Paris-Edinburgh: Cultural Connections in the Belle Epoque (Historical Urban Studies)

PARIS-EDINBURGH

Historical Urban Studies Series editors: Jean-Luc Pinol and Richard Rodger Titles in the series include: The Transformation of Urban Liberalism Party Politics and Urban Governance in Late Nineteenth-Century England James R. Moore Property, Tenancy and Urban Growth in Stockholm and Berlin, 1860–1920 Håkan Forsell Civil Society, Associations and Urban Places Class, Nation and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Europe edited by Graeme Morton, Boudien de Vries and R.J. Morris The European City and Green Space London, Stockholm, Helsinki and St Petersburg, 1850–2000 edited by Peter Clark Resources of the City Contributions to an Environmental History of Modern Europe edited by Dieter Schott, Bill Luckin and Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud City Status in the British Isles, 1830–2002 John Beckett European Cities, Youth and the Public Sphere in the Twentieth Century edited by Axel Schildt and Detlef Siegfried Culture and Class in English Public Museums, 1850-1914 Kate Hill The Market and the City Square, Street and Architecture in Early Modern Europe Donatella Calabi Young People and the European City Age Relations in Nottingham and Saint-Etienne, 1890–1940 David M. Pomfret

Paris-Edinburgh Cultural Connections in the Belle Epoque

SIÂN REYNOLDS

University of Stirling

© Siân Reynolds 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Siân Reynolds has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hampshire GU11 3HR England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA

Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Reynolds, Siân Paris-Edinburgh: cultural connections in the Belle Epoque. – (Historical urban studies) 1.Scots–France–Paris–History–19th century 2.Scots–France–Paris–History–20th century 3.French–Scotland–Edinburgh–History–19th century 4.French–Scotland– Edinburgh– History–20th century 5.Edinburgh (Scotland)–Intellectual life 6.Paris (France)–Intellectual life 7.Scotland–Relations–France 8.France–Relations–Scotland I.Title 941.3’4’081 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Reynolds, Siân. Paris-Edinburgh: cultural connections in the Belle Epoque / Siân Reynolds. p. cm. – (Historical urban studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-7546-3464-5 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-7546-3464-7 (alk. paper) 1. Paris (France)–Intellectual life–19th century. 2. Paris (France)–Social life and customs– 19th century. 3. Paris (France)–Intellectual life–20th century. 4. Paris (France)–Social life and customs–20th century. 5. Edinburgh (Scotland)–Intellectual life–19th century. 6. Edinburgh (Scotland)–Social life and customs–19th century. 7. Edinburgh (Scotland)–Intellectual life– 20th century. 8. Edinburgh (Scotland)–Social life and customs–20th century. 9. Scots–Paris– France. 10. France–Relations–Scotland. 11. Scotland–Relations–France. I. Title. II. Series. DC715R46 2006 303.48’2413404436109034–dc22 2006016609 ISBN-13: 978-0-7546-3464-5 Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall.

J.D. Fergusson, Anne Estelle Rice in a hat facing dexter, Conté drawing, Paris 1907. © The Fergusson Gallery, Perth and Kinross Council, Scotland, image courtesy of Alexander Meddowes, Fine Art Broker, Edinburgh. Private collection.

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Contents List of Figures General Editors’ Preface Acknowledgements

ix xiii xv

1

Seine and Forth: Paris and Edinburgh in 1900

2

Stone Cities

21

3

Taking the Boat-train to Montparnasse: Edinburgh Artists in Paris

57

Bringing Parisians to Edinburgh: Patrick Geddes’s Networks of Academics, Anarchists and Artists, 1870s to 1890s

79

4

1

5

A ‘Petite Entente’? The Origins of the Franco-Scottish Society

101

6

Professor Geddes Goes to the Fair: The Globe, the Assembly and the Rue des Nations at the 1900 Paris Exhibition

115

An ‘Entente Cordiale’ in Publishing, or a Scottish Victory? Nelson’s French Collection

143

New Women, Old Men?

163

7

8

Afterword Bibliography Index

193 199 213

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List of Figures Frontispiece: J.D. Fergusson, Anne Estelle Rice in a hat facing dexter, Conté drawing, Paris 1907. © The Fergusson Gallery, Perth and Kinross Council, Scotland, image courtesy of Alexander Meddowes, Fine Art Broker, Edinburgh. Private collection. 2.1 2.2a 2.2b 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7a

2.7b

2.8

2.9

2.10

3.1 3.2

3.3

Haussmann-type façades, Boulevard Saint-Michel, Paris, c. 1900. Postcard, private collection. House, rue Larrey, Paris, c. 1900. Author’s photograph. House, rue Larrey, Paris, 1901. Author’s photograph. Caledonian Hotel, West End, Edinburgh. Author’s photograph. Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, by R. Rowand Anderson, completed 1906. Author’s photograph. The former Forsyth’s department store, Princes Street, Edinbugh, by J. J. Burnet. Author’s photograph. Statue of Voltaire, Square Monge, Paris, c. 1900. Postcard, private collection. Gladstone Memorial, Coates Crescent, Edinburgh, by Pittendrigh McGillivray, completed 1916. Detail, draped female figure. Author’s photograph. Gladstone Memorial, Coates Crescent, Edinburgh, by Pittendrigh McGillivray. Detail, two naked boys and inscriptions. Author’s photograph. Jenners department store, Princes Street, Edinburgh, by W.H. Beattie, built in the 1890s, showing caryatids on top levels. Author’s photograph. The Scotsman newspaper building, now the Scotsman Hotel, North Bridge, Edinburgh, completed 1902, showing atlas and caryatids. Author’s photograph. The Ross Fountain, Princes Street Gardens, Edinburgh, erected 1860s. Author’s photograph. Ottilie McLaren, photograph sent to Auguste Rodin, c. 1900. Reproduced by permission of the Musée Rodin, Paris. Signed photograph of Auguste Rodin given to Ottilie McLaren, c. 1900. Reproduced by kind permission of the owner. Private Collection. Flier for Ottilie McLaren’s sculpture course in London, 1904. Reproduced by permission of the Musée Rodin, Paris.

23 26 27 33 39 43 47

49

50

52

53 54

67

68 70

x

3.4

4.1

4.2

5.1

6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4a

6.4b

6.5

6.6

6.7

6.8

6.9

PARIS-EDINBURGH

John Duncan Fergusson, Rhythm, oil painting, 1911. © The Fergusson Gallery, Perth & Kinross Council, Scotland, and courtesy of the University of Stirling. Photograph of Patrick Geddes in Ramsay Garden, 1912, by E. McGillivray. Reproduced by permission of the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland (MS 19286). Group photograph of the Edinburgh Summer Meetings, c. 1895. Reproduced by permission of the University of Strathclyde Archives. John Duncan, black and white drawing, ‘The way to Rheims’, in The Evergeen: the book of summer, 1896, p. 99. Reproduced by permission of the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland. The Trocadéro, still standing in the belle époque, demolished in the 1930s. Postcard, private collection. The Paris Exhibition, 1900, the Monumental Entry Gate. Postcard, private collection. The Paris Exhibition, 1900, the ‘moving pavement’, a travelator, which was a sensation. Postcard, private collection. Elisée Reclus’s project for a Terrestrial Globe for the 1900 Paris Exhibition, 1897-98. Reproduced by permission of the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland (MS 10625). The plan for the Globe, enlarged. Reproduced by permission of the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland (MS 10625). Patrick Geddes’ handwritten address list, Paris, 1900, two pages. Reproduced by permission of the University of Strathclyde Archives (T.GED 6/1/5A and 5B). Map of the Paris Exhibition 1900. Reproduced by permission of the University of Strathclyde Archives (T.GED 6/1/7). Sample Programme, 25-30 June, for Patrick Geddes’s International Assembly, Paris Exhibition 1900. Reproduced by permission of the University of Strathclyde Archives (T.GED 6/1/5A). Sample Programme, 10-15 September, for Patrick Geddes’s International Assembly, Paris Exhibition 1900. Reproduced by permission of the University of Strathclyde Archives (T.GED 6/1/5A). The Paris Exhibition 1900. The rue des Nations, temporary pavilions, seen from the West. Postcard, private collection.

76

80 86

106

117 118 120

122

123

127

131

133

134 138

LIST OF FIGURES

7.1

8.1

xi

Nelson Collection Catalogue, cover from first year; later catalogue showing lists of first 96 titles and the Victor Hugo and Lutetia collections. Reproduced by permission, special collections, University of Edinburgh.

155

Cartoon from the magazine Le Grelot, 1900, showing a woman going ‘off to the Feminist conference’, held during the 1900 Exhibition.

173

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Historical Urban Studies General Editors’ Preface Density and proximity are two of the defining characteristics of the urban dimension. It is these that identify a place as uniquely urban, though the threshold for such pressure points varies from place to place. What is considered an important cluster in one context – may not be considered as urban elsewhere. A third defining characteristic is functionality – the commercial or strategic position of a town or city which conveys an advantage over other places. Over time, these functional advantages may diminish, or the balance of advantage may change within a hierarchy of towns. To understand how the relative importance of towns shifts over time and space is to grasp a set of relationships which is fundamental to the study of urban history. Towns and cities are products of history, yet have themselves helped to shape history. As the proportion of urban dwellers has increased, so the urban dimension has proved a legitimate unit of analysis through which to understand the spectrum of human experience and to explore the cumulative memory of past generations. Though obscured by layers of economic, social and political change, the study of the urban milieu provides insights into the functioning of human relationships and, if urban historians themselves are not directly concerned with current policy studies, few contemporary concerns can be understood without reference to the historical development of towns and cities. This longer historical perspective is essential to an understanding of social processes. Crime, housing conditions and property values, health and education, discrimination and deviance, and the formulation of regulations and social policies to deal with them were, and remain, amongst the perennial preoccupations of towns and cities – no historical period has a monopoly of these concerns. They recur in successive generations, albeit in varying mixtures and strengths; the details may differ The central forces of class, power and authority in the city remain. If this was the case for different periods, so it was for different geographical entities and cultures. Both scientific knowledge and technical information were available across Europe and showed little respect for frontiers. Yet despite common concerns and access to broadly similar knowledge, different solutions to urban problems were proposed and adopted by towns and cities in different parts of Europe. This comparative dimension informs urban historians as to which were systematic factors and which were of a purely local nature: general and particular forces can be distinguished.

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These analytical frameworks, considered in a comparative context, inform the books in this series. Richard Rodger Jean-Luc Pinol

University of Leicester Université de Tours

Acknowledgements This book brings together research conducted over several years in the two cities I know best. Earlier versions of some sections have been published as journal articles or chapters, or read as conference papers, but have been reworked to take account of further research. My greatest debts are acknowledged in the footnotes to my many predecessors who have studied either Paris or Edinburgh, though rarely the two together. The bibliography could have been endless, so only works quoted are mentioned by name, but I have benefited from many others, as well as from comments by students, editors, and conference audiences. Special thanks to Helen Beale, Angela Smith, David Steel and David Finkelstein, for kindly sharing their research, and to fellow-members of the team that organized the exhibition, ‘Patrick Geddes: the French Connection’, at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in 2004: Elizabeth Cumming, Frances Fowle, Elizabeth Laidlaw, Murdo Macdonald and Belinda Thomson, who alerted me to all kinds of new sources of material and ideas. Belinda also helped me greatly with illustrations. My thanks to Malcolm Read for helping to transfer them to disk. Picture credits are listed separately, but I am very grateful to all the institutions and individuals who have given permission to reproduce. They include my most frequent ports of call in Scotland: the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh University Library, the Edinburgh Room of the Central Library, and the Archives of the University of Strathclyde. I am, as ever, indebted to Robin FarquharOliver, copyright holder of the McLaren-Wallace correspondence. In Paris, I have received much help at the Musée Social and the Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand and benefited from the huge collections in the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris. I am particularly grateful to the staff of the Musée Rodin, especially Antoinette Lenormand-Romain, both for permissions and for all their help over the years. Among reference works, the recent publication of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004) was absolutely indispensable for checking details about British individuals – I only wish the equivalent existed in France. Particular thanks are due to the Urban Studies series editor, Richard Rodger, who encouraged the original proposal and made helpful comments on the manuscript; to my copy editor, Sarah Price; at Ashgate Publishing to Tom Gray, commissioning editor, and to Barbara Pretty, senior desk editor, for her help in seeing the book through the publication programme. Lastly, Peter France has been with me on many journeys between these two cities and has lived at rather too close quarters with the travails of composition. After all that, this book is for him, from Paris and Edinburgh, with love.

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CHAPTER ONE

Seine and Forth: Paris and Edinburgh in 1900 On 24 January 1890, the Marchioness of Tweeddale drove the first train across the Forth Railway Bridge, just north of Edinburgh. On 4 March, the Prince of Wales formally declared the huge metal bridge open. Among the invited guests at the ceremony was French engineer Gustave Eiffel, whose tower, originally built as a temporary structure for the Paris Exhibition of 1889, was almost exactly contemporary with the bridge, and structurally related to it. These two huge rust-coloured metal structures, one vertical, one horizontal, one made of iron, the other of steel, could be seen as symbols of the new Paris and the new Edinburgh of the belle époque, though they are not usually mentioned in the same breath. One French visitor to Edinburgh in the 1890s did however link them in the remark that the bridge was ‘infinitely more interesting than the awful Eiffel Tower, since despite the lack of beauty intrinsic to all iron structures which are cold, unlovely and stark, it does at least have the beauty of usefulness’.1 Nothing in common? Paris and Edinburgh, particularly in the period from about 1885 to 1914, might seem like polar opposites, if we confine ourselves to received stereotypes. The fin de siècle was after all the time when Paris was still widely thought of as ‘the capital of the 1 Marie Anne de Bovet, L’Ecosse: souvenirs et impressions de voyages, Paris, Hachette, 1898, p. 66. [This and all following translations from the French are my own unless otherwise indicated. SR] On the opening of the Forth Bridge, see Colin McWilliam, Lothian except Edinburgh (N. Pevsner, ed., Buildings of Scotland series), Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1984, p. 436. Following the disastrous collapse of the Tay Bridge in 1879, the Forth Bridge Railway Company formed in 1882 adopted an innovative cantilever structure proposed by Benjamin Baker and Sir John Fowler, and the contract was awarded to William Arrol. While it has occasionally been remarked that the tower is phallic and ornamental, the bridge functional and sturdy, both enterprises had their detractors: Guy de Maupassant hated the Eiffel Tower, John Ruskin hated the Forth Bridge. The Eiffel Tower was originally designed by Emile Nouguier and Maurice Koechlin, engineers in Eiffel’s firm. It was on the point of being demolished in 1900, but was decorated with electric light bulbs instead in a canny move by Eiffel; it was eventually saved as a radio transmitter. For full details see Henri Loyrette, ‘La Tour Eiffel’, in Pierre Nora, Les Lieux de Mémoire, vol. 3, Paris, Gallimard, Quarto (paperback edition), 1997, pp. 4271 ff.

2

PARIS-EDINBURGH

nineteenth century’, to use Walter Benjamin’s later formula. Looking back from 1940, Gertrude Stein, who had arrived there in 1903, wrote that ‘Paris was where the twentieth century was’. For most foreign observers, the French city itself came to symbolize the age before the First World War, nostalgically christened la belle époque, which one can translate either as ‘the beautiful age’ or ‘the good old days’. Recent historiography has usually treated the expression with irony since, as in most ages of human history, how good a time one was having depended on who one was. In this book, the term will be used simply as a shorthand for the period straddling 1900, without implying value judgements. What is beyond doubt is that during these years Paris was the destination of seekers after cultural pursuits, artistic, intellectual and sexual, a city with a dangerous reputation, whether the smoke of revolution or the cigars of the café-concert. A guidebook of 1898 noted among ‘gaffes to avoid’ when visiting the French capital: ‘Turn a blind eye if you meet a lady or a friend of your acquaintance, in an unaccustomed street or at an odd hour, muffled up, or with a hat pulled well down and a collar turned well up. Forget this meeting’.2 Edinburgh’s reputation at the turn of the century could hardly be more different: it was that of a staid, climatically bracing, Presbyterian and puritanical city, bristling with well-frequented churches, and peopled with ministers, lawyers, academics and doctors. Morningside was never likely to be mistaken for Montparnasse. Samuel J. Peploe, the Edinburgh painter, remarked exasperatedly as he left for Paris in 1911 that in his home city the women were badly dressed, and ‘there’s nothing here but healthy-looking people with golf-clubs’.3 His friend and fellow-artist, John Duncan Fergusson, on a visit home, complained of ‘this feeling of Sunday … I tried going a walk [sic] the other Sunday, but people made me want to blow hell out of everything. In their Sunday clothes and faces to match.’4 Contrast the first impression of the Boulevard Beaumarchais as described by the Italian Edmondo de Amicis, arriving 2 Paris-Parisien, Paris, Ollendorff, 1898, p. 395; Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, is reproduced in his The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin, Cambridge MA, Belknap, 1999, pp. 3-25; cf. Gertrude Stein, Paris France, 1940, quoted in Norma Evenson, Paris: a century of change 1878-1978, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1979, p.1; and for a recent re-statement of Paris’s literary claims, see Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 2004, pp. 23-4 and passim. For a discussion of the term la belle époque, see Michel Winock, La Belle Epoque: la France de 1900 à 1914, Paris, Perrin, 2002, introduction. As he remarks, ‘there are two clichés about these years: one is that it really was a beautiful age; the other is that … it was not beautiful at all, and in any case, not for everyone’, p. 9. The term fin de siècle is open to other objections, notably chronology. 3 Letter of 1911, quoted in Guy Peploe, Samuel John Peploe, Edinburgh, Mainstream, 2000, p. 42. 4 Letter of 27 September 1915, quoted in Margaret Morris, The Art of J. D. Fergusson: a biased biography, Glasgow and London, Blackie, 1974, p. 107. A French visitor in the 1880s remarked that ‘Edinburgh is perhaps the place in Scotland where suspension of all activity on Sundays is most strictly observed’, Comte de Lafond, L’Ecosse jadis et aujourd’hui, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1887, p. 2.

SEINE AND FORTH

3

in Paris (admittedly during an exhibition, but in the summer of 1878, not long after the Franco-Prussian war): ‘between the two rows of trees is a constant passing and repassing of carriages, great carts and wagons drawn by engines and high omnibuses laden with people, bounding up and down on the unequal pavement … [The] faces, the voices and the colors give to that confusion more the air of pleasure than of work’.5 Beyond these contrasts of atmosphere and reputation, the most striking differences between the two cities are those of location, size and political history. In their geographical sites, the two cities are very unlike. Paris spreads out its buildings across a wide river basin, ringed round with a circle of hills. It is nowhere near the sea. Edinburgh is perched on several mounds and ridges, with dizzying plunges here and there: ‘steep-sided, ice-eroded volcanic stumps, ice-moulded ridges, glacially deepened valleys and pro-glacial basins’.6 The sea is visible from many high viewpoints, such as Calton Hill and Arthur’s Seat, and sometimes at the turn of a street corner. Whereas Paris is a variegated and multicoloured carpet spread out at the feet of Montmartre or the Eiffel Tower, Edinburgh is a fractured combination of the Old Town (south) and the New Town (north), either side of Princes Street. Edinburgh-raised Robert Louis Stevenson saw his home town as two distinct cities: From their smoky beehives, ten stories high, the unwashed look down upon the open squares and gardens of the wealthy; and gay people sunning themselves along Princes Street, with its mile of commercial palaces all beflagged for some grand occasion, see, across a gardened valley set with statues, where the washings of the old town flutter in the breeze at its high windows.7

It is true that the Seine, already a broad and navigable river by the time it reaches Paris, does divide the city similarly, between Left Bank (south) and Right Bank (north), although the division is not clear-cut socially. Both cities need bridges to connect their two halves. But Edinburgh’s ‘river’ is the picturesque but shallow Water of Leith, marginal to the city centre, and its largest bridges are over streets or buildings, while Paris is punctuated by its many great and picturesque river bridges. As to size, although both cities were in 1900 comparatively compact, compared with either Glasgow or London, the area covered by the Ville de Paris’s twenty arrondissements (administrative districts) in 1900 was much greater than that of the city of Edinburgh, and Paris already had a large ring of suburbs, destined to swell even further. The population of the French capital by that time was already over two and a half million. It had long been a populous city, but had expanded mightily in the 5

Quoted from E. de Amicis, Studies of Paris (1882), in Evenson, Paris, p. 2. G. Gordon, ‘The status areas of Edinburgh in 1914’, in George Gordon and Brian Dicks, eds, Scottish Urban History, Aberdeen, Aberdeen University Press, 1983, pp. 168-196, p. 160. Perhaps unintentionally, this passage suggests a northerly climate too. See notes 59 and 60 below. 7 Quoted ibid., p. 188; in his Edinburgh: picturesque notes, Edinburgh, Salamander, 1983 [1878], p. 26. 6

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nineteenth century, doubling and redoubling from about 550,000 inhabitants in 1800 to 2,714,000 in 1900, rising steeply during the final decades of the century. Much of that expansion was by internal immigration from the French provinces. Only about one-third of Parisian residents were Paris-born, and another 6 per cent were of foreign origin, one of the highest proportions in Europe.8 Edinburgh’s population in 1901 was a mere 300,000 or so, just approaching the size of Paris in 1800, though it too had quadrupled. Between 1801 and 1911, the combined population of Edinburgh and the port of Leith increased from 82,560 to 320,318. Its population growth was mostly in the early nineteenth century, unlike Paris, but another wave of (partly Irish) immigration in the last third of century came with the building of the roads and canals. A majority of the residents were, however, locally born.9 In this respect, indeed, Glasgow, not Edinburgh, was the Scottish city which most nearly fulfilled Paris’s role in terms of overall size, acting as a magnet for rural immigration. Glasgow already had a population of over 750,000, drawn both from Ireland and from all over the West of Scotland, as it expanded to become ‘the second city of the Empire’, with its industry based on coal, iron, textiles and later shipbuilding. As an account of Glasgow put it in 1901, while the ‘Scots rustic’ thought of Edinburgh as a place of tradition, ‘Glasgow is the place of his advancement […] for are not Donald and Angus employed there, and is not young Archie going to enter a shop there when he is old enough to leave the stony farm of his fathers?’10 One major difference between our two cities is here indicated: while Paris was unrivalled within France, Edinburgh had a challenger in the newly enormous industrial city of Glasgow, with its own ancient university and many cultural claims. Since at least the eighteenth century, Glasgow and Edinburgh had been the contrasting and complementary leading cities of Scotland, locked into rivalries that persist today. And this is perhaps the place to say that another, though very different, study could probably be written about Glasgow and Paris. The focus of this book could not accommodate Glasgow’s very different trajectory and character, but Glasgow’s cultural profile too in the fin de siècle is considerable, and will often be referred to in what follows.

8

Figures from census tables in Winock, La Belle Epoque, p. 365; the Paris population numbered 1,851,792 in 1872 and 2,888,110 in 1911, mostly though immigration. By contrast, 65 per cent of Londoners were born there. See Pierre Casselle, Paris républicain 1871-1914 (Nouvelle Histoire de Paris (NHP) series), Paris, Association pour la publication d’une histoire de Paris, 2003, p. 129, and for the 6 per cent figure, Colin Jones, Paris, Biography of a City, London, Allen Lane, 2004, p. 413. 9 Gordon, ‘The status areas of Edinburgh’, p. 173; cf. Stevenson, The Third Statistical Account of Scotland, The City of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Collins, 1966, p. 106; and see also an essential book which will be mentioned frequently in this chapter and the next, Richard Rodger, The Transformation of Edinburgh: land, property and trust in the nineteenth century, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 23-25. 10 James Hamilton Muir (pseudonym for James and Muirhead Bone and Archibald Hamilton Charteris), Glasgow in 1901, Glasgow, Hodge, 1901, p. 27.

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In terms of political and religious history, to conclude this brief summary of the most obvious differences between Paris and Edinburgh, the two cities once more had little in common. Paris was the focus of French national politics. It had been the theatre of all French revolutionary movements since 1789, its convulsions having world-wide significance. In 1830 and 1848, regimes had been overthrown by violent revolution in the Paris streets. In the very recent past, France had been invaded during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71, and Paris had been under siege for several harsh months, followed by a civil war concentrated on the capital. The resulting regime, the Third Republic, was not firmly established for several years and had had a traumatic beginning. The violent end to the insurrectional Paris Commune of 1871 had resulted in the death or exile of many thousands of its working-class supporters at the hands of the army, and the burning and destruction of many of the city’s central public buildings. (It is in many ways remarkable that by the 1880s, Paris was once more seen as a popular tourist destination, though many came to look at the ruins.) Edinburgh might be the Athens of the North, but it was but the quasi-capital and administrative centre of a Scotland firmly inside the 1707 Union with England. Its days of turmoil linked to national events were well in the past. It had seen the final failure of Jacobitism in 1745, and over the next hundred years or more ‘was becoming douce, class-segregated and greatly ordered’. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, its city fathers were Gladstonian Liberals, and along with the rest of Scotland, it appeared to have settled for a form of ‘unionist-nationalism’ in which a sense of cultural Scottishness sat alongside integration into the United Kingdom.11 Perhaps its greatest excitement in the previous half-century was the Disruption of the Church of Scotland in 1843, when the majority of delegates left the Church Assembly to form the Free Church. This in itself provides a major contrast with Paris. Religious conflict in Edinburgh was mostly inside the Protestant faith. The Catholic population (unlike Glasgow’s) was comparatively small, so there was relatively little of the sectarian conflict found in the West of Scotland. And Scotland as a whole saw nothing like the central antagonism in France, which pitted republican anti-clericalism against the Catholic Church. During the period covered by this study, the early Third Republic, such conflict culminated in the Separation of the Church and the French State in 1905, a conclusion brought about partly by the Dreyfus Affair (see below and pp. 112-113). The affair convulsed France in 1896-99, and had a particularly high profile in Paris. Some things in common: legacy of the past Even such a brief outline of the points of separation between the two cities tells us that the agenda for this book cannot be to force direct comparisons (too difficult) 11

For a discussion of ‘unionist-nationalism’ in terms of culture, see John Morrison, Painting the Nation, Identity and Nationalism in Scottish Painting 1800-1920, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2003, esp. pp. 200 ff., and cf. T. Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain, London, New Left Books, 1977.

