David M. Pomfret

"A Muse for the Masses": Gender, Age, and Nation in France, Fin de Siècle

Following the critique of the concept of "separate spheres," historical literature dealing with modern gender relations has centered more recently around the question of how far women were able to overcome marginality to appropriate identities beyond those prefigured by norms of domestic femininity.¹ While highlighting the exclusion of women from full citizenship and suffrage in modern times, scholars have also noted the extensive deployment of the female form as allegory in gendered representations of the nation.² The question of why bodies excluded from the body politic were chosen to represent the nation has begun to be addressed, as has the extent to which such duties legitimated exclusion or extended the possibility of accessing new subjectivities and resources. Existing scholarship on the gendered iconography of the modern nation has suggested a contrast. In some countries, such as the United States, women were able to supplement purely symbolic roles to become, in the mid to late nineteenth century, a "visible and active presence in public ceremony," while in others, such as modern France, women were apparently unable to assert themselves as an embodied official symbolic presence in public rituals after the early 1790s.³

Such an interpretation seems to accord well with views of the late nineteenth century as a period when European men sought to defend the traditional gender norms on which male authority rested. Evidence of such a reaction is not hard to find more generally, but scholars have argued that the social, political, and demographic conditions particular to France produced an especially vigorous defense in this context. This article reexamines the question of how women and men negotiated the accession of women to social and political rights and the responsibility of representing the body politic at the turn of the twentieth century. It does so by highlighting a cultural phenomenon, the fête de la couronnement de la Muse du peuple (the Festival of the Crowning of the People's Muse). Through this event, young French women, contrary to received views, were able to establish an embodied presence at the heart of public celebrations of the French nation. This musical ceremony, created by the composer Gustave Charpentier, featured a new female icon, the Muse. Although it has received little attention from historians, the ceremony of the Crowning of the People's Muse swept across France from Paris to the provinces after 1897, becoming a central feature of Bastille Day celebrations, local festivals, and commemorations. It engaged young females in a national public performance, attracting large amounts of municipal expenditure, reams of newspaper reportage, tens of thousands of spectators, and even a campaign to create a new national holiday.⁴

The study of this phenomenon offers new insights into several issues of broad relevance. First, it suggests how, why, and with what implications political elites used female bodies as public spectacle to represent the modern nation. In particular, at a time when the project of widening the electoral franchise and absorbing new social groups into civil society was gaining momentum, it shows how efforts to transcend damaging class divisions led republicans to elevate young females to new roles in civic ritual. Second, the selection by political elites of these Muses to perform in public on the grounds that they were "young" and "beautiful" is of special significance to this discussion. At the end of the nineteenth century, hopes that alarming trends toward "degeneracy" and "depopulation" might be reversed were pinned on efforts to raise the quantity and quality of the rising generation.⁵ This was also a time when intellectuals and politicians in Europe from left to right began more intensively to conceptualize youth as a potential force through which the regeneration of European societies might be effected. Scholars have shown greater sensitivity in recent years to the unstable and historically contingent process through which identity is constructed in relation to class, gender, and race. Since the 1960s, a considerable literature on the creation and historical evolution of various stages of pre-adulthood has emerged; however, historians working outside this field still consider only rarely how the variable of age has contributed to the shaping of social relations.⁶ As a component of identity experienced by all, age situates individuals within implicit or explicit hierarchies of power, further complicating gender, class, and race. In explaining the emergence of a new national icon of beauty and femininity conceived by elite males, sponsored by the state, and consumed by a mass audience, this article aims to demonstrate how age intersected with gender, class, and race in constructions of modern womanhood and national identity. It also aims to show how historians can, through sensitivity to this category, develop a methodology capable of illustrating the complex way in which it worked in conjunction with others to reproduce social relations. Third, concentrating on the relationship between age and gender, the article confronts the question of how women negotiated commodified urban culture and opportunities to appropriate new subjectivities and resources accessible by performing as the Muse. It considers how far this event, which was linked closely to practices of self-fashioning then being foregrounded in the construction of modern womanhood, presented a cultural challenge to traditional gender identities, or whether it worked to reinforce these instead.

It seems curious that the French fin de siècle produced an embodied female performance of the nation, given that historians have tended to read this context as one in which male anxiety over women's challenges to established norms of domestic femininity was particularly intense. Although the European fin de siècle has also been viewed as a period of confidence, commercial prowess, and cultural creativity, scholars have recently focused on crises accompanying symptoms of relative decline. Explained in racial terms but also in terms of "degeneration," "decadence," or "over-civilization," it has been argued that these crises caused especially acute concern in France, where demographic stagnation and the legacy of military defeat by newly unified and vigorous Germany reinforced perceptions of their gravity and prevalence.⁷ Historians have emphasized contemporaries' understanding of the crises of the fin de siècle in terms of a crisis of gender relations. Contemporary commentators made frequent reference to biological models in explaining evidence of "degeneration." Pathologies (neurasthenia, suicide, prostitution, and a worryingly low birth rate) were believed to be upsetting the balance of the social organism and undermining the "virility" of the French nation. The concomitant efforts of women to move beyond bourgeois models of domestic femininity and to claim social and political rights thus became a major source of conflict.⁸

Nevertheless, in the Crowning of the People's Muse, at a time when the gender order was apparently destabilized, women emerged to assume a leading role in republican political ritual. The individual responsible for conceiving this event was the composer Gustave Charpentier (1860–1956). Originally from industrial Tourcoing, Charpentier attended the Paris Conservatoire from 1879, studying with Jules Massenet from 1885. In 1888 the young composer departed to take up residence at the Villa Medici in Rome (having won the "Prix de Rome" the previous year). Charpentier did not allow the august environment in which he worked to stifle his penchant for anti-authority gestures. He took up residence in Montmartre, adopted a bohemian lifestyle and appearance and engaged in "nervous fellow traveling" with anarchists. With this in mind, it is no great surprise that he accepted the invitation of the illustrator Adolphe Willette to devise a finale for the carnival of the vache enragée (the "raging cow," or Vachalcade), organized in Montmartre, in 1897.⁹ It was into this event with its riot of outrageous floats and costumes and antibourgeois theme that Charpentier brought his new work, the Couronnement de la Muse.

Those who witnessed the first performance of the crowning were agreed that it was a curious production. ¹⁰ Part cantata, part mime, part ballet, the ceremony was set to a piece of music entitled Le Couronnement de la Muse (with solo voice, choir, and orchestral sections), elements of which were eventually integrated into the second scene of the third act of Charpentier's then work-in-progress, the opera Louise. The event centered on a girl worker elected Muse for the occasion by female colleagues from the laundries of Montmartre. One rendition took place in 1897 at Montmartre's Nouveau Thèâtre, and a more elaborate outdoor performance was planned for Place Blanche (though it was canceled owing to poor weather). In spite of this, the couronnement ceremony caught the attention and the imagination of the republican elite. Charpentier was invited to perform the piece before the Paris Hôtel de Ville, where, in 1898, the crowning was staged to commemorate the historian of the revolution Jules Michelet and to serve as a "curtain raiser" for Bastille Day celebrations. The event commenced with a procession to the stage, headed by the Muse. Once seated on her throne, where she remained throughout the ceremony, before a sizeable orchestra (and, beyond that, the crowd), a ballet act was performed before the Muse. During the ballet, the lead dancer, representing "beauty," placed a crown of roses upon the head of the enthroned girl. The recitation of a poem, "To the Muse," was followed by a mime act, during which a Pierrot, representing the "common man," performed "human suffering." The turning point in this performance came as the Pierrot, lying prone, perceived the girl, and, reanimated by her presence, knelt before her in exultation. With this, the Muse motioned the Pierrot to stand and join hands with the lead dancer. A vigorous flourish from the brass section then swept the performance to its dramatic conclusion.¹¹

In the decades that followed the first performances of the couronnement in Paris, provincial municipalities scrambled to stage the event. Charpentier, accompanied by an orchestra of hundreds, toured France, taking the ceremony to Lille in May 1898, Bordeaux in July 1899, Le Mans and Rouen and, in June 1900, to Niort. A month later, the Loire city of Saint-Etienne staged the festival. Before World War I, it was performed in many more urban centers, including Montpellier in 1904, Amiens in 1906, and Nancy in 1909. Cities organized repeat performances. Lille conducted two crowning ceremonies in 1898 and 1899, for example, as did Lens in 1903 and 1913, while Saint-Etienne staged the fête thrice, in 1900, 1902, and 1906. Although the core performance (which almost always took place in central squares before city halls) changed relatively little, with repetition it became more elaborate. Festival organization committees formulated variations on Charpentier's original template, spending significant amounts on performances. Processional itineraries grew longer and more complex, incorporating elaborately decorated floats, delegations of civic dignitaries, and champagne toasts at the city hall and prefecture.¹²

Organizers, commentators, and observers linked the figure of the Muse closely to the idea of the French nation. The crowning became the centerpiece of celebrations of national heroes such as Michelet. In some cases (notably that of Saint-Etienne), the performance of the Muse was introduced into Bastille Day celebrations, displacing the military review. Although the crowning was not always incorporated into the festivities of the national day, it was often framed by stirring renditions of the national anthem, and journalists and music critics writing in mass-circulation newspapers attributed national significance to the phenomenon. In a nation apparently in danger of being eclipsed permanently by more vigorous external challengers, those searching for a remedy to the pathologies besetting France identified Charpentier's compositions as "virile" and "truly French" and saw the performances as a means through which "a happy awakening of the national spirit" could occur.¹³ The crownings also had a strong local emphasis. In a period when interest in municipalization (the transfer of the provision of urban amenities into the hands of the city government) intensified, councilors and journalists also used the event to express civic pride and to showcase the achievements of their cities.¹⁴ However, Paris and other large urban centers were points of comparative reference within an unofficial national hierarchy as municipalities vied with each other for the prestige of being part of Charpentier's itinerary. Provincial Muses elected as representatives of their cities were invited to grand ceremonies in Paris, notably during the exhibition year of 1900. By this time, in a move indicating the seriousness with which the event was regarded, elections of the Muse were beginning to be taken out of the hands of candidate-electors and turned over to municipal selection committees. These committees deployed police agents to conduct stringent background checks ensuring that candidates were "genuinely" virtuous young working-class women. One former Muse recounted how:

To be certain of their qualities they demanded information from neighbors, the shopkeepers of the neighborhood, the whole city. On the stage they questioned me, asking what I did for a living, if I was dependent upon my parents, and so on.¹⁵

Candidates' reputations became the subject of rumor and gossip constructed from intrusive police interviews with neighbors. One girl in Saint-Etienne was, for example, rejected for her "deplorable" behavior as she was said to have "numerous lovers" and to return home "every day very late at night."¹⁶

From Paris to the provinces, this oeuvre produced a centripetal, integrative effect, drawing thousands of onlookers into city centers. Municipal councilors worked to ensure that a significant number of "the people" observed "their" Muse. One newspaper estimated that a cumulative one million spectators had witnessed the event by 1903, and, in general, reports indicated that this "popular" performance did bring together socially diverse crowds of male and female observers. The republican press wasted no opportunity to highlight the unifying potential of the Muse.¹⁷ In a nation torn apart by the Dreyfus Affair, a political cadre fighting internal enemies used this fête to surmount tensions and instabilities through the symbolic invitation of diverse political factions back into an abstract national community. Thus this phenomenon was more significant, and its impact wider, than historians have previously suggested.¹⁸

It is not immediately apparent, however, why this event in particular, with its overtones of the carnivalesque, should have found favor with the many municipal governments that sponsored it. Such an oeuvre seemed somewhat at odds with the style of recently reinvented traditions of French republican ritual. Bourgeois organizers had expunged much of the bacchanalian effusiveness associated with festivals of the Second Empire from mass public celebrations of the republic that had recommenced in France in 1880. Elements of the carnivalesque certainly persisted in public ritual into the late nineteenth century, as in the case of the Lenten festivals of the Boeuf Gras and Mi-Carême in Paris. These events, as well as many provincial trade fairs, featured "queens" elected from the various markets and laundries of the city on which Charpentier, with his bohemian leanings, drew in preparing his "consolatory" work. The Muse also seems to have something in common with the rosières, central figures in a prerevolutionary festive tradition that persisted into the twentieth century in which young females were chosen because of their virtue to represent their village or town. Although these carnivalesque precursors informed—and continued to exist alongside—Charpentier's creation, a number of factors made the latter more suitable for elevation to the status of a new national icon in fin-de-siècle France.¹⁹

It was no coincidence that the Festival of the People's Muse flourished during and after the divisive Dreyfus Affair, at a time when forces of collectivism were in the ascendant in France. The Dreyfus Affair boosted socialism nationwide, the rude health of which was exemplified by the inclusion of Alexandre Millerand, the first socialist to participate in high government, in Renè Waldeck-Rousseau's cabinet in 1899 and by steps by the socialist movement toward national integration.²⁰ These developments coincided with the rise in the late 1890s of the doctrine of solidarism espoused by the prominent republican politician Léon Bourgeois, which envisaged the achievement of national solidarity and an end to class conflict through social justice, wider access to education, and practical, state-led reform. For several reasons, Charpentier's oeuvre resonated with the socially progressive, solidaristic outlook of an increasingly influential cadre of left-oriented republican councilors and enhanced their willingness to bankroll its performance. The Muse was well suited to become an icon "of the people," a secular representation of the national collective, in ways that her precursors were not. In appearance and style, the Muse evoked associations with the goddesses of Reason and Liberty of the revolutionary era, which appealed to left republicans. The use of an aesthetic at once populist and classical enabled Charpentier to distance this icon from the overtly monarchical coding of the "queens" and the strongly clerical and aristocratic overtones of the festivals of the rosières.²¹ This political cadre was also keen to reinforce the legitimacy of its newly discovered influence by democratizing access to the "highest peaks of art." Charpentier's allusions to the possibility of "elevating" the people through artistic public ritual resonated strongly with those who hoped that by aestheticizing the "everyday" a reciprocal transformation of daily life would occur.²² The integration of the couronnement into celebrations of the republic at the city level, then, was suggestive of the broader ambitions of progressive councilors to reconfigure republicanism, overcome class conflict, and "elevate" the masses.

