What I Am Reading: "Gilded Youth" by Kate Cambor
This book will start a brief run of French history. I'd been thinking about the Belle Époque recently after reading the Wikipedia page for some movie (impressive, I know) whereby a character went back in time to the Jazz Age, only to find that one of the characters there pined for the bygone world of the Belle Époque. This read comes from that item; and a pursuit of a little more pre-WW1 lost world European splendor may later culminate in Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower. Anyway, this book is a triple-biography of three interconnected lives: Jeanne Hugo, and her successive husbands: Léon Daudet and Jean-Baptiste Charcot. All three were the children of luminaries of the Second French Empire and early Third Republic, and (nearly) all three spanned the life of the Third Republic itself, imbuing the frustrated expectations of the French generation that were born with the republic and came into influence around the turn of the century (fin de siècle). The book quotes critic Henri Massis describing this generation, from the later vantage point of the interwar years, as a "sacrificed" generation. They lived as the faith in limitless advances in science and technology of the 19th century curdled into pessimism and a fear of physical and social degeneration (a major theme of the book), resulting in major social anxiety. The war finally came after everyone was too fat and middle-aged to take part; and it was their children, the "lost generation" of course, who went to war “For an old bitch gone in the teeth, / For a botched civilization…For two gross of broken statues, / For a few thousand battered books.” (Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, V, by Ezra Pound). This is where I stop to remind you Boomers and Zoomers and Gen Xers and Millennials that generations are entirely a social construct, and that you should structure your analyses accordingly.
Jeanne Hugo was the granddaughter of Victor Hugo, Europe's most celebrated writer at the time of his demise in 1886, when she was age 16. Hugo, a swashbuckling and political novelist, pulled himself out of a spiral of exile debauchery to write works about his pride in being a grandfather, bringing him back to the popular consciousness in a new, wholesome, apolitical role at the end of his life. Jeanne and her brother were the focus of his writings on the subject, obviously, and Jeanne went on to receive considerable attention in her own right as a beautiful socialite. After Hugo died, she lived in his shadow for the rest of her life, essentially as someone who peaked too young and never established a life of her own.
Her first marriage was to her brother's friend, Léon Daudet. He was the son of Alphonse Daudet, a realist writer of the small "Group of 5" literary circle in 1870s Paris with Émile Zola, Gustave Flaubert, Edmond de Goncourt (who left plenty of daily updates in his scandalous, posthumous diaries), and the Russian Ivan Turgenev. Alphonse, acclaimed as a writer in middle age, spent his son's life dying of tertiary syphilis, and this inculcated in Léon an obsession with heredity, as recent science brought inheritance of both genius (such as literary genius) and neurological conditions to intellectual attention.
Instrumental in this effort was Jean-Martin Charcot, a pioneering neurologist who did considerable work studying neurological disorders at a level that we would of course find grotesquely gothic today, but was at the time a big step up from the "just chain everyone to the wall" school of asylum-keeping. Charcot was in fact Auguste Daudet's doctor as he declined. His son, Jean-Baptiste, was friends with Léon, and the pair entered medical school together.
As the three grew up in the last decades of the century, the Third Republic's brief honeymoon ended, and the political and cultural scenes turned divisive and vitriolic. Conservatives deplored the scourge of modernity and cosmopolitanism, and intellectuals fell from belief in social and technological progress to the influence Schopenhauer and Spencer's pessimism and uncertainty. The generation was adrift, searching for meaning. The symbolism was cranked up by the deaths of their fathers in the 1890s, to get ahead of ourselves for a moment. In Charcot, Daudet, and others, the old scientific and literary idols joined the Republican idol of Hugo in the grave.
Prior to this, though, Léon and Jeanne had a brief marriage for the first half of that decade. Both were spoiled children with large egos, used to getting their way, and the marriage was marked by considerable conflict. An additional impediment was Léon's failure in medical school, whereupon he struck out as a writer: a heavy burden to carry in light of his wife's pedigree. This failure also ruptured his childhood friendship with Jean-Baptiste, who succeeded in becoming a doctor. Léon had entered medical school for reasons of bourgeois respectability, and Jean-Baptiste for reasons of family legacy. He practiced as a perfectly normal and competent doctor for a time, but his heart was not in it. He had been fascinated by the sea and a life of adventure, and looked toward that as at least a hobby, if not perhaps a calling. He married Jeanne, his childhood friend, on the rebound, in 1896.
It was around this time that the "sacrificed generation," the first French generation in a century not to deal with a war or a revolution, took up its great cause. Léon, working as a journalist, was present for the degradation ceremony of Alfred Dreyfus in January of 1895. The Dreyfus Affair divided all of French society, and was of course a battle fought largely among the intellectual class. At some point I might tackle a full book on the topic, but in brief: Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer, was accused of leaking military secrets to the Germans; he was found guilty of treason and sentenced to imprisonment on Devil's Island. However, his supporters waged a long, LONG campaign to have him exonerated and the crime attributed to the actual culprit, aristocratic, gentile officer Major Ferdinand Esterhazy (not to be confused with the Hungarian pavement artist, to tell a joke that absolutely nobody will get). There were multiple trials, political careers of old republicans ruined, military cover-ups, fabricated evidence, dramatic denunciations, and the birth of the Zionist movement. The Dreyfusards persevered through considerable setbacks and state opposition, and the scandal defined the political culture of the Third Republic at the time.