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or to underline contrasts (too easy). But it aims to show how many cultural threads connected Paris and Edinburgh during this period, in ways that have rarely been suspected. To provide some background for these connections, it is appropriate to consider some of the characteristics shared by both cities. Almost from the start, they had both been primarily administrative, legal, religious and university centres. Both housed royal palaces and had been the seat of kings – and queens. Paris was the administrative, political and legal capital of France, with all the concentration of elites implied by that. Edinburgh, while without absolute power of that kind, had inherited the relative power of the past. The 1707 Act of Union had left autonomy to the Scottish legal, educational, financial and religious frameworks. Scottish financial centres, banks, insurance companies, law courts and administration were concentrated in Edinburgh. Its dominance in these respects over the industrial giant Glasgow was the result of past relationships, giving it particular prominence as a British city. Moreover, it had well-established circles of interconnected networks and families – on a smaller scale than in Paris, but similar in function. Like Paris, it had a disproportionately large professional and white-collar population. In 1885, Edinburgh was described as having ‘a calm steady character in keeping with the predominance of legal, educational, literary and artistic pursuits, from which it derives its chief maintenance, and [which] contrasts boldly with the fluctuations, excitements and mercantile convulsions which produce so much vicissitude in manufacturing towns’.12 Neither Paris nor Edinburgh was essentially industrial, although in neither city was industry negligible; in both cases there was much artisanal production, and a quite varied industrial sector, including textiles and clothing, food and drink, but no single really dominant or staple industry. Building and printing (and in Edinburgh’s case brewing) provided much employment. In Paris, the centralization of publishing and administration led to large-scale printshops in the city centre and hundreds of smaller shops in every quartier. Printing with its allied trades was also one of the key industries of Edinburgh: in 1861, ‘3000 inhabitants were engaged in printing, binding and typefounding. […] The building trades occupied the largest workforce: 7000’. Otherwise, brewing, leather, glass, brass and rubber manufacture, and the food and garment trades occupied much of the working class. Although Edinburgh was surrounded by coalfields, few miners lived inside the city; and textiles, while present, were not a dominant industry.13 Both city centres were still marked by the survival of artisanal production: that population of small craft shops, linked to the growing luxury consumption by the middle classes. In Edinburgh this meant ‘printing, lithography, book-binding, portraiture and picture framing, watchmaking, jewellery, precious metal-working, the furniture trades, bespoke clothing … house

12

Rodger, Transformation. p. 20. Cf. ibid., p. 18: ‘The power and influence of the Edinburgh middle classes is difficult to exaggerate’. 13 Ian MacDougall (ed.), Minutes of Edinburgh Trades Council 1859-1873, Edinburgh, T. & A. Constable, 1968, pp xvi-xvii.

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repairs and maintenance, hairdressing, gardening and domestic service’. In Paris, the category known as articles de Paris covered a huge range of products manufactured in the artisanal workshops of the capital: ‘games, musical instruments, buttons made of horn, bone, wood etc; […] wigs and hairpieces; fans; corsets; […] cutlery […] umbrellas and sunshades; whips, artificial flowers, leather goods’ – and so on, occupying some 25,000 workers in 1860. Colin Jones points out that ‘There would still be far more shoemakers and tailors than car-workers in the [Paris] region in 1914’.15 Both cities had also had major episodes of urbanization in the nineteenth century. In Paris, the most drastic intervention was the remake of the old city under the Second Empire (1852-70) directed by the prefect, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann (180991), in the course of which much of medieval central Paris was destroyed to create broad avenues, bourgeois housing, and green open space.16 In Edinburgh, the creation of the New Town had occurred over 50 years earlier, starting in the late eighteenth century, and carrying on into the first decades of the nineteenth: it had meant the building of what was virtually a second city to the north (and to a lesser extent the south) of the insalubrious centre, the Old Town. In both cities, and this applied to both old and new housing, the typical town dwelling was the immeuble de rapport or tenement block: residents were used to dwelling in flats (apartments) on separate landings in houses of four, five or six storeys. A Paris immeuble and an Edinburgh tenement were not always strictly comparable in other ways but both were quite unlike the broadly low-rise houses of much of London for example (see Chapter 2 below). And in both improvement schemes, trees and greenery were introduced, breaking up the residential blocks.17 In each city too these defining episodes of city planning had given rise to a new kind of segregation. Whereas before it had often been vertical – rich people on the 14 Rodger, Transformation, pp. 20-21; cf. ibid., note 53: ‘Among the many small businesses listed in the 1881 Post Office directory for Edinburgh were: ‘artificial flower makers (8); bird and animal stuffers (15); baby carriage manufacturers (29); billiard table makers (4); cabinetmakers (167); carvers, gilders and picture framers (46); fishing tackle makers (16); gunmakers (8); gardeners (75); hotels (90); refreshment rooms (67); musical instrument makers (29); photographers (43); pocketbook casemakers (16); umbrella makers (16).’ 15 Cf. Jones, Paris, p. 413; list of articles from the Dictionnaire du commerce, quoted in Albert Fierro, Histoire et dictionnaire de Paris, Paris, Laffont, 1996, pp. 686-687. 16 See David P. Jordan Transforming Paris: the Life and Labours of Baron Haussmann, Chicago, London and New York, Free Press, 1995. It is noteworthy that ‘transformation’ is used of works on both cities, cf. Rodger, Transformation, see note 9 above. 17 In Edinburgh’s New Town, this typically took the form of private squares, never a feature of Paris; but between 1884 and 1900, the Edinburgh corporation added 563 acres in six purchases at a cost of £151,000 to the ratepayers, Richard Rodger, ‘The evolution of Scottish Town planning’ in Gordon and Dicks, Scottish Urban History, 71-91, p. 85. On the New Town more generally, see A. J. Youngson, The Making of Classical Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1966.

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lower storeys, working classes up the stair in the same house – now it was more geographical.18 Haussmannization pushed up Parisian prices and rents, forcing the working classes out towards the northern, eastern and southern arrondissements, as far as Belleville and Ménilmontant. In Edinburgh, well-off families moved out of the cramped Old Town, leaving it to those who could not afford new town prices. Only one family in 20 in the Canongate (the east end of the High Street in the Old Town) was middle class thereafter. Richard Rodger has argued that for Edinburgh’s wealthy middle classes, the New Town was a ‘municipally sponsored suburb built between the 1760s and the 1820s, before the concept, far less the reality, was far advanced in London or other English cities’.19 The parallel between the two improvement schemes can be pushed a little further, since the city fathers of Edinburgh actually embarked upon a substantial slum clearance programme in the Old Town from the 1860s, almost exactly contemporary with Haussmann, though much smaller in scale. Rodger explicitly comments that the Edinburgh street improvement proposals in the 1860s were ‘not dissimilar to those in Paris, where a by-product of Haussmann’s plans in the 1850s for improved access was the amelioration of the state of health of the town, through the systematic destruction of the infected alleyways and centres of epidemic’.20 In neither case, of course, was the initiative uncontroversial or universally welcomed, although both had some beneficial effects, especially connected with the drainage and water systems. And although Edinburgh’s housing problems were far less acute than those of Glasgow and other Scottish cities, it was still the case that in 1901, 17 per cent of families lived in one-room apartments (‘single ends’); 31.4 per cent occupied two rooms; and 19.2 per cent lived in three rooms (67.6 per cent in all) Meanwhile the well-to-do were able to move into villas or larger flats (main-door apartments at ground level for example). As Chapter 2 explains, during the belle époque both cities saw a very substantial expansion of buildings, both residential and public, catering for the middle classes. But the state of Edinburgh’s Old Town at the turn of the century remained dire, preparing the way for the ‘abnormal spatial 18 Rodger, Transformation, p. 15 on the Old Town, ‘a society segregated on a vertical basis’; see also Gordon, ‘The status areas,’, p. 170. The older ‘vertical’ arrangements persisted in some areas of both cities: an article in The Architect in 1873 remarked of Paris that ‘it would be difficult to quote any institution of the French which English people might less readily fall in with, than that which consigns the tenancy of the half-dozen successive storeys of the same house to just as many utterly dissociated and indeed discordant people, ranging from a jaunty viscount on the premier étage … to a little nest of the humblest workpeople on the cinquième, all meeting on the common stair’; my italics: in Edinburgh this would be a recognizable pattern. Quoted in Donald Olsen, The City as a Work of Art: London, Paris, Vienna, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1986, p. 137. 19 Rodger, Transformation, p. 18. 20 Ibid., p. 431. The Edinburgh Medical Officer of Health, Henry Littlejohn, had established that the districts of Canongate, the Tron, St Giles and Grassmarket had death rates much above the average for the city, see J. Butt, ‘Working-class housing in Scottish cities’ in Gordon and Dicks, Scottish Urban history.

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segregation’ of the twentieth century. Paris, too, was a city where the gap between rich and poor could be visibly measured by looking at their living space. The physical fabric of each city reflected its social makeup to some extent then.21 The motivation behind both sets of ‘improvements’, whatever their eventual consequences, was complex: it was partly philanthropic: to create a more healthy environment; partly architectural: to create an impressive cityscape; and partly to deal with bourgeois fears related to ‘the dangerous classes’. To take just one focus of concern, the question of drink was something causing both cities some anxiety, though of different kinds, and this period was seeing a transition from uncontrolled drinking to a less tolerant approach. In France, drunkenness was comparatively rare, despite the large numbers (over 11,000 in 1872) of debits de boisson or wine-shops, and the apparently large per capita consumption of wine (60 litres). Drunkenness became a criminal offence there only in 1873, in which year there were but 4,000 accusations, rising to over 60,000 in 1880, but this was still far less than in England, let alone Scotland.22 Paris was not free from drink-related problems, mainly however of alcoholism, as documented in Zola’s Parisian novel L’Assommoir (1877) and illustrated in contemporary images of absinthe drinkers. But whereas in Paris drinking was largely associated with other amusements, such as cabarets, cafés and pleasure outings to guinguettes, Edinburgh had a more obvious culture of heavy and anti-social drinking. In the mid-nineteenth century, the city had about five licensed houses for every thirty families. If Glasgow was regarded as a damned place in this respect, (‘three times more drunken than Edinburgh’), Edinburgh was by no means exempt. The Scotsman newspaper in 1850 had pointed out that ‘it may seem strange that Edinburgh, the headquarters of the various sections of a clergy more powerful than any other save of Ireland, should in respect of drunkenness exhibit scenes and habits unparalleled in any other metropolis and that Glasgow, where the clergy swarm, should be notoriously the most guilty and offensive city in Christendom’.23 Alcohol was freely available and increasingly whisky was being drunk – by the lower classes, unlike in the eighteenth century when the literati were described as ‘knee-deep in claret’.24 Some reduction in drinking was achieved by Sunday closing, duty on spirits and the temperance movement. French visitors to Edinburgh were struck by the very large number of Temperance Hotels in the 1890s. But the amount of alcohol consumed was still high during our period. Although women were not unknown in pubs in the mid-century, they were tending to disappear there, both as drinkers or barmaids, and as T. M. Devine remarks, ‘the Scottish pub now became

21

See T. C. Smout, A Century of the Scottish People, 1830-1950, London, Collins, 1986, chapter on ‘The tenement city’, and p. 55 on the gradual move towards ‘abnormal spatial segregation of the social classes’ in Edinburgh. 22 See Theodore Zeldin, France 1848-1945, vol. II, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1972-73, p. 907; cf. Fierro, Histoire de Paris, p. 1194 for figures of wineshops. 23 T. M. Devine, The Scottish Nation, London, Penguin, 2003 [1999], p. 351. 24 Billy Kay and Cailean Maclean, Knee Deep in Claret: a celebration of wine and Scotland, Edinburgh, Mainstream, 1994 [1983].

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the male domain which it long remained, down to the 1960s’.25 It would not have been easy for a Scottish Manet to paint the equivalent of The Bar at the Folies Bergère. In 1908, the drinking culture in Scotland was still resisting control: the closing of public houses at ten o’clock has proved a ghastly failure so far as improvement in drunkenness is concerned […] The abominable practice of drinking spirit from the bottle may be seen in operation in the street after ten p.m. more especially on Saturday nights.26

Some things in common: cultural change Yet at the same time, in both Paris and Edinburgh, the new literacy brought about by educational reform in the 1870s and 1880s was leading to a better-educated population at all levels of society, acquiring what would now be called ‘cultural capital’, in other words the mental and to some extent financial preparation to enjoy cultural experiences. It explains the predominance and expansion of printing and publishing (discussed in Chapter 7 below). Education was a major employer in both cities. Each had an ancient university, which created all kinds of ancillary occupations, and led to a not inconsiderable and highly concentrated student population – estimated at 2.3 per cent of Edinburgh’s active population in 1901.27 Alongside higher education, there were many colleges and increasing numbers of schools. Teaching was an expanding source of posts for the well-educated of both sexes. Both cities had a large and increasingly well-qualified middle class. One striking difference between Edinburgh and Paris in this respect, however, was the cultural influence of a clerical background. Many successful Scots of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were sons or daughters of the manse. As one French visitor put it, ‘the influence of the manse [le presbytère] on a whole people is nowhere more evident than in Scotland and that is how this savage, empoverished and uncultivated nation has become the most educated, civilised and happiest of countries’.28 Gender differences persisted, although they were starting to be challenged (see Chapter 8 below). All over Europe, the professions – the law, medicine, banking and accountancy, local administration – offered careers to ambitious young men, though not yet generally to women, of the middle classes. The large numbers of clerical or 25 Devine, The Scottish Nation, p. 355. Re Temperance Hotels see Lafond, L’Ecosse jadis et aujourd’hui, p. 3. 26 Anthony Keith, Edinburgh of Today, Edinburgh and Glasgow, William Hodge & Co 1908, p. 194. 27 Richard Rodger, ‘Employment, wages and poverty in the Scottish cities’, in R. J. Morris and Richard Rodger, eds, The Victorian City: a reader in British urban history 18201914, London, Longman, 1993, pp. 73-113, p. 86. 28 Mme Edgar Quinet, De Paris à Edimbourg, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1898, p. 201. Mme Quinet, widow of the historian Edgar Quinet (1803-75) also remarked on the Temperance Hotels.

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white-collar employees, however, were increasingly of both sexes (in Paris women already occupied 15 per cent of such jobs by 1870). Within the working class of both cities, domestic and other services (food, laundry, clothing, and so on), catered to the expanding bourgeoisie, employing women within families where the men were workers in the artisan trades mentioned above. The horizons of working-class girls often remained confined to such trades. On the eve of the First World War, ‘40 per cent of female employees in Edinburgh were in domestic service’, probably the socially least-advantaged group.29 Nevertheless, educational provision explains, in part, the cultural renaissance both cities appeared to experience during the belle époque, drawing in both cases on a long tradition. That of Paris is of course much better known: its attraction for creative artists of many nationalities is discussed in Chapter 2 below, and it was the scene of new and influential movements in fine arts, literature and music (from Impressionism to Symbolism, Decadence and Modernism).30 Much less has been written about the culture of fin-de-siècle Edinburgh – the attention of historians has been focused on its glory days of the eighteenth century when, as the major centre of the Scottish Enlightenment, it was a ‘hotbed of genius’, or on the age of Sir Walter Scott in the early nineteenth century. But late Victorian and early Edwardian Edinburgh too was changing, becoming the location for a new set of cultural institutions, at a time, the 1890s, that Michael Lynch has called ‘the high summer of a confident renewed sense of national consciousness’ in Scotland, 31 an opinion echoed by Elizabeth Cumming in relation to a particular event, the building of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery: ‘for an 1890s audience, this choice […] boldly stated that Scotland was on the verge of a cultural Renaissance’.32 It is one aim of this book to draw attention to some of the signs tending in this direction. Patrick Geddes, an Edinburgh citizen who will feature prominently in the following chapters, was also persuaded that Scotland generally and Edinburgh at its centre, was about to see a renaissance in its arts, partly inspired by the Celtic revival (see Chapter 4).33 29

Rodger, ‘Employment, wages and poverty’, p. 86. Fin-de-siècle Paris has been written about by many cultural historians: see for example Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: the origins of the avant-garde in France: 1885 to World War I, London, Jonathan Cape 1969 and later editions; Christophe Charle, Naissance des intellectuels, Paris, Minuit,1990; Paris, Fin de Siècle: culture et politique, Paris, Seuil,1998; Christophe Prochasson, Les Années électriques (1880-1910), Paris, La Découverte, 1991; Paris 1900: essai d’histoire culturelle, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1999. 31 Cf. D. Daiches, J. Jones and P. Jones, A Hotbed of Genius, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1986; Michael Lynch, ‘Scottish culture in its historical context’, in Paul Scott (ed.) Scotland: a Concise Cultural History, Edinburgh, Mainstream, 1993, pp. 15-45, p. 35. 32 Elizabeth Cumming, ‘Ruskin and Identity in Scottish National Architectural Sculpture’, Journal of the Scottish Society for Art History, vol. 5, 2000, p. 11. 33 See also Rodger ‘Employment, wages and poverty’, p. 85: ‘Leisure and amusements, soirées and concert parties, artistic and cultural pursuits derived substantial patronage from such a heavily represented [middle/professional] class.’ 30

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Connections If we turn now to the direct connections between Paris and Edinburgh, there were of course historic links between France and Scotland, going back 600 years, and embodied in the Auld Alliance: most Scottish people both today and in the past would be aware of this history, though it is less well-known in France. The oldest known Franco-Scottish treaty was signed in Paris in 1295 and ratified across the Forth from Edinburgh, in Dunfermline, in 1296. The original alliance was military and diplomatic, inspired by hostility to England, but it could also be intellectual. Medieval contacts between France and Scotland were exemplified both by mercenary service of Scots soldiers in France and by the arrival of Scots students in Paris, to study at the Sorbonne. The Collège des Ecossais or Scots College had been founded in the fourteenth century as a community of scholars in Paris; it acquired a building in the Latin Quarter in 1662, which is still standing.34 The contentious reign of Mary Queen of Scots (1542-87) brought a Renaissance court and French courtiers to Edinburgh in the 1560s; some of the most dramatic events of that decade (the confrontation with John Knox, the murder of Rizzio in Holyrood, and that of Darnley in the Kirk o’ Field) occurred in or near the city, and the French court left many traces, in place-names and language.35 In later years, Stuart exiles took refuge in France and Jacobite armies had theoretical if inconsistent support from the French crown.36 More relevant to the present purpose, the later eighteenth century had represented a ‘privileged moment in Franco-Scottish mutual awareness’, differing from the dynastic and essentially anti-English links of the past.37 Both in the connections between Scottish and French philosophy, exemplified by the personal contacts of David Hume and Adam Smith, and in the European vogue for the poems of ‘Ossian’, supposedly from the Gaelic and published by James Macpherson in the 1760s, there was a growing propensity in France to distinguish Scotland from England, and to attribute certain qualities to it. In the nineteenth century, the phenomenal popularity in Continental Europe of the novels of Sir Walter Scott furthered a French notion of Scotland as a mist-girt land of mountain and flood, but also projected an image of Edinburgh as a romantic northern city: Jules Verne, interviewed in 1895, towards the end of his life, said: All my life I have delighted in the works of Sir Walter Scott, and during a never-to-be forgotten tour in the British Isles, my happiest days were spent in Scotland. I still see as

34 M. Lynch, (ed.) The Oxford Companion to Scottish History, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 247; on the Alliance in general, see J. Laidlaw, ed., The Auld Alliance: France and Scotland over 700 years, Edinburgh, University of Edinburgh, 1999. On the Scots College see below Chapter 5, note 8. 35 The area near Craigmillar Castle to the south of Edinburgh is still called ‘Little France’. Many Scots words (douce, gigot, ashet, etc.) are derived from sixteenth-century French; even haggis has its origin in ‘hachis’. See also Lynch, Oxford Companion, p. 409. 36 Ibid., p. 351. 37 P. France and J. Renwick, ‘France and Scotland in the eighteenth century’, in Laidlaw, The Auld Alliance, p. 89.

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in a vision, beautiful, picturesque Edinburgh, with its Heart of Midlothian, and many entrancing memories: the Highlands, world-forgotten Iona, and the wild Hebrides.38

The French politician Jules Simon, at the first full meeting of the Franco-Scottish Society in 1895 (see Chapter 5 below), described how his mentor Victor Cousin was indebted to the Scottish School of philosophy, notably Thomas Reid, Adam Ferguson, and Dugald Stewart.39 But on the whole, after the eighteenth-century high point, when the histories of both countries did refer to the other, the Auld Alliance itself seems to have lost even symbolic force. In a collection of lectures to mark the Alliance’s 700th anniversary in 1996, no reference was made to any links in the period between the French Revolution and the present day.40 And while the port of Leith had seen regular shipments of claret directly from France in earlier centuries, the rise of Clydeside meant that trade with France, as with the rest of the world, was mainly conducted from the West of Scotland. Yet during the fin de siècle, there were possibly more personal and cultural links between the two cities in this study than there ever had been before, and by no means insignificant ones. One reason was simply that it had become easier physically to travel between Britain and France, the other that there was a growing awareness on both sides of the Channel of the language, society and culture of the other country. These perceptions were often critical, sometimes caricatural, occasionally admiring. Within this wider context, Parisians and Edinburghers shaped their own impressions of the other. Getting there Travellers between Scotland and France in the belle époque normally went via London, by rail and cross-Channel ferry, rather than all the way by sea as often in the past (though in the early twentieth century it was still possible to sail cheaply and directly from Grangemouth to Rouen, or from Leith to Brittany.)41 The total journey could be completed in two 8-hour sections. From Edinburgh to London, there were two rail lines, one down the west coast (connecting with the Glasgow line), the other down the east coast, ending at the London terminals of Euston (1839) and King’s

38 ‘Jules Verne at home’, interviewed by Marie A. Belloc in The Strand Magazine, February 1895, read via http://jv.gilead.org.il/belloc; see Ian Thompson ‘Jules Verne, la géographie et l’Ecosse du XIXe siècle’, La Géographie, Acta Geographica, no. 1511, 2003, pp. 48-71; my thanks to him for providing these references. 39 Transactions of the Franco-Scottish Society, vol. I, Edinburgh, Franco-Scottish Society, 1898, p. 233. 40 Laidlaw, The Auld Alliance, contains one chapter on the post-revolutionary period followed by one on the present day, (including references to French fondness for Scotch whisky and Scottish salmon) with nothing in between. 41 Moray McLaren, The Capital of Scotland: a twentieth-century contemplation of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Douglas and Foulis, 1950, p. 119.

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Cross (1852). The east coast journey took between 8 and 9 hours in the 1890s, a time that remained unchanged for many years. In 1894, according to an official guide, ‘the Flying Scotsman has its reputation to maintain. The capital of Scotland must be reached in 8 1/2 hours’. Leaving London at 10.00 am, the train arrived at 6.30 pm, allowing ‘twenty minutes for a hasty dinner at York’, and averaging about 60 mph.43 To a generation still using horse-drawn transport, these times were amazingly fast. One commentator writes that ‘Anglo-Scottish services were speeded up at least enough to allow a great-aunt of the present writer […] to dance away most of an Edwardian night in London, catch the 5.05 am from King’s Cross and arrive in Inverness the same evening in time for a Highland Ball’.44 Once in London, the Scottish traveller to France or the Parisian going the other way had to change stations, connecting with the boat-train. Cross-Channel shipping had a long history, but the interconnections of trains and boats made it much easier for passengers to make the through trip from London to Paris. As early as 1848, it could take as little as 10 1/2 hours, via Folkestone and Boulogne. The international exhibitions in Paris of 1878, 1889 and 1900 (see Chapter 6 below) were a stimulus to setting up more regular timetables. Until 1899, rival boat-train services were run by the South-East Railway (SER) via Folkestone and Boulogne, and by the London, Chatham and Dover Railway (LCDR) via Dover and Calais; a single French railway company, the Nord line, took passengers on to Paris. The rail lines ran out of and into Victoria, Charing Cross and London Bridge in London, and the Gare du Nord in Paris. The sea-crossing took between one and two hours when the weather was fine, though it might be prolonged by the difficulty of tidal harbour entries. Conditions aboard both ship and train, originally rather primitive (no corridors, no overhead covers) were remedied, with the coming of increased passenger traffic. From 1882, the LCDR daily service ran regularly via Dover and Calais. Its boat train ‘left Victoria at ten o’clock every morning and Paris [was] reached at 6.50 pm’.45 The first crossChannel steamers were all English, but two large French vessels, the Nord and the Pas de Calais came into service in 1898.46 The period 1899-1914 was later seen as an age ‘in a class of its own’, as the service was streamlined. By the late 1890s, the ‘overall time by fastest normal service from London to Paris via Dover-Calais was reduced to eight hours’, and a ‘special’ laid on for racing at Longchamp in 1896 did 42 The east coast route was in three sections, owned by separate railway companies: the Great Northern, the North-Eastern and the North British railways, which eventually combined only after the First World War to form the LNER . 43 The North British Railway Official Tourist Guide, Edinburgh, T. E. Jack, 1894, p. 73. 44 J. Spence, Victorian and Edwardian Railway Travel, London, Fitzhouse Books, 1977, p. iii. In the summer of 1900, it took Ottilie McLaren 24 hours to travel by boat, train and local horsedrawn transport from Paris, where she was a student, to Glenuig in the Highlands, where her family was on holiday, NLS, MS 21543, letter of 31 July. 45 E. W. P. Veale, Gateway to the Continent, a history of cross-Channel travel, London, Ian Allan, 1955, p. 50. 46 Ibid., p. 53.