Given its bacchanalian origins, anarchist undertones, and progressive republican patronage, the Festival of the People's Muse was remarkable for its success in drawing favorable comment from a broad spectrum of observers. Representatives of the moderate (and even the militant) Left were enthusiastic. In the street processions accompanying the crowning, trade unionists and socialists were conspicuous by their presence. One socialist journal contrasted "this veritable civic and popular festival" with "the savage and patriotic rejoicing" of the usual July 14 and insisted, "the Triumph of the Muses must become a popular and national institution celebrated annually on a fixed date."²³ In Paris, prominent intellectuals acclaimed the event. For Gérard de Lacaze-Duthiers, a libertine academic with anarchist sympathies, the work was "plainly and clearly revolutionary," drawing as it did "on the life of the crowd, on the life of the people."²⁴ Even conservative critics of the republic found little to oppose here, in terms of either content or imagery, and much to praise. Le Figaro, which had taken up the anti-Dreyfusard cause in 1897, referred to the "poetic and charming idea, of giving to the people of Paris a Muse drawn from their own number," while L'Intransigeant, the daily from which Henri Rochefort attacked the republican government, found the display "a true success" and the Muse "charming."²⁵ Provincial arbiters of taste were no less impressed. Lille Artiste, for example, found it "a touching idea to represent the popular 'Muse' using young girls" while La Vie Illustrée labeled her "the heroine of the day."²⁶ Even the Catholic press, which usually ignored or directed vitriol toward republican festivities, had little negative to say about the Muse herself and attested to her popularity.²⁷ The vast majority of journalists commenting on this cultural phenomenon were men, but female commentators, such as those writing in the pro-feminist newspaper, La Fronde, also found the Muse "extremely agreeable" and the event a "real triumph."²⁸

The arrival of the Muse as a focus for celebrations of the nation foregrounded the feminine in the embodied representation of the republic. However, when this window of opportunity finally emerged for the involvement of actual female bodies in public rituals, it was not adult women who were able to take advantage of it, but girls, or "young women." The age of the performers was perhaps the most notable feature of the couronnement. By informing the selectors of the Muse to accept only those between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one, organizers excluded the mature female body from this spectacle. Even the use of the title Muse (in place of queen) was significant in allowing the allegorical potential of a more youthful femininity to be explored. Why then did representatives of local and national government sanction the creation of a new, girlish icon of the French nation when republicans had already appropriated, from 1792, the figure of Marianne to serve as the symbolic embodiment of the republic?

The creation of a young female icon of the French nation owed much to the fact that the womanly body was perceived by the late nineteenth century as a problematic site for political representation. The female body had been identified in the nineteenth century as an ideal visual representation of the nation as a "natural" unity. The image of Marianne, symbol of the republican nation-state, was ubiquitous in France. In her late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century incarnations, Marianne had often taken on a youthful appearance. In the mid to late nineteenth century, however, she developed a more mature and maternal aspect. By the 1890s, the voluptuous, matronly Marianne was beginning to be seen as the symbol of an older, more conservative republic, less relevant to the new left and a target for the invective of those on the non-republican right.²⁹ Aside from the specific political connotations of Marianne, the potential of the mature female body to represent social unity diminished as this form became an important site on which fin-de-siècle anxieties about male status were inscribed. Such anxieties centered on several threatening incarnations.

First, the term, "New Woman," was used to describe and deride educated, independent, dandyish women who dared to disrupt the bourgeois ideal of domestic femininity.³⁰ In addition to the New Woman, feminists seeking improved social and political rights also emerged as a focus of concern among male elites. The movement for women's rights in France was chronically fragmented but had impetus and was showing signs of coherence by the late 1890s.³¹ One congress, in 1896, drew a politically diverse audience and even inspired the creation of a daily newspaper, La Fronde, which became an important mouthpiece of the women's movement. Both the New Woman and the feminist, but particularly the former, though the two were often elided, were ruthlessly pilloried. Although scholars have tended to emphasize the attack on the androgenous New Woman, the over-powerful, matronly mother figure was also a focus for bitter criticism.³² As women challenged the gender order, the image of the nurturing woman—the voluptuous Marianne, the mother-protector of the republic—so useful in fashioning a narrative of the birth of the French republic, could no longer easily serve its function of empowering the male political subject.

The New Woman and the feminist were high-profile targets for male ire partly because a real challenge to gender norms appeared to spread beyond the realm of political discourse. La Fronde, for example, drew attention to the success of women in taking on new roles in a variety of professional contexts.³³ Meanwhile, lower on the social hierarchy, the electrification of industry threatened to make the cheap, semiskilled female worker an attractive alternative to the skilled male.³⁴ The growing presence of adult women in the non-domestic workplace was the subject of a vicious critique. Men, especially those with skill working in industries hit by structural decline, mobilized a discourse eulogizing the housewife and constructing married female workers as parasites—on the grounds that, by doubling the income of one household, they supposedly halved that of another.³⁵ These challenges to the established gender order help to explain why the adult female body was overlooked in the search for a new national icon. It is still necessary, however, to consider why Charpentier's vision of young women generated such acclaim from those who viewed it.

The appeal of the young female body in the fête owed much to the vagueness of contemporary constructions of young womanhood and the marginality experienced by those living through this life stage. As women began to appropriate greater social, economic, and political liberty, the identity "woman" became more densely layered with political meaning. For young women or "girls," in contrast, this process was much less marked. Young women continued to experience social, political, and economic marginality before marriage. The labor of this group cost little. Young women were poorly unionized. In the middle-class ideal, young women's involvement in the work force was temporary. While the married female worker emasculated the male worker both by the act of working and by taking away the livelihood of another family, the young female worker did not jeopardize the breadwinner's wage, or his authority. As adult French women made a strong case for admission to the body politic (raising republican fears that they would cast votes for clerical parties), young women, and in particular those in their teens, had no hope of gaining such a right. Thus the marginality of young females endowed this life stage with a relative iconic vacuity compared with that of adult womanhood.

To be sure, this is not to say that modern European societies did not invest young womanhood with specific meanings. In fact, among the performers selected to be the Muse, most were drawn from age ranges then beginning to be associated more strongly with the concept of "adolescence." This cultural construct was, in the late nineteenth century, being extended across class lines. It is critical to remember that in this period the notion of adolescence referred to much more than just sexual maturation. Certainly, physical change was used to assert the commonality of this age-related experience, but the desire to recognize and extend the dependency of young people between school and marriage owed much to perceptions of social and sexual vulnerability and of the need to reverse national decline. Popular literary representations of adolescence identified it as a time of storm and stress and the adolescent body as intrinsically vulnerable and malleable. Around the turn of the century, scholars in France, as in other European countries, worked up the ideas of the American psychologist G. S. Hall, to afford new scientific legitimacy to such views.³⁶

In many European countries, intellectuals and politicians of different ideological persuasions were at this time beginning to explore the idea of youth as a potentially regenerative force.³⁷ As European society aged, in France, the country with the smallest proportion of people under age twenty-one, particularly acute concerns over national degeneration and the reproduction of the social body persisted. Claims that the vitality of the adolescent could be harnessed and used to regenerate French society and politics were commonly heard. Reformers worked to extend institutionalized dependency in the form of "youth movements" to those experiencing this life stage.³⁸ However, while commentators agreed that adolescence was a distinct and potentially regenerative life stage located between childhood and adulthood, the term lacked the age specificity that it often connotes today, especially when used to refer to females. As inheritors of greater political and economic rights, male "adolescents" were assigned considerable importance, and the boundaries of male adolescence were defined and policed carefully, but the boundaries of female adolescence remained relatively indeterminate.³⁹ Some believed that female adolescence terminated at age twenty-one, the age of civil majority, but for others marriage was the decisive rite of passage defining the upper limit of this transitional phase, since with marriage, women's dependency was assumed to be transferred from father to husband and the threat posed to property by sexual delinquency diminished. Young females in France often remained dependent on their parents until marriage, and parental consent was required in order to marry before age twenty-five. On average, young working-class girls in France tended to marry in their mid-twenties.⁴⁰

In the production of a Muse to represent "the people," organizers of the crowning ceremony selected from young women between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one. This reinforces the validity of understanding the Fête de la Muse as a performance, broadly speaking, of "adolescence." Indeed, it is possible to see the actual performance of the Muse as the enactment of adolescent status. The sight of the Muse chaperoned by the serried ranks of municipal councilors was suggestive of the protective impulse evidenced in state legislation and republican voluntary work. The attributes of these young women portended their idealized departure from the stage, a ritual realization of the exchange of workplace for marital home and motherhood, as per the bourgeois ideal, triggered by the crowning—itself a symbol of the transition from pre-adulthood to adulthood. Nubile, marginal, naive, and vulnerable, the Muse was the focal point of a spectacle in which the brevity and ambiguity of her own adolescence was articulated.⁴¹

The creation of the Muse allowed the iconic vacuity of female adolescence to be exploited for political ends. However, the success of this image is perhaps surprising when contemporaries' anxieties about girlhood, as well as womanhood, are taken into consideration. Around the turn of the century, as new patterns of work eroded established forms of parental surveillance, fears were expressed about girls' potential to indulge in greater autonomy, sexual delinquency, and the leisure culture of the large city. A new and deplorable kind of girl who failed to conform to bourgeois norms of acceptable behavior was identified. The popular press intensified its focus on exemplars of this lamentable type into the early twentieth century, for example, in coverage of the so-called apaches. Girls who moved with these gangs of poor "delinquents," roaming the dilapidated suburbs of Paris, were seen as representatives of the unfortunate autonomy and moral lassitude that seemed to be afflicting girls more generally.⁴²

While young women emerged as a troubling element of the social body in this period, they retained their potential appeal as icons of national unity for a number of reasons. First, the scientific and medical discourses that informed debate about adolescents encouraged commentators to attribute moral failings to the "adolescent condition." Young females were seen to display the potential for the individual to be corrupted by environment and culture. However, their very malleability encouraged reformers and advocates of state intervention to retain faith in the conviction that these girls could be "rescued" and redirected for regenerative purposes.⁴³ A similar urge was announced in newspaper reports describing the Muse. These often employed a romantic bourgeois rescue plot in which the honest, good, simple, poor young girl was liberated from the depredations of her own proletarian culture. Anxieties about the "New Girl" derived from and helped to reinforce notions of young women's vulnerability and hence also reinforced the acceptability of the (rescued) young female body as spectacle. Female adolescence remained vague enough and evocative enough to admit multiple readings while assumptions of a natural, age-related vulnerability prevented moral outrage from precluding its production as spectacle.

The contemporaneous emergence of a number of literary, theatrical, and operatic works recasting the figure of the rebellious girl in a more favorable light also helped to mitigate the more troubling aspects of female adolescence. At a time when anarchism was influential in artistic circles, individuals such as Charpentier celebrated these girls' spirited and youthful contravention of stuffy bourgeois norms as a regenerative force. Their dynamic—but usually tragic—heroines frequently were cast as opponents of their parents, and particularly of their mothers.⁴⁴ French writers, who had begun to engage with this theme in the 1880s, retained their fascination for autonomous and feisty young female characters.⁴⁵ As another product emerging from this vital cultural scene, the Muse was endowed with the vivacity of the feisty modern girl of page and stage but renounced, in the manner of the rosière and the carnival queen, any overt challenge to traditional norms of domestic order. Complemented and vocabulized by scientific and medical professionals, these flights of the male imagination posited the adolescent body as a potentially regenerative force, which could be rescued, rehabilitated, and deployed against the urban pathologies besetting France.

The image of the young woman, though conflicted, seems to have generated a powerful protective desire among male observers. This image was especially useful to those progressives and solidarist sympathizers who identified the need to extend new rights to women in the battle against depopulation. Such a move was highly controversial at a time when feminists were threatening to make incursions into the male-dominated political sphere. Thus, as several scholars have noted, it was carried out by stealth. The state forged an alliance with women offering piecemeal welfare legislation in exchange for the raising of healthy republican children. However, a concomitant of this endeavor was the stripping away of the traditional authority of the paterfamilias and the admission of women to public roles.⁴⁶ This potentially destabilizing move necessitated careful efforts to negotiate men's support. Adolescent females were useful in making such an appeal as they represented a vulnerable age group for the protection of which republican legislators had already introduced a raft of legislation. This included, for example, the education law of December 21, 1880, which extended republican secondary schooling for girls to destroy the influence of the church among them. Labor legislation passed in 1874 and 1892 excluded girls under age twenty-one from working in mines, pits, and quarries and from performing night shifts in factories. These girls, like their representative, the Muse, were future mothers in the bourgeois ideal. As one commentator explained, "The Muse of Gustave Charpentier is our sister today, she is the mother of tomorrow."⁴⁷ Linking sisterhood and motherhood, the Muse offered republicans a vision of femininity through which they might encourage men to extend their acceptance of state protection from girls to women, even as this eroded the status of the paterfamilias.