Léon Daudet was not on the right side of the battle lines. He and some other writers of his generation worked with older writers to defend the conservative, antisemitic position, whereby Dreyfus was the instrument of a foreign threat. A bit of a minor anti-Republican crank at first, Léon’s monarchist views became more organized and synthesized by his second wife, Marthe Allard (his first cousin). He went on in the first decade of the century to co-found Action Française (AF), a journal and a movement that sought, in a proto-fascist alignment, to join bigoted working-class street-fighters with upscale reactionaries in high society and big business.
Dr. Cambor's writing on Léon is interesting, because in the absence of context, he is easy to romanticize. He is a radical writer who, in middle age and at loose ends after a divorce and the death of his beloved invalid father, finds a new purpose in life. He becomes an agent provocateur, eagerly needling the establishment through his writings and oratory, with a small but dedicated following among intellectuals, dethroning sacred cows and ending careers, fighting duels and living large. Many journalists and media figures to this day would conceptualize themselves this way. However, with context added, he is doing these things to the ends of antisemitism, monarchism, opposition to modernism and cosmopolitanism; he is picking at sore spots to destabilize Europe's most republican government, always teetering because of its own cultural anxieties and social divisions. He reminds me a lot of a certain someone. This career continued for decades, through World War 1 and into the interwar years.
Sometimes, however, history works out. In this case, it was a little bit ghastly. Léon's son, Philippe, committed suicide at age 14 in 1923. He ran away from home, wandered around the country and then the city, tried to link up with anarchists, and eventually shot himself in a taxi. Léon, however, would not let go of the idea that this was a hit by the republic's authorities, and conspiracy-theorized endlessly against the individuals his son encountered in his last days, believing them part of a larger plot. Eventually, the taxi driver, a man named Bajot, had had enough, and sued Léon and the AF paper for slander. The trial was a bit of a circus, and Léon was a bit of a fulminator, but Bajot's lawyer, Louis Noguères (later one of the Vichy 80, a resistance member, and presiding judge at Pétain's and Maurras' trials) had a plan. For his closing argument, he delved deeply into Léon's life, his divorces, his father's illness and the resulting anxiety over heredity. He took on Léon’s writings and the perpetual anger-stoking and violent rhetoric of the AF, and theorized how a moody, nervous boy like Philippe might react when his whole life was suborned to his father's hateful cause. Even his death was re-contextualized by his father, in good faith or otherwise, as a political battle against secret enemies. Léon's weepy and despondent final defense generated sympathy, but not a verdict of innocence. He was fined and sentenced to jail time, escaping instead into Belgian exile for a few years.
To return to the others: Jean-Baptiste Charcot's dream of polar exploration was realized, as part of the "Heroic Age" of polar exploration. He outfitted his own ship and crew and charted Graham Land from 1904 to 1907. Jeanne was taciturn and unsupportive of her new husband's ambitions, and filed for divorce while he was on one of his expeditions. Jean-Baptiste completed another mapping/scientific expedition in Antarctica, and became one of those adventurers who longs for the ice while at home at the celebratory dinners. I didn't know that this would be my summer read about polar exploration going in, but Jean-Baptiste notches a fair career out of his passion. He is not one of the major figures of polar exploration, but is interesting for transcending the Heroic Age into a more modern era, an era of airplanes and radar and radio. He feared a permanent end to his expeditions during WW1, but after the war sailed on several expeditions to Greenland, as well as frequent training exercises.
This era, too, was fraught with peril, and this comes home not only in Jean-Baptiste's occasional loss of crew, but more so in his involvement in multiple searches for the missing Roald Amundsen, another figure who straddled the two eras. Jean-Baptiste was mobilized both when Amundsen's plane went missing in 1925, and again for the search-within-a-search when Amundsen took off to find his old frenemy Umberto Nobile in 1928 and disappeared in action. Jean-Baptiste similarly did not die in his bed: he went with a sense of doom on his last expedition up the Greenland west coast in 1936, at age 69; a pretty remarkable accomplishment for that age. He was caught in a storm on his way around Iceland, and his ship wrecked with only one survivor.
After her marriage to Jean-Baptiste collapsed in 1905, Jeanne finally made a lasting marriage to a young Greek military officer, though he died in 1914. Jeanne settled into widowhood after that, reliving the glory days with a touch of aging elegance at her son's house until her death in 1941. She did have an opportunity in a late interview to discuss her own life, which was of course the subject of scandal-sheet gossip for many years. Though she seized some control through her divorces, she seems to have been stunted by her illustrious upbringing with her grandfather, and never had much going on after that. Léon meanwhile lived to see the Third Republic collapse, and supported the Vichy regime. Ambivalent about the Nazi occupation, he found himself unable to engage in events with much vigor; he died last in 1942.
This book did justice to each of its subjects' biographies, inner lives, and social milieu. The book delved deeply into many other topics besides those mentioned here, including the Zola family legacy, the Lessups Suez Canal success and Panama Canal debacle; it gave a good chapter-length summary of the Dreyfus scandal, had much more information than I’ve conveyed about the careers of its respective subjects and their parents, and had all kinds of minor cameos, appearances, and quotes, including Blog Favorites Roald Amundsen and Jean Jaurès. It discussed considerably the sociology and psychology of the "sacrificed generation" (yes I am running with that) early on in their lives, especially their scientific and literary influences. I wish it had had more to say on those influences later in their collective lifespans, including the shattering events of WW1, which received mention at the national level but not the generational level. Overall it was a good, deep dive into a specific subject, and nailed the use of Jeanne Hugo, Léon Daudet, and Jean-Baptiste Charcot (and their families) as a lens.