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the trip in a record 6 1/2 hours. By 1913, on the eve of war, the regular route via Dover usually took about 7 hours.47 Improved services also meant improved communications. The Edinburgh art student Ottilie McLaren (see Chapter 3 below) corresponded daily with her fiancé in London during the 1890s, and they appear to have been able to exchange letters extremely quickly. There were several postal deliveries a day – up to five in Edinburgh, London and Paris.48 More advanced technological solutions to crossChannel communication, such as a ‘train ferry’, taking carriages on board ship, or a railway tunnel under the Channel, were already being proposed during this period, but were not implemented until much later: the 1930s for the train-ferry, the 1990s for the Eurotunnel. Communicating: mutual awareness Both Ottilie McLaren and Patrick Geddes, like many well-educated Scots, spoke and wrote correct and fluent French. It may have been limited in vocabulary and their accents may not have been perfect, but both these Edinburgh-based travellers in Paris were well able to communicate for a range of purposes, practical and intellectual. Of Geddes, a French colleague, Firmin Roz, wrote: ‘He seems so much at home with us that involuntarily I try to identify him with one of our provinces. I find in him the grace of [Anjou] and the poetry of Brittany […] His language is very pure French: elegant, savorous, enlivened by a trace of Anglicism’. It was often assumed that the well-off and well-educated would know some French, since, in the words of the principal of Edinburgh University in 1876, ‘an intelligent man who has the rudiments of what I consider a University education is certain to pick up French and German’.49 In fact women from the upper echelons of Scottish society were more likely than men to be taught French informally, perhaps by a governess, and when eventually Scottish university courses were open to them after 1892, they often studied modern languages. But by the end of the century, modern languages were being widely taught in Scottish secondary schools by the new generation of teachers from the recently created teacher training colleges, where the syllabus expressly included French and German. Correctness rather than fluency was for a long time to mark language learning in Scottish schools: Mme Quinet remarked in 1898 that, 47 Rixon Bucknall, Boat Trains and Channel Packets: the English short sea routes, London, Vincent Short, 1957, p. 118. 48 Ottilie McLaren’s correspondence (1897-1905) is in the National Library of Scotland (NLS), Wallace papers, MSS 21502 ff. and will be referred to frequently by date; see Chapter 2 below. 49 Quoted in R. G. Wakely, ‘Modern Language Studies at Scottish universities; the early days’, in R. G. Wakely and P. Bennett, eds, French and German in Scotland, Edinburgh, Dept of French, University of Edinburgh, 1996, pp. 1-21, p. 18. Firmin Roz’s comment on Geddes, dated 1903, is quoted by Philip Boardman, The Worlds of Patrick Geddes, Biologist, Town Planner, Peace Warrior, London, Routledge, Keegan, Paul, 1978, p. 181.

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while the study of French was obligatory, ‘I have never been able to extract a word of French from Miss Stewart, who teaches French in a girls’ school in Edinburgh’.50 There was among elite circles at least, much inter-cultural awareness on both sides of the Channel at the turn of the century (see Chapter 5 below on the clientele of the Franco-Scottish society). Then as now, however, since most French people used the term ‘Angleterre’ to cover the whole of Britain, it is not clear to what extent Scotland was always included in or distinguished from England in the French mind. French visitors undoubtedly admired Scottish enterprise, for example the engineering works that brought Glasgow’s drinking waters from Loch Katrine, the railway network, including the Forth Bridge, the shipyards of the West, the evidence of municipal initiatives to provide for public hygiene, and the model farmers of Lowland Scotland. Yet in the French mind, according to Richard Tholoniat, this ‘energy’ was seen as part of a general economic dynamism which they associated with England or Britain as a whole.51 Similarly, the Parisian aristocracy and haute bourgeoisie were much attached to fashionable sports associated with ‘England’, such as horse-racing, golf and tennis; but golf, although Scottish in origin, does not seem to have been associated with Scotland by its French admirers.52 The children of such families often had English governesses. When Proust’s narrator first meets Albertine on the promenade at Balbec, he remarks upon her affecting an English accent, probably picked up from her governess.53 However, Scottish education was definitely perceived as outstanding, and French travellers remarked with surprise that ‘coachmen and gravediggers’ were keen to discuss points of theology, while Edinburgh University’s excellence at this time impressed French academic visitors.54 The well-read British were aware of French literature and vice versa. In the decade 1900-10, translations from the French outnumbered those from any other language by about eight to one in British publishers’ lists. Most of the titles were of nineteenth-century fiction, and favourite authors were Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Anatole France and Honoré de Balzac. Many educated Britons could 50 Quinet, De Paris à Edimbourg, p. 200; see previous note for the teaching of French in Scotland. 51 For an overview of French visitors’ impression of Scotland as a whole in the later nineteenth century, see Richard Tholoniat, ‘L’Ecosse “dénationalisée”’? Voyages français à reculons outre-Tweed (1855-1915)’, special issue (‘Victorian and Edwardian Scotland’, ed. G.Leydier) of Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens, no. 54, 2001, pp. 77-94. My thanks to Richard Tholoniat for contacting me with this article, which has a long bibliography. 52 See Elizabeth C. Macknight, ‘Entertaining Company: the sociability of le Tout-Paris. 1880-1914’, PhD, University of Melbourne, 2003, chapter 4. 53 M. Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu, A L’Ombre des Jeunes filles en fleur, Paris, Gallimard, Pléiade edn, 1962, I, p. 877 (‘a juvenile affectation of British phlegm, [and] the teaching of a foreign governess’); and cf. Casselle, Paris républicain (NHP), pp. 131-132: English women in Paris were often ‘governesses and nannies, sought out for their knowledge of a foreign language’. 54 Tholoniat, ‘L’Ecosse “dénationalisée”’, p. 81.

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read French works in the original: in London, booksellers reported in 1903 that Maupassant, Daudet and Balzac, as well as George Sand and Verlaine, were selling fairly well, though the real publishing phenomenon was the interest in Napoleon: about 10 books a year were being written about him throughout the belle époque.55 One may assume that in Edinburgh the same pattern was repeated. By the end of the century, modern languages became part of the university curriculum there as elsewhere, and George Saintsbury, the Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at Edinburgh University from 1895-1915, had already published a Short History of French Literature in 1882.56 But British perceptions of France and especially of Paris were also marked by notions of frivolity if not immorality. Henry Vizetelly, the publisher of translations of Zola’s novels into English was prosecuted for obscenity in 1888.57 As will be seen in Chapter 7 below, French novels were regarded as uniformly risqué. In particular, to mention Paris in Britain was to evoke glitter, excitement and immorality. As Christophe Campos wrote in his exploration of ‘the view of France’, ‘the English [and presumably Scots] learnt far less about France from all the works of Flaubert and Zola than from George Moore’s Confessions of a Young Man’.58 The Irish writer’s Confessions (1888) are centred on the art studios of Paris, and in some ways set out deliberately to shock. George du Maurier’s best-selling novel Trilby (1894) about expatriates in a similar Parisian Bohemia, also helped foster the picture, which was actively encouraged for tourists’ benefit by the Paris café and entertainment sector. Although she was over 21, Ottilie McLaren had to fight hard against her family’s apprehension before being allowed to study in Paris in the late 1890s. But as Campos points out, and as she found when she got there, ‘it is wrong to judge the city as a whole from the habits of such circles of leisure as can […] be found somewhere in any cosmopolitan or artistic centre … The real society of Paris [was] made up of a solid bourgeoisie … with strong family traditions and a similarly respectable morality’.59 Literary French perceptions of Scotland had been shaped above all by the novels of Walter Scott. In France, the most translated Scottish authors were Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson, both closely associated with Edinburgh. Other Scottish authors whose works were translated included Burns, Carlyle and – after 1900 – the millionaire and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie.60 It is not always clear, though, 55 Christophe Campos, The View of France, from Arnold to Bloomsbury, London, Oxford University Press, 1965, p. 243. 56 See Alan Bell, ‘Saintsbury, George’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004 (hereafter ODNB). 57 On this see, Peter France and Kenneth Haynes, The Oxford History of Literary Translation into English, vol. IV, 1790-1900, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006, chapter 6, and T. Secombe, rev. P.D. Edwards, ‘Vizetelly, Henry’, ODNB. 58 Campos, The View of France, p. 6. 59 Ibid., p. 148. 60 According to BOSLIT (Bibliography of Scottish Literature in Translation), online catalogue in the National Library of Scotland (www.boslitnls.uk).

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whether French readers identified such writers as Stevenson – whose adventure stories they read – with Edinburgh, or indeed Scotland. Richard Tholoniat argues that the influence even of Scott was waning in the fin de siècle, and that the French saw Scotland as well-assimilated culturally with its southern neighbour.61 But since they certainly associated the works of Scott with ‘the mists of the north’, it is worth pausing for a moment to mention climate. Stevenson himself in Picturesque Notes, was unkind about Edinburgh’s weather: Edinburgh pays cruelly for her high seat in one of the vilest climates under heaven. She is liable to be beaten by all the winds that blow, to be drenched with rain, to be buried in cold sea fogs […] The weather is raw and boisterous in winter, shifty and ungenial in summer.62

It is true that some of the French visitors who arrived in Edinburgh in the belle époque complained about the weather. They had arrived during the summer, when Edinburgh is usually far from hot: the summer months ‘are appreciably cooler than in the south of England … but there is the compensation that … it is seldom too hot to work in the city’, as a modern meteorologist put it. Between October and March however, ‘Edinburgh … enjoys more hours of bright sunshine than London’, and far less pollution. The annual rainfall is only slightly more than that of Paris and London – the difference is that it is more likely to fall during summer. Stevenson himself relented so far as to say that ‘there are bright and temperate days, with soft air coming from the inland hills … the flags waving in Princes Street, when I have seen the town through a sort of glory’. 63 ***

For certain citizens of France and Britain, some cultural acquaintance was taken for granted then. But political relations between Britain and France in general were not relaxed. The late nineteenth century might even look like a particularly low point in their mutual awareness, with little to distinguish Franco-Scottish or Scoto-French links from relations between the two nation-states. It was an inauspicious moment, with much mutual distrust. France, albeit diminished by the aftermath of the FrancoPrussian war, was nevertheless still a world power, and Paris the beating heart of a restored, if somewhat conservative Republic. Britain as a whole, was mostly committed to Queen and Country. Queen Victoria – a frequent visitor to Scotland – died in January 1901, but not before hostility to Britain’s colonial activities had triggered insulting caricatures of the Queen in the French press. Both countries were engaged in strenuous colonial expansion, including the ‘scramble for Africa’, where they were in direct competition. During the 1890s, there were some acute causes 61

Tholoniat, ‘L’Ecosse “dénationalisée”’, pp. 84-5. Quoted by James Paton, ‘The Edinburgh weather’, in The Third Statistical Account of Scotland, The City of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Collins, 1966, p. 961. 63 Ibid., pp. 960 and 967. 62

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of hostility between the two nations. The confrontation at Fashoda, the Dreyfus Affair and the South African War were modern issues grafted on to a long history of suspicion and distrust. The Entente Cordiale of 1904, negotiated during the reign of Edward VII – a frequent visitor to France – was essentially an attempt to negotiate a global modus vivendi rather than any real meeting of minds. (See Chapter 5 below for further discussion of the political situation.) Despite this political context of hostility and distrust, within the broader context of cultural exchange, relations between our two cities were possible. The aim of this study is not to try to prove that more was going on in Edinburgh, and less in Paris, than met the eye, although that may occasionally be hinted. The book’s remit is necessarily selective: it describes in a series of linked essays, the possibilities for cultural connections and exchanges, and in some cases parallels between these two cities. But it does intend to look beneath the surface and detect the stirrings of nonconformity, as well as the forces of resistance to it, in both cities. French bourgeois society, for all the excitement of some quartiers of Paris, could be as resistant to change as the suburbs of Edinburgh. This study, largely based on contemporary sources, considers some interchanges and comparisons that have gone relatively unobserved by historians of either city, with the aim of providing a fresh perspective on the internal–external connections of the time. The culture in question is not what would today be called ‘popular culture’. The popular cultures of foreign countries are often the least accessible to visitors from abroad. And in the belle époque, foreign travel and knowledge of languages was on the whole restricted to the comfortably off. Sport and cinema, as international systems, were just starting to take off, but it would be artificial to make much of a Franco-Scottish dimension: there was a France-Scotland rugby match in 1898 (see Chapter 5 below) and the second Olympic games were held in Paris 1900, but these were as yet rather minority events. On the other hand, we are not really talking about an elite and inaccessible cultural world either. The book will mainly engage with the culture of the comfortably off, though not necessarily the rich. It concerns most those with a degree of cultural capital, in the sense of the term used by Pierre Bourdieu. In many cases, this was quite recently acquired, with the expansion of secondary and higher education, in particular for women, who had previously often had rather a superficial cultural education compared to the best available to men. An outline of the topics will make this clearer. Chapter 2, ‘Stone Cities’, will look at the public buildings, the furniture of the streets and the monuments which transformed both cities in the years from the 1880s to 1910, and provided some kind of visual cultural context for the expanding middle classes of both cities. Although both Edinburgh and Paris are historic ensembles, in practice many of the buildings we take for granted in the city centres and which colour our image of both cities date from the late nineteenth century, and indeed from the quite narrowly defined belle époque (1890-1910). Many such buildings have points in common, and it is no accident that Scottish architects and sculptors had often trained in Paris. Hence Chapter 3, ‘Taking the Boat-train to Montparnasse, Edinburgh Artists in Paris’, which discusses the migration to Paris of students and artists, concentrating particularly on

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representatives of two groups from Edinburgh, the so-called Scottish Colourists, who made their fortunes in France, and the young Scottish women art students who were among the first generation of women to travel for an education. Travel was not all one-way however. In Chapter 4, ‘Bringing the Parisians to Edinburgh’, a key figure appears who unites in his person almost every aspect of the links between Paris and Edinburgh at the time. Patrick Geddes, Scottish scientist, intellectual and urbanist, was at the centre of avant-garde thinking in Edinburgh, on topics as diverse as urban planning, museums, decorative arts and ecology. He was also well-connected with the liberal republican and academic establishment in France, some of whom he attracted to a unique series of Summer Meetings in Edinburgh. More surprisingly, a number of French anarchists, with whom he had close links, were also invited. Chapter 5, ‘A Petite Entente’, examines the FrancoScottish Society, an initiative in which Geddes was also initially involved, though this had a very different clientele. In practice, the Society, despite its name, linked people from rather narrow social and academic circles in Paris and Edinburgh. It was, however, originally intended as a stepping-stone towards more general friendship between Britain and France, and the personnel involved were not unconnected to the Entente Cordiale of 1904. Chapter 6, ‘Professor Geddes Goes to the Fair’, considers the 1900 International Exposition or World’s Fair, held in Paris: opening at a critical moment in Franco-British relations, this was both an attraction and the scene of some controversy and a series of projects and meetings to which Geddes was once more central. Chapter 7, ‘An Entente Cordiale in Publishing or a Scottish Victory’, moves several years on, to the period 1910-14. It tells the story of a little-known episode in which the Edinburgh printing and publishing firm of Thomas Nelson and Sons launched an invasion of the seemingly impregnable Parisian publishing scene, by producing a series of pocket versions of French classics and modern authors. The Collection Nelson became familiar to many generations of readers in Britain, France and indeed worldwide. Finally, Chapter 8, ‘New Women, Old Men?’, considers changes in the lives of women and relations between the sexes in France and Scotland during these years, concentrating on three instances: physical mobility within the city space; higher education, especially in the medical schools of both cities; and the support or otherwise for women’s rights, including the vote. In the course of these essays, certain figures will appear more than once: as well as Patrick Geddes, the names of Elisée Reclus, Auguste Rodin, Ottilie McLaren, J. D. Fergusson, Charles Saroléa, the Nelson family, Mme Edgar Quinet, Marguerite Durand and others will recur from time to time.

CHAPTER TWO

Stone Cities Walk down a street in central Paris or central Edinburgh, and the first impression is one of height and stone. The blocks of housing are at least three storeys high, and most are much higher; behind each doorway lies access to several apartments or flats – also known as houses in Scotland. Not unusual in many continental cities, the pattern is perhaps less common in England where, outside the immediate business districts, housing tends to be lower-rise. There is also an impression of uniformity. The straight-line perspective of the Haussmann-type Paris street has been much photographed. Edinburgh tenements too were standardized: post-1860 tenements have been compared to ‘a four-storey equivalent of a medieval wall with windows’.1 The Franco-Scottish comparison is not necessarily too far-fetched: a description of Edinburgh in the 1950s remarked on ‘the huge grey blank side of a tenement house in the Old Town, grey and blank and huge in the way no side of a house is in England – crying aloud to be covered with advertisements for “Cinzano”, “Quinquina” and “Dubonnet”’.2 The design of the buildings is very far from identical of course: Edinburgh façades are often flat ashlar-faced expanses, with inset windows, while even the plainest Parisian façades contain more surface detail. French buildings in this period had “French windows”, that is, casements which open like doors; most Scottish buildings had sash windows (because of the climate). But the impression of an echo is furthered by the use of uniform building materials: in both city-centres, most buildings are of stone, or at least stone-faced, rather than brick-built or harled. In Edinburgh the occasional pink sandstone building occasionally breaks the pattern, but grey predominates. ‘Even in fashionable districts [of late nineteenth-century Paris], one often received the impression of being buried in a stone quarry’.3 In Edinburgh, ‘similarities in materials and architectural details gave an impression of architectural coherence … and the characteristics of the building industry contributed to the standardized appearance of housing’.4 In both cities, this creates a sense of antiquity, with houses of different periods sitting close to one another without much obvious incongruity. In each case, the 1 Quoted in Richard Rodger, The Transformation of Edinburgh: land, property and trust in the nineteenth century, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 498. 2 Moray McLaren, The Capital of Scotland: a twentieth-century contemplation of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Douglas and Foulis, 1950, p. 115. 3 Norma Evenson, Paris: a century of change 1878-1978, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1979, p. 142. 4 Rodger, Transformation, p. 498.

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tall structures were originally caused by crowding and lack of space: Edinburgh’s Old Town was strung out along a ridge surrounded by lower-lying marshy ground.5 Pressure on space resulted in tenements, houses built on top of each other, to make it one of earliest high-rise cities in the world in the seventeenth century. Paris expanded out from a small and crowded site round the islands in the Seine and the Montagne Ste Genevieve. It was largely a three-storey city in the reign of Louis XV, but taller buildings began to triumph thereafter. However, surprisingly perhaps, a great deal of what is visible in both city centres today dates from the late nineteenth century, or belle époque, rather than from earlier (or indeed later) periods. This chapter is concerned with the visual culture of space. While bearing in mind the difference of scale, it suggests that there are particular affinities between the reconstruction of both cities during the last decades of the nineteenth century and early 1900s. Sometimes a direct link is apparent. More often we are looking at parallel developments, but ones which give these cities more in common with each other than might first appear. On to an already established pattern of height, the nineteenth century as a whole imposed a huge expansion of multiple-unit housing, with particular developments during its last three decades. What was more, and this has a direct bearing on the central theme of the book, there was a considerable increase in the number of prominent public buildings, mostly catering for the wellbeing, culture and leisure of the middle classes. Residential buildings Paris’s massive restructuring programme during the Second Empire (the 1850s and 1860s) is often seen as having completely reshaped the city. But the early Third Republic, far from rejecting Haussmann’s projects, continued and completed the work into the 1870s and beyond, especially on the Right Bank. As the veteran politician Jules Simon remarked approvingly in 1890: ‘Haussmann’s expenditure may have been extravagant, but that doesn’t matter now. He undertook to make Paris a magnificent city and he entirely succeeded’.6 His successors followed suit. ‘More of this classic Haussmannian kind of building was constructed in the decades after 1870 than under the Second Empire. It still marks the urban landscape of Paris more profoundly than building of any other kind’. Between 1878 and 1888, ‘more than three times as many buildings were erected as between 1860 and 1869’.7 In terms of the surface area covered, residential building dominated (see Figure 2.1). The determination to destroy crowded and overpopulated old centres, containing 5 John Gifford, Colin McWilliam, David Walker et al., Edinburgh, London, Penguin, 1984, p. 59 (in N. Pevsner, ed., The Buildings of Scotland series; hereafter this essential book is referred to as Pevsner, Edinburgh). 6 Philippe Casselle, Paris républicain 1871-1914 (Nouvelle Histoire de Paris (NHP) series), Paris, Association pour la publication d’une histoire de Paris, 2003, p. 239. 7 Colin Jones, Paris, Biography of a City, London, Allen Lane, 2004, p. 382, my italics.

Figure 2.1

Haussmann-type façades, Boulevard Saint-Michel, Paris, c. 1900. Postcard, private collection.

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warrens of unhealthy dwellings, had led to large-scale demolition and rebuilding in the Haussmann era.8 But where Haussmann had concentrated on redesigning the inner arrondissements near the Seine (the notoriously crowded Hôtel de Ville area for example), in the 1880s much new residential building in Paris was in the outer ring of arrondissements, and speculatively aimed at bourgeois families – who did not at first respond. As an observer noted of the Gare St Lazare district in 1882, the ‘sixstorey houses with marble staircases and mosaics, with their solemn and ice-cold vestibules, in which a lift goes silently up and down as if by magic – these houses are standing empty’.9 This was a period of considerable building, before a slump in the late 1880s; work took off again in the mid-1890s, and with the economic upturn the number of new buildings once more rose steadily in the 1900s.10 Construction during the first decade of the Third Republic was still governed by the building regulations of 1859, themselves based on even older ones from the eighteenth century, relating to the permitted height of houses and the allowable decorations or projections of façades. Even during the Haussmann era, buildings could be no more than 20 metres high at the corniche, less if the street was a narrow one, and projection into the space over the street was strictly regulated. This usually meant five storeys, that is, ground floor plus four up to the corniche, and one or two low-ceilinged spaces above. Some observers complained of monotony, of ‘an almost wearisome uniformity of style’.11 A decree of 1884 allowed some relaxation, however, notably in the degree of projection from the façade permitted. One visible result was the appearance of a French version of the ‘bow-windows’, already familiar in British cities, and normally known as ‘bay windows’. In winter, Britain and particularly Scotland have less natural light than France: the bay window maximizes any light there is by projecting from the façade. Mme Edgar Quinet, when visiting Edinburgh, was greatly taken with the generous proportions of the local bay windows.12 Originally, the French version was allowed to project only a short distance from the façade, and had to be of temporary materials, but soon became a permanent fixture. Further relaxations to the rules in 1902, bearing on the skyline and profile, and allowing architects to build several more storeys above the corniche, meant that the Parisian house of the 1900s was very different from its predecessors (see Figure 2.2). The strict uniformity of the Haussmann block (the rue de Rivoli or the section of the rue Monge near the rue des Ecoles) had given way to a riot of jutting corbels and balconies, and florid decorations, still visible in many 8 See also David P. Jordan Transforming Paris: the Life and Labours of Baron Haussmann, Chicago, London and New York, Free Press, 1995, and cf. his article in French Historical Studies, Winter 2004, special issue on Paris, p. 90 (‘an enduring template’); and p. 92 for a list of buildings of the later period; Jordan argues that they do not interrupt the Haussmannian template. 9 Casselle, Paris républicain (NHP), p. 248. Rents here were over ten times those of the poorer arrondissements (in the north, east and south). 10 Ibid., figure on p. 297. 11 Baedeker, Guide to Paris, 1888, quoted in Evenson, Paris, p. 148. 12 Mme Edgar Quinet, De Paris à Edimbourg, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1898, p. 30.