Men were encouraged to read the Muse not only through an affective, paternal paradigm. Cultural producers identified the falsely homogeneous, falsely apolitical identity of female adolescence as a useful field into which narratives of desire could also be projected. The contours of a second, related inscription of the crowning as a titillating bourgeois fantasy of consuming the sexualized body of the vulnerable, exotic "other," can also be discerned in official and newspaper discourse. At a time when concerns over adolescent female sexuality were expressed forcefully, the idea of a pure, unsullied daughter of the workers was endowed with overtones of regenerative barbarism and rare exoticism. In pursuit of the "exotic," Lille Artiste ventured into the poorer quarters of the city, to the "humble" household of another newly elected Muse. There, "in a small lodging where the seven young girls of Mme Dassonville were cramped together [was] our Muse ... very much resembling Werther's Charlotte."⁴⁸ The same journalist found it difficult to:

convey in a few strokes of the pen her pleasing slenderness, her sweet and sad dusky face while her delicate ear is like a perfect jewel box in white pearl ... white, all white like her young girl's soul, ignorant of all the immorality of existence.⁴⁹

This account, with its confusion of binaries, duskiness and paleness, is suggestive of the fetishization of the image of working-class adolescent femininity. The idea that amid the dirt and degeneracy of the slums the middle class might find some potentially regenerative, "savage" force was inscribed prominently in this pseudo-ethnographic narrative.⁵⁰ The reading of the young Muse as the dusky "other," an unstable presence in the faubourg beyond the urban "pale," was instrumental in mapping onto her body an erotic charge. Men were encouraged to interpret their weakness for this exotic vision of female adolescence as a reassuring sign of their own virility. Class, race, and convention rendered taboo (and thereby heightened) what was read as a healthy, invigorating desire for the objectified body of the girl.⁵¹ These narratives of the imagined pursuit and conquest of the "savage" femininity of girl workers on the margins of the big city offered men a reminder of their duty to desire.

If age was essential in making girl workers' bodies acceptable as sites for political representation, another critical element of this spectacle was beauty. Physical appearance, to a significant extent, determined selection. Organizers required electors to "give your preference to the most beautiful [candidate]," and local newspapers noted the preference for girls who were "tall and beautiful."⁵² Precisely what was meant by "beautiful," of course, was a matter for debate. French intellectuals, observing the democratization of "beauty" and "luxury" in modern times, speculated as to the meaning and significance of these concepts. Morality was often discussed in relation to beauty, but greater attention was beginning to be paid to purely aesthetic considerations. Literature on hygiene and health emerged as an important influence on new standards of beauty. "Objective" norms of beauty based on rules defining ideal proportions, derived from the "eternal" norms evinced in classical art, were formulated and formalized by hygienists and health experts.⁵³ French commentators, accustomed to interpreting the ills of the nation in organic terms also began to elide health and beauty, drawing on models from antiquity to represent new norms of both. The result of these deliberations, to which the Muse du peuple was a contribution, was not a stable or fixed vision, nor a representation of the "average" body. It was, rather, an ideal that women and men, antifeminists and feminists, not only accepted but celebrated. For all the claims by organizers that beauty was eternal, through the process of exhibition and dissemination that was the couronnement, standards of beauty were reconsidered, reconfigured, and refined.

It was no coincidence that the modern beauty pageant, which helped to institutionalize and formalize these notions, emerged at this time. However, while beauty contests in many countries, notably the United States, remained closely bound to commercial interests, in France, through the couronnement, representatives of the state integrated this phenomenon directly into celebrations of the nation.⁵⁴ The state, the police, the media, the family, and young females were entwined, through the event, in a network reformulating, reinforcing, demonstrating, and eliding ideas of youth, beauty, and health. Like the representations of nation, modern concepts of beauty, in spite of contemporaries' assertions to the contrary, were not "eternal" (nor had they been simply "retrieved" from classical antiquity). Both nation and beauty were, rather, reformulated through a complex process into which the state, the individual, and various consumer industries were drawn. As the "New Woman" rendered problematic the role of women as iconic representatives of national culture, tradition, and "timeless national memory," so the eternal nation was reasserted through its staged association with eternal beauty.⁵⁵ In the crowning ceremony, both concepts were fused purposely. Hence, while historians have emphasized the importance of the young, militarized male body to the late nineteenth-century revival of ritual in Europe, it is worth noting that at the same time the French led the way in turning the beauty contest, of which the crowning ceremony was effectively the finale, into an equivalent and similarly didactic demonstration of fit and healthy female specimens of the "race."

The elevation of the individual girl to symbolic centrality on the basis of her youth and beauty worked to reassure the male spectator in one more important way. The Muse undercut efforts by French feminists to use feminine beauty to achieve political aims. Marguerite Durand, editor and founder of La Fronde, urged women to recognize physical beauty as a vital component of what would become a more distinctively French version of the strong woman, less blatantly threatening, and more attractive to men than the Anglo-Saxon "New Woman."⁵⁶ To those republicans who nurtured hopes of a fertile alliance between women and the state, however, such a move was troubling, as it placed greater emphasis on women as individuals deriving power from their appearance, rather than as "moral equals" meeting maternal responsibilities for the good of the national collective.

The select few who had become "women who counted" in fin-de-siècle France, Durand among them, represented a destabilizing force for this very reason.⁵⁷ Famous actresses, however, having been castigated as charlatans for their capacity to destabilize femininity and cheapen morality through the portrayal of both for commercial gain, were beginning to be rehabilitated, endowed with respect, and invoked as paragons of luxury and beauty.⁵⁸ These women had achieved prominence through the use of many assets, including beauty. However, youth, if defined in terms of age, was not one of them.⁵⁹ The democratization of beauty, of which the Muse formed a part, brought youth and beauty within reach of older women, but at the same time it relegated their beauty to the status of a simulacrum, constructed in comparative relation to that of youth. Advice manuals of 1892 had argued that, "age alone does not destroy beauty," but by the eve of World War I, beauty "experts" were more inclined to claim that at age forty a woman might, at best, have "the face of a twenty-year-old."⁶⁰ The Muse was, like the "women who counted," an unstable but alluring presence at the heart of modern spectacle. By introducing this younger paragon of femininity, republicans helped to shift contemporary norms of beauty down the age spectrum, pushing out of reach of adult women the very weapon Durand argued should be used to advance feminists' claims to political power.

While the Muse bore the stamp of male fantasy, she was a complex invention and, ultimately, her performance was about more than submissiveness and domesticity. As women began to exploit the recognition of motherhood as a public duty to assert their right to act as public individuals, the dominant coding of the public individual as male was being eroded.⁶¹ As we have seen, this gave rise to tensions that helped to dissuade organizers from inviting individual adult women to perform in public ritual. Although they sanctioned the production of a spectacle of adolescent femininity, this too was shot through with subversive elements. During her performance, the Muse occupied space traditionally coded masculine. In the penetration by the marginal Muse of the male-coded public spaces of town hall and prefecture, it is possible to see inverted the picaresque tour of the middle-class male journalist to the faubourg. Marina Warner reminds us that "otherness is a source of potential and power; but it cannot occupy the centre," yet here (albeit temporarily) the Muse did exactly that.⁶² The androgenous qualities of the Muse were often commented on. Newspaper correspondents made much of the slimness, the unwomanliness, of the Muse, and Charpentier himself alluded to a hermaphroditic potential latent within the Muse in references to her as a kind of "priest man god."⁶³ The Muse possessed the power to emasculate through her movement in "male" space and her androgynous appearance, though age and fantasy were critical for the admission of such transgressions. As Muses, inspiring, otherworldly creatures, often dressed for the performance in long classical robes, these young women appeared as wanderers between worlds, placed above and beyond everyday struggles. (See Figure 1.) Where previously the ability to situate "the feminine" beyond history had encouraged its use in imagery as a focus for the love of the nation, in troubled times, this image was now, through dress, more explicitly decoupled from the present and fused with youthful femininity. The "empowered" female body was allowed to move into male space only as a festive deity, and only because it was an adolescent body and thus assumed to be fragile, frail, and unthreatening—except to itself. In this way, an acceptable vision of the unwomanly woman was constructed and disseminated in public, where it offered a limited and controlled enactment of transgressive, public femininity.

Figure 1: The Muse as otherworldly wanderer, Virginie Grousson, 1902. Reproduced with kind permission of the Archives Municipals de Saint-Etienne.

The claims made by organizers to be elevating "the people" through displays of moral and eternal beauty were made in a context where concerns over the capacity for commerce to corrupt republican virtue were elevated. It seems rather surprising, then, that municipal councils sanctioned, and even encouraged, the commercial exploitation of the Muse phenomenon. Purveyors of luxury goods rushed to dress the Muse or to add their wares to the list of presents to be given to victorious candidates, associating their products with the transient beauty of these young women. Newspapers extended to urban dwellers opportunities to purchase and possess the image of the Muse. (See Figures 2 and 3.) In Lille, one publication offered a "superb portrait of the Lille Muse [on] de luxe paper ... at a price of 10 centimes" to each reader.⁶⁴ Councilors discussed the event in terms of its capacity to boost local business. The youthful female body was produced for public consumption as a commercial spectacle in a highly visual process linking central and local government to the marketplace via the media and new technologies such as photography. Beauty was returned to "the people" as a commodity.

Figure 2: The Muse as marketing tool, "crowning" Bord's 10,000th piano. Reproduced with kind permission of the Archives Municipals de Saint-Etienne.

Figure 3: Consuming the image of the Muse, Ernestine Curot, 1898. Reproduced with kind permission of the Bibliothèque de la Ville de Paris.

The encouragement of this outcome should be considered in light of the contemporary critique of commercial culture and its influence on constructions of womanhood. By the late nineteenth century, new urban practices and spaces of bourgeois consumption had emerged in Europe and North America, affording female city dwellers opportunities of greater public mobility through the assumption of the identity of consumer. Access to luxury burgeoned in an era ushering in new forms of mass consumption. In France, conservative commentators inveighed against what they identified as an aesthetically defective commercial culture linked to a cultural crisis, the social and political dimensions of which threatened to undermine the French nation. These critics decried the augmented presence (and visibility) of women in commercial space. Such spaces, in their view, drew women away from the domestic realm, corroded the maternal instinct and substituted it with the hysterical desire to consume. At a time of demographic weakness such distractions were potentially cataclysmic. Through her avid consumption of "tasteless" mass-produced department store goods, the bourgeois woman, in the view of critics, epitomized the myopia, philistinism, and arrivisme of a republic that could not be trusted to uphold the reputation of French aesthetic excellence.⁶⁵

The commercialization of the couronnement de la muse provided a useful weapon in the republican rearguard action against this elitist critique. The Muse may have elevated the workers, but as a phenomenon bridging culture and commerce she also emerged as an icon of taste epitomizing the potential aesthetic maturity of the bourgeoisie. Defenders of the republic were keen to "transform and aestheticize the middle class relation to worldly goods by educating the taste of the bourgeois consumer."⁶⁶ Age was once again important in allowing the Muse to fulfill this role. The adolescent, posited as residing naturally in a state of leisure, made an apposite glyph for consumerism while her youthful "savage" purity provided a counterpoint to the supposed vanity and materialism of the bourgeois woman.⁶⁷ Untainted by consumerism, the Muse was portrayed as deriving her status from labor rather than material wealth. Photographic portraits of these girls often depicted them at work in the domestic context. (See Figure 4.)

Figure 4: The Muse as domestic worker, Virginie Grousson, 1902. Reproduced with kind permission of the Archives Municipals de Saint-Etienne.

Other photographs, however, showed the Muse as an incarnation of that supposed oxymoron, bourgeois taste, complete with the chic outfit and accessories of a modern bourgeois girl. (See Figure 5.) In this guise, the working-class girl represented the salvation of established bourgeois modes of consumption and a defender of the materialist woman. The latter was identified by some republicans as a potentially potent ally against the spiritual woman. The lesson to be drawn from this spectacle was clear. While beauty was "eternal," taste could be acquired—by the girl-Muse, by the republic, itself an adolescent capable of further maturation, and by the bourgeois consuming this imagery. This was, in the end, a ritual of reversal. While the girl worker was elevated to a position of lay nobility, the bourgeois consumer was transformed from acquisitive materialist to aesthete. By sponsoring this transmogrification, the republic reasserted its claims to political authority through the display of aesthetic sensibility. Style magazines and the press of Paris and the provinces scrambled to establish themselves and, by association, their reader-consumers as connoisseurs of the couronnement. By doing so, they anointed themselves arbiters of taste. Thus it can be seen that the civilizing influence of taste operated not only through rituals of the marketplace, as Lisa Tiersten has suggested, but also through the marketing of ritual.⁶⁸

Figure 5: The Muse as an icon of consumer taste. Reproduced with kind permission of the Bibliothèque de la Ville de Paris.

