern, imagebased societies as a cultural model for the effort to fashion personal identity through appearances and has
contributed to the persistence of the belief that inner essence can be judged through outward
representation.
53
Guilbert, Op. cit., pp. 190-91.
T.S. Eliot. The Sacred Wood: essays on poetry and criticism. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1920, p.
47.
54
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