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Paris streets, on houses which were sometimes as high as 30 metres in all. These too were criticized for ‘making the capital ugly’.13 While the thoroughgoing art nouveau house as designed by Hector Guimard, (1867-1942, the creator of the first Metro stations) was confined to a few extravagant sites, more modern styles could be seen for example in the Rue Réaumur, fully opened by President Félix Faure in 1897, and, according to a report of 1891, ‘one of the most beautiful and useful streets in the capital’. Here the use of metal frameworks came into its own. Less work was carried out on the Left Bank, but the Republic completed the Boulevards Saint-Germain and Raspail, making possible the ‘exuberant’ façade of the Hotel Lutetia (1907).14 The post-Haussmann façade is usually in pierre de taille (stone blocks), not rendered, often with a balcony on the first floor, and four or five upper storeys. This is higher than most buildings in Edinburgh, partly because of the introduction of mechanical lifts, invented in the US by the Otis Company in the 1850s and introduced in Paris fairly soon afterwards, then electrified in the 1890s. Houses built in Paris in this period often have a wide stairwell to accommodate the lift, unlike the narrow Edinburgh stair, where lifts are very infrequent.15 In Edinburgh, centuries of building had nevertheless left a legacy of tall dwelling-houses. The Old Town, centred on the spine of the High Street, already had buildings as high as seven storeys in the seventeenth century, and some had as many as ten levels in the nineteenth. The New Town, (see Chapter 1 above) built between the 1760s and the 1830s, had lower, more uniform, but still fairly high houses: four good floors above a basement area was a common pattern. By far the most fundamental change to the Edinburgh townscape and that most relevant to the majority of its citizens, was in the volume of residential building which was completed in the second half of the nineteenth century. ‘Between 1871 and 1911 [the housing stock of Edinburgh] increased by 100%, i.e. more than the number of houses accumulated over the entire history of Edinburgh’, much of it in extensions out of the central area. The Edinburgh slum demolition scheme of 1868-75 led to ‘the creation of seven new streets and widening of others’, altering the townscape. About 30% of the housing stock in the Old Town was demolished. A measure of visual uniformity was also imposed on external features. Moreover improvements 13

André Hallays, quoted Evenson, Paris, p. 159; see ibid., pp.147 ff., ‘Beauty and the law’ for details of the building regulations, which were complex and precise, relating to width of the street. See also Casselle, Paris républicain (NHP), pp. 300 ff. 14 See Evenson, Paris, pp. 143 and 154-155. 15 The standard Parisian house had five storeys with a cellar and ground floor, and a row of attic rooms, the chambres de bonne; it had an inner courtyard and at least two stairwells, one sometimes being a service stair. The flats would be suites of rooms opening one on to another, M. Agulhon, ed., Histoire de la France urbaine, vol. IV, Paris, Seuil, 1984, p. 211. All this was different from the Edinburgh pattern of a single stair and a common drying-green at the back of the row of houses. In other respects, too, the houses differed, for example in the shape of windows (sash or French) or shutters: in both cities wooden or metal shutters were widespread in this period, but they were by then usually external in Paris, pierced wooden persiennes to keep out the sun, while in Edinburgh they were internal, to keep in the warmth.

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Figure 2.2a House, rue Larrey, Paris, c. 1900, note projections from facade. Author’s photograph.

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Figure 2.2b House rue Larrey, Paris, 1901, note architect’s inscription. Author’s photograph.

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in the water supply were made. ‘In the last third of the century, mortality associated with water-borne diseases was significantly reduced’.16 The third wave of speculative building in the late nineteenth century created a ring of suburbs, which combined some streets of two-storey villas with many areas of tall tenements, once more offering ‘veritable grey-walled canyons’.17 As Tom Devine has pointed out, there were reasons not to abandon the tenement option, often reworked in the Scottish baronial style. Stone-built, multi-storey houses gave protection against the weather and were easy to heat, while those above ground level had less damp to contend with – all reasonable responses to a northern climate. Middle-class tenement flats could be quite spacious. The problem was in poorer and overcrowded areas, where cramming whole families into small tenement flats without light caused horrific slum conditions.18 In both cities, although there was some ‘social housing’ the late nineteenth century on the whole saw poor householders either displaced to the outer suburbs (Belleville and Ménilmontant in Paris, Dalry and Gorgie in Edinburgh); or squeezed into certain pockets in the city centre (the rue Mouffetard in Paris, the Canongate and remaining High Street closes in Edinburgh). Meanwhile there was a proportionate expansion in the more spacious houses available to the middling or well-to-do classes already embarking on a more expansive lifestyle. Large fortunes were made by some developers such as Edinburgh’s Sir James Steel, a self-made man who bought up land on the fringes of the city centre between 1866 and 1894 (Comely Bank, the West End). Having developed middle-class tenement housing there, Steel became both very wealthy and Lord Provost.19 Much of Edinburgh’s social housing was also high rise (1901, Portsburgh Square; 1897, High School Yards; 1898, Tynecastle; 1900, Cowgate), though its design was rather like London’s in this respect. One striking and untypical development, partly intended as a contribution to social housing in the very centre, was the takeover and development of some of the run-down closes in the Old Town by Patrick Geddes (see Chapter 4 below), who later launched an extraordinary ‘arts-and-crafts’ complex at the top of Castle Hill, today fully visible from Princes Street. Planned as a ‘Town-and-Gown’ hall of residence and block of flats, and executed by sympathetic architects in 1893-94, Ramsay Garden combined Scots baronial and English cottage styles, with half-timbered gables, turrets and balconies, much of it harled white, with red-tiled roofs. It stands out in Edinburgh as much as Guimard’s extraordinary art nouveau houses do in the beaux quartiers of Paris.20 16

Rodger, Transformation, p. 444. The Third Statistical Account of Scotland, The City of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Collins, 1966, p. 23. 18 T. M. Devine, The Scottish Nation, London, Penguin, 2003 [1999], p. 341, and see the chapter on ‘The Scottish city’; cf also Chapter 1, note 21 above. 19 Rodger, Transformation, Chapter 7 and 8, and p. 346 on James Steel. 20 Earlier ‘social’ or rather artisan housing in Edinburgh included the various ‘Colonies’, solidly built low-rise streets at certain locations, see T. C. Smout, A Century of the Scottish People, 1830-1950, London, Collins, 1986, p. 37 and more details in Rodger Transformation, 17

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Public buildings: from railway stations to churches Alongside the residential extensions, in both cities, there appeared a mushroom growth of public buildings in the late nineteenth century, as the new kind of city life established itself. In Paris, part of the impetus was of course that many city centre buildings – mostly those representing authority – had burnt down, or been bombarded by the army, during the fighting at the end of the Commune in May 1871. Among public edifices wholly or partly destroyed were the Palais de Justice (law courts), the Tuileries Palace, the Palais Royal, the Hôtel de Ville, the Ministry of Finance, and the Cour des Comptes – mostly dating back several centuries. Their rebuilding, except for the Tuileries, which was later completely demolished to create an open space, was an early priority. But even without the impetus of such devastation, in Edinburgh ‘between 1850 and 1914, almost 1,000 new civic, public, governmental and ecclesiastical buildings were built’.21 The scale of buildings was monumental; their turrets, cupolas and roofs were generally eclectic in style yet unmistakably of their period. Since neither city suffered much in the way of bomb damage during the Second World War, most of the buildings from this period survive and often sit alongside much older structures, appearing to blend in with them. There are some literal parallels between the French and Scottish buildings of the time, since many of the architects in fin-de-siècle Scotland – sometimes hailing from Glasgow, but working in Edinburgh – had trained in Paris. There they had been exposed to the so-called Beaux-Arts rules of rationality, in which exterior shape should reflect the internal function, rules particularly applicable to public buildings. Several Scottish architecture students had spent time in the studio of Jean-Louis Pascal, a ‘favourite’ with foreign students, perhaps because he spoke English. In the 1870s, John James Burnet (1857-1938) designer of many public buildings in Glasgow, and several commercial buildings in Edinburgh, studied there.22 In Chapter 6, pp. 437-438; 444, 491-492, 451, 488 and passim. On Ramsay Garden, see Pevsner, Edinburgh, pp. 191-192 and the dustjacket illustration. Cf. Miles Glendinning, Ronald McInnes and Aonghas MacKechnie, The History of Scottish Architecture, from the Renaissance to the Present Day, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1996, pp. 354-355, which describes Geddes’s schemes as ‘conservative surgery’, with some provision for working-class housing, but driven by the need for more beautiful design. 21 On the rebuilding of Paris under the Third Republic, see for example Jones, Paris, pp. 381 ff. On Edinburgh, see Rodger, Transformation, p. 491; he points out that the volume of residential building was what really transformed the city. See also William Matthews Gilbert, Edinburgh in the nineteenth century, J. & R. Allan, Edinburgh, 1901 [reprinted 1976 as ‘An Edinburgh diary 1800-1900’], which lists all the events including major public buildings, by year. 22 On Burnet, the ‘Frenchified Scot’, see David M. Walker, ‘Burnet, John James’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004 (hereafter ODNB). Burnet designed the Edinburgh International Exhibition of 1886, which the same author describes as ‘even more Parisian’ than his other early work: ‘the façade of its domed main hall with giant-scaled sculpture was essentially a small version of Léopold Hardy’s scheme for the Paris Exhibition of 1878, erected in much less substantial materials’, David

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Scotland, formal training in architecture was recognized to be inadequate in the mid-nineteenth century. In part this was because of a Glasgow–Edinburgh split (a Scottish Institute was planned but never happened in the 1850s). Matters improved later but many of the Edinburgh buildings put up between the 1880s and 1910 were designed by architects who had trained outside Scotland.23 Among the Paris buildings restored after 1871, the most spectacular was perhaps the Hôtel de Ville or City Hall, built on the footprint and in the style of its Renaissance original, while enlarging its statuary. A commentator in 1892 thought the new building, which included magnificently decorated reception halls, an improvement even on the old: ‘the most perfectly beautiful of modern edifices’. His approach was also coloured by political sentiments: he saw the building as ‘free from the horrors of history, but it is also free from its vulgarity. The wretched quarrels of demagogues jumping on tables and crushing pens and inkstands under their heels, have not as yet resounded in a building that seems fit only for the presence of gentlemen’.24 Contemporary with the Hôtel de Ville were a whole set of new mairies in Paris – town halls for the twenty arrondissements, or ‘republican châteaux’, as they were called.25 Other spectacular alterations of the period were the new (or rebuilt) railway stations and bridges, occasioned by the rise in rail travel. The French railway network was later in date than the British, being largely developed during the Second Empire in the 1850s and 1860s, but almost all of the existing Paris stations were enlarged or redesigned after 1870 – the Gare St Lazare and the Gare d’Austerlitz, for instance. The Gare de Lyon, gateway to the south, was a completely new creation, between 1899 and 1902, with striking art nouveau décor. The Gare d’Orsay too was newly built, for the 1900 exhibition, (on the site of the old Cour des Comptes, destroyed during the Commune). More bridges were needed to carry both road and rail across the Seine: the Third Republic built no fewer than eight between 1876 and 1905, including the Pont Sully (1876); the Pont de Tolbiac (1882) and the Pont Mirabeau (1895) – still quite new when Apollinaire wrote his poem about it. The Pont Alexandre Walker, ‘Scotland and Paris 1874-1887’, in John Frew and David Jones, eds, Scotland and Europe: architecture and design 1850-1940, St Andrews, St Andrews Studies in the History of Scottish Architecture and design, 1991, pp. 15-40, pp. 21 and 30. 23 On architectural training in Scotland, see Walker, ‘Scotland and Paris’, and C. MacKean and D. Walker. ‘The professorial on the professional: a history of the Scottish architectural profession’, in Rebecca Bailey, ed., Scottish Architects’ Papers, a source book, Edinburgh, Rutland Press, 1996, p. 40: the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris provided ‘the most comprehensive architectural training in the world’. 24 Philip G. Hamerton, Paris in Old and Present Times, London, Seeley and Co. 1882, p. 322. The reference is to the declaration of the Republic in September 1870 and to the Paris Commune of 1871. 25 On the new mairies, see Georges Poisson, Histoire de l’Architecture à Paris (NHP), Paris, Hachette, 1997, p. 530: the mairie of the XIIth arrondissement was built in in 1875, the XVIIIth in 1888; the chef d’oeuvre of its kind was the mairie of the Xth in 1896, inspired by the new Hôtel de Ville.

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III, of modern metal design, though laden with much florid statuary, was specially built for the 1900 Exhibition (it represents the nymphs of the Seine and the Neva, to symbolize the Franco-Russian alliance of the 1890s); the Grenelle-Passy railway bridge and the Debilly footbridge were both built for the same occasion. The Pont de Passy (today Bir-Hakeim) and the metro-bridge at Austerlitz both date from 1905.26 The same period saw Edinburgh reconstruct the railway complex in the city centre, with the new North Bridge, a metal span which dates from 1894-97; its redesign, replacing the original stone bridge, was necessary because of the rebuilding of Waverley Station below it. The present station building, though altered since, basically dates from the 1890s; the redeveloped Waverley Station (after the Forth Bridge had opened) was then one of the biggest in Britain, with 4,360 metres of platforms.27 Waverley Bridge too was built of metal in the 1890s. And of course there was the Forth Bridge, already mentioned, the largest steel bridge in the world at the time (1890).28 Transport was one of the keys to the changing cityscape in this period, as horsedrawn traffic was gradually replaced. In Paris, public transport developed so fast and so chaotically that in the years up to 1910, every kind of traction equipment one could imagine coexisted: motor engines, steam traction, electric vehicles, horsedrawn cabs and omnibuses, boats along the Seine. The horses disappeared gradually, but the boats went into swift decline with the coming of the Paris Métro (metropolitan railway). Surprisingly late in arriving, the Paris subway was long overdue by 1900. The London ‘Tube’ was started in the 1860s, New York had a subway in 1868, Chicago in 1892. Glasgow had an underground railway in 1897, Berlin in 1871 and Budapest in 1896. The Métro had been delayed because the city authorities and the state were at loggerheads for about twenty years after the 1870s, over strategic decisions. The imminence of the Paris 1900 exhibition broke the deadlock: in return for the city making available funds for the Exposition universelle, the state conceded that the métro could be built in the city’s preferred mode.29 It became popular very fast, expanding from 13,000 metres to 30,000 in 4 years. Even in 1900 there were 48.4 million journeys (Paris had 2.5 million inhabitants); by 1910, there were 251.7 million.30 Its creation radically changed the look of the Paris streets (though not for ever). Hector Guimard, the art nouveau designer, was given the contract for the surface outlets, and produced an extraordinary style, with its great entrance arches, made of writhing tendrils of green metal, familiar from many period photographs 26 For dates of stations and bridges see articles ‘Gare’ and ‘Pont’ in Fierro, Histoire et dictionnaire de Paris, Paris, Laffont, 1996, pp. 1086 ff. 27 Robin Smith, The Making of Scotland, Edinburgh, Canongate, 2001, p. 324. 28 Jones, Paris, pp. 391-394, is one of the rare writers to mention the parallels between the Eiffel Tower and the Forth Bridge. 29 On public transport, see Guide des sources de l’histoire des transports publics urbains à Paris, XIXe-XXe siècles, Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne, 1998, and Michel Margairaz, Histoire de la RATP, Paris, Albin Michel, 1989; on the Metro see Evenson, Paris, Chapter 3, ‘The daily journey’. 30 See Fierro, Histoire de Paris, article ‘Métro’, pp. 993 ff.

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over the next 50 years. But only a few of the original station entrances remain today, and almost none of the ‘dragonfly’ pavilions with their glass roofs.31 Edinburgh’s equivalent of the Métro was a good deal less picturesque: its tram system, now vanished. The city’s geography – built on three long ridges – made an underground railway impracticable, and for many years it depended for public transport on a horse-drawn trams, followed by a cable-car system. Its smaller area of course enabled contacts to be made much more easily: many of the city centre buildings were within walking distance of each other. The advantage of trams over carriages was that they could carry more passengers. Fares were lower and the ride was smoother, so that passengers were not jolted over the cobbles. ‘From 1893, an extensive cable tramway was being laid down … later powered by new depots at Leith Walk … and at Tollcross’, erected 1896-98. The first route, serving the city’s hilly streets, opened in 1899, eventually leading to ‘Britain’s greatest cable tram system’, comparable to San Francisco. It was cumbersome but cost-effective.32 Most inner-city transport systems of the turn of the century have left few permanent traces; but the corollary of the large railway station in the nineteenth century was the grand hotel for travellers, again developed from about the 1850s, with the most striking examples dating from the belle époque. In Paris, a whole series of ‘palaces’, still standing, were built to attract rich foreign – mainly Englishspeaking – tourists. Six of them were in the VIIIth arrondissement, near the Gare St Lazare: they included the Ritz (1898) the Crillon (1906) and others from the pre-1914 years: the Georges V, the Plaza Athénée, the Prince de Galles, the Royal Monceau and the Bristol. The florid Lutétia, looking like ‘an enormous soft cheese with bizarre blisters’, was not far from the Gare Montparnasse.33 In Edinburgh’s Princes Street, the no less imposing pink sandstone Caledonian Hotel, originally a station terminal, from 1890 to 1893, was turned into a hotel in 1899-1903 (see Figure 2.3). The huge North British Hotel (now the Balmoral) was built at Waverley in 1895-1902 by W. Hamilton Beattie, who had ‘undeniably designed more hotels than any British architect then living’. He also designed the Carlton (1898) at the south end of North Bridge.34 The North British Hotel was the only exception to the rule about not putting up buildings on the south side of Princes Street: it was made possible by the demolition associated with the new bridge. Princes Street already had some ten ‘good hotels’ in the 1890s, before either of these major developments,

31 On Hector Guimard’s design for Métro entrances, especially his ‘dragonfly’ and ‘pagoda’ structures in glass and metal, see Evenson, Paris, pp. 110 ff. and illustrations p. 111. Many of these were knocked down as the eccentric design fell out of favour in modernist times, but surviving examples are now cherished. 32 On the Edinburgh cable system, see D. L. G. Hunter, Edinburgh’s Transport, vol. 1, The Early Years, Edinburgh, Mercat Press, 1992. 33 On the hotel Lutétia, see C. Lorstch, La Beauté de Paris et la loi, Paris, Sirey, 1913, p. 88 and 92, quoted in Evenson, Paris, p.154, and ibid., pp. 152 ff. On other hotels see Paris le long des rues, le 8e arrondissement, Paris, La Documentation française, 1987, p. 17. 34 Pevsner, Edinburgh, p. 285.

Figure 2.3

Caledonian Hotel, West End, Edinburgh. Author’s photograph.

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and Lothian Road, near the Caledonian station, was remarkable for the number of less imposing temperance hotels. These edifices were spectacular, but for sheer numbers, new buildings in these years connected with education and health were predominant. More schools, hospitals and university buildings were put up during the last quarter of the century than ever before. In Paris, most of the big hospitals in the central arrondissements went up between 1878 and 1900: Tenon (1878), Andral (1880), Tarnier (1881), Bichat (1882), Broussais (1883), Baudelocque (1890), Boucicaut (1897), Trousseau (1901), Bretonneau (1901), Hérold (1904). Edinburgh’s new Royal Infirmary north of the Meadows (today vacated and under conversion) dated from 1876 and had the classic post-Nightingale shape of three projecting pavilions running off a long corridor. Longmore Hospital for Incurables was built in Newington in 1880. Edinburgh’s City Hospital in Greenbank Drive, was designed by city architect Robert Morham between 1896 and 1903; Craighouse, built in 1889-1894 for the Royal Edinburgh Asylum, is a chateau in François I style by Sidney Mitchell; the nearby Craiglockhart building (1877-80) was a hydropathic institution before becoming a sanatorium during the First World War. Public baths and swimming baths, both favoured for promoting hygiene, appeared in both cities in the 1880s and 1890s.35 To give one example of a road transformed in this period, Sciennes Road, near the Meadows in south Edinburgh, is dominated by two public buildings, alongside residential tenements dating from the 1870s. One is the Royal Hospital for Sick Children, (1892, G. Washington Browne) a pink sandstone ‘renaissance-style’ building. The idea for the hospital was explicitly modelled on the Hôpital des Enfants Malades in Paris, in the rue de Sèvres, which was visited by John Smith and Dr Henry Littlejohn (later Edinburgh’s MOH) in the 1840s.36 The original Edinburgh Children’s Hospital opened in the 1860s, in a smaller building on the other side of the Meadows, near the site of the Infirmary. Philanthropic donations and sale of their site to the new Infirmary enabled the new (very expensive) building to be put up in Sciennes Road. Next door to the hospital is Sciennes primary school (1889), by Robert Wilson: a ‘large and symmetrical Jacobean Renaissance building with a central cupola’ – large and rather awe-inspiring for small children.37 Wilson was the School Board’s own architect, responsible for many schools in this period. In both Britain and France, educational reforms had been passed in the 1870s and 1880s respectively, creating compulsory free elementary education (Scottish Education Act 1872; lois Jules Ferry 1879-81). In both cities this meant more school buildings: each district had its primary school, built in each case to a formula, though varying with the site: thus Paris has the standard French école communale (300 were

35

Ibid., p. 73-74, and Fierro, Histoire de Paris, p. 935. Ibid., p. 596; see George Birrell, A Most Perfect Hospital, the centenary book, Edinburgh Royal Hospital for Sick Children Trust, 1995. 37 Wilson developed a Queen Anne style, putting ‘some of the best architecture in the least favoured places’, Pevsner, Edinburgh, p. 75. 36

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built between 1871 and 1914) and Edinburgh the Scottish elementary school; both originally had one entrance for boys, one for girls. Edinburgh School Board primary schools are all marked with their own carved stone relief roundel of ‘the female figure Education’ with her pupils.39 The first free secondary school was Boroughmuir, opened in 1904 but quickly crowded, and a much bigger school had to be built at Viewforth (1911-14). The city already had a number of older, mostly mid-Victorian, private or Merchant Company schools, often set in huge grounds, to which the children of the higher echelons of society were sent. In Paris, 17 more boys’ lycées were also created to welcome the expanding secondary school population, including Carnot (1876); Jeanson de Sailly (1883), Buffon (1887), Victor Hugo (1895), and some old ones were designed, for example, Louis-Le-Grand. The first lycées for girls, created by the 1881 law, began to appear: Fénelon (1883), Molière (1886); Racine (1885).40 The largest single educational project in either city was Paris’s University: the New Sorbonne. In all, this reconstruction covered 21,000m2 in the Latin Quarter, making it ‘the largest building constructed in Paris during the nineteenth century’.41 The reform of the Sorbonne was planned by the Republic, like the school reforms, to deal with the perceived inadequacy of French education, following the humiliation of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871. It was to be a collective ‘palace of science’.42 The French state and city were to share costs, and the design contract went to 29year-old Henri-Paul Nénot, (1853-1934, Prix de Rome 1877). It took 17 years to complete, from September 1884 to July 1901; and was carried out in three stages so that the students could continue to attend. Academics, including Marie Curie, Louis Pasteur and Ernest Lavisse, were among those consulted about the internal design – the lighting and acoustic of lecture theatres for instance. The first phase was built starting from the rue des Ecoles, and included the grand amphitheatre, and the faculties of letters and sciences. This section was inaugurated during the 1889 Exhibition. The symbolist murals, by Puvis de Chavannes, were a new departure decoratively, with their muted mythological scenes. The next phase, up to 1895, meant knocking down several small streets, and most of Richelieu’s seventeenthcentury Sorbonne – except the chapel, which was maintained. The rest was rebuilt in similar external style, and now included the library and a spectacular astronomical 38

Poisson, Histoire de l’Architecture (NHP), p. 533. Octave Gréard, the educational administrator whom we shall meet again in Chapter 5 below, had 86 primary schools built between 1870 and 1878, even before the Ferry laws. 39 See W. M. Stephen, Fabric and Function, A Century of School building in Edinburgh 1872-1972, privately published, 1996; the ‘typical Board School is symmetrical: girls on one side, boys on the other’. For an example of the round plaques, see Rodger, Transformation, p. 490, fig. 14.1. 40 For dates of lycées, see Fierro, Histoire de Paris, pp. 413 ff.; on Edinburgh Merchant Company Schools (4,000 pupils in the 1870s), see Rodger, Transformation, pp. 111-113. 41 Poisson, Histoire de l’Architecture (NHP), p. 532. 42 Cf. Universités et grandes Ecoles à Paris, les Palais de la Science, Paris, Action artistique de Paris, 1997.