Young women appear to have been captivated by the idea of participating in this event. Although the eventual winner was admitted into the heart of republican ritual dressed as a bourgeois male fantasy, and although the selection process to be negotiated was tiring, traumatic, and often humiliating, large numbers of young women contested the right to become the Muse. In Paris, several hundred girls applied to become candidates in 1898. A year later, the public election of the Muse in Bordeaux was said to have "excited the interest of all the young girl workers in the main ateliers," with contestants, "enrolling in great numbers."⁶⁹ In 1900, 1,500 young hopefuls crammed into Saint-Etienne's Prado Hall for the election. As young women elected their own representatives, in a broad sense, the assumption of this role as a political icon made real women participants in the political process of representing the republic.⁷⁰

For those young women involved, there was a price to be paid. Elections were so fiercely contested that they regularly descended into scenes of tumult. One round of voting in 1898, for example, "produced a wave of protest ... such that it was in the midst of a veritable charivari that they proceeded to the second" and, as cries of "down with number sixty-nine!" resounded from one side, chants of "down with the rue de la Paix!" and "your firm paid for your dress!" echoed from the other.⁷¹ The actual performance was no less stressful. According to one Muse, when the procession "left rue St. Sébastien my heart was thumping; if I had had the wooden step to get down from my throne I would have run for it."⁷² Organizers sought a performer tough enough to handle the intense demands of the event. As one commentator insisted, "she must not be timid because it would be ridiculous to see her cry when the Mayor presented her to the city."⁷³ If the ideal Muse was expected to be demure, simple, and happy to relinquish her crown, the success of those who won the right to wear it owed much to tenacity, fortitude, and guile.

Why did these young women compete? Material gain certainly may have motivated some. In certain cities, prizes took the form of savings accounts (worth 400 francs for the winner in Saint-Etienne, in 1902). Given that a young woman dressmaker in France earned between 1.50 and 3 francs per day, one local newspaper considered it obvious that, "the happiness of the Muse and her maids of honor owes much to the thought of the superb prizes that will be offered to them."⁷⁴ However, the pursuit of financial incentives was far from being the participants' only motive, as suggested by the growing number of candidates rejected on the grounds that their parents were too wealthy. The role of Muse was also attractive as it represented the kind of aspirational space into which larger numbers of young women were already moving. The Muse identity resonated with young women's own concurrent experience of repositioning vis-à-vis the commercial sector, derived from changes in work practice and new educational and employment opportunities. Even city girls with little disposable income were becoming more frequent and more sophisticated consumers of spectacle, surrounded as they were by the department store, the theater, the press, the advertising hoarding, the exhibition, and the cinema.⁷⁵ The figure of the Muse legitimated, facilitated, and represented the accession of younger women from even the poorest backgrounds to practices of mass consumption. Although very few actually succeeded, the competition to be Muse placed victory within tantalizing reach of large numbers of young women.

This perception owed much to the contemporary "democratization" of beauty. Although the classicizing garb worn by the Muse was intended to elevate her beyond fashion into the domain of the "eternal," this political staging of adolescent working-class femininity was quickly infused with commercial significance. The industries of fashion and beauty and sections of the print media forged closer links through and beyond the crowning ceremony, rendering standards of physical beauty more visible and accessible. The burgeoning beauty advice literature of the period—like the event—linked achievement to a willingness to subject one's body to disciplines of beautification. As the art of applying cosmetics was extended from the theatrical realm to the everyday lives of "ordinary" girls, "scientific beauty institutes" were being established in Paris. The substitution of photographs for lithographs was enabling newspapers and magazines to mass-produce representations of beauty at a level of unprecedented detail. The expansion of the ready-made garment trade and the fashion industry was bringing smart styles within reach of girl workers. The possibility that beauty might be democratized was, thus, extended even as advertisers promised the elevation of the individual above the mass through the very same means. The couronnement formed part of a more broadly developing consciousness that the body, its performance, and appearance, might be shaped for success in modern urban society.⁷⁶

The fête de la Muse offered young females a catalyst for the real life achievement of the empowerment implicit in the promise of fin-de-siècle spectacle and consumption. Victory translated into the (temporary) embarkation upon an odyssey of social elevation, a chance to sample the exotic pleasures of power—drinking champagne in refined company, occupying civic space, traveling, wearing fine fabrics, and experimenting with bourgeois consumer practices. Although they were supposed to relinquish their crown and status after only a day, some Muses used the experience as a springboard for social, financial, and professional success. The mother of one Muse claimed the event generated "superb opportunities" for her daughter, while another Muse, Berthe Dassonville, was offered 10,000 francs by a brewer for the right to use her image.⁷⁷ Ernestine Curot, Muse of Paris at age seventeen, described how, "for a year the title, Muse, gave me the greatest pleasures ... I was everywhere, I oversaw [ceremonies], I smiled, I traveled."⁷⁸ Curot claimed to have received up to sixty-five marriage proposals per day following her performance. Among her suitors:

The most persistent was the Italian prince, Vilaris ... Mother hastily delivered me to his luxurious residence. He was thirty-eight years old, but he scared me with his long dark beard. After dining, he showed us his bedroom, his bed, a four-poster bed, surrounded by a collection of revolvers. Mother seemed decided, but in front of all this, taken by panic, I ran off.⁷⁹

Victory offered the chance to become the focus of attention, to win the envy and respect of neighbors, peers, and other ordinary citizens, and although this national spectacle was very much the product of male desire, young women were eminently capable of inscribing their own aspirations upon it and of exploiting it as a site for the construction of their individual desires.

Still, in many cases, parental influence remained a substantial obstacle to the realization of more ambitious dreams of social mobility. Dassonville recalled how her "mother did not wish to hear the word [Muse]," and insisted after the event "that I was once more plain and simple Berthe Dassonville," a fact underlined by her return to work as a laundry woman.⁸⁰ Forty years later, in a letter to Charpentier, Dassonville's niece confirmed that after the performance, her aunt had "simply gone back to her life caring for her mother," adding, "the one adventure of her whole life was this festival, which she told me about so often."⁸¹ Even in such cases, young women whose lives and working experiences were characterized by poor pay, dangerous conditions, and constant drudgery could, it seems, derive hope, self-respect, and a kind of power from this event and from the practices of beauty implicit within it.

The experience of being the Muse could change lives, but the ability to develop new subjectivities and to tap new sources of self-knowledge was extended to only a tiny number, briefly, and at a price. For every Muse there were thousands of disappointed candidates forced to reflect on the inadequacies that had ruined their chances of success. The particularities of bodily appearance requisite for victory were brought into sharper focus through competition. Fears that physical inadequacy might precipitate failure were evident in the behavior of candidates who, "awaiting the vote ... checked each other over, compared each other ... with the competition and asked each other with a certain anxiety ... what were their chances?"⁸² The event accentuated and engendered anxiety about appearance. The contest also had the potential to break down networks of female social solidarity in the neighborhood and workplace. In an article in La Fronde, Marie-Louise Néron described girls, "hiding their disappointment with laughter which sounds false" and "throwing long, envious stares" toward those who had won.⁸³ Winners, borne to success on the double exclusion of being young and female, often bore the brunt of resentment aroused in those forced to live a triple exclusion of being young, female, and not quite beautiful enough. Asked of her experience as Muse, one young woman replied, "If you only knew how they made me suffer ... the insults, the scandalmongering."⁸⁴ While organizers sought to harness the potential of youthful femininity to engender a sense of social unity, the competition to become Muse in fact undercut worker solidarity and introduced a new source of divisive desperation in working-class neighborhoods. To an extant, also worked to impoverish the ambitions of girl workers in urban neighborhoods by encouraging them to perceive "success" as being sought properly in the realm of artifice and physical appearance.

Given the popularity of the Muse, the questions remain as to why the event never became the focus of a new national day as some had hoped, and why it had already begun to fade from its earlier prominence by 1914. In fact, public performances of the couronnement continued into the mid-twentieth century and by the time Charpentier died in 1956, an estimated one thousand crownings had taken place in French cities.⁸⁵ Into the 1930s, some commentators continued to lament the failure of the Festival of the People's Muse to become a separate national holiday. However, by this time the couronnement had become, in effect, a sideshow and a small-town event. The decline of the Muse owed something to the loss of political impetus by progressive moderate and leftist councilors who had bankrolled the performance and declining confidence in the project of elevating the masses through art. A tense international context also helped to tip the balance in republican festivals back toward reassuring displays of herculean masculinity. Perhaps the most important influence behind the demise of the Muse, however, was the "mainstreaming" of French feminism. In the late 1890s, while the true nature and extent of the feminist threat remained unclear, the Muse phenomenon had emerged and flourished. By 1914, however, it was apparent that French feminism was not likely to reach the "extremes" of militancy demonstrated by its northern European and North American variants, nor the kind of mass influence achieved in Germany, for example. As the French feminist movement's emphasis on difference rather than equality became more apparent and the campaign for woman suffrage became "almost fashionable," the political relevance of the crowning ceremony also diminished.⁸⁶

Formed at the confluence of desires to regenerate the nation and to confront challenges to the gender order upon which the modern idea of the nation was based, the "people's Muse" drew acclaim from diverse audiences at the turn of the twentieth century. At a time when "mass evasion of the ideal of domestic virtue was an open secret," and politicians worked to extend the partnership between women and the French state, the Muse emerged as a male-generated vision of femininity capable of countering disruptive performances of womanhood, salvaging traditions of domestic femininity, and averting "national emasculation."⁸⁷ This rearguard action was mounted in the realm of spectacle—the realm from which "disruptive" performances of empowered femininity had often emerged. In a context where women's explorations of new ways of being women raised possibilities of a multivalent femininity, the Muse fused this diversity in full view of mass audiences into a single docile body, sealing fissures opened by disjunctive behaviors, and homogenizing the views of "acceptable woman." The Muses of classical times were supposedly born of a liason between Zeus and Mnemosyne, the goddess of Memory. In certain respects, the modern French Muses represented the desires of bourgeois men to monumentalize norms of femininity and to anchor tradition in the national memory, at a time when these norms and traditions were being challenged. As women attacked values represented as universally binding, an elite struggling to restore social harmony, to absorb women's claims for social rights, and to counter depopulation anointed young women as its ritual representatives.

The iconic power of young womanhood or female adolescence rested upon the social, economic, and political marginality of those to whom these categories referred. While representing the national community, the Muse also emerged as an emblem against which the masculine was defined. The ideal Muse was chosen for her capacity to exude an attractive sexual vulnerability, reassuring the core anxieties of men. The youth, beauty, and traditionalism of this vision of femininity thus constituted a rare basis for agreement across sectarian and ideological lines. While this vision of unity incorporated references to sources of social divisiveness—the androgenous, individual, public woman—it also helped to mediate between the contradictions inherent in the invitation of women to take up more prominent public roles. The Muse was a highly unstable presence at the heart of modern ritual, a product of fin-de-siècle tensions that saw femininity idolized and loathed simultaneously. In this ambiguous figure, qualities of physical fragility and fortitude were combined. Through the accordance of greater visibility to women and their admission to new spaces and subjectivities, republicans sanctioned a partial revision of norms of domestic femininity with a view to countering degeneration. Thus efforts to prevent depopulation in fin-de-siècle France went beyond attacks on "deviant" women, the extension of welfare legislation, and the opening of professional opportunities to women. They extended also to the state-sponsored creation of alluring visions of femininity produced for consumption by both women and men.

Although performing the nation did not endow these young women with access to full citizenship, through the creation of the Muse the French political elite, unwittingly, opened up routes to new female subjectivities. This may have amounted to a new feminine civic symbolism, but it allowed young women to succeed where women had failed, by appropriating an embodied public presence at the center of civic spectacle. A group marginalized on account of their sex, class, and age found social importance reflected in their own juniority, which in turn emerged as a potential basis on which to mount a challenge to the exclusions imposed upon them. This cultural product was unmistakably a male invention, but the young women thrust into the long defunct duty of embodying the republic, as an incarnation of inclusivist nationalism, performed more than just the duty of inhabiting exemplary bodies in a conservative bourgeois spectacle. Through their genuine presence in culture, politics, and commerce these girls contributed to the blurring of public and private that accompanied the rise of the socially interventionist state.⁸⁸

This article has sought to explain how, as the demographic boom of the nineteenth century tailed off and Europeans struggled with the consequences of what they perceived as decadence, degeneration, and over-civilization, age became a more important component in the representation of the modern nation. As the case of the Muse shows, elites were highly sensitized to the importance of age and gender as fields through which their claims to power in the modern nation-state might be legitimated and challenges to the social order might be resolved. The figure of the Muse saw the French nation classed, raced, and gendered —ambiguously in each case. It was also, however, "aged," through association with the inherently ambiguous category of adolescence. Age was used to fragment the feminist challenge to tradition and male authority, and to dampen mass male resistance to the burgeoning alliance between women and the republican state. While historians have challenged gender and race blindness in studies of the modern nation, they have tended to reproduce a certain blindness to the significance of age in power relations. As this article has suggested, through the adoption of a methodology foregrounding age as a social variable it is possible to cast new light upon historical change and to reconsider the enduring assumptions (many generated during this period) through which the highly politicized nature of pre-adulthood was, and still is, concealed.