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tower on the rue Saint Jacques. For the scientists in the Jardin des Plantes, the Grande Galerie was built in 1877, the Galeries d’Anatomie in 1896.43 In Edinburgh too, although there was no overall rehaul, the University was radically changed physically in the space of 20 years or so, though in a rather eclectic way, very different from the comprehensive design of the Sorbonne. The University and the College of Art have left their mark on the space between the Meadows and the Old Town, Edinburgh’s student quarter for many years. Its central building, now known as Old College, dates from 1789-1827 and is by Robert Adam, continued by William Playfair. Adam always intended a dome to be built, but it was not until 1879 that an Edinburgh architect who was to have a major impact on the city, Robert Rowand Anderson (1834-1921), was commissioned to provide one, making it identifiable, like the Sorbonne as a temple of learning, topped by gilded male figure representing ‘Youth’. The University was meanwhile building a new Medical School nearby (1876-86), in ‘Venetian cinquecento’ style. And a local brewer endowed its graduation building in the space between the two, the McEwan Hall (1888-97, again by R. Rowand Anderson). The McEwan Hall, which looks rather like a version of London’s Albert Hall, in the shape of a ‘petrified blancmange’, has murals by William Palin (added 1892-97) and an external frieze of allegorical figures. The near contemporary Teviot Hall (1887-88) is in completely contrasting ‘early sixteenth-century Scots’ idiom. Shortly afterwards, along the north end of nearby George Square, which still mostly retained its eighteenth-century New Town shape, George Watson’s Ladies’ College building (1876) was extended in 1890-93 in French renaissance style. Not far away, but having to wait until the political case was made for it and the funds found (see Chapter 3 below), the Edinburgh College of Art (1906) now hidden behind a modern extension, is described as ‘Beaux-Arts classical’ and rather like the Ecole militaire, with its ‘deep French roofs’.44 Educational motives were also behind the expansion of libraries, museums and art galleries. In Paris, the creation of public libraries had been on the agenda of previous prefects of the Seine département, but was only systematically attacked from 1879 by Ferdinand Hérold. All twenty arrondissements received a public lending library, usually housed in a new building. Edinburgh’s new Central Library was designed during the belle époque (1887-90) by the ‘Francophile’ George Washington Browne, assisted by Stewart Henbest Capper, one of the architects of Ramsay Garden.45 Museums too were very largely a creation of the later nineteenth 43

See previous notes and Casselle, Paris républicain (NHP), p. 359 ff. On Anderson, see Sam McKinstry, ‘Sir Robert Rowand Anderson’, in ODNB; on the University buildings, see Pevsner, Edinburgh, p. 244-247; and on the Edinburgh College of Art, ibid., p. 258; the architect J. Dick Peddie, designer of the latter, ‘was deeply into BeauxArts design’, Walker, ‘Scotland and Paris’, pp. 35-36. The roofs were not the first of their kind: the Café Royal (originally a showroom for sanitary fittings, then turned into an oyster bar) was designed by Robert Paterson as early as 1861 and its ‘undoubtedly French’ mansard roof was ‘probably the first of its kind’ in central Edinburgh, Pevsner, Edinburgh, p. 331. 45 Stewart Henbest Capper of Edinburgh had trained, like J. J. Burnet, in the Paris atelier of Jean-Louis Pascal, Pevsner, Edinburgh, p. 35; see also pp. 70-71 and 178-179. 44

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century. In both cities, these often had their beginnings earlier (even much earlier), but this period was when they began to attract seriously large numbers of visitors. The vast and sprawling Louvre, with buildings dating from the time of François I, was originally a royal palace, dominating the centre of Paris on the right bank of the Seine. It already housed the royal art collections, open to the public since 1750, and had later been turned first by the revolutionaries, then by Napoleon, into a museum to house national treasures and international collections, including artworks ‘collected’ during military campaigns. Much altered and extended during the nineteenth century, it became both a museum and France’s national gallery.46 In Edinburgh, Princes Street Gardens had two early Victorian buildings, less venerable but similarly right in the centre of the city and monumental in design. They are in different styles, though by the same architect, William Playfair (1790-1857). What is now the Royal Scottish Academy, was known as the Royal Institution, built for the Board of Manufactures and Fisheries. Begun in the 1820s as an ‘austere temple’, it was extended in the 1830s with more decoration, including its sphinxes and (in 1844) the statue of Queen Victoria. What is now the National Gallery of Scotland was built to accommodate both the Gallery and the Royal Scottish Academy and was completed in 1854. The Royal Scottish Museum, in Chambers Street, was mainly built during the 1860s, with its glass-roofed great hall and galleries, but only brought to completion in 1885-89.47 In both cities, towards the end of the century, commemorative national buildings were created or re-created. The Pantheon in Paris already had a complicated history. Originally the eighteenth-century church of Ste Geneviève, patron saint of Paris, it was converted during the Revolution into a temple honouring the illustrious heroes of the time, and the inscription ‘Aux grands hommes la patrie reconnaissante’ was engraved on the façade (‘The Fatherland Grateful to its Great Men’). During the nineteenth century it twice reverted to being a church, under the Bourbon Restoration and the Second Empire. But after Victor Hugo’s funeral in 1883, it was definitively disaffected to become a mausoleum – chilling and gloomy of aspect. ‘Pantheonization’, the removal of a great person’s remains to the crypt, was politically controversial, and in the end the most acceptable figures for honouring in this way were mainly scientists and writers. Paradoxically, the 1890s murals by Puvis de Chavannes, decorator of the Nouvelle Sorbonne, republican and symbolist painter, celebrate Sainte Geneviève.48 Surprisingly, perhaps, one monument Paris does not have is a National Portrait Gallery. (London had inaugurated one in 1856.) The Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh, begun in 1882, was explicitly designed to be a ‘Scottish Pantheon’ by its architect, R. Rowand Anderson. It was also to hold for many years the National 46

Cf. J. P. Babelon, ‘Le Louvre, demeure des rois, temple des arts’, in P. Nora, ed., Les Lieux de Mémoire, vol. II, Paris, Gallimard, Quarto (paperback edition), 1997, pp. 18031830. 47 See Pevsner, Edinburgh, pp. 186-7 and 289. 48 See Mona Ozouf, ‘Le Panthéon’, in Nora, Lieux de mémoire, vol. I, pp. 155-178.

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Museum of Antiquities. Debates in the press at the time of its founding related to the idea of a ‘Caledonian Temple of Fame’, to Thomas Carlyle’s concept of the Hero, and to that of a Scottish Pantheon of ‘great men’. In 1906, when the building was completed, these notions were again in the air, the Scotsman commenting on ‘the power of great national monuments and Pantheons appealing to national pride and energy and self-reliance’.49 Its architect believed that sculpture should be appreciated ‘not as a mere excrescence to a building … but as part of the general plan of decoration, where its presence beautified and ennobles all the rest’.50 His design incorporated a series of niches for full-size statues, with the express aim of encouraging a revival of sculpture in Scotland, comparable on a smaller scale to the external sculptures on the Paris Hôtel de Ville (see Figure 2.4). The sculpture programme took seventeen years, 1889-1906, and was planned to commemorate eminent Scots, unless they already had monuments elsewhere in the city. Consequently neither Scott nor Burns figures among the thirty historical figures, (twenty-eight men, and two women, Queens Margaret and Mary); and six allegorical figures or groups, the latter including the female figures of History and Scotland, and a group representing War and Peace, one male in armour, one female bearing a palm. Yet another Franco-Scottish connection (once more relating to the Pantheon) can be detected in the Portrait Gallery murals, executed by antiquarian painter William Hole. On receiving his commission in 1897, he visited Italy and France, and ‘almost certainly’ studied the murals by Puvis de Chavannes in the Pantheon; the Pantheon murals based on Ste Geneviève’s life, were intended to make a statement about national renewal, and thus ‘set an important precedent’. In terms of technique too, Hole used a spirit fresco process very similar to that of Puvis, in his frieze celebrating ‘eminent Scots’ from history, presided over by Caledonia.51 The clientele of museums and art galleries also frequented the theatre and musical concerts. In this respect, Paris’s cultural industry was obviously on a completely different scale from Edinburgh’s. The French capital had thirty theatres in 1870 and forty-three by the 1900s, many of them still surviving (with half a million theatre 49 For the complex history of relations with the Museum of Antiquities etc see Helen Smailes, A Portrait Gallery for Scotland: the foundation, architecture and mural decoration of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery 1882-1906, HMSO and Trustees for the National Galleries of Scotland, 1985. 50 Ibid., p. 37. 51 Ibid., pp. 53-54 on the murals, and appendix, pp. 67-69 on the statues. Claire Willsdon, in her study Mural Painting in Britain 1840-1900; image and meaning, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 278, also remarks of Hole that he was ‘perhaps looking to the vision of an ideal past of Puvis de Chavannes’s Le Repos, or his Ste Geneviève Panthéon cycle in Paris’. Frances Fowle points out that although contemporaries compared Hole to Puvis, perhaps because of the muted tones of some of the murals, Hole’s medieval procession has little in common with the allegorical ‘withdrawn, disengaged figures’ of Puvis’s works, ‘The Franco-Scottish Alliance: artistic links between Scotland and France in the late 1880s and 1890s’, in Frances Fowle and Belinda Thomson, eds, Patrick Geddes; the French connection, Oxford, White Cockade, 2004.

Figure 2.4

Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, by R. Rowand Anderson, completed 1906. Author’s photograph.

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tickets sold every week during the belle époque).52 In Edinburgh, despite its more staid reputation, there were a dozen or more theatres during the belle époque, but the only two that survive from these years are the Lyceum (a ‘little jewel’ of 1883), and the King’s (1905-06). The Tivoli Theatre in St Stephen St, dating from 1901 seated 2000 – then became a cinema, and exists no more. The Empire Palace of Varieties of 1891 (now replaced by the Festival Theatre) was a ‘regrettable casualty’.53 Paris’s principal concert hall, the Salle Pleyel, did not alter the cityscape, being off-centre in the west, but it dates from the same period, having opened in 1880. In Edinburgh, the McEwan Hall (1888-97, mentioned above), belonging to the University but used for concerts, was a major landmark, ‘very French inside’, but the largest concert hall, was the Beaux-Arts Usher Hall (another result of the philanthropy of a brewing magnate, offered to the city in 1896). In 1908, the unbuilt Usher Hall was reported to be still the source of amusement to the citizens, since nobody could decide on the right site, but it was finally completed in 1914. Its Beaux-Arts design was seen by some as rather old-fashioned by then, but had in its time been described as ‘very French-looking’ and ‘modern’ with its giant Ionic proscenium.54 Almost exactly contemporary with it, but completely different and forward-looking, was Paris’s modernist Théâtre des Champs Elysées, originally intended as a concert hall – and planned to be the opposite of the ornate Garnier Opéra dating from the Second Empire. The new austere building was made of metal and reinforced concrete, to simple designs by Bourdelle and Denis; this was, fittingly, where the modernist ballets russes were performed in 1913 when the theatre had just been opened.55 When one turns from cultural palaces to commercial buildings, a generalization that can be made is that Edinburgh built more banks and insurance companies for its size, housed in ‘palazzi’, while Paris put up more large department stores. Paris had been slow to create a modern banking centre, with its major expansion under the Second Empire, while as the History of Scottish Architecture puts it of Edinburgh and Glasgow, ‘the capitalistic confidence of the age was most proudly expressed in the ornate banks and commercial buildings of city centres’.56 This was one area where Edinburgh’s financial functions put it ahead of Paris: there was a ‘stampede’ of head offices into the New Town during the mid-nineteenth century, while insurance companies competed for corner sites in the last quarter of the century: the Prudential (1892) and Scottish Equitable (1899) both put up pink sandstone buildings in St Andrew Square; while Standard Life played safer (1897). The present Commercial Union building with its copper dome, on the corner of George Street was built in 1908.57 52

Jones, Paris, p. 429. See Smith, The Making of Scotland, p. 324; and Pevsner, Edinburgh, p. 72. 54 On the Usher Hall, see Anthony Keith, Edinburgh of Today, Edinburgh and Glasgow, William Hodge & Co, 1908, p. 152, and Pevsner, Edinburgh, pp. 261-262. 55 On the Théâtre des Champs Elysées, see Paris le long des rues, le 8e arrondissement, pp. 31-32. 56 Glendinning et al., History of Scottish Architecture, p. 312. 57 Pevsner, Edinburgh, pp. 68-69 and 301; the figure on top of the dome is Prudence. 53

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On the other hand, France had virtually invented what has been called ‘the cathedral of modern commerce, solid yet light, aimed at a female clientele’, the department store or grand magasin. As Lewis Mumford put it: ‘If the vitality of an institution can be measured by its architecture, one can say that the department store was one of the most vital institutions of the epoch from 1880 to 1914.’58 The magasin de nouveautés, where one could buy all kinds of haberdashery, was developed under the Bourbon Restoration, the first real ‘grand magasin’ being La Belle Jardinière in 1824, followed by Aux Trois Quartiers (1829) and others – already being commented on by Balzac. They developed greatly, mostly on the Right Bank, as the population of Paris boomed during the Second Empire: Au Bon Marché, the only large one on the Left Bank, was founded in 1852, Au Louvre in 1855, both destined to expand further. They were followed by the Bazar de l’Hotel de Ville (BHV) 1857, and Au Printemps (1865), by La Belle Jardinière’s expanded version (1867) and La Samaritaine in 1870. Most of these shops still exist today, partly because they moved into even larger buildings during the middle years of the Third Republic. One that did not survive was the shop La Paix, opened in 1869 and used as the model for Zola’s novel Au Bonheur des Dames (1883). The grand magasin entered its ‘golden age’ in the 1890s. The Galeries Lafayette opened in 1895 along the road from the existing Au Printemps, which was itself redeveloped and enlarged in 1905. The grand magasin provided under one roof all kinds of household and personal fabrics and utensils; it was usually built round a central hall, with a cupola to make the most of natural light (since electric lighting did not develop at the same rate), and galleries at every level. Metal-framed, the new department stores often had a ‘sumptuous masonry exterior’.59 Outside Paris, shops on this model had been rather slow to develop in Europe, mostly not appearing until the 1890s. Harrods in London dates only from 18971905, and Selfridges from 1908. Surprisingly, perhaps, Edinburgh was one of the first European cities to possess them.60 On Princes Street, Charles Jenner’s new store (1893-95) purpose-built (after a fire had destroyed the previous one housed across several old buildings) was a ‘wondrous Renaissance compilation in pink stone’, at the time one of the biggest in Britain. Jenners was designed by W. H. Beattie, architect of the North British Hotel. Soon afterwards, Forsyth’s on Princes Street 58

‘La formation des grands magasins’, Paris-project, 8, p. 93, quoted Evenson, Paris,

p. 142. 59 Ibid., p. 141, and see Fierro, Histoire de Paris, p. 916; Zola’s novel has been described as ‘of documentary interest as a story of modern commercialism and commodity fetishism’, though Zola himself called it ‘le poème de l’activité moderne’, P. France, ed., The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French, article ‘Au Bonheur des Dames’, Oxford, Oxford University Press, p. 51. 60 See Bernard Marrey, Les grands magasins, Paris, Picard, 1979, p. 257, for a list of foundation dates of department stores. Both Edinburgh and Glasgow were ahead of most other European cities outside France; the development was most marked in the USA. See Keith, Edinburgh of Today, p. 60 ff., who reports that there were several ‘dry goods’ stores’ on Princes Street in 1908: Maule’s, Jenner’s, Cranston & Elliott’s, Forsyth’s and Renton’s.

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(1906 and with a crowning openwork sphere, reminiscent of Carpeaux’s globe in the Jardins de l’Observatoire in Paris) and the Cooperative Wholesale Store (1903-07) were easily recognizable as built on the same pattern (see Figure 2.5). Their French air is perhaps no accident, as their architect was John James Burnet (see note 23 above). Burnet also designed ‘the Edwardian giant’ building at 78-80 George Street for the Professional & Civil Service Supply Association, ‘a sort of Harrods with club facilities’, 1903-07.61 If grands magasins were cathedrals of commerce, the bourgeoisie of both cities was also attentive to spiritual buildings. Both city centres had their ancient churches, but the context of religious observance in the belle époque was very different. Throughout the nineteenth century, in Edinburgh, ‘doctrinal rivalry was matched by architectural rivalry’ in the Protestant churches after the Disruption. The city saw a huge expansion of church building in various styles. In late Victorian times, ‘every new suburban congregation … wanted a distinctive church, [though] few got a distinguished one’.62 Spires appeared all over the city, and despite theological differences, the Presbyterian Church of Scotland adopted a broadly Anglican church layout. Several of the city’s churches of the period (both Anglican and Presbyterian) were designed in the French style by Hippolyte Blanc (1844-1917), an Anglican Frenchman, raised in Scotland by French parents. St Cuthbert’s in Princes Street (1895), a huge edifice built over an older foundation is the grandest, though his earlier churches of the 1870s in the southern suburbs Mayfield and Bruntsfield are thought more attractive. The nearest thing to controversy over architecture was that the marble frieze of Leonardo’s Last Supper in St Cuthbert’s was considered slightly ‘popish’.63 In France, by contrast, the belle époque was the time when the Republic launched its most effective opposition to the Catholic Church, closing monasteries and convents in the capital, and finally passing the law which separated Church and State (1905). The Catholic Church was in retreat from the increasingly anti-clerical republic throughout the last decades of the nineteenth century, and the relatively few churches that were built had the ‘most conformist design’.64 Virtually all French churches remained state property after 1905, and the state was unlikely to build any more, but the diocese of Paris did manage to fund some 24 new churches between 1906 and 1914, mostly in the suburbs. Perhaps the difference in approach between the two cities can be summed up in two atypical but very dominant churches, both of which were under construction throughout the period. In Edinburgh, the Episcopal (Anglican) Cathedral of St Mary’s, was endowed by the pious Walker sisters, heiresses to a fortune. A huge Gothic edifice, it was designed by G. Gilbert Scott, and work began in 1874, continuing throughout the years until 1917. It dominates the city’s skyline to the west with its three great spires, but has been surprisingly well accepted in Presbyterian 61 62 63 64

See Pevsner, Edinburgh, pp. 72, 304, 312. Ibid., pp. 39. and 42. Ibid., pp. 42 and 274-77. Poisson, Histoire de l’Architecture (NHP), p. 535.

Figure 2.5

The former Forsyth’s department store, Princes Street, Edinbugh, by J. J. Burnet. Note the globe on the roof, reminiscent of Carpeaux’s fountain in the Jardins de l’Observatoire, Paris. Author’s photograph.

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Edinburgh. In Paris, by contrast, the most striking church of the time was that of the controversial Sacré-Coeur, perched boldly on Montmartre’s butte: a Byzantine monument with startling white domes. The conservative French National Assembly had voted in 1873 to build a church in expiation of the Paris Commune uprising of 1871 (which had started in Montmartre). The church on the hill later became the focus of much anti-clerical feeling, especially from the Paris city council and was eventually built entirely out of private funds: it could not therefore be confiscated by the French state. Conceived in a spirit of diviseness, which it retained, the SacréCoeur is an instantly recognized if not always widely loved landmark. It was being built throughout the belle époque period, and was finally consecrated in 1919.66 Stone people: caryatids and heroes Where the difference between our two cities might appear to be even greater and most visible to the naked eye is in the number of decorative features and statues. Ornamentation on the buildings of Paris ran the gamut from classical to art nouveau. Already considerable, even when building regulations were stricter, the ornamental features of façades exploded into fantasy after 1900, in a profusion of ‘decorative garlands, mouldings, protrusions, tendrils, arcs, medallions’, commissioned by householders.67 Some people felt this was over the top: ‘Paris has become a chamber of horrors in stone’.68 Putting it another way, the 30 years before the First World War have been described as ‘the golden age of sculptors’. Paris thus had a whole ‘stone population’ of figurative and representational statues, ranging from monuments to real individuals, through allegorical figures, to the many nymphs, caryatids and atlases, usually unclad, who appear as decorative features on bridges, fountains and buildings.69 Edinburgh is far from having the same degree of ornamentation sprinkled across its façades, although as Richard Rodger has argued, a subtler view of the buildings sees much embellishment, once one looks for it. On tenements, ‘in heraldic fashion, the exterior walls prominently displayed stone shields chiselled with initials, crests, dates, decorative motifs and the occasional homily in splendid examples of the stonemason’s craft’. Many of these

65 Pevsner, Edinburgh, pp. 46, 363 ff. cf. Marie Anne de Bovet, L’Ecosse: souvenirs et impressions de voyages, Paris, Hachette, 1898, p. 17, who writes of Edinburgh’s ‘beautiful new churches, like the episcopal cathedral of St Mary’s’. 66 See Evenson, Paris, pp. 25-28; she quotes an observer who calls it a ‘strange monster’, though with affection. See also François Loyer, ‘Le Sacré-Coeur de Montmartre: un haut lieu contesté’, in Nora, Lieux de Mémoire, vol. 3, pp. 4253-4269. 67 Agulhon, Histoire de la France urbaine, vol. IV, p. 211. 68 Article in Mouvement socialiste, quoted by Christophe Prochasson, Paris 1900: essai d’histoire culturelle, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, p. 136. 69 François Loyer, Paris XIXe siècle ; l’Immeuble et la rue, Paris, Hazan 1987, p. 360; this book is indispensable on the buildings and street furniture of nineteenth-century Paris.

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date from older times, but new tenements in our period often adorned their exteriors with thistles and other flowers.70 In Paris, the caryatid, a figure seeming to support on its shoulders a roof or ledge, was ‘usually a woman, usually unclothed, for this age was devoted to celebrating women’s bodies, though not directly referring to sex. These caryatids were generally graceful, but often of imposing and even aggressive physique’.71 Male figures shouldering ledges were usually described as ‘Atlases’. Their numbers are almost impossible to estimate, depending on classification, but Kjellberg suggests the figure of 500 true caryatids, that is, with a full-length figure to the waist.72 In addition, there were also allegorical figures, again very largely female. Maurice Agulhon connects this to the humanist education received by most young Frenchmen in school, which naturally led them to identify an abstract idea with an allegorical woman.73 But this combined during the belle époque with both overt and covert eroticism, so that these figures are often halfclad, displaying suggestive curves, especially by the end of the century. Among allegories, the four cardinal virtues, Fortitude, Prudence, Temperance and Justice, however, usually appear gracefully draped, as on the Fontaine Saint-Michel, a Second Empire creation. Truth was always depicted naked, while the Republic was often depicted bare-breasted as in Delacroix’s painting Liberty guiding the people (1830). The major representation of the Republic erected in our period is Jules Dalou’s sculpture, the Triumph of the Republic (1899), in the Place de la Nation. But female allegories proliferated, particularly in science, arts and geography. The façade to the new Sorbonne, on the rue des Ecoles, completed between 1885 and 1901, had eight ‘antique’ statues, all female allegories : Chemistry, Natural History, Physics, Mathematics, History, Geography, Philosophy and Archeology. The Gare d’Orsay showed female figures representing the cities of Bordeaux, Nantes and Toulouse, while the Petit Palais had The City of Paris protecting the Arts; the Gare de Lyon had modern allegories – Mechanics, Navigation, Steam and Electricity – represented, however, as fairies, while the Pont de Passy (Bir-Hakeim) carried no fewer than eight monumental cast-iron groups as well as stone figures of Science and Labour, Electricity and Commerce.74 Once the Third Republic was firmly installed, by the 1880s, the mania for putting up statues to individuals, usually by private subscription via committees, took hold. It is hardly surprising that there seems to be no agreement on how many there were 70 Rodger, Transformation, pp. 461 ff. Rodger is particularly concerned, however, with the way these adornments are not merely decorative, but can be coded to symbolize power and social control within property relationships. 71 Poisson, Histoire de l’Architecture (NHP), p. 557. 72 Pierre Kjellberg, Le Nouveau Guide des Statues de Paris, Paris, Bibliothèque des Beaux-Arts, 1988, p. 9. 73 Agulhon, Histoire de la France urbaine, vol. IV, pp. 428-429. 74 Kjellberg, Le Nouveau Guide des statues, identifies all these. The Place de la Concorde famously contains eight female statues representing French cities, dating from earlier in the century. During the period covered by this book, the statue of Strasbourg was draped in black to indicate the loss of Alsace and Lorraine.

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in all. In his book La Statuomanie (1912) Gustave Pessard wrote: ‘not to speak of the 333-plus statues of mythological and other figures, if we add the 328 ‘Parisians and Parisiennes worthy of note’ who decorate the Hôtel de Ville, and the 180 monuments to individuals, and the 72 statues still under consideration, we shall soon be facing some NINE HUNDRED statues’.75 During the reconstruction of the Hôtel de Ville, work which lasted from 1873 to 1892, a total of 230 sculptors were called on to do the decoration, the largest ornamental ensemble of the Third Republic. The 300plus statues round the façade represented famous Parisians ‘to affirm the prestige of the city’. Even Rodin contributed a statue, of the eighteenth-century philosophe D’Alembert,76 while work never ran out for academic sculptors like Denys Puech, or Ottilie McLaren’s first tutor, Jean-Antoine Injalbert (four caryatids on the Gobelins tapestry manufacture, for example). Jacques Lanfranchi calculated that 150 statues were erected in Paris between 1870 and 1914, compared to only twenty-six between 1815 and 1870.77 Not all of these still stand. For example, the huge monument to politician Léon Gambetta right in the middle of the Louvre, on the Place du Carrousel, was put up in 1884, but stripped of its bronze in 1942, like many metal monuments during the Second World War, and finally demolished in 1954. By the end of the nineteenth century, there were apparently sixty-seven monuments to men of letters, sixty-five to ‘men of progress’, fifty-six to politicians and forty-five to artists (see Figure 2.6).78 The singling out of artists seems to have been characteristic of the belle époque, with some parks turning into shrines to arts and letters. In the Parc Monceau, between 1897 and 1907, monuments were inaugurated to Maupassant, Musset, Chopin, and Gounod, while the Luxembourg Gardens contain fifty-seven sculptures from the belle époque, dotted about everywhere, in a very different style from its formal circle of statues of queens of France around the central pond. The standard monument was a great man, either as a bust or full length, in a formal jacket and trousers on a geometric plinth; sculptors often liked to add a graceful female figure or two, draped in light garments, offering him a palm. Rodin’s Balzac (1898) the first proto-modernist monument, caused a scandal and was not cast in bronze until much later, although for those who had seen it, it had already made most other statues look dated. Edinburgh might appear rather different at first sight, so it is interesting to find that Mme Edgar Quinet reported in the 1890s that ‘statuomanie’ was just as strong there: ‘on every square … stands the statue of some famous man, a political orator or soldier, poet or scholar’.79 One big difference, on which she particularly remarked, 75

Quoted in June Hargrove, ‘Les statues de Paris’, in Nora, Lieux de mémoire, vol. II, pp. 1855-1886, p.1864 (an indispensable article). 76 Poisson, Histoire de l’architecture a Paris (NHP), p. 523 ff. 77 Prochasson, Paris 1900, p.19, quoting J. Lanfranchi’s thesis on ‘Les Statues de Paris’, which is also quoted by Hargrove, ‘Les statues de Paris’. See also Agulhon, Histoire de la France urbaine, vol. IV, p. 429. 78 For an illustration of the Gambetta monument, see Hargrove, ‘Les statues de Paris’, p. 1865. 79 Quinet, De Paris à Edimbourg, p. 29.

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Figure 2.6

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Statue of Voltaire, Square Monge, Paris, c. 1900. Postcard, private collection.

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was the already existing number of royal monuments, which had naturally escaped French-type iconoclasm. Monarchs Charles II in Parliament Square, George II in the old Infirmary, and George IV on top of a column in George Street (1831) were later followed by Queen Victoria, while Prince Albert was given a large memorial in Charlotte Square (1876). Statesmen included Pitt, Dundas, and the equestrian Duke of Wellington by John Steell (1852). Head and shoulders above the rest was of course the monument to Sir Walter Scott on Princes Street, a Gothic shrine dating from the 1840s, housing a marble statue of Scott also by Steell. The statues in the niches on the monument representing characters from Scott’s novels were mostly added later – twenty-four in 1871 for the centenary, and another thirty-two in 1882. With the exception of Queen Victoria, who sits above the Royal Scottish Academy looking down at Princes Street (1844), draped in robes, ‘so as to give a general idea of Britannia’, 80 and, who also stands at the end of Leith Walk (1907), most of Edinburgh statues of individuals are, like those of Paris, of ‘great men’. None of those mentioned above was new in the later years of the century, but the period contributed a fresh crop. In Princes Street Gardens, there is a kind of stone pantheon: Thomas Chalmers, founder of the Free Church (1878); Thomas Guthrie, founder of Ragged Schools (1910); John Wilson, the literary figure ‘Christopher North’; James Simpson (1876), pioneer of anaesthesia; and the missionary David Livingstone (1870s). The Gladstone monument (completed 1916) now in Coates Crescent, formerly in a more central site, is by Pittendrigh MacGillivray, and shows the statesman ‘surrounded by naked boys’ – unusually so in Edinburgh, where unclad forms were not appreciated, at least in obvious sites (see Figure 2.7a and b).81 On this point, Douglas Bliss, the Head of the Glasgow School of Art in the 1950s made the sweeping statement that ‘being a Protestant city, Edinburgh has avoided Madonnas and saints, and it has given no opportunity to the sculptor to indulge in his favourite subject, the naked human figure’.82 An initial impression of Edinburgh could convince the traveller that this is true. Compared with the ubiquitous undraped female form apparent everywhere on Paris’s fountains, monuments and façades, Edinburgh seems to offer no such display. There are sculpted female allegories here and there, for example the roundels on the Board schools; but understandably, they are fully dressed and respectable evocations of Education, surrounded by her pupils. Nevertheless, belle époque sculptors in Edinburgh were not unaffected by the era’s taste for the unclad female body. If John Rhind’s statue of William Chambers (completed 1888-91) ‘gives Chambers Street a Parisian panache’, 83 in the street named for him, it is partly because on the side panels, bronze allegories of graceful

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Pevsner, Edinburgh, p. 289. On the Gladstone memorial, see Louise Boreham’s article ‘The Gladstone memorial’, in A. Guest and R. Mackenzie, eds, Dangerous Ground: Sculpture in the City, Glasgow, Scottish Sculpture Trust, 1999. 82 Douglas Percy Bliss, writing in The Scotsman, 1 August 1959, quoted in Third Statistical Account of Scotland, p. 880. 83 Pevsner, Edinburgh, p. 48. 81

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Figure 2.7a Gladstone Memorial, Coates Crescent, Edinburgh, by Pittendrigh McGillivray, completed 1916. Detail, draped female figure. Author’s photograph.

Figure 2.7b Gladstone Memorial. Detail, two naked boys and inscription. Author’s photograph.

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half-clad women emerge in bas relief. In particular, Bliss appears not to have looked above eye-level. Edinburgh does indeed boast its caryatids and nymphs, often boldly unclad, but the great majority are several storeys above the street. On Jenner’s new department store for example, built 1893-95, there are figures of draped women, in contemporary dress at an intermediate level, and unclad caryatids at the top of the building. They were included in the design at the express wish of the store’s founder Charles Jenner, who died while the new building was being designed. He left £8,000 towards its external decoration, and specified the female figure, because ‘women were the support of the business’ (see Figure 2.8).84 Similarly on the huge Scotsman newspaper building, built between 1899 and 1902 (now the Scotsman Hotel), various naked figures, both male and female, adorn the north-facing façade, overlooking North Bridge: atlases and allegories (of Peace, Night, Day and Mercury; see Figure 2.9). Comparable figures will be found at high levels on many of the public buildings referred to in the previous section, such as the Usher Hall. and not surprisingly perhaps, in buxom shape inside the Edwardian King’s Theatre. This discreet siting of its caryatids may reinforce Edinburgh’s image as a hypocritical and falsely respectable city, exemplified by figures such as the deceptive Deacon Brodie, the inspiration for Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, or by the popular description of Edinburgh folk as ‘fur coat and nae knickers’ – compared to Paris’s frank and public display of sexuality. One last example reinforces such ambiguity. In Princes Street Gardens, under the walls of Edinburgh Castle, stands the Ross Fountain: a ‘colossal Second Empire set piece, composed of voluptuous female figures’. It is indeed Parisian, having been commissioned from an unknown sculptor and cast by the firm Durenne of Paris for the International Exhibition of 1862. There it was purchased by an Edinburgh gunsmith, Daniel Ross, and ‘bestowed upon a grateful city’. The mid-Victorian Dean Ramsay however, in a close-packed series of adjectives, described it as ‘grossly indecent and disgusting; insulting and offensive to the moral feelings of the community and disgraceful to the City’.85 Yet there it has stood to the present day (see Figure 2.10). This was the age of fountains, but perhaps Dean Ramsay would not have approved of a counter-gift made a few years later by a second-generation Scot to the Parisians, and still standing today: the numerous little green drinking fountains, mostly adorned with graceful sculptures of naked graces, which are known by the donor’s mother’s maiden name, Wallace.86 84 See www.edinburgharchitecture.co.uk; see also Mary Grierson, A Hundred Years in Princes Street, Jenner’s of Edinburgh 1838-1938, Edinburgh, McLagan and Cumming, 1938. 85 Quoted Pevsner, Edinburgh, p. 317. See Agulhon, Histoire de la France urbaine, 4, p. 421 on fountains. 86 The story of the ‘fontaines Wallace’, to be found all over Paris, has a Scottish, though not an Edinburgh connection. They were a philanthropic gesture by Sir Richard Wallace, illegitimate son of the Marquis of Hertford, and long-term Paris resident, who donated these pure drinking-water fountains to the Parisians after the 1871 Commune. They were designed by French sculptor C.-A. Lebourg. Sir Richard’s mother (Mrs Agnes Jackson or Bickley, b. 1790) was originally a Wallace from Craigie in Ayrshire, and he took her maiden name – which

Figure 2.8

Jenners department store, Princes Street, Edinburgh, by W.H. Beattie, built in the 1890s, showing caryatids on top levels. Author’s photograph.

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Figure 2.9

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The Scotsman newspaper building, now the Scotsman Hotel, North Bridge, Edinburgh, completed 1902, showing atlas and caryatids. Author’s photograph.

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Figure 2.10 The Ross Fountain, Princes Street Gardens, Edinburgh, erected 1860s. Author’s photograph.

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Visiting the city in 1900: vanished perspectives As noted earlier, two of the most famous tourist landmarks in Paris – the Eiffel Tower and the Sacré Coeur – date from this period. Tourism was starting to be a major employer in both cities, so which monuments did belle époque tourists visit? Probably, with the above exceptions, only a few of the modern buildings going up in front of their eyes. Then, as now, in Paris they would visit Notre Dame and the Louvre and other ancient buildings; in Edinburgh, they visited the Castle and Holyrood Palace. But in both cities, some historic buildings, visible then, have disappeared: Paris’s extravagant Trocadéro Palace, built for the 1878 exhibition, was still there in 1900 but is no longer standing, having been replaced by the Chaillot complex built for the 1937 Exhibition. One of the most spectacular losses, in the 1970s, was the demolition of the Baltard metal pavilions for the Halles centrales (the central wholesale food market). In Edinburgh, what struck most visitors first of all, before they adjusted to the rhythm of the city, was the set of monuments on Calton Hill overlooking the City from the south-east. Edinburgh claimed to be the ‘Athens of the north’, and had started to build a Parthenon to prove it in the early nineteenth century. Not enough money was subscribed so it remained as a rather picturesque ruin, though known locally as ‘Edinburgh’s shame’. The collection of stone monuments was however regarded by French visitors as rather pretentious. They were also inclined to find the New Town ‘grand but boring’, and to head for the ‘romantic Old Town’ with its warren of closes, its ‘Heart of Midlothian’, and its medieval atmosphere. Much of historic Edinburgh is still there, but parts of the city with which visitors in 1900 would have been familiar have disappeared. A New Town square was demolished to create the St James shopping centre in the 1960s, and during the same decade the University demolished parts of George Square. Less controversial perhaps, but indicative of the loss of industry, a huge biscuit factory stood for many years on the corner of Causewayside for instance. Perhaps most striking of all, the mighty Nelson’s printing plant, the Parkside Works, built in the 1880s with a massive new extension in 1906, and employing hundreds of people, stood under Arthur’s Seat, on a site today occupied by an ultra-modern insurance building, a swimming pool and the University halls of residence (see Chapter 7 below). Conclusion The aim of this chapter was to draw attention to a certain number of parallels between two cities which might, if we attended only to literary accounts, seem like polar opposites. The belle époque saw cities all over Europe change their outlines, was, after a long story, attached to his father’s collection of painting, the Wallace Collection, bequeathed to a grateful nation in 1897 by his widow. See Alan Sykes, The Wallace Fountains of Paris, Kendal, Stramongate Press, n.d. and John Ingamells, ‘Wallace, Sir Richard’, in ODNB.

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as the comparative economic prosperity of the 1890s encouraged building plans. So it is not surprising to find that so many physical structures of Edinburgh and Paris date from this time. In the way that they were designed and welcomed, differences between the two societies appear quite clearly: there were more churches and insurance companies in the Athens of the North, more theatres and nymphs in the City of Light. Yet at the same time, there are more similarities than one might have expected. It was becoming easier to move around the city space, and to travel for pleasure rather than business; public institutions were acquiring a higher profile, while a much larger proportion of the population was receiving the kind of education that opened eyes to the wider world. There was a greatly increased readiness on the part of the middling classes in both cities, to spend their time on cultural pursuits, in the broad sense, visiting theatres, concerts, libraries, art galleries and museums. In the past, for example, professions such as painting and sculpture had often been confined to the families of painters, or to enthusiastic amateurs. Now the sons and daughters of bank clerks and lawyers could dream of professional artistic careers not thought of by their parents’ generation, and this is the subject of the next chapter.

CHAPTER THREE

Taking the Boat-train to Montparnasse: Edinburgh Artists in Paris ‘Prancing off to Paris to study art’ ‘In the first years of the twentieth century, to say that a lass perhaps not out of her teens had gone prancing off to Paris to study art was to say that she had gone irretrievably to hell’.1 The writer, a Scottish clergyman’s daughter, orphaned and brought up in an austere bachelor household in Edinburgh, had herself gone to Paris at the age of twenty-three in 1901. It was a big jump from a household where ‘the blinds were kept down of a Sunday until dinnertime … [and ] no book save a Bible might be read on the holy-day’.2 This chapter puts into context the particular experiences of four Scottish artists: two female sculptors and two male painters, who made the journey from Edinburgh to Paris in the 1890s and 1900s. There was no shortage of artists from the other Scottish cities, especially Glasgow, but also from the rest of Britain, who travelled to Paris in these years, but there were some particular motives operating in Edinburgh, as will become clear from what follows. Although foreign students came to Paris for other studies too (especially medicine, see Chapter 8 below), by far the largest number were students of fine art, for whom the French capital was routinely described as a Mecca. Its supremacy had emerged gradually during the century. One of the earliest attractions was the Louvre, with its collections of artworks, many of them the fruits of Napoleonic conquests. But Paris could also offer a uniquely dense concentration of artists, teachers and studios, and the long-established annual exhibitions, known as ‘Salons’, offered a pathway to recognition, as did the various ‘alternative’ Salons of the later years of the century. French provincial students gravitated to Paris too. French influence was also at its height abroad, including Scotland, whether in painting (various movements from realism to post-Impressionism) or sculpture. As Patrick Elliott has put it, in an article on the latter:

1

Kathleen Kennet, Self-portrait of an Artist, London, John Murray, 1949, pp. 23-24. Ibid., p.17; her great-uncle was the historiographer-royal, William Skene (18091892) but the household in Inverleith Row was not as austere as all that: he had 54 nephews and nieces, including the 11-strong Bruce family, who were boarded with him for several years; moreover he was an Episcopalian, albeit a strict one, rather than a Presbyterian. See Louisa Young, A Great Task of Happiness: the Life of Kathleen Scott, London & Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1995, p. 7 ff. 2

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PARIS-EDINBURGH The currents of influence travelled almost exclusively in one direction – from France to Britain – and the Scots cannot claim to have been exceptions from this rule. Scottish collectors bought French sculptures, Scottish sculptors studied in France, and French sculpture was widely exhibited in Scotland.3

Although sculpture was in the ascendant in the period, there were far more painters, both famous and would-be. The artist’s studio was still a semi-public space, more open both to pupils and to casual visitors than it would later become: the Paris guidebook, Paris-Parisien (1898) included a list of the ‘famous artists’ studios’ which tourists could visit at fixed times: they could walk round observing works of art in progress and chat, rather as if they were Salons.4 Foreign students in Paris were often not formally enrolled anywhere, or not for long, but moved quite informally from various schools and ‘academies’ to others, or took instruction directly from well-known artists in their studios, paying fees as charged. Many British artists went to Paris as a matter of course, to visit the Louvre and other galleries, to pick up tuition, and probably to taste a Bohemian way of life. The teaching was mostly in the hands of painters now regarded as academic – the avant-garde, whether Impressionist or post-Impressionist, caused cultural sensations but hardly ever gave tuition. But it has been argued that ‘French academic teaching was the best and most thorough in Europe at the time’, and ‘to be taught by an academic was not a stultifying experience’ in the hands of the current French masters.5 Until 1883, it was possible for men to be admitted to painting school in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts without an entrance exam, although women were not admitted at all until 1897.6 British artists also welcomed the chance to show their pictures, if selected, at the annual Salons, held from 1857 until 1900 in the Palais de l’Industrie, thereafter in the Grand Palais. If not at Beaux-Arts, students could enrol by the week or month, either at ‘academies’ such as Julian’s on the Right Bank or Colarossi’s on the Left Bank, or study directly with such well-known painters as Bouguereau, 3

Patrick Elliott, ‘French and Scottish Sculpture 1890-1940’, Scottish Society for Art History Journal, vol. 1, 1996, p. 54-62, p. 54; see also Fiona Pearson, ed., Virtue and Vision: Sculpture in Scotland, 1540-1940, Edinburgh, National Galleries of Scotland, 1991. 4 Paris-Parisien, Paris, Ollendorff, 1898, pp. 290-297, also quoted in Christophe Prochasson, Paris 1900: Essai d’histoire culturelle, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1999, pp. 71-75. Virginia Woolf and her sister visited Rodin’s studio in 1904, when his fame had become international, Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf, London, Chatto,1996, p. 199. 5 D. and F. Irwin, Scottish Painters at Home and Abroad, London, Faber & Faber, 1975, p. 375; J. D. Fergusson disagreed. The expression ‘Mecca’ is used by many writers, cf. Christophe Charle, Paris fin de siècle: culture et politique, Paris, Seuil, 1998, p. 42. 6 Architecture, however, had an entrance exam and eliminatory stages; in Edinburgh architecture was not professionally taught until the 1890s, by which time the School of Applied Art, founded by Robert Rowand Anderson, had opened (see Chapter 2 above). On the battle to achieve women’s entrance to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, see Tamar Garb, Sisters of the Brush: women’s artistic culture in nineteenth-century Paris, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1994. For a comparison between French and English women artists see Charlotte Yeldham, Women Artists in Nineteenth-Century France and England, 2 vols, New York, Garland, 1984.

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Gérôme, Carolus-Duran, Laurens, and so on. In virtually all the cases of Scottish artists traced to Paris, they lived not in Montmartre, where several of the more avantgarde painters were recently established, but in Montparnasse, which was a sort of student quarter, cheap and quiet. The area ‘between the Boulevard Montparnasse and the Boulevard St Michel’ was where American and British students of fine arts concentrated.7 Scottish artists had long been in the practice of studying abroad, not only in France, but in Holland, Italy and Germany. In particular, nearer our period, the group of painters who came to be known as the ‘Glasgow Boys’, (who only rarely painted pictures of Glasgow) spent extended periods of time in France, and their example influenced others. Born in the 1850s and 1860s, several of them, including John Lavery, Alexander Roche, William Kennedy and Thomas Millie Dow, had studied in Paris in the early 1880s, and worked in the nearby countryside; James Guthrie went there in the later 1880s. They had been much influenced by the mid-century French school: Corot, Courbet, and especially Jules Bastien-Lepage (1858-84), and their French-influenced paintings are often genre scenes from the countryside, or landscapes. Arthur Melville (1844-1904) although mostly raised on the East Coast, was closely associated with the Glasgow group by 1889: he had spent time in Paris and Grez-sur-Loing in the 1870s and 1880s, and was particularly influential on J. D. Fergusson (see below).8 The Glasgow Boys were perhaps the British group most in touch with French trends in the 1880s. It is sometimes argued that later generations in Glasgow had less need to go to Paris when opportunities expanded at home, with the flowering of the Glasgow School of Art. But in Edinburgh, there is general agreement that the kind of art education provided during the last decades of the nineteenth century, before the Edinburgh College of Art opened in 1906, had become conservative and uninspiring. The capital was the home of the artistic establishment, with its focal point the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) founded in the 1820s. By the later decades of the century, its east-coast exhibition bias was under challenge from the West of Scotland, where the Royal Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts, founded in the 1860s, had a more ‘enlightened

7

P. Joanne, Dictionnaire géographique et administrative de la France, volume on Paris, section on foreigners in Paris, Paris, Hachette, 1898, pp. 3177 and 3372 ff.; cf. P. Gérard, Paris et les artistes 1840-1940, Paris, Editions du Chêne, 1998, p. 79 ff.: Montparnasse was particularly the haunt of foreigners and sculptors – Dalou, Bourdelle and later Zadkine, Richier, Brancusi, Giacometti all had studios there; cf. John Milner, The Studios of Paris: the world of art in the late nineteenth century, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1991. On Julian’s and Colarossi’s, see also note 26 below. On Montparnasse in general see a quirkily nostalgic book by Eric Hazan, L’Invention de Paris, Paris, Seuil, 2002, pp. 226-227. 8 Philip Long with Elizabeth Cumming, The Scottish Colourists, 1900-1930, National Galleries of Scotland, 2001, p. 17; on the Glasgow boys see Roger Billcliffe, ‘The Glasgow Boys’ in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004 (hereafter ODNB), and Roger Billcliffe, The Glasgow Boys: the Glasgow School of Painting, 1875-1895, London, John Murray, 1985.

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and imaginative’ approach. Art education in Edinburgh was available from two sources: the Trustees’ Academy, connected to the Board of Manufactures, which concentrated more on design, and the RSA’s own school, set up to provide more fine art tuition. The Academy life class – or ‘School of the living model’– opened in 1840 and grew rapidly. It was of course open only to male students, who in any case first had to spend 2 years studying from plaster casts. And in the atmosphere of Victorian Edinburgh, concern could be expressed about displaying the students’ work (‘a large array of undraped nudities’) which ‘might result in its being seen by lay visitors’ in 1872.10 Although it had periods of greater or lesser success, the teaching was erratic, and not available for many hours a week: ‘Edinburgh School of Art was a poorly organized collection of classes under the general supervision of the RSA’.11 Both J. D. Fergusson and S. J. Peploe, whose experience is described below, gave up pretty quickly on the Edinburgh classes in the 1890s. For women art students, Edinburgh was if anything even less inspiring. In Glasgow, the School of Art, open to women since the 1850s, had seen a large increase in their numbers and success from the late 1880s: the percentage of women students rose from 28 per cent in 1881, to 35 per cent in 1891, and 42 per cent in 1901. The change was largely due to the encouragement of the inspirational headmaster of the School, Francis (Fra) Newbery (1853-1946) who arrived there in 1885, and stayed until 1918. He appointed female staff and encouraged design and crafts as much as easel painting and sculpture. Additionally, the Glasgow Society of Lady Artists (SLA), had been in existence since 1884, organizing its own exhibitions, and working closely with the GSA to support its students after they left the school. Retrospectively, the generation of women artists from this period has been called ‘the Glasgow Girls’ and their work seen as collectively coherent, has been accorded renewed attention.12 In Edinburgh, by contrast, ‘education for women artists … [was] intertwined with the conservative bastion, the Royal Scottish Academy’.13 Women were admitted to study at the Board of Trustees school, but this took them only so far and until 1890 certainly had no life drawing classes – seen at the time as the bedrock of a professional art education – and they were not admitted to the RSA classes. The Scotsman in October 1889 commented that the RSA had not yet seen fit to offer ‘tuition in art to lady students’, so that when female students had completed their work at the Board of Manufactures School, they had to continue their art education in a somewhat desultory way or set up their own life drawing classes. Consequently, 9

Long with Cumming, The Scottish Colourists, p. 14. Joanna Soden. ‘The role of the RSA in art education during the 19th century’, Journal of the Scottish Society for Art History, vol. 4, 1999, p. 37. See also E. Gordon, The RSA 18261976, Edinburgh, Skilton, 1976. 11 Roger Billcliffe, The Scottish Colourists, Cadell, Fergusson, Hunt and Peploe, London, Murray, 1989, p. 15. 12 For a full account, see Jude Burkhauser, ed., Glasgow Girls: women in art and design 1880-1920, Edinburgh, Canongate, 1990. 13 Janice Helland, Professional Women Painters in Nineteenth-Century Scotland: commitment, friendship, pleasure, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2000, p. 33. 10

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the Edinburgh Ladies Art Club was ‘from the start an oppositional group’, since there was a distinct lack of support, by contrast with the Glasgow SLA.14 Perhaps for this reason, whereas most of the ‘Glasgow girls’ retained Glasgow as a base, while sometimes spending time in Paris, their Edinburgh counterparts in the 1890s were more likely to opt instead for moving to London, or longer-term attendance at classes in Parisian studios. Several of them were later to take part in the founding of the Paris Club for International Women Artists, based in London: all members had to have studied in Paris. In this respect – since the admission of women to formal courses hinged in practice on the life class – the Edinburgh establishment was similar to Paris, where women were not admissible to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts until 1897, and where the life class was similarly set up as a stumbling block to their entry.15 But in Paris, there were plenty of alternatives. The experience of Mary Margaret Cameron (1865-1921) is fairly representative of an Edinburgh woman painter. Born in Portobello, she was the daughter of a stationer (who patented the Waverley fountain pen.) Helped by the family’s stable finances, she began her studies at the Board of Manufactures School, aged 16. She probably had to join an informal life class organized outside the RSA and no doubt took part in the founding of the Edinburgh Ladies Art Club in 1889, since she exhibited among other paintings one of ‘French soldiers reclining on a bank’, at the club’s first exhibition and showed further paintings on subjects drawn from the Franco-Prussian war the following year. Between her early years in Edinburgh and her emergence as an exhibitor, she had been to Paris, where she studied with Gustave Courtois and André Rixen in their studios. She went on, in the 1900s, to become a much-remarked painter of Spanish bullfights.16 By that time, Edinburgh had its own College of Art, opened in 1906, and thereafter providing a more congenial milieu for students of both sexes than the RSA school. In 1908-09, ‘a few students who had left Edinburgh in order to study in Paris returned and attended the college’; in 1909-10, ‘at least three students came to the college direct from Paris’.17 After their studies, deserving students became eligible for travel scholarships abroad, many of them choosing Paris. The College archives contain records of some of their trips to European destinations up to 1914. Their experience seems (as one would expect) to be mixed. Nora Paterson began her 1912 trip at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, then in November went to Paris, where she did drawings of tapestries at the Musée de Cluny and the Louvre. Architecture student Andrew Bennett spent two months in Paris, where he found that ‘facilities for making measured drawings were not easily obtained and he confined