The crowning provided a focus for a debate about bodily aesthetics in the French context that was conducted more broadly in Europe and North America during this period. In the specific context of France, sensitivity to the transgression of established norms imperiling the nation was sufficient to produce the demonstration (and elision) of age, beauty, and health as a focus of mass spectacle. Although it slipped from political ritual, however, this vision of youthful femininity did not disappear. Instead, in France and elsewhere it acquired still greater cultural relevance into the interwar years as a new paradigm of health and beauty to which all women were expected to conform.⁸⁹ Young female bodies were invested with new significance in the commercial and political realm in an era marked by more intensive state-led drives to promote bodily health and "racial hygiene." The integration of the youthful female body into spectacle in fin-de-siècle France, can thus be seen to have prefigured the emphasis laid on this aesthetic by fascist regimes during the interwar period and the wartime mobilization of the "eternal feminine" by the Vichy state.⁹⁰ From the figure of the Muse, positioned somewhere between the barricades, the boutique, and the boudoir, emerged the fault lines of prominent twentieth-century themes—the iconic power of the young female body, its exploitation for political and commercial ends, and the opportunities for individual empowerment that lay therein.

The author would like to acknowledge the importance of the Research Initiation Fund for Newly Appointed Junior Staff at the University of Hong Kong (allowing travel to France for research purposes) in the preparation of this article. Warm thanks are also due to Leslie Paris, Helen Meller, Staci Lee Ford, Jeremy Tambling, Marie-Paule Ha, Peter Cunich, Nick Hewitt, Sandrine Lamiable, Michael Grossberg, and the anonymous reviewers of the AHR for their helpful advice and comments in the preparation of the manuscript. An earlier version of this paper was given at the Society for the History of Childhood and Youth Conference, Baltimore (2003).

David M. Pomfret is assistant professor of Modern European History at the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of books and articles on the history of young people and urban history. His most recent publication is Young People and the European City: Age Relations in Nottingham and Saint-Etienne (2004). He is currently working on a history of open spaces in European cities and a comparative study of young people in the empires of Britain and France.

Notes

¹ The metaphor of "separate spheres" emphasized the occupation of different social domains by men and women. Supposedly, women occupied the private space of the home (where they performed reproductive and moral roles) while men occupied public space (immersing themselves in the market and the institutions of civil society) in the ideal of the rising middle classes of Europe and North America. More recently, scholars have reconsidered the value of this metaphor in historical research. Amanda Vickery, for example, raised the question of whether such a division can be located in contemporary ideology and society. Such criticism was the starting point for work highlighting the interconnectedness of the "public" and the "private" in modernity and examining the social conflicts inspiring attempts to legitimate and "naturalize" this dichotomy. Amanda Vickery, "Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women's History," Historical Journal 36, no. 2 (1993): 383–414.

² Historians have begun to devote more attention to the role of how women's bodies were used as symbolic sites in the political project of nation building, a project founded upon modern constructions of sex difference. See, for example, Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann, and Catherine Hall, eds., Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 2000). Jo Burr Margadant has illustrated how images of women were central to narratives of the French nation during the July Monarchy. Margadant, "Gender, Vice and the Political Imaginary in Postrevolutionary France: Reinterpreting the Failure of the July Monarchy, 1830–1848," AHR 104, no. 5 (1999): 1461–96. See also, for example, Martha Banta, Imaging American Women: Ideas and Ideals in Cultural History (New York, 1987); Susan Shifrin ed., Women as Sites of Culture: Women's Roles in Cultural Formation from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century (Aldershot, 2002); Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–1880 (Baltimore, Md., 1990). For a less recent but provocative and relevant discussion, see also Eric Hobsbawm, "Man and Woman in Socialist Iconography," History Workshop no. 6 (1978): 121–38; Maurice Agulhon, "On Political Allegory: A Reply to Eric Hobsbawm," History Workshop no. 8 (1978): 167–73. On the encoding of women's marginality after 1789, see Joan W. Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, 1996). This process was evident not only in the European and North American contexts. For discussions of similar developments in Africa and the Middle East, see Beth Baron, "Nationalist Iconography: Egypt as a Woman," in Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East, James Jankowski and Israel Gershomi, eds. (New York, 1997), 105–24; Helen Bradford, "Regendering Afrikanerdom: The 1899–1902 Anglo-Boer War," in Blom, Hagemann, and Hall, Gendered Nations, 207–28. For a discussion of these issues in relation to the Asian context, see Joan Judge, "Talent, Virtue, and the Nation: Chinese Nationalisms and Female Subjectivities in the Early Twentieth Century," AHR 106, no. 3 (June 2001): 1, 3.

³ For more on the success of women in appropriating the right to move in public space as part of political ceremony in the United States, see Ryan, Women in Public, 52. Scholars studying France have noted that women held central roles in the disorderly public celebrations of the revolution in the early 1790s. See, for example, Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (New York, 1985), 286–87. Mona Ozouf notes, however, that although "from the beginning women had aspired to take part in the festivals," this aspiration "was so often rejected," that their involvement remained "partial" at best. Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, Alan Sheridan, trans. (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 101. After 1793, according to Joan Landes, "women were banned from active and passive participation in the political sphere." Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988), 147. See also Madelyn Gutwirth, The Twilight of the Goddesses: Women and Representation in the French Revolutionary Era (New Brunswick, N.J., 1992). On the sublimation of real women's public visibility in French politics into symbolic duty in the form of Marianne, see Lynn Hunt, "Engraving the Republic: Prints and Propaganda in the French Revolution," History Today (October 30, 1980): 17; Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley, Calif., 1984), 65. Maurice Agulhon, who examined the changing fortunes of Marianne as a visual representation of the republic, has argued that the American republic, "produced no female myth comparable to the French one," but endowed women with an embodied public presence, while in France a concomitant of this powerful myth was the relinquishment of an embodied role for women in the public ceremonies of the republic. Agulhon, Marianne into Battle: Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France, 1780–1880, Janet Lloyd, trans. (Cambridge, 1981), 182; Hobsbawm, "Man and Woman in Socialist Iconography."

⁴ Music historians have referred to the couronnement de la muse du peuple, in particular, the earliest performances in Paris. See, for example, Mary Ellen Poole, "Gustave Charpentier and the Conservatoire Populaire de Mimi Pinson," 19th Century Music 20, no. 3 (1997): 237; Jane F. Fulcher, "Charpentier's Operatic 'Roman Musical' as Read in the Wake of the Dreyfus Affair," 19th Century Music 16, no. 2 (1992), 168; Steven Huebner, "Between Anarchism and the Box Office: Gustave Charpentier's 'Louise,'" 19th Century Music 19, no. 2 (1995): 136–60. The event is also discussed in Martine Segalen and Josselyne Chamarat, "La Rosière et la 'miss': Les 'reines' des fêtes populaires," L'Histoire 53 (1983): 48–49. Save for one concise local study, the impact of the ceremony in the provinces has been largely ignored. Renée Martel, "De la muse du peuple à miss France," Saint-Etienne Histoire et Mémoire 188 (1997): 73–82.

⁵ In France those under age twenty-one constituted 34.9 percent of the population, while in Germany the equivalent group was 43.7 percent. James F. McMillan, France and Women, 1789–1914: Gender, Society and Politics (London, 2000), 141. For a discussion of fears of depopulation in France, see Karen Offen, "Depopulation, Nationalism, and Feminism in Fin-de-Siècle France," AHR 89, no. 3 (June 1984): 648–76. For a discussion of similar fears in Great Britain, see Pat Thane, "The Debate on the Declining Birth-rate in Britain: The 'Menace' of an Ageing Population, 1920s-1950s," Continuity and Change 5 (1990): 283–305.

⁶ The historical study of life stages, generation, and age relations developed in the wake of the influential work by Philippe Ariès, L'Enfant et la vie familiale sous l'ancien régime (Paris, 1960). Although historians questioned Ariès's method, his argument that childhood was a cultural construct was persuasive and inspired the development of a subfield of "youth history." A number of scholars provided, subsequently, important insights into the ways in which modern and premodern societies represented and attributed meaning to pre-adulthood and how young people experienced this identity and its specific constituent life stages. Important examples of this scholarship include Natalie Zemon Davis, "The Reasons of Misrule: Youth Groups and Charivaris in Sixteenth-Century France," Past and Present, no. 50 (February 1971): 41–75; John R. Gillis, Youth and History: Tradition and Change in European Age Relations, 1700-Present (New York, 1974); Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge, Mass., 1979); Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (Princeton, N.J., 1994); Carolyn Steedman, Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780–1930 (London, 1995).

⁷ On the Fin de Siècle, see Eugen Weber, France, Fin de Siècle (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 9–11; Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York, 1981); Christophe Prochasson, Les Années électriques, 1880–1910 (Paris, 1991), 5–14. For a discussion of the pathologies of national decline, see Robert A. Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline (Princeton, N.J., 1984), chap. 5. French population levels rose only marginally from 36.1 million in 1871 to 39.6 million in 1914. This contrasted markedly with a 57.8 percent increase in the size of the German population during the same period. The French medical doctor, Bénédict-August Morel had helped to pioneer "degeneration theory" in the 1850s, theorizing connections between heredity, environment, medical pathologies, and decline. The population issue was debated with such regularity and intensity that medical discourse was bound into public discussions of degeneration. Max Nordau's work, Degeneration, published in 1892 and translated into French a year later, for example, was hugely influential. On degeneration, see Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848-c.1918 (Cambridge, 1989).

⁸ For discussions of the perceived crisis of masculinity, see Robert A. Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (New York, 1993); Edward Berenson, The Trial of Madame Caillaux (Berkeley, Calif., 1992), 11–12, 115–17, 186–96; Annelise Maugue, L'Identité masculine en crise au tournant du siècle, 1871–1914 (Paris, 1987); Maugue, "L'Eve nouvelle et le vieil Adam," in Histoire des femmes, vol. 4, Geneviève Fraisse, ed. (Paris, 1991), chap. 19. As prophecies of the "end of the family" haunted the bourgeois imagination, women who resisted the norms of domestic femininity and made claims for suffrage were decried as decadent "idols of perversity." For a discussion of the expression of this crisis in fin-de-siècle literature and art, see, for example, Hollis Clayson, Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era (New Haven, Conn., 1991); Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Female Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (New York, 1986); Nicholas White, The Family in Crisis in Late Nineteenth-Century French Fiction (Cambridge, 1998), 17.

⁹ Steven Huebner, "Between Anarchism and the Box Office: Gustave Charpentier's Louise," 19th Century Music 19, no. 2 (1995): 141. The Vachalcade was held only twice, in 1896 and 1897, a fact attributed by Jerrold Seigel to the poor weather afflicting it in its second year. Seigel, Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830–1930 (New York, 1986), 338. In its mixture of elite and popular elements, the Vachalcade had much in common with earlier popular festivities, such as the Carnaval held during the week of Lent, which had reached its zenith in the 1830s and 1840s. "La Vachalcade," Le Petit Parisien, April 15, 1897. For a more recent discussion of the Vachalcade see Nicholas Green, The Spectacle of Nature: Landscape and Bourgeois Culture in Nineteenth Century France (Manchester, 1990), 77; and Huebner, "Between Anarchism and the Box Office," 152–55. Mary Garden, the Scottish-American soprano who took the lead in Charpentier's Louise in 1900, remembered him as "a real bohemian to whom money and fame meant nothing. He was satisfied if he had enough to pay for drinks for himself and his friends at the Rat Mort. He lived in a dirty little garret up on the butte... The production of his opera brought him nearly half a million francs, but he spent it all on the working girls of Montmartre." Mary Garden, quoted in Michael T. R. B. Turnbull, Mary Garden (Aldershot, 1997), 24. See also André Himonet, Louise de G.Charpentier: étude historique et critique, analyse musicale (Paris, 1922), 6–7.

¹⁰ Le Petit Parisien, covering dress rehearsals for the couronnement suggested the piece was "as curious as it is interesting." "La Vachalcade," Le Petit Parisien, April 15, 1897, 2. L'Illustration described it as "most original." "La Fête populaire du centenaire de Michelet," L'Illustration, July 30, 1898, 68. La France, discussing the Bordeaux performance, was moved to ask "Why all of these muses? What are they for? What big idea do they represent?" La France, June 25, 1901, Fonds Charpentier 362, Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris (Hereafter, BHVP). All translations are by the author, unless otherwise stated.

¹¹ In the earliest Paris performances, the poem "To the Muse" began with the lines: "O beautiful one! Chosen sister! Eternal inspiration," but in Saint-Etienne Paul de Champville's work "To the Muse" began with the words, "Cheerful and responsible girl worker, O muse you have no need for a crown, the workshop bench is the noblest throne." Saint-Etienne poem, 1I18, Archives Municipales de Saint-Etienne (Hereafter, AMSE). Notably, Jules Michelet had expressed strong views on the symbolic centrality of women to the republic. For a discussion of Michelet's views on women and the republic, see Judith F. Stone, "The Republican Brotherhood: Gender and Ideology," in Gender and the Politics of Social Reform in France, 1870–1914, Elinor A. Accampo, Rachel G. Fuchs, and Mary Lynn Stewart eds. (Baltimore, Md., 1995), 32–35.

¹² By way of illustration, Saint-Etienne's municipal council allocated 49,000 francs to the event in 1902. "La Fête national," La Loire Républicaine, July 16, 1902, Archives Départementales de la Loire (Hereafter, ADL); Saint-Etienne Letter, Mayor of Saint-Etienne to Mayor of Romans, March 11, 1903, 1I16, AMSE.

¹³ The perceived "Frenchness" of Charpentier's music was an important pillar upon which the unifying potential of the Muse was built. Gérard de Lacaze-Duthiers saw Charpentier as "rediscovering the true French tradition which decidedly could not be accommodated to the Wagnerian yoke." Alfred Bruneau observed in the couronnement the "beauty of a virile music and the grace of a young woman." Bruneau was, like Charpentier, a former pupil of Jules Massenet. Lacaze-Duthiers, Ville de Châlons-sur-Marne Fête de couronnement de la muse, 14 juillet 1903: Gustave Charpentier et la muse du peuple (Châlons-sur-Marne, 1903), 8–9; Bruneau, "La Muse de Paris—et son poète," Le Figaro, July 25, 1898, 1.

¹⁴ William B. Cohen, Urban Government and the Rise of the French City: Five Municipalities in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1998), 241–54; "Les muses départmentales," Journal du Mans, July 26, 1899, Fonds Charpentier 361, BHVP; "Les Muses à l'exposition," Le Matin, September 8, 1900.

¹⁵ "La Muse du peuple," La France, July 18, 1899, Fonds Charpentier 423, BHVP; "La Doyenne des reines de beauté qui reçevait par jour 65 lettres d'amour retourne, à 71 ans, des manteaux à 100F la pièce," Paris-Hebdo, September 18–21, 1952.

¹⁶ Saint-Etienne Police Report, Central Police Commissioner, "Antoinine Palle," 1906, 1I18, AMSE.

¹⁷ Councilors and the press, keen to read the benefits of their endowment into the reactions of those who observed it, paid a great deal of attention to the crowd's response and read this as betraying the reception of the event's implicit message. For the Républicain de l'Ouest, for example, "the people were not capable of understanding the symbolism" but, at the climax of the performance, "a shudder, nevertheless, shook [them]." "Chronique sur le couronnement de la muse," Le Républicain de l'Ouest, June 14, 1900, 2.

¹⁸ Although the few historians who have commented on the phenomenon have tended to focus only on the Paris events, the work was truly national, performed in more than a dozen cities in a decade. One report noted, "in six years fourteen muses have been crowned." Report cited in "Les Fêtes de la Muse—a Liège," Journal, July 21, 1903, Fonds Charpentier 363, BHVP. References were made in the republican press to the "thousands of curious bystanders," crammed into central city squares, or "curious onlookers massed in great numbers." An estimated 60,000 people observed the event during Bastille Day in Saint-Etienne in 1902. "L'Election de la muse," Le Progrès du Nord, May 17, 1898; "Le Couronnement de la reine des ouvrières," L'Echo du Nord, June 13, 1899, 2. In this way, the Fête de la Muse appears to have much in common with another spectacle, the Tour de France established in 1903, which also offered the French a vision and sense of their nation through urban spectacle and the newspaper press. The muse festival was also performed outside France, in Belgium and Algiers, and was discussed in the English press. "Les Fêtes de la Muse—a Liège," Journal, July 21, 1903, Fonds Charpentier 363, BHVP; Daily Telegraph, July 6, 1901, Fonds Charpentier 362, BHVP.

¹⁹ The rather starchy slate of events drawn up for republican festivals included reviews of troops and gymnastics performances by military preparation societies. Still, greased pigs and other popular entertainments did not disappear entirely from view during Bastille Day festivities. For more on republican festivals, see Charles Rearick, "Festivals in Modern France: The Experience of the Third Republic," Journal of Contemporary History 12 (July 1977): 450–56. For more on the beauty contests centering on the Paris laundries, see Alain Faure, Paris carème-prenant: Du carnaval à Paris au XIX^e siècle, 1800–1914 (Paris, 1978), 134–36. Spring rituals held to celebrate fertility involving "queens" dated back to the late medieval period. For more on the custom of selecting rosières in the fête de la rose that flourished in France from the 1760s, see Sarah C. Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France (Berkeley, Calif., 1993), 68–85, 102–08, 130; Segalen and Chamarat, "La Rosière et la 'miss,'" 47; Segalen and Chamarat, "Les Rosières se suivent et ne se ressemblent pas," Centre d'Animation de l'Histoire de Nanterre (1979): 8.

²⁰ Following the Dreyfus crisis, René Waldeck-Rousseau brought together a leftist coalition of radicals, socialists, and moderates that gave the republic an unusual spell of stability (with only two cabinets in five years). Moves toward greater integration included the unification of the Confédération Générale du Travail and Bourses du Travail movement in 1902, and Jean Jaurès's success in unifying the six competing segments of the French socialist movement. Outside Paris, at a municipal level, this was also a period of remarkable advancement for the socialist movement. In Bordeaux, for example, in 1900, a republican list containing seven socialists was elected in its entirety. For details, see Louis Desgraves and Georges Dupieux, eds., Bordeaux au XIX^e siècle (Bordeaux, 1969), 333–34. In Lille, socialists won control of the municipal council thanks to an agreement with the radicals in 1898. This is covered in Louis Trenard and Yves-Marie Hilaire, eds., Histoire de Lille: Du XIX^e siècle au seuil du XXI^e siècle (Lille, 1999), 75–76. In Saint-Etienne, the socialists took overall control in 1900 of a council headed by an anarcho-syndicalist mayor, Jules Ledin. For an account of the socialist victory, see Jean Merley ed., Histoire de Saint-Etienne (Toulouse, 1990), 214.

²¹ Picking up on Charpentier's populist turn, Gérard de Lacaze-Duthiers explained that "a muse, is ... less solemn, but is as dignified" as a "queen," appearing "more human, closer to us." Lacaze-Duthiers, Ville de Châlons-sur-Marne, 17–18. Liberty had been portrayed in the revolutionary iconography of womanhood as a virtuous daughter figure. Aspects of the visual style of performance of the muse—her proximity to the Hôtel de Ville, the enthronement, the gestures of deference—had much in common with the festival of the Triumph of Reason held on November 10, 1793. This point was not lost on contemporary commentators. For more on Liberty, see Joan B. Landes, "Representing the Body Politic: The Paradox of Gender in the Graphic Politics of the French Revolution," in Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution, Sara E. Melzer and Leslie W. Rabine, eds. (New York, 1992), 32. See also Stéphane Michaud, Muse et madone: Visages de la femme de la révolution française aux apparitions de Lourdes (Paris, 1985). Notably, opera decor featured in the Festival of Reason of November 1793, as did "members of the Opera ballet and music from the Opera repertory." Hunt, "Engraving the Republic," 14; Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class, 65. Another similarity lay in the rapid spread of the ritual from Paris to the provinces. Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class, 63–64. Huebner, "Between Anarchism and the Box Office," 153–55. On the rosières' associations with the French aristocracy, see Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs, 72–73.

²² Republican press reports identified the disbursal of "beauty" for the benefit of the urban masses as the proper responsibility of socialist-influenced city council. Initial enthusiasm for a festival which, as one councilor put it, was "endowed with a solemnly artistic, popular and moral character," thus owed much to hopes that this might have an enlightening effect on those who viewed it. New conceptions of art as having a social function and of improving the taste of the workers were disseminated by intellectuals, in particular Camille Mauclair, who advanced such views in regular contributions to the debate on the democratization of beauty and luxury in the pages of the Revue Bleue. Rosalind H. Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley, Calif., 1982), 158–67; Conseil Municipal de Bordeaux, Conseil municipal de Bordeaux, procès-verbaux des séances (Bordeaux, 1899), 267; "Le Couronnement de la muse," Le Républicain de l'Ouest, June 5–7, 1900, 2.

²³ Saint-Etienne Newspaper Extract, L'Aurore, July 17, 1902, 1I16, AMSE.

²⁴ Lacaze-Duthiers, Ville de Châlons-sur-Marne, 9, 15.

²⁵ "L'Election d'une muse," Le Figaro, July 11, 1898, 1; "Le Couronnement de la muse," L'Intransigeant, July 26, 1898, 2. L'Indépendance of Cambrai, for example, explained the event in 1911 as "a work of art, the beauty and value of which has never been contested by anyone." L'Indépendance, August 8, 1911, Fonds Charpentier 362, BHVP. Even after the rather racy plot of the opera Louise was revealed in February 1900, few dissonant voices were heard.

²⁶ Saint-Etienne Newspaper Extract, La Vie Illustrée: L'Univers Illustré réunis, 197, July 25, 1902, 280, 1I16, AMSE; "La Muse Lilloise," Lille Artiste, June 1, 1898, 2.

²⁷ While ambivalent at best about the crowning ceremony, which was perceived as "revolutionary" and "pagan," Catholic spokespersons were at pains to explain that they did not wish to criticize the Muse herself. Pro-Catholic newspapers poked fun at the festival floats and raised doubts as to councilors' motives for sponsoring the event, but conceded that the performance itself was remarkably popular. In some cities, editorial staff from pro-Catholic newspapers even attended meetings held by the organizing committee of the municipal council. L'Indépendance, August 8, 1911, Fonds Charpentier 361, BHVP; "Le 'Couronnement de la Muse,'" La Croix du Nord, June 6, 1898, 2. Notes from meeting of organizing committee members, June 30, 1902, 1I16, AMSE.

²⁸ "La Muse de Paris," La Fronde, July 11, 1898, 1.

²⁹ The poet Paul Verlaine dwelt on the tiredness of Marianne's image in the sonnet, "A Bust for the Town Halls" of 1881 in which he suggested that "Marianne is very old, getting on for a hundred ... now she is a garrulous crone with thin hair and no teeth." This translation of Verlaine and further discussion of the evolving appearance of Marianne can be found in Maurice Agulhon, Marianne into Battle, 178–79. See also Hunt, "Engraving the Republic," 17.

³⁰ The "New Woman" was a widespread phenomenon but formed part of an especially forceful critique in the French case, articulated in such literary vehicles as the Journal des débats, Revue des deux mondes, La Plume, La Revue, La Nouvelle Revue, and others. For the "New Woman" in the French context, see Debora L. Silverman, "The 'New Woman,' Feminism and the Decorative Arts in Fin-de-Siècle France," in Eroticism and the Body Politic, Lynn Hunt, ed. (Baltimore, Md., 1991), 144–63; Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style (Berkeley, Calif., 1989), 63–74, 193–206. Mary Louise Roberts, Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-Siècle France (Chicago, 2002), 11–15; Michael Wilson, "'Sans les femmes, qu'est-ce qui nous resterait?' Gender and Transgression in Bohemian Montmartre," in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub, eds. (New York, 1991), 195–222. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "Discourses of Sexuality and Subjectivity: The New Woman, 1870–1936," in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey Jr., eds. (New York, 1989). On the "New Woman" in the Anglo-Saxon context, see Ruth Brandon, The New Women and the Old Men: Love, Sex and the Woman Question (London, 1990); Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York, 1990); Smith-Rosenberg, "The New Woman as Androgyne: Social Disorder and Gender Crisis, 1870–1936," in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York, 1985), 245–96.

³¹ From 1889 to 1900, twenty-one feminist periodicals were established and three international feminist congresses were held, but real success in achieving convergence between the various women's leagues did not arrive until 1908–1909. For more on these developments and on the links between demographic crisis and the feminist challenge, see Offen, "Depopulation, Nationalism, and Feminism," 648–75. For a detailed discussion of the growth and consolidation of French feminism before 1914, see Steven C. Hause, Women's Suffrage and Social Politics in the French Third Republic, with Anne R. Kenney (Princeton, 1984); Laurence Klejman and Florence Rochefort, L'Egalité en marche: Le Féminisme sous la troisième république (Paris, 1989). On this theme, see also George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York, 1996), 104; McMillan, France and Women, 204.

³² This figure formed part of a panoply of female caricatures representing those supposedly eroding male virility in public and private. While the "New Woman" was castigated for her rejection of reproductive "duties," the old mother, a symbol of declining fertility (to whom suspicions of clerical conservatism easily attached), was considered to be complicit in national decline, having been part of a generation of women who had produced too few babies. For more on such images, see Honoré Daumier, Intellectuelles (bas bleus) et femmes socialistes (Paris, 1993); Michelle Perrot, "The New Eve and the Old Adam: Changes in French Women's Condition at the Turn of the Century," in Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, Margaret Randolph Higonnet, et al., eds. (New Haven, Conn., 1987), 59. For a contemporary discussion of this "menace," see Georges Deherme, Le Pouvoir social des femmes (Paris, 1912), 238–75. On the "New Woman" in the English context, see John Tosh, A Man's Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven, Conn., 1999), 152–53.

³³ Women began to command respect and authority in new professional domains, notably in public sector work, as in the case of the school mistresses, labor administrators, and inspectresses discussed in Linda L. Clark, The Rise of Professional Women in France: Gender and Public Administration since 1830 (Cambridge, 2000), chaps. 1–4; Clark, "Bringing Feminine Qualities into the Public Sphere: The Third Republic's Appointment of Women Inspectors," in Accampo, Fuchs, and Stewart, Gender and the Politics of Social Reform, 128–56; Rachel G. Fuchs, "France in a Comparative Perspective," ibid, 183–87.

³⁴ According to one historian, the gradual "feminization" of the tertiary sector of the economy formed "perhaps the most striking change in the pattern of women's employment." At 20 percent of the total nonagricultural workforce, married women in the late nineteenth century were a significant presence in work spaces dominated by men. In France the percentage of married women who worked was among the highest in Western Europe. Perrot, "The New Eve and the Old Adam," 52.