14

Ibid., p. 49. See Garb, Sisters of the Brush, Chapter 4. 16 Helland, Professional Women Painters, p. 152; The Scotsman, 28 October 1889 and The Glasgow Herald, 22 June 1910, quoted ibid., p.197, note 13. 17 Edinburgh College of Art (ECA), Archives, Annual Reports (AR), 1908-09, p. 9; 1909-10, p.18. on the College, see Soden, ‘The role of the RSA’; of the ECA staff, both Robert Burns and Mabel Royds had spent some years in Paris (c. 1898-1906). 15

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himself to making perspective sketches with sketched detail of the interior, wood, and so on, at Versailles, Cluny, the Trocadéro’.18 Other individuals who went to Paris from the register of students pre-1914 included Wilma Weir, aged 23 in 1908; Adam Thomson, aged 23 in 1908; Bessie Molyneaux, aged 21 in 1904, George Paulin, aged 20 in 1908; John Turnbull, aged 21 in 1908. Cécile Walton (1891-1956), later a star of the ‘Edinburgh school’, was sent to Paris in the 1900s too. She found the teaching at La Grande Chaumière dull, and preferred La Palette, with Jacques-Emile Blanche, where she must have encountered J. D. Fergusson.19 What was the Parisian experience like? One Edinburgh student who went on a Carnegie travel award in 1908 described his days as follows: During the morning, I study at Julian’s 8 to 12 o’clock, under Monsr Jean-P. Laurens and two or three afternoons a week, I go into ‘La Palette’, another studio with visiting masters Mr J. E. Blanche & Devilliers; the rest of the time I spend in visiting the galleries and museums and the Louvre of course is getting most attention.20

Kathleen Bruce and Ottilie McLaren Kathleen Bruce, the determined author of the opening quotation, who had gone ‘prancing off to Paris’, had originally enrolled at the Slade School in London in 1900. A year later, no doubt because she found no adequate sculpture training there, she left for Paris, where she lived an independent and bohemian life. Nevertheless, in retrospect, she described her first day at Colarossi’s as follows: In the school where we worked, new figure models were chosen every Monday morning. On the first day, I saw Hermione standing at the back of the room and went to join her … at the end of the studio passed one by one a string of nude male models. Each jumped up for a moment on to the model throne, took a pose and jumped down. The model for the day was being chosen. Before reason could control instinct, I turned and fled, shut myself in the lavatory and was sick.21

This reminds us that the nude life class was after all an unprecedented experience for a middle-class young woman, who was unlikely to have seen unclothed adults

18

ECA archives, AR, 1912-13, p. 16; 1912-13, pp. 17-18. ECA archives; student records; several of these students made a career in art; see entries on them in Peter M. J. M. McEwan, Dictionary of Scottish Art and Architecture, Woodbridge, Antique Collectors’ Club, 1994; on Cécile Walton, who became a prominent member of the Edinburgh Group in the early 1920s, see J. Kemplay, The Two Companions: the story of two Edinburgh artists, Eric Robertson and Cécile Walton, Edinburgh, R. Crowhurst,1983. 20 RSA archives: Correspondence with Carnegie Award holders, consulted with permission: letter from D. Allison, 9 Jan. 1908; both the Académie Julian and La Palette were popular with these students, and J. P. Laurens was also singled out for praise as a very serious teacher, (letter from P. Munnioch, 10 February 1908). 21 Kennet, Self-Portrait of an Artist, p. 26. 19

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except in pictures (though she had been traumatically attacked in the street by a drunk in Edinburgh). The fellow-student ‘Hermione’ was the Irish-born designer Eileen Gray (18781976) who had just moved to Paris, and lived at 21 rue Bonaparte on the Left Bank, her base for the rest of her life. Kathleen Bruce was her flatmate for some time: sharing flats was one way for young women to escape the stricter pension (boarding house). Living was frugal – the budget for the day’s food totals one franc according to Kathleen Bruce’s diary.22 Her account of that first day may be coloured by the desire to tell a good story; she was in fact made of tough stuff, surviving this baptism of fire and staying on in Paris, with some absences until 1906. She won a contest to become ‘massière’ ( a kind of head of the students) at Colarossi’s, which meant that she was excused fees in exchange for helping to organize sessions. As well as the collective classes, she also had some tuition from Rodin, whose influence is detectable in her early pieces. It is not clear quite how much consecutive teaching she actually received from him, but the following description certainly fits what is known of visits to Rodin’s studio from other sources: I had got to know Rodin before that grand old sculptor’s executive power had begun to wane … In those earlier days, I would often walk with him round his studio and he would open small drawers such as one is used to find birds eggs’ in and show dozens and dozens of exquisitely modelled hands and feet.23

Kathleen Bruce became friendly with Isadora Duncan, who danced for Rodin on his birthday, out at his villa in Meudon in 1903; and she figures on a photograph taken there that day. She may have slightly exaggerated the degree of contact with Rodin in retrospect, since her five letters preserved in the Musée Rodin do not suggest prolonged acquaintance, but Rodin very likely visited her studio at least once to advise her. It is hardly surprising that Rodin was not quite sure who she was on a couple of occasions, (‘you didn’t recognise me’) since Katheen Bruce impulsively interrupted her studies in 1903 to go and nurse typhoid victims, refugees from Macedonia at Monastir, as assistant to Lady Thompson, returning to Paris only in 1905. This Edinburgh-raised ‘lass’ was extremely serious about her work, however, and technically accomplished. She went on to have a spectacular life and a successful career, mostly in London, under several names (Scott, Young and Kennet); she married first the explorer Captain Scott, and after his death in the 22

Young, A Great Task, p. 27; on living conditions, see also Alison Thomas, Portraits of Women: Gwen John and her forgotten contemporaries, Cambridge, Polity, 1994. One aspect mentioned by all accounts is that women students were regularly charged more than men, possibly because it was assumed they were foreign and well-off. Cf. Robert Louis Stevenson, who remarked as early as the 1870s, that ‘a painter will not accept female students without mulcting in a smart fee’, ‘A Studio of Ladies’, in The Lantern Bearers and other essays, ed. J. Treglown, London, Chatto & Windus, 1988 [1877], p. 55. 23 Kennet, Self-Portrait of an Artist, p. 42. This is borne out by frequent descriptions in the letters of Ottilie McLaren, see below and note 25.

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Antarctic in 1912, continued to work as a sculptor. Well-connected, she received many portrait commissions of well-known figures, also producing many studies of young men in a rather academic style; her rejection of modernism meant that she has been somewhat marginalized in art history. She married as her second husband Edward Hilton Young, later Baron Kennet.24 There is an even more detailed record of the Parisian years of another Edinburgh sculptor. Ottilie Helen McLaren (1875-1947) was the youngest daughter of Lord (John) McLaren, an Edinburgh lawyer and Lord Advocate of Scotland in Gladstone’s 1881 government; her mother, Ottilie Schwabe, was from a Glasgow GermanJewish family, so her daughter regarded herself, like another Edinburgh artist Phoebe Traquair, as a ‘mixture of Celt and Jew’. She belonged to respectable upperclass Edinburgh, with a family house in Moray Place and a holiday home in the Highlands. It is possible she originally took up sculpture as therapy after a serious illness, but her enthusiasm led to her studying first with Pittendrigh MacGillivray (1856-1938), one of the leading Scottish sculptors of the day, responsible for many of the external statues on the Portrait Gallery and for the Gladstone memorial – and the only sculptor among the ‘Glasgow Boys’, although he spent most of his life in Edinburgh. Ottilie McLaren does not appear to have enrolled at the Board of Trustees School. In 1895-96, she cycled out to ‘Macdevilry’s’ studio in Murrayfield, for a year or two, but found him irascible and discouraging. She had to work hard to get her parents to allow her to go unaccompanied to Paris, as we know from her letters to her fiancé, the composer William Wallace (1860-1940) who was fighting his own battles to give up medicine and study composition.25 Ottilie McLaren’s experience is probably more typical than Kathleen Bruce’s. A source of concern for her family was where she should stay. She arrived there in the autumn of 1897, taking rooms in a respectable boarding-house (ladies only) on the Boulevard Montparnasse, and attending classes at the nearby Académie Colarossi in the rue de la Grande Chaumière, (reputedly freer than Julian’s). The Ecole des BeauxArts after a long struggle, had only just agreed to admit women students when she arrived – she did later attend some anatomy classes there. She was under pressure 24 The photograph showing Kathleen Bruce at Meudon is opposite p. 78 in Young, A Great Task, as is a photo of Colarossi’s studio, showing a life class with nude male model, and Kathleen among the students. Cf. letters from Kathleen Bruce in the Musée Rodin Archives: undated letter no. 3 from Monastir to Rodin, refers to the photo, saying that that she was ‘the one sitting on the ground’; undated letter no 4, remarks ‘you didn’t recognise me’; undated letter 1 from 22 rue Delambre invites Rodin to come as promised to her studio. For an estimate of her later career see Mark Stocker ‘Scott, Kathleen’, in ODNB. 25 The McLaren letters are part of the Wallace papers, National Library of Scotland, (hereafter NLS/Wallace), MSS 21502 ff. They are filed chronologically and subsequent quotations will be identified by date. The quotation ‘Celt and Jew’ is from a letter from Ottilie McLaren to William Wallace, dated 18 December 1901. On MacGillivray, see ODNB, entry on ‘James Pittendrigh MacGillivray’ by Robin Woodward; cf. Louise Boreham, ‘ “A guarantee and a slogan”: James Pittendrigh MacGillivray, no ordinary sculptor’, Folio no. 9 (NLS), Autumn 2004, pp. 10-12.

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from her parents to enrol at Julian’s, as being the more ‘proper’ academy, located in an expensive quartier on the right Bank. Julian had pioneered his academy in 1868 and soon found he needed to open a special women’s class: by 1873 this contained ‘eight or nine English girls’. By 1877 life models were allowed in the women’s class. There was no entrance examination and women could compete with men for the class prizes. It charged high fees – but in fact women were regularly charged twice the fee paid by men in all the independent Paris studios (100 francs compared to 50 for men) whether to discourage dilettantism, or because most women students were from well-off, mostly foreign backgrounds. By the 1890s, Colarossi’s Academy had opened in Montparnasse, in the artists’ quarter. The classes were cheaper – and mixed.26 Another Edinburgh sculptor, Morag Burn-Murdoch, recently returned, encouraged Ottilie to prefer it, saying it was more serious.27 A third possibility, but only for painting and drawing was the nearby Académie Carmen, which had just opened, and where the revered James McNeill Whistler was the master. Many English-speaking students, including Gwen John, attended this idiosyncratic, intense and short-lived school (1898-1901). Whistler became too unwell to teach after a year or two, and died in 1903.28 Ottilie McLaren enrolled, like Kathleen Bruce, at Colarossi’s and reported that ‘the famous mixed class is like a Sunday School’.29 Her first tutor, like Morag BurnMurdoch’s, was Jean-Antoine Injalbert (1845-1933), an academic sculptor and creator of a number of the capital’s statues. Her American friend Sarah Whitney at first went to the Académie Carmen. However, through luck and determined networking, both students managed to become pupils of Rodin. They first visited his studio in 1898, 26 See Catherine Fehrer, ‘New light on the Académie Julian’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, CIII, 1984, pp. 207-216. Paris-Parisien, 1898, p. 91, characterizes Julian’s as a ‘boîte à bachot’, or ‘crammer’, which aimed to get students into the Ecole des Beaux-Arts; it regarded Colarossi’s as more easy-going. In both places, academicians regularly came to give classes. 27 Morag Burn Murdoch wrote at some length about Colarossi’s, which was ‘a great deal cheaper than Julian’s’. ‘There are hundreds of painting classes but not so many at all for sculpture.’ ‘There is a new model every week, generally turn about, women posing nude, men not quite’. She recommended the sculpture tutor, [Jean-Antoine] Injalbert : ‘he comes every Friday (or nearly so). I like his work very much and think he is a more modern professor than [Denys] Puech’, all quotations from her letter reproduced in letter from O. McLaren, NLS/ Wallace, 22 August 1897. 28 The Académie Carmen was run by a former model of Whistler’s, Carmen Rossi. For its history see Nigel Thorp, ‘Whistler and his students in the Académie Carmen’, Journal of the Scottish Society for Art History, no. 4, 1999, pp. 42-27 and for the link between this and the even shorter-lived ‘Académie Rodin’, see S. Reynolds, ‘Art education in the Rodin circle and women’s relation to the avant-garde: the case of Ottilie McLaren’, in Claudine Mitchell, ed., Rodin: the Zola of Sculpture, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2004, pp. 201-216. Ottilie McLaren considered Whistler’s academy a possibility in the autumn of 1898 (at the time when Gwen John was also there), but did not apparently sign up for it; the sculpture tutor was the American, Frederick MacMonnies. See NLS/Wallace, McLaren’s letters of 9 October and 8 November 1898. 29 NLS/Wallace, McLaren’s letter of 27 April 1898.

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probably on an open day, and a year later, in May 1899, Ottilie contrived to make direct contact with him, in part through another Scotswoman, Miss Marie Preble, who appears to have been a trusted friend.30 Rodin initially suggested that Sarah and Ottilie apply instead to his pupil and former lover, Camille Claudel (1864-1943). It was then six years since their personal relationship had ended, though their working contacts had continued to some extent. At first Camille Claudel accepted her new pupils and all went well: ‘She herself is charming and has none of the airs and graces of the great artists’, but it was in fact an awkward moment for her (‘poor Miss Claudel is overworked’) and in the end, she left for the country, so ‘I, Ottilie McLaren, am going to write a note to Auguste Rodin, telling him that the hour suits us’31 (See Figure 3.1). The two students moved to a studio at 223 rue de l’Université, close to Rodin’s state-provided studio at no. 182 in the same street. For the next 2 years, Ottilie McLaren worked closely with the leading sculptor of France, reporting regularly on her progress: and introducing her father to him: Lord McLaren bought a bronze entitled Frère et soeur for £80, and thanked Rodin for his daughter’s tuition. Her letters give a detailed account of the ups and downs of her apprenticeship, and it is clear that not only did Rodin take much trouble with her, but that his tuition was intellectual and theoretical as well as practical. His words of praise, which were never overstated but clearly meant, are faithfully reported. In the spring of 1900, she and Sarah Whitney (whose approach to study seems to have been less serious) helped Rodin to organize his pavilion for the 1900 exhibition (see Chapter 6 below). Throughout this time, Ottilie McLaren’s experience was probably more constrained than a man’s would have been. She was obliged to keep returning at intervals to 30

Marie Preble seems to have been a go-between for Rodin and Camille Claudel, his protegée and former lover; see the Preble letters in Musée Rodin Archives; a letter of 2 March 1899 from Miss Preble indicates that Rodin has asked her to send pupils to Claudel, but that she fears (rightly) that the latter is busy preparing for the Salon. The sculpture in progress was no ordinary work, but the striking ‘L’Age mûr’. Marie Preble’s letter is sent from 6, passage Stanislas, which was also the address of the Whistler Academy; she died at the American Hospital in Paris, in 1915 ( letter to Rodin from ‘E. Schwabe, cousin of Ottilie Wallace’, 3 March 1915, Musée Rodin). Another intermediary was Emilia Cimino, one of Rodin’s former pupils: see letter dated 19 February 1899 in Musée Rodin, also indicating that the ‘deux jeunes filles’ have been directed to Camille Claudel. The two students appear to have been privileged to be among Camille Claudel’s few students, if only for a short while, and Ottilie McLaren regarded her as an inspiring, if infuriatingly unreliable teacher. On Claudel’s talent and tragic life, see Jacques Cassar, Le Dossier Camille Claudel, Paris, Maissonneuve et Larose, 1997 [1987]; Claudine Mitchell, ‘Intellectuality and sexuality: Camille Claudel, the fin-de-siècle sculptress’, Art History, 12, 4, December 1989, 419-447; see also Anne Pingeot, on the particular circumstances of the spring of 1899, ‘Le Chef d’oeuvre de Camille Claudel: l’Age mûr’, Revue du Louvre, vol. 4, no. 1, 1982, pp. 287-295. The Musée Rodin organized in 2005 a travelling exhibition on Claudel and Rodin; see the catalogue, Claudel and Rodin, fateful encounter, produced jointly with the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, 2005, by Antoinette Lenormand-Romain et al., which contains much archive material. 31 NLS/Wallace, McLaren letter of 28 May 1899.

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This figure has intentionally been removed for copyright reasons. To view this image, please refer to the printed version of this book

Figure 3.1

Ottilie McLaren, photograph sent to Auguste Rodin, c. 1900. Reproduced by permission of the Musée Rodin, Paris.

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Figure 3.2

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Signed photograph of Auguste Rodin given to Ottilie McLaren, c. 1900. Reproduced by kind permission of the owner. Private Collection.

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Edinburgh and to the Highlands during the summer break, where her family made constant demands on her. (Rodin never took a break in the summer.) She had to be careful too to observe les bienséances (propriety): she was well aware of Rodin’s reputation for sexual promiscuity, and once when he gave her an exuberant paternal kiss in a restaurant, during a discussion of their work, she dealt with it as follows: Suddenly he seized hold of my hands and said: ‘You really are my daughter’, and kissed me on both cheeks. I very quickly pushed him back and went on with what I was saying as if nothing had happened, but I don’t think he will ever try again … It was a very affectionate embrace on the one hand and a very innocent one in another way. [But] I felt very miserable about it.32

Ottilie McLaren was not at all prudish in a general way: her happiest time was perhaps in 1900-1901 when she contrived to rent an attic room of her own in the rue Duguay-Trouin in Montparnasse and, against all the rules, was visited there by her fiancé. Their relationship was clearly a sexual one, reading between the lines, and that is perhaps one reason why she was impervious to Rodin’s advances, if such they were; but her attitude also reflects an Edinburgh-ish sense of public propriety (see Figure 3.2). When the allowance Ottilie McLaren’s family was paying her came to an end, she prepared to return home. Rodin, who had his own teaching methods, very different from those of the Beaux-Arts, appears to have wanted her to become his disciple in Britain: As far as my work goes, he feels I can really stand alone now, but his one fear is that I shall get into an unsympathetic atmosphere where everyone will be against me … He said to Miss Preble, ‘You must explain to her … that she won’t have success for years … but that she must keep at it, and when she gets too discouraged she must come over and see me’.33

Ottilie did persist. She returned to Edinburgh, where she rented a studio in George Street, and exhibited at the RSA (enamels at first), but later moved to London, where she asked and was granted Rodin’s permission to set up a sculpture class for women using his methods34 (see Figure 3.3). Both Kathleen Bruce and Ottilie McLaren went to Paris as an escape of some kind from the constraints of family life and the lack of educational training available to them in Edinburgh (or in Bruce’s case in London too). In both cases, they found 32 On the purchase of Frère et soeur, see Musée Rodin Archives, four letters from Lord McLaren; for the incident in the restaurant see NLS/Wallace, McLaren letter of 6 February 1901. 33 NLS/Wallace, McLaren letter of 5 June 1901. Rodin also expressed doubt that, for a woman, marriage and sculpture could be combined. 34 On Ottilie McLaren’s subsequent career and the problems of influence in this context see Reynolds, ‘Art education in the Rodin circle’.

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This figure has intentionally been removed for copyright reasons. To view this image, please refer to the printed version of this book

Figure 3.3

Flier for Ottilie McLaren’s sculpture course in London, 1904. Reproduced by permission of the Musée Rodin, Paris. (Note that she spells her name Maclaren, but most records of the family use the spelling McLaren, which is used in this book.)

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themselves initially living in sheltered all-female households, but each in her own way carved out a more independent path: for Ottilie it provided the chance to work without the duties expected of her in the family, and to see and write to her non-approved fiancé; for Bruce it led to a bohemian, though apparently chaste life, carrying on friendships and expeditions with a range of male friends, including Aleister Crowley and more seriously the photographer Edward Steichen. Both women appear to have been strongly imbued with a sense of moral duty and a work ethic, taking their work very seriously. Both had subsequent careers which could reasonably be called competent and professional, in the case of Kathleen Bruce a very successful one in terms of commissions and visibility. But neither really appears to have taken the post-Rodin modernist turn, so that much their work seems to belong more to a lost moment in European sculpture. In this they can perhaps be seen as representative of the new ‘bulge’ of art students in fin-de-siècle Paris. Neither went back to Paris for more than brief visits after they had left. Both of them married in the 1900s: for some of their generation, this spelled the end of their artistic careers. In these two cases this did not happen, perhaps because they did not have large families: Ottilie had no children, and Kathleen, having been widowed in 1912, had only one child until her second marriage in the 1920s. John Duncan Fergusson and Samuel Peploe Rather different were the trajectories of the Edinburgh painters John Duncan Fergusson (1874-1961) and Samuel Peploe (1871-1935), two of the four painters usually described as ‘the ‘ Scottish colourists’ (the other two were Francis Cadell (1883-1937) and Leslie Hunter (1877-1931).35 J. D. Fergusson, born and raised in Edinburgh, was the son of a Perthshire farmer, who moved to the city and opened a spirit merchant’s shop. The family’s fortunes gradually improved, but they were never rich. John Fergusson later chose to identify emotionally with his Highland origins rather than with the Edinburgh shopkeeper milieu. He enrolled for art classes at the Trustees’ Academy in Edinburgh in the early 1890s, but found them dispiriting and left. He was much more influenced by the Glasgow School of painting, to which he remained committed lifelong, and particularly by Arthur Melville. Fergusson temporarily took refuge in Edinburgh’s

35

Cadell was also from Edinburgh and a refugeee from the RSA school. He enrolled at the Académie Julian in Paris 1899 and returned to Edinburgh in 1903; the city’s middle-class society was the background for most of his mature work; Hunter was the only one without any connection with Edinburgh, though he did spend time in Paris both before and after the First World War. Unlike the Glasgow Boys, the Colourists were never really a group, although they exhibited together in the 1920s. See Billcliffe, The Scottish Colourists and his article on them in the ODNB; see also T. J. Honeyman, Three Scottish Colourists, Peploe, Cadell and Hunter, Edinburgh, Paul Harris, 1977 [1950]; Long with Cumming, The Scottish Colourists.

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Music Hall, where he sketched all the artists of the time.36 His first trip to Paris was probably made in the mid-1890s, since he later recalled that he went there every May, for several years running, with his father’s financial help. He had little contact with either the schools or the studios, finding both equally academic, though with the advantage of having an accessible life class, and educated himself by visiting galleries and museums, finding Manet and the Impressionists greatly to his taste. ‘The idea of being in an art school didn’t suit me at all’. These episodic early visits attached him to Montparnasse, where he used to eat in a crèmerie called ‘The Hole in the Wall’ with other young artists.37 Returning to Edinburgh, he met for the first time the slightly older Samuel J. Peploe, whose progress so far had mirrored his own: the son of Robert Luff Peploe, secretary of the commercial bank, and now an orphan with a modest trust fund, Peploe too had given up on the Edinburgh training and gone to Paris, along with Robert Brough (in the 1890s). He had worked at Julian’s with William Bouguereau, and at Colarossi’s, where he was awarded the 1894 medal.38 Both men were in Edinburgh for a while in the early 1900s, with studios in Picardy Place and Shandwick Place respectively. Fergusson was the first to make a more definite move back to Paris, in 1906 selling his father’s gold watch to pay for the trip, and settling in a studio on the Boulevard Edgar Quinet, again in Montparnasse. Paris, [he wrote] is simply a place of freedom. Geographically central, it has always been a centre of light, learning and research … where an artist of any sort is just a human being like a doctor or a plumber and not a freak or a madman.39

Fergusson quickly became an habitué of the local cafés, sketching with charcoal or in quick oil paint, in preparation for later pictures. In 1906-07, he met an American painter, Anne Estelle Rice: they were both doing work for a trade magazine. ‘She shared his curiosity and love of adventure, breaking with social convention in order to accompany him to venues that were then considered unacceptable for women’– for respectable women that is.40 Fergusson was particularly fond of the Café d’Harcourt on the Boulevard St Michel: ‘For me the attraction was the girl frequenters. They were chiefly girls employed by dressmakers and milliners and wore things they were working at, mostly too extreme from a practical point of view but with that touch

36

Margaret Morris, The Art of J. D. Fergusson: a biased biography, Glasgow & London, Blackie, 1974, pp. 30-31. 37 Quoted in Kirsten Simister: A Living Paint: J. D. Fergusson 1874-1961, Edinburgh, Mainstream, 2001, p. 22; see also J. D. Fergusson, Modern Scottish Painting, Glasgow, McLellan,1943, p. 9, where his memories relate precisely to 1898. 38 See Guy Peploe, Samuel John Peploe, Edinburgh, Mainstream, 2000; and references in note 35. 39 Fergusson, Modern Scottish Painting, p. 70. 40 Simister, A Living Paint, p. 37, and see frontispiece above.