³⁵ Deliberations on this issue at the meeting of the Confédération Générale du Travail in 1898 produced a discussion of the return of women to home and hearth as an ideal solution to this "problem." X^e Congrès National Corporatif (IV^e de la Confédération Générale du Travail), tenu à Rennes les 26–30 septembre et 1 octobre 1898, Compte rendu des travaux du congrès (Rennes, 1898).

³⁶ For two important expressions of contemporary French opinion on adolescence, see Gabriel Compayré, L'Adolescence, études de psychologie et de pédagogie (Paris, 1909) and P. Mendousse, L'Ame de l'adolescent (Paris, 1909). For a discussion of the idea (and institutionalization) of adolescence in France, see Agnés Thiercé, Histoire de l'adolescence, 1850–1914 (Paris, 1999). The attribution of new importance to adolescence was a widespread phenomenon in Europe and the United States around the turn of the twentieth century. For a discussion of the development of this life stage in the British context, see John Springhall, Coming of Age: Adolescence in Britain, 1860–1960 (Dublin, 1986); Harry Hendrick, Images of Youth: Age, Class and the Male Youth Problem, 1880–1920 (Oxford, 1990). On the "schizoid" tendencies of the fin-de-siècle adolescent self, see Bill Schwarz, "Night Battles: Hooligan and Citizen," in Modern Times: Reflections on a Century of English Modernity, Mica Nava and Alan O'Shea, eds. (London, 1996), 176–207. For a discussion of adolescence in the Austrian context, see J. R. Wegs, "Working-class 'Adolescence' in Austria, 1890–1930," Journal of Family History 17, no. 4 (1992): 439–50. On Germany, see Gillis, Youth and History. On the United States, see Joseph Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present (New York, 1977). The fin-de-siècle emergence and development of adolescence as a literary theme has been discussed by Justin O'Brien, The Novel of Adolescence in France (Oxford, 1939); John Neubauer, The Fin-de-Siècle Culture of Adolescence (New Haven, Conn., 1992); Patricia Meyer Spacks, Adolescent Idea: Myths of the Young and the Adult Imagination (New York, 1981).

³⁷ On the political left, efforts were made by unionists to set up educational wings, and revolutionary, "collectivist," and socialist student groups also emerged in the 1890s. Into the early twentieth century, reactionary forces, especially the Catholic church, reinvigorated their own extensive networks of social contact with young people, while conservative nationalist writers elevated the regenerative potential and national significance of "youth" to new heights. Agathon [Henri Massis and Alfred de Tarde], Les Jeunes gens d'aujourd'hui, le goût de l'action, la foi patriotique—une renaissance catholique, le réalisme politique 4th edn. (Paris, 1913); Gaston Ragéot, "A Propos de la jeunesse d'aujourd'hui," Annales Politiques et Litteraires (February 1913): 113–14; Ferdinand Antonin Vuillermet, Les Sophismes de la jeunesse (Paris, 1910).

³⁸ Great efforts were made by republican activists, in particular those working within the Ligue d'Enseignement, to enroll adolescents in after-school societies. These societies were admitted, after 1890, in larger numbers to perform in Bastille Day celebration schedules. The Muse, in this way, formed part of a wider movement to reinvigorate republican festivals (by then struggling to recapture the imagination and interest of the public) through ritual performance by the young. For details of the institutionalization of adolescence in France, see Kathleen Alaimo, "Shaping Adolescence in the Popular Milieu: Social Policy, Reformers and French Youth, 1870–1920," Journal of Family History 17 (1992): 419–38; David M. Pomfret, Young People and the European City: Age Relations in Nottingham and Saint-Etienne, 1890–1940 (Aldershot, 2004), 103–52.

³⁹ This was reflected in terminology. When it had first come into common usage earlier in the nineteenth century the term, jeune fille (young girl), had been used to refer to young, single women from the haute bourgeoisie. By the late nineteenth century, contemporaries sometimes used the terms jeune fille and jeune femme (young woman) interchangeably. See, for example, Fémina Bibliothèque, Pour être belle (Paris, 1913), 12. For a discussion of the vagueness of the upper and lower boundaries of adolescence (and in particular female adolescence) in France, see Thiercé, Histoire de l'adolescence, 20–24, 161–63.

⁴⁰ Alaimo, "Shaping Adolescence in the Popular Milieu," 425.

⁴¹ Most of the girls selected to perform as Muses were between sixteen and eighteen years old. Thus, when one scholar refers to the Muse as a "proletarian woman," he ignores the important role played by the variable of age in explaining the cultural significance of this phenomenon. Huebner, "Between Anarchism and the Box Office," 152. It is worth noting that Charpentier's work Louise played upon the key theme of adolescent rebellion and that, as an artistic movement, verismo (with which Charpentier's work was identified) emphasized characteristics often attributed to both adolescents and the lower classes in social commentary. In this vision, workers were seen as, "'more natural' men and women, whose emotions were closer to the surface and hence more intense than those of effete upper class city dwellers." On this see Dona De Sanctis, quoted in Helen M. Greenwald, "Realism on the Opera Stage: Belasco, Puccini, and the California Sunset," in Opera in Context: Essays on Historical Staging from the Late Renaissance to the Time of Puccini, Mark A. Radice, ed. (Portland, 1998), 280.

⁴² Adolescent female "delinquency," particularly sexual delinquency, became an intense focus for attention in this period in France, as elsewhere. See, for example, Anne-Marie Sohn, Chrysalides: Femmes dans la vie privée (XIX^e–XX^e siècles) (Paris, 1996). For a discussion of the apaches, see Michelle Perrot, "Dans la France de la belle époque: Les 'Apaches', premières bandes de jeunes," in Cahiers Jussieu: Les Marginaux et les exclus dans l'histoire (Paris, 1978), 387–407. At this time, concern also began to crystallize around the figure of the "girl mother" (filles mères) whose transgressive behavior and fatherless offspring ruptured the ideal family and threatened the nation. On the filles mères, see Rachel G. Fuchs, "Morality and Poverty: Public Welfare for Mothers in Paris, 1870–1900," French History 2, no. 3 (1988): 298–301; Fuchs, Abandoned Children: Foundlings and Child Welfare in Nineteenth-Century France (Albany, N.Y., 1984); Yves Roumajon, Enfants perdus, enfants punis: Histoire de la jeunesse délinquante en France. Huit siècles de controverses (Paris, 1989). For a discussion of concern over young females in the American context during this period, see Ruth M. Alexander, The Girl Problem: Female Sexual Delinquency in New York, 1900–1930 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1995); Regina G. Kunzel, Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890–1945 (New Haven, Conn., 1993); Mary E. Odem, Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885–1920 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1995); Kathy Lee Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia, 1986).

⁴³ A survey of prominent writers' views of recent changes in young women's lifestyles, though often producing sharply critical opinions, was notable for the fact that the majority of those interviewed still felt it worthwhile to articulate their ideal of the French girl and to offer their views on how this ideal might be realized. "Le Type idéal de la jeune fille française," Fémina, February 1, 1908, 54.

⁴⁴ The eponymous protagonist of Charpentier's Louise, for example, was a young working-class seamstress, feisty, impulsive, and contrarian, who rejected parental constraints to throw herself into the cultural tumult of Montmartre, a free love relationship, and the freedoms of the city streets. Similar themes of autonomy and resistance to the authority of the family can be found in a number of other operas in this period. These included, for example, Giacomo Puccini's La Bohême (1896), Madama Butterfly (1904), and La Fanciulla del West (1910) and Pietro Mascagni's Iris (1897).

⁴⁵ From the 1880s, a number of French writers endowed young female characters with tendencies to willful independence that often produced tension in relations between daughters and their parents. Early examples included Emile Zola, Germinal (Paris, 1885); Marcel Prévost, Les Demi-Vièrges (Paris, 1894). In George du Maurier's hugely popular novel, Trilby (1894), the vitality of an independent and promiscuous orphan girl was snuffed by bourgeois convention. For more on this theme, see Clifford H. Bissell, Les Conventions du théâtre bourgeois contemporain en France, 1887–1914 (Paris, 1930), 114–18; Roberts, Disruptive Acts, 22, 32–34, 79.

⁴⁶ Between 1880 and 1914, a slew of legislation granted women new legal rights. Reforms in 1881 and 1886, for example, gave women the right to set up savings accounts without their husbands' intervention or authorization. In 1884, the right to divorce was reintroduced. In 1907, married women gained the right to use their own earnings as they wished. McMillan, France and Women, 152. Although this piecemeal approach has led historians to identify France as comparatively backward in developing welfare provision when contrasted with other European countries and the United States, according to Rachel Fuchs, "an early, if uncoordinated, introduction of welfare measures" occurred. In this revisionist view, the republic can in fact be seen as "a European leader in designing family policies and allowances." Fuchs, "France in a Comparative Perspective," in Accampo, Fuchs, and Stewart, Gender and the Politics of Social Reform in France, 159–61.

⁴⁷ "La Muse du Peuple," L'Indépendant, July 23, 1911, Fonds Charpentier 361, BHVP.

⁴⁸ The reference to Goethe's classic novel of adolescence is noteworthy, as are the voyeuristic overtones of this bourgeois observer's account of his penetration of the inner domestic recesses of the working class "slum" districts in search of workers' daughters. "La Muse Lilloise," Lille Artiste, June 1, 1898, 2.

⁴⁹ In a similar vein, reporters were careful to explain that the "Muse Noire" of Lens (designated thus to represent the local coalmining industry) "while black has very white skin." One newspaper expressed parents' anxieties at the potential of the male gaze to render their girls "deflowered in image" or "undressed" in public during these events. Evénement, June 20, 1901, Fonds Charpentier 362, BHVP; "La Muse Lilloise," Lille Artiste, June 1, 1898.

⁵⁰ Lacaze-Duthiers evoked a similar idea a few years later in his claim that, "a muse ... will be the most delicate, the most healthy, the most lively." Lacaze-Duthiers, Ville de Châlons-sur-Marne, 18. The search for the regenerative girl was cast in the kind of narrative form then being employed in French accounts of encounters with the "exotic" in the colonial context. In France, in the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair, women who moved beyond fixed and admissible subject positions inspired racially coded condemnation. In particular, "the Jew" and the "New Woman" were linked as cultural constructs through characteristics of race and gender. The former was constructed as a rootless, effeminate element in the social body while the latter broke (or "wandered") free of her domestic roots through her cosmopolitanism. Both supposedly weakened the national organism by breaking traditions constituting the "eternal" France. In France, the writer and journalist, Marcelle Tinayre, for example, viewed such women as "wandering Jews, whose position cannot be defined, and to whom one refuses respect." In this context, the young Muse appeared as a provocative figure, racialized and wandering between autonomy and dependence, but her age made this a "natural" tendency, part of her vulnerability, and in this way protected her against censure. Marcelle Tinayre, "Ménages d'artistes," La Fronde, March 3, 1898, quoted in Roberts, Disruptive Acts, 113.

⁵¹ On "patriarchal patriots" and the crisis of male virility, see Offen, "Depopulation, Nationalism and Feminism," 669.

⁵² "Mazas ou Charenton—éléction de la muse de Paris," L'Intransigeant, July 12, 1898, 1; "Couronnement de la Muse du Peuple," Tribune Républicaine, July 4, 1906, ADL.

⁵³ In relation to the influence of the classical aesthetic on modern notions of beauty, it is worth noting that the Muse appeared on stage dressed in long white ceremonial robes, a conspicuous reference to the origins of the norms of "elemental" beauty that the girls were chosen to represent. For an early discussion of the classical influence upon modern notions of beauty, see Auguste Debay, Hygiène et perfectionnement de la beauté humaine. Dans ses lignes, ses formes et sa couleur. Théorie nouvelle des aliments et boissons, digestion—nutrition, art de développer les formes en moins et de diminuer les formes en trop, 4th edn. (Paris, 1864), 9–17, 33. Michael Hau has examined this process in the case of Germany. Hau, The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany: A Social History, 1890–1930 (Chicago, 2003), 33. On the links between Social Darwinism and fin-de-siècle theories of the nature of beauty, see Kurt Bayertz, "Biology and Beauty: Science and Aesthetics in Fin-de-siècle Germany," in Fin-de-Siècle and Its Legacy, Mikulá� Teich and Roy Porter, eds. (Cambridge, 1990), 278–96.

⁵⁴ In the United States, "Lafayette Girls" had been selected in the early nineteenth century from each state to celebrate the visit of the French hero of the War of Independence. In 1854, P. T. Barnum organized the exhibition of photographic beauty contests, an idea taken up in the press. In 1880 the "first beauty contest of record," the Miss United States beauty pageant was held in the resort of Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. These contests, in spite of the name, proliferated mainly along the eastern seaboard of the United States and were organized with a view to boosting tourism. The first national photographic contest was held in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1905, with 40,000 entrants. Later, regional competitions were unified in the first Miss America event held in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1920 (the same year in which the journalist, Maurice de Waleffe, organized the inaugural Miss France contest). The Miss World pageant, which commenced in 1951, brought together international competitors for the first time. For a brief historical overview of the American context, see Colleen Ballerino Cohen, Richard Wilk, and Beverly Stoeltje, eds., Beauty Queens on the Global Stage: Gender, Contests, and Power (London, 1996), 3–5. For a more detailed discussion, see Lois W. Banner, American Beauty (Chicago, 1984), 250–61.

⁵⁵ Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983); Alon Confino quoted in Silke Wenk, "Gendered Representations of the Nation's Past and Future," in Blom, Hagemann, and Hall, Gendered Nations, 66.

⁵⁶ In the same vein, Durand had famously made claims for the debt owed by French feminism to her blonde hair. For more on Durand and the feminist celebration of beauty, see Roberts, Disruptive Acts, 44–70. For a discussion of feminists' invocation of democratic notions of beauty in the context of the United States, see Lois Banner, American Beauty, 206–08. According to Banner, in the United States ethical definitions of beauty remained more important to feminists who perceived the dangers that claims for democratic access to physical beauty held for their cause.

⁵⁷ The "disruptive" tendencies of the most high profile female theater star, Sarah Bernhardt, are discussed in Roberts, Disruptive Acts, 15, 55, 165–78.

⁵⁸ With the erosion of the highly eroticized image of the actress and the "chastening of the stage," according to Lenard Berlanstein, "theatregoing became an increasingly feminised cultural event." Berlanstein, Daughters of Eve: A Cultural History of French Theater Women from the Old Regime to the Fin-de-Siècle (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), 161–67.

⁵⁹ In 1900, Marguerite Durand was thirty-six years old, Sarah Bernhardt was fifty-six, and Julia Bartet (star of the Comédie-Française) was forty-six, Jeanne Granier (actress and opera singer) was forty-eight, Jane Hading (actress) was forty-one. Berlanstein, Daughters of Eve, 8, 166, 197.

⁶⁰ Mathilde Pokitonoff, La Beauté par l'hygiène: Son développement et sa conservation (Paris, 1892), 1; Fémina Bibliothèque, Pour être belle, (Paris, 1913) 32; Ernest Monin, Pour le beau sexe: Causeries d'un vieux spécialiste (Paris, 1914), 300. In her revisionist history of Victorian fashion styles, Valerie Steele has argued that older women were able to exploit erotic dress forms, emphasizing bodily concealment and the undergarment, to preserve their sexual allure. However, by the turn of the twentieth century, changes in dress style served to introduce more distinctive forms of appearance for young women, reflecting in fashion the developing acknowledgement of this group's age-specific allure. Valerie Steele, Fashion and Eroticism: Ideals of Feminine Beauty from the Victorian Era through the Jazz Age (New York, 1985), 221–34.

⁶¹ Women were consigned in this Enlightenment paradigm to the status of subordinates or adjuncts. Carole Pateman, The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism and Political Theory (Stanford, Calif., 1988), 3–4, 9–10, 18–19, 44–47.

⁶² This argument runs counter to that of Silke Wenk, who states that "the public visibility of women ... occurs outside of the space where politics is negotiated." Wenk, "Gendered Representations of the Nation's Past and Future," 65. Warner, Monuments and Maidens, 293. According to George Mosse, "when woman left the place assigned to her in the division between the sexes, she became an outsider as well and presented one of the most serious and difficult challenges to modern masculinity." Mosse, The Image of Man, 102.

⁶³ "Préface pour programme," Fonds Charpentier 423, BHVP, cited in Huebner, "Between Anarchism and the Box Office," 152. Charles Chincholle, for example, described how these girls were "elegantly slim." "L'Election d'une muse," Le Figaro, July 11, 1898, 1. In her underdeveloped state, the Muse was notably androgenous. In the medical discourse of this period, the adolescent was often referred to using the neuter pronoun, it. On the androgenous woman, see Maugue, L'identité masculine en crise, 106–13.

⁶⁴ "La Muse Lilloise," Lille Artiste, June 1, 1898, 3. In Cambrai, for example, the Muse and her ladies-in-waiting received garments from the high-quality fashion houses of the city. "Journée du 15—le couronnement de la muse," L'Indépendant, August 17, 1911. Prizes offered in Lille included such items as a "silk robe from Galeries Lilloises, two superb illustrated books by Librairies Allandier, a basket of ribbon by Modes Parisiennes, a purse by Phénix" and so on. "La Fête de la muse—A Lille," Le Réveil du Nord, May 31, 1898, 2.

⁶⁵ This thesis is put forward convincingly in Lisa Tiersten, Marianne in the Market: Envisioning Consumer Society in Fin-de-Siècle France (Berkeley, Calif., 2001). On the rise of the department store and the dangers that lay therein, see also Michael B. Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869–1920 (Princeton, N.J., 1981); Elaine S. Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store (New York, 1989). The notion of luxury was complicated in this period as the number of consumers increased. These developments raised questions of established bourgeois modes of consumption and prompted experiments with new ways of consuming. Rosalind H. Williams, Dream Worlds, 109–10.

⁶⁶ Tiersten, Marianne in the Market, 85.

⁶⁷ One might wonder why children, a group defined similarly, were not chosen as the focus of this spectacle. In considering this, it should be noted that though advances had been made in realizing the bourgeois view of childhood as dependent, these had been won through the highly contentious education reforms of the 1880s, which had alarmed Catholics (who fought against the loss of prestige and influence these changes entailed) and workers (many of whom contested the idea of a non-working childhood). As a critical site on which the battle for the future of the nation was fought, childhood therefore made a less suitable focus at this time for a festival of national unity. Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian Britain: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1941 (Stanford, Calif., 1990), 243.

⁶⁸ Tiersten, Marianne in the Market, 3. In this way, it can be seen that although, as Elinor Accampo has suggested, the state "used middle-class women to moralize working women in the public sphere," it also utilized working-class women to moralize women across the class divide. Accampo, "Gender, Social Policy and the Formation of the Third Republic," in Accampo, Fuchs, and Stewart, Gender and the Politics of Social Reform, 21.

⁶⁹ "Mazas ou Charenton—éléction de la muse de Paris," L'Intransigeant, July 12, 1898; "La Muse du peuple," La France, July 18, 1899, 3.

⁷⁰ Denied the right to elect men (or women) to govern them, young women were afforded the right, through the simulacrum of suffrage that formed part of the event, to elect aesthetic representatives. The event was interpreted in several daily newspapers as a "feminist ceremony" and a means through which "feminism has taken a great step forward." "Causerie," Petite Gironde n.d., Fonds Charpentier 361, BHVP; "L'Election du Mans," Journal du Mans, July 15, 1899, Fonds Charpentier 361, BHVP.

⁷¹ "Pour la jeunesse," Le Figaro, July 9, 1898, 1. The reference to the premodern, carnivalesque charivari is notable. Electors were encouraged to select a candidate who was hardworking, humble and dedicated to her family. Ideally, the Muse would project these values in spite of material impoverishment. In the selection process, young candidates skillfully manipulated this gendered discourse of honorable impoverishment and female sacrifice to portray themselves as deserving daughter-martyrs and to attack other candidates as less than deserving. "La Muse de Paris," La Fronde, July 11, 1898, 1. Charpentier later recalled seemingly interminable rounds of voting in 1897, as the girls, all candidate-voters, repeatedly cast their ballots for themselves. "Le Couronnement de la Muse," Fonds Charpentier 430, BHVP; "M. Gustave Charpentier qui dirigea jusqu'à ce jour plus de cent couronnements de 'sa' muse évoque pour nous des souvenirs," Excelsior, July 2, 1933.

⁷² "Les Fêtes Desrousseaux," Le Progrès du Nord, June 10, 1898, Fonds Charpentier 360, BHVP.

⁷³ Newspaper Extract, Le Stéphanois, 1900, 7C17, AMSE.

⁷⁴ "Les Fêtes de la Muse," Loire Républicaine, July 10, 1902, 3, ADL. Notably, a high proportion of those who enrolled as candidates in the competition to become the Muse were factory workers. "Mazas ou Charenton—éléction de la muse de Paris," L'Intransigeant, July 12, 1898, 1; Saint-Etienne Police Reports, Fête de la Muse du Peuple, 1900–1906, 1I15, ASME.

⁷⁵ On the rise of mass culture, see Patrick Brantlinger, "Mass Media and Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Europe," in Teich and Porter, Fin de Siècle and Its Legacy, 98–114; Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley, Calif., 1998). On advertising and its links with artistic and commercial culture, see Marjorie A. Beale, The Modernist Enterprise: French Elites and the Threat of Modernity, 1900–1940 (Stanford, Calif., 1999), 11–47. Studying the United States, Susan Glenn has drawn attention to the process through which theater, in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, provided a space in which women could investigate possibilities for self-promotion and self-realization. Glenn, Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism (Cambridge, Mass., 2000).

⁷⁶ From the 1880s in France, as elsewhere, a new kind of advice literature emerged to counsel women on the economic and social management of beauty. It was believed to be especially important for young women to adopt the beauty practices espoused by experts because, as possessors of the intrinsic beauty of young womanhood, they supposedly had a greater chance of prolonging this beauty through body discipline. See, for example, Paul Marrin, La beauté chez l'homme et la femme: Les Moyens de l'acquérir et de l'augmenter, 15th edn. (Paris, 1891); Dr. Luiggi, La Beautyculture (Paris, 1893), 3–5; Y. H. Khamed, Vénus biblion arcanes physiologiques. La Beauté conservée et restituée par la science (Paris, 1899), ii-iv; O. De Jalin, Les Secrets de la beauté (Paris, 1904); Comtesse de Tramar, Que veut la femme? être jolie, être aimée, et dominer (Paris, 1911), 5–10, 18, 23–24; Fémina Bibliothèque, Pour être belle; Monin, Pour le beau sexe. These practices and the literature that supported them were legitimated through their endorsement by the stars of page, stage, and screen. For more on the extension of fashionable clothing to the girl worker in this period, see Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (Berkeley, Calif., 1985), 77–78, 157. Consciousness of the need for body maintenance was also being raised in other areas at this time and spaces for the cultivation of the body were opened up in the form of hygienic sports clubs. See for example, Alaimo, "Shaping Adolescence," 426; Thiercé, Histoire de l'adolescence 176, Mary Lynn Stewart, For Health and Beauty: Physical Culture for Frenchwomen, 1880s-1930s (Baltimore, Md., 2001), 13; Jacques Thibault, "Les Origines du sport féminin," in Les Athlètes de la république: Gymnastique, sport et idéologie républicaine, Pierre Arnaud, ed. (Toulouse, 1987), 336. Michael Hau's work on the "life reform" movement in Germany and Michael Anton Budd's work on bodybuilding in Britain illustrate similar moves toward "body culture" elsewhere in Europe. Hau, The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany; Michael Anton Budd, The Sculpture Machine: Physical Culture and Body Politics in the Age of Empire (Basingstoke, 1997).

⁷⁷ One young woman was also offered 300 francs per month by the Gaité-Rochechouart and Divan Japonais simply to make a brief appearance on stage. "Les Muses de départements," Les Débats, July 17, 1921, Fonds Charpentier 361, BHVP; "Representations populaire du couronnment de la muse," Le Progrès du Nord, June 13, 1898, Fonds Charpentier 361, BHVP.

⁷⁸ "La Doyenne des reines de beauté" BHVP. The Lilloise Muse of 1898 received two return tickets to Paris courtesy of the Compagnie du Chemin de Fer du Nord. "La Fête de la muse—A Lille," Le Réveil du Nord, May 31, 1898, 2.

⁷⁹ "La Doyenne des reines de beauté," BHVP. Other Muses used the publicity they received to launch successful careers in show business. One became a singer, for example, and another, Geneviève Felix (elected Muse of Montmartre), a little later, became a silent movie actress. "Les Muses de départements," BHVP.

⁸⁰ "Les Fêtes Desrousseaux," Le Progrès du Nord, June 10, 1898, Fonds Charpentier 361, BHVP.

⁸¹ Letter, Hélène Raumes to Gustave Charpentier, May 30, 1948, Fonds Charpentier 432, BHVP.

⁸² "Mazas ou Charenton—éléction de la muse de Paris," L'Intransigeant, July 12, 1898.

⁸³ "La Muse de Paris," La Fronde, July 11, 1898, 1.

⁸⁴ "Les Fêtes Desrousseaux," BHVP.

⁸⁵ Segalen and Chamarat, "La Rosière et la 'Miss,'" 49; "Gustave Charpentier, gloire nationale," La France du Sud-Ouest, July 3, 1930 Fonds Charpentier 318, BHVP; "Le Couronnement de la Muse," Fonds Charpentier 442, BHVP. The last performance of the crowning ceremony to which reference is made in the Fonds Charpentier was held in Liévin on June 23, 1963.

⁸⁶ On the "moderate" and "consensual" turn of the French suffrage movement (centering around the Union française pour le suffrage des femmes) see Hause, Women's Suffrage and Social Politics, 132–45; McMillan, France and Women, 215. The decline of the couronnement from its prewar heights coincided with what has been seen as the rolling back of French feminism during and after World War I. Perrot, "The New Eve and the Old Adam," 59–60.

⁸⁷ Berlanstein, Daughters of Eve, 161.

⁸⁸ Accampo, "Gender, Social Policy and the Formation of the Third Republic," 10, 21–22.

⁸⁹ The pushing of beauty norms down the age spectrum was a phenomenon witnessed in European and North American society beginning in the late nineteenth century and developing to new levels of prevalence after World War I. The figure of the modern, young beauty reemerged with striking monotony in such forms as the "postcard girl," the "flapper," the "Gibson girl," "Miss World," and many others. Richards, Commodity Culture of Victorian Britain, 240–44.

⁹⁰ Francine Muel-Dreyfus, Vichy and the Eternal Feminine: A Contribution to a Political Sociology of Gender Kathleen A. Johnson, trans. (Durham, N.C., 2001), 313.

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