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41

of daring that made them very helpful’. Fergusson explained retrospectively that it was not just the social life that was different. I wrote a long letter [to Peploe] trying to explain modern painting. Something new had started and I was very much intrigued. But there was no language for it that made sense in Edinburgh or London – an expression like ‘the logic of line’ meant something in Paris that it couldn’t mean in Edinburgh.42

He persuaded Peploe to come over as well, and the latter echoed his feeling of release: It is terrible to be an artist in Edinburgh. I don’t think it can be quite as bad for anyone else. You see Paris is different … Art – painting – is considered seriously. There you have the camaraderie, good talk, enthusiasm, you are among people who are in sympathy with you – there is plenty of amusement just merely to sit in a café and watch the people.43

Fergusson frequented the studio La Palette run by Jacques-Emile Blanche (where Cécile Walton may have met him) and was selected for the Salon d’Automne, from 1907 to 1912, becoming a sociétaire in 1910. His work in this period was very varied: one particular strand is his drawing and painting of café society. His many drawings at this time are on the spot sketches in black and white of Paris people and scenes, sometimes worked into paintings of distinctive bright colours (for example, La Terrasse, Café d’Harcourt). He was later to write: ‘Calvinism has produced a state of mind in Scotland that makes the Scots artist afraid to paint a nude and the Scots buyer afraid to hang one on his wall’, and ‘If Scotland is to be accepted as only gloom and greyness then all tartans must be false, out of place and exotic’. 44 He admired several French artists, including Toulouse-Lautrec, for his swift line, and Auguste Chabaud, but perhaps most of all the group later known as the Fauves (notably Matisse, Derain and Vlaminck) who had held their first exhibition in 1905. Although Cubism was soon to capture the headlines (and Fergusson was acquainted with Picasso)45 it was the post-Impressionist approach that most influenced him thereafter. The English critic Frank Rutter, reviewing the Salon d’Automne in 1910, 41

Morris, The Art of J. D. Fergusson, p. 63, and see his map of Montparnasse p. 30,

ibid. 42 J. D. Fergusson, ‘Chapter for an autobiography’, Saltire Review, 1960, 6, 21, quoted Morris, The Art of J. D. Fergusson, p. 45. 43 S. J. Peploe, letter of November 1908, quoted Peploe, Samuel John Peploe, p. 35. 44 Fergusson, Modern Scottish Painting, pp.135 and 84; and for black and white drawings see the catalogue ‘A Tribute to Fergus’, Alexander Meddowes Gallery, Edinburgh, 2004, text by Elizabeth Cumming. 45 Letter of 1911, quoted in Helen Beale, ‘“Mingling with the torrent of postimpressionism”: Toulouse-Lautrec, August Chabaud and John Duncan Fergusson as outsiders in Paris’, in H. Beale and Angela Smith, Outsiders in Paris, John Duncan Fergusson, Katherine Mansfield and their Circles, (Stirling French Department, 9), Stirling, Stirling French Publications, 2000, pp. 3-24, p. 8.

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remarked that ‘great strength of mind is needed to mingle with to the full with the torrent of post-impressionism, steering one’s course the while’; but he thought that Fergusson was one outsider who could handle it: ‘thanks to a hard-headed ancestry, J. D. Fergusson may be trusted to emerge from the present anarchy a law-giver, if not an actual despot’.46 Mark Antliff’s study of the avant-garde sees Fergusson and Anne Estelle Rice as ‘major protagonists’ of a continuing Fauvist movement, much influenced by Henri Bergson, and the idea of the élan vital (life force) in the later 1900s. ‘Fellow travellers’ were Dunoyer de Segonzac, Peploe, Marguerite Thompson and Jessica Dismorr.47 In 1909, reviewing the Salon d’Automne, Fergusson had moved away from his earlier admiration for Whistler, now dismissed as too ‘decorative’, towards Matisse and the ‘Matisseites’: ‘The paint that best expresses their emotions is to them the right paint’.48 Fergusson’s various pronouncements about liberty, escape, and the force of France might suggest he was rejecting Scotland, but in fact he is sometimes seen as linking figure between a French and a British, or rather Celtic esthetic. He did not avoid expatriates, but on the contrary mixed with English-speakers, American, English and Scots. He was ‘considered to be the leader of the English-speaking artistic community in Paris’.49 Paris, he said, ‘allowed me to be Scots as I understand it’. By 1912, his friend Peploe had returned to Edinburgh, where he would spend the rest of his life, though with frequent visits to France, usually the south. But other expatriates included fellow Scots, E. A. Taylor and Jessie King, who had set up a small gallery and studio called ‘The Sheiling’ in 1910 and ‘who made a link with the Glasgow School’.50 John Duncan, the Celtic revival painter and Edinburgh associate of Patrick Geddes (see Chapter 4 below) visited Fergusson in 1910. As Fergusson later wrote: To go to Paris was the natural thing for the Scot … It doesn’t seem to have occurred to the modern Scot that the Scottish Celt when in France was among his own people, the French Celts. French culture was founded by the Celts and […] if Scotland or Celtic Scotland could make a ‘new alliance’ with France, not politicial like the ‘Auld Alliance’ but cultural, it would perhaps put Scotland back on to the main track of her culture, and

46

Sunday Times, 2 October 1910, quoted by Helen Beale, ‘”Mingling with the torrent”’,

p. 3. 47

Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson: cultural politics and the Parisian avant-garde, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1993, pp. 69 ff. 48 Art News, 21 Oct. 1909, quoted Antliff, Inventing Bergson, p. 78. 49 Angela Smith, ‘Tigers in Paris: Katherine Mansfield, Emily Carr, John Duncan Fergusson and Fauvism’, in Beale and Smith, Outsiders in Paris, p. 38: she is commenting on Emily Carr, the Canadian artist who signed up with him in 1910. 50 Fergusson, Modern Scottish Painting, p. 170; Fergusson, ‘Memories of Peploe’, Scottish Art Review, vol. 3, 1962, quoted in Peploe, Samuel John Peploe, p. 38. See Jan Marsh, ‘King, Jessie M.’, ODNB.

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see the Scots do something Scottish instead of imitiating the English or rather second-rate British.51

This mixture was perhaps best displayed in the adventure of Rhythm, the short-lived arts magazine started by the young writer John Middleton Murry (1889-1957) in 1911. Murry had met Fergusson, with Anne Estelle Rice, at the Café d’Harcourt, quite by chance in 1910. It was their shared enthusiasm for the ideas of Bergson which brought them together in the venture of an art journal, the first number of which appeared in summer 1911. Its first editorial declared that it was committed to art ‘vigorous, determined, which shall have its roots below the surface and be the rhythmical echo of the life with which it is in touch’. Fergusson was Rhythm’s art editor, and succeeded in attracting illustrations from among others, Picasso, Derain, Marquet, Gaudier-Brzeska and Chabaud, as well as Peploe and Rice, and contributing himself. The network around Rhythm was fully in touch with the Parisian cultural environment: We were all very excited with the Russian Ballet when it came to Paris. Bakst was a sociétaire of the Salon d’Automne and used all the ideas of modern painting for his décor ... No wonder S.J. [Peploe] said these were some of the greatest nights of his life. They were the greatest nights in anyone’s life … But we didn’t spend all our evenings at the Russian ballet; there was the Cirque Médrano, the Concert-Mayol and the GaitéMontparnasse.52

At the same time, the group was an expatriate one, outsiders in Paris. The writer Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), in particular (by now Murry’s lover), appears to have found Fergusson’s friendship crucial personally and esthetically: ‘his confidence as being both a Scot and a Fauvist seems to have revealed to her what she could do with her own national experience’.53 Rhythm sought to marry Celtic patterns with the fauvist colours then present in the changing French scene54 (see Figure 3.4). Fergusson’s second prolonged spell of living in Paris was very different from being a student and ‘falling under the influence’ of France, as in the case of the two women students and many others like them – rather he was taking Scottish tradition over to Paris, being appreciated in France as Scottish. ‘Peploe and Fergusson during the critical years of the evolution of modernism before the First World War were not faced with a simple choice between Fauvism and Cubism. They were involved 51 Fergusson, Modern Scottish Painting, p. 67-69 ; see Murdo Macdonald, ‘Patrick Geddes’ generalism: from Edinburgh’s Old Town to Paris’s Universal Exhibition’, in Frances Fowle and Belinda Thomson, eds, Patrick Geddes, the French Connection, Oxford, White Cockade, 2004, p. 91. On John Duncan and Celtic revivalism, see Chapter 4 below. 52 Quoted in Morris, The Art of J. D. Fergusson, p. 55. 53 Smith, ‘Tigers in Paris’, pp. 36-37; she quotes a striking description by Mansfield of Fergusson’s studio. 54 Beale, ‘“Mingling with the torrent”’, develops this point, as does Antliff. Fergusson’s Rhythm, oil painting University of Stirling, with overt Celtic symbolism is fully discussed in Antliff, Inventing Bergson.

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Figure 3.4

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John Duncan Fergusson, Rhythm, oil painting, 1911. Note the partial Celtic cross, top right. © The Fergusson Gallery, Perth & Kinross Council, Scotland, and courtesy of the University of Stirling.

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55

directly as no other British artists were’. It was therefore odd that neither Fergusson nor Peploe were included in Roger Fry’s second post-Impressionist exhibition in 1912, especially since they had both exhibited shortly before this in London with some critical success. Characteristically, as they would say, Peter Dott of Aitken Dott in Edinburgh was by then finding them too advanced, while London did not seem to know of the Scottish connection. In later years, they, with the other two painters labelled ‘Scottish colourists’, Hunter and Cadell, held a show in Paris, at the Galeries Baluzanges in the XIVth arrondissement: ‘Les peintres de l’Ecosse moderne’, 2-15 June 1924. ‘While the Camden Town Group were still absorbing the work of the divisionists and Bonnard and Vuillard, Fergusson and Peploe were in close touch with Matisse, Derain and Vlaminck … The Scots were outside [Roger Fry’s] field of vision, and as his star rose, theirs fell’.56 Frances Spalding called their absence ‘an omission that reflects on the English tendency to relegate Scottish art to a secondary, peripheral position’, while Angela Smith has argued that Fergusson was responsible for helping both Katherine Mansfield and the painter Emily Carr, from New Zealand and Canada respectively, to overcome their ‘cultural cringe’, perhaps because a Scottish background made him appreciate their problems.57 Conclusion This chapter opened by saying that the currents of influence between France and Scotland ran one way. One could nuance that, without contradicting it, by saying that the traffic was two-way: Scottish artists travelled to France, and French art works travelled to Scotland. In 1911, for example, the RSA held an exhibition of contemporary French sculpture, curated by Pittendrigh MacGillivray. The works shown included, inevitably, several pieces by Rodin, as well as sculpture by Landowski, Bourdelle, Marqueste and L’Arrivé.58 One can read this both as acknowledging French influence, and as being open to the new influences in European sculpture. At the same time, Scottish artists were able to display their works in the Paris Salons, as many examples show, without apparently having much influence on French art. But it can also be argued that the picture is a little more complex than that. While the two women sculptors featured here were quite successful in their careers, they are typical perhaps of the many students of the period, whether from Scotland or anywhere else, and not only women, who found it particularly hard to work out individual paths for their talents, just as the academic was giving way to the modern. The painters mentioned were differently placed. As Duncan Macmillan argues, Peploe and Fergusson ‘did not go to France naïve’. At least on their later 55

Duncan Macmillan, Scottish Art 1460-1990, Edinburgh, Mainstream 1990, p. 330. (the cover illustration of this book is Fergusson’s Terrasse of the Café Harcourt). 56 Billcliffe, Scottish Colourists, p. 7. 57 Smith, ‘Tigers in Paris’. 58 Elliott, ‘French and Scottish Sculpture’, p. 62.

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stays, while their French experience was ‘central to their achievement … the tradition of Scottish painting in which their ambitions were formed was already woven from a mixture of strands, some native and some international’.59 It is arguable that the Scottish colourists, whose reputation has risen remarkably in recent years as they have been rediscovered, brought something distinctive to their French experience, and produced in turn work different from their English contemporaries, who unduly overshadowed them at the time.

59

Macmillan, Scottish Art, pp. 325-326. He argues, in M. Lynch, ed., The Oxford Companion to Scottish History, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 153, that Fergusson’s 1912 painting Les Eus (Hunterian Museum, Glasgow) is ‘one of the most ambitious British paintings of its time’.

CHAPTER FOUR

Bringing Parisians to Edinburgh: Patrick Geddes’s Networks of Academics, Anarchists and Artists, 1870s to 1890s Brief mention has already been made of Patrick Geddes (1854-1932). This Scottish scientist, educationist, ecologist, encourager of the arts, and town planner, was a figure of Protean variety. ‘At first glance he is seen nowhere; but with a little digging, he’s hard to miss’.1 In some respects, he fits the French term ‘intellectuel’, a word first coined in the 1890s, in the context of the Dreyfus Affair: it referred to those who lived by the intellect, but who applied it to a wider world than the academy – often by taking a public stance on matters of principle. This is perhaps no accident, in view of Geddes’s wide-ranging contacts with France during his formative years. The Edinburgh educationist Simon Somerville Laurie described him as ‘the Scot who had best kept up the French connection’ in academic and cultural matters2 (see Figure 4.1). Geddes’s name is recognized more widely abroad than in Britain, although in recent years he has aroused much interest in Scotland. Born in Ballater, Aberdeenshire, in 1854, the son of a former sergeant-major in the Black Watch, Patrick Geddes was brought up in the Perthshire countryside, and inspired by his father with a love of nature. After Perth Academy, some manual apprenticeship, and a year in a bank, he decided to study natural science. His early academic career was, according to his most recent biographer, ‘idiosyncratic’, and he never completed a degree.3 Having 1 Murdo Macdonald, ‘Patrick Geddes’, special number of The Edinburgh Review, on Geddes, no. 88, 1992, p. 3. 2 Murdo Macdonald, ‘Patrick Geddes’s generalism: from Edinburgh’s Old Town to Paris’s Universal Exhibition’, in Frances Fowle and Belinda Thomson eds, Patrick Geddes: the French connection, Oxford, White Cockade, 2004, p. 83, and note 1. There are several biographies of Geddes, three by P. Boardman: Esquisse de l’Oeuvre éducatrice de Patrick Geddes, Montpellier, Imprimerie de la Charité, 1936; Patrick Geddes: Maker of the Future, Chapel Hill, University of Carolina Press, 1944; and The Worlds of Patrick Geddes: Biologist, Town Planner, Re-educator, Peace-Warrior, London, Routledge, Kegan Paul, 1978. See also Philip Mairet, Pioneer of sociology: the life and letters of Patrick Geddes, London, Lund Humphries, 1957. The most recent full-length work is the critical biography by Helen Meller, Patrick Geddes: Social Evolutionist and City Planner, London, Routledge 1990, containing a bibliography and primary sources. 3 Meller, Patrick Geddes, p. 6.

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Figure 4.1

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Photograph of Patrick Geddes in Ramsay Garden, 1912, by E. McGillivray. Note the fleur-de-lys motif. Reproduced by permission of the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland (MS 19286).

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rejected the formal course in Edinburgh, his crucial formative education was with T. H. Huxley in London. Geddes eventually settled back in Edinburgh in 1880, aged 26, and made it his home-base most of his life thereafter. He published, with his student J. Arthur Thomson, a resounding book, The Evolution of Sex (1889), and, after several disappointments, landed his first permanent post the same year. This was a specially created and privately sponsored Chair of Botany at Dundee College (affiliated to the University of St Andrews), but his obligation there for only three months in the year left him with plenty of time to apply his energies to other things, which he proceeded to do for the next 30 years. In Edinburgh, he was surrounded and supported by a devoted group of people, starting with his wife Anna Morton, whom he married in 1886, and including friends, former students and disciples, and later his children. Members of the Geddes circle ‘considered themselves as radicals and members of the avant-garde’.4 They were not always appreciated in their adopted city, in part because of Geddes’s ‘many foreign connexions’.5 Geddes went on in the years after 1900 to have far-reaching influence and international fame in matters of ecology and urban planning, in a context that included India and Palestine: Lewis Mumford was perhaps his most famous admirer. But this chapter, and parts of the following two, concentrate on the years up to 1900, when Geddes was energetically cultivating links between France and Scotland, or more accurately Edinburgh and Paris, and frequently brought together people from both cities, as well as from further afield. It examines his connections to major figures in Parisian public and intellectual life over the last years of the nineteenth century, and the means by which he brought a number of them over to Edinburgh to his ‘Summer Meetings’. How did a Scottish outsider manage to mobilize certain preexisting French networks, resulting in a remarkable degree of international contact? His activities have passed comparatively unobserved, both from the French and the Scottish side, yet with only a little exaggeration, it can be argued that the Geddes networks were among the most significant and thoroughly integrated of FrancoBritish contacts at this time. Networks can be professional or personal, formal or informal, goal-directed or recreational. The Geddesian networks in both Scotland and France, were, like their inspirer, of all sorts. They seem to shift from informal and affectionate links, made by a man already charismatic in his student days, into a series of target-oriented groups. They crossed frontiers and were often attached to projects which were inspirational if not always easy to realize. To discover Geddes’s networks means retracing his 4

Ibid. p. 7. On Anna Geddes, see the entry on her in E. Ewan, S. Innes and S. Reynolds, eds, The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2006. 5 Mairet, Pioneer of sociology, p. 63; Geddes maintained controversially that ‘the greatest sons of Scotland, those who attained European significance, were men who drew inspiration from the Continent, and the second-rate were those who formed their minds in England only’. The conservative Scotsman newspaper printed no report of the events Geddes organized, ibid., p. 67, and he had difficulty obtaining finance for all his schemes; see note 16 below.

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steps, following his correspondence and papers, and identifying several clusters of people and their inter-connections.6 Academic contacts: natural science and social science Geddes’s first link to France was a scientific one. In the summer of 1878, aged 24, with Huxley’s encouragement, Geddes went as a student of marine biology to the field station at Roscoff, Brittany. He was made welcome there by Henri de LacazeDuthiers of the Sorbonne, and first met Yves Delage, later professor of zoology in Paris.7 His Roscoff friends encouraged him to make his first visit to Paris, where he saw the 1878 International Exhibition and listened to lectures by Louis Pasteur, (who would later himself be drawn into a Geddesian project). Geddes became a convert to the French capital: he was captivated both by the concentration of scientific and cultural activity and the atmosphere: ‘Our true University is thus in the City – nay more it is the City, great Paris herself. She is ever stretching out for us her fresh ideas, in the bright conversations of the salon and of the café and so she diffuses them into the intellectual atmosphere and at every social level’.8 In the 1880s, Lacaze-Duthiers wrote to Geddes, encouraging him to make his career in France: ‘Your research activity ... your knowledge of histology and physiology make me think you have a brilliant future. Be a professor and come to Roscoff and Banyuls with a legion of young naturalists.’9 Geddes did not in the end take this advice, although he published many scientific papers during these years, based on his Roscoff work. But he maintained his links not only with Lacaze-Duthiers and Delage, but also with Professor Charles Flahault in Montpellier, an expert on the distribution of vegetation, with whom he developed a close friendship and to whom he sent many Scottish students.10 Passionate about the interplay of academic ideas across frontiers, Geddes took student exchanges very seriously. He set up mechanisms to care for them, eventually in Paris, but first of all in Montpellier, which he visited with his family and where he developed lifelong friendships, through Flahault.11 It was in Montpellier that he 6 The Geddes papers are in several locations. Two of the largest deposits are in Patrick Geddes Archive, in the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, (hereafter PGA/US); and the National Library of Scotland (hereafter NLS), Edinburgh. Geddes’s French contacts were not only with Paris: he maintained strong links with Montpellier from the earliest days, and spent his last years there. But the 1890s in particular saw him concentrating on Paris. 7 ‘Student Days in France’, Outlook Tower booklet, quoted in Boardman, Esquisse, pp. 91-92. 8 ‘Paris University’, Outlook Tower booklet, quoted by Meller, Patrick Geddes, p. 34; reference to Patrick Geddes and Victor Branford, Our Social Inheritance, 1919. 9 Quoted in Boardman, Esquisse, p. 15. 10 Meller, Patrick Geddes, p. 126. 11 In 1890, Flahault set up a welfare committee for foreign students, an informal interdisciplinary group, and encouraged Geddes’s plans for a ‘Scots College’ in Montpellier, something which came to fruition only much later. See Anna Geddes, ‘Montpellier and its

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met for the first time Charles Gide, and Ernest Lavisse, thus enlarging his academic contacts beyond the sciences; both men, about ten years his senior, would be important contacts later in Paris. Gide (1847-1932) was a Protestant economist, uncle of the writer André Gide and a fervent supporter of the cooperative movement. Lavisse (1842-1922) was a historian, author of key textbooks, and power in the land. He was soon to become ‘one of the most influential figures behind the reorganisation of French education’ in this period’.12 In the meantime, the scientific network had also led, almost accidentally, to other things. During the winter of 1878, while working on a botanical survey in Paris, Geddes dropped into a lecture at the Sorbonne given by a young man of his own age, Edmond Demolins (1852-1907), a disciple of the social observer and theorist Frédéric Le Play. In 1879, a second edition appeared of Le Play’s series of monographs Les Ouvriers européens – a series of case-studies of working-class households. Geddes was immediately inspired by certain of Le Play’s approaches and observations of society, which he later considered alongside the philosophy of Auguste Comte, encountered at almost the same time. The subject is too large to explore here, but essentially what Geddes borrowed from Le Play was the need for a thorough observational survey of a region, which became one of his key preoccupations, while in Comte he found the concept of the hierarchical but linked structure of knowledge.13 Le Play’s claim that a family’s way of life was not necessarily linked to its income, but had to do with its approach to culture, was to inspire some of Geddes’s social projects in Edinburgh. He became friendly with Demolins, and eventually a network of Le Play disciples found its way to Edinburgh This is the ‘second Geddes–France network’, one passionately concerned with the social sciences.

ancient university’ in The Art Review, Vol. 3, 1890, pp.130-134. We know from Flahault’s correspondence with Geddes (PGA/US, T. GED 12/3/2, letters written in May and June 1890) that her article was translated into French by ‘Monsieur Valéry’, (most likely Jules Valéry, (1863-1938) the law-student elder brother of Paul Valéry the poet; Jules turns up again in the Franco-Scottish Society, see Chapter 5). 12 Theodore Zeldin, France 1848-1945, Oxford, OUP, 1973, vol II, p. 338. Lavisse has been described as follows: ‘By the age of about 60, [in the early 1900s] he was reigning over or presiding over everything: in the rue des Ecoles, in the Sorbonne, in historical studies […] on the Boulevards Saint-Germain and Saint-Michel, location of the big booksellers and publishers Hachette and Armand Colin, who published historical works and schoolbooks; in the rue de Grenelle, at the Ministry of Public Instruction; on the Superior Council of the latter; and goodness knows how many commitees and ceremonies’, quoted in Pierre Nora, ‘Lavisse, instituteur national’ in P. Nora, ed., Lieux de mémoire, vol. I, Paris, Gallimard, p. 240. See NLS, MS 10525, Geddes papers for references to Flahault, Gide and Lavisse. 13 Meller, Patrick Geddes, p. 43 for further details. Le Play (1806-82) left a controversial legacy: his conservative views about ‘social peace’ and paternalism alienated just the same people who would have appreciated his empirical sociology; see Theodore Zeldin, France 1848-1945, vol. II, New York, Garland, pp. 954-960. Geddes admired Auguste Comte (180682) for his ‘concern with the real’ and his ‘French lucidity’, (cf. ibid., p. 596 and Meller, Patrick Geddes, p. 44).

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For most of the 1880s, Geddes was taken up with his various residential and building schemes in Edinburgh, most importantly the rescue and restoration of buildings in Edinburgh’s Old Town. He had a dramatic impact on the area round the castle. As noted in Chapter 2, the High Street by the late nineteenth century was dilapidated and unhealthy. ‘The students of Edinburgh’s Medical School were not only given an excellent training, they also had direct experience of most of the diseases known to man which were to be found on their doorstep.’14 The Improvement Scheme of mid-century, as noted earlier, had demolished some slums, but left intact the problems of overcrowding in the centre. Geddes proposed to use the university, which was close at hand, to try and revitalize and beautify the tenement blocks on the High Street. He wanted to bring students back to live where the Enlightenment had once thrived. In furtherance of his plans, he and his wife Anna moved into a converted flat on the top floor of a tenement in James Court. He then leased out other rooms to students and this was the beginning of what was to be the first university hall of residence in the country. The enterprise recruited several of his most devoted followers (J. Arthur Thomson, and others). Gradually more leases were taken and restoration work begun on Ramsay Garden which altered the skyline of the Old Town as seen from Princes Street. By then, several hundred students were living in the residences. In a complementary intellectual initiative, Geddes acquired in 1892 the old Observatory, near the Castle: this six-storey building topped with a Camera Obscura (still existing), he proposed to turn into a regional and civic museum, known as the Outlook Tower: each level representing a different scale (the city, Scotland, language, Europe, the world). Over the door was Geddes’ motto Vivendo discimus, by living we learn. Although not formally connected to Edinburgh University, Geddes was thus building up a series of contacts and projects centred in the historic heart of the city, where his pioneering Summer Meetings would later be held.15 The Summer Meetings While travelling to France only from time to time during the 1880s, Geddes did not lose touch. His most notable visit was for the 1889 Paris Exhibition, commemorating the centenary of the French Revolution, when he renewed many of his contacts and extended them into some enterprising pedagogical projects, with exchanges both of students and teachers (see Chapter 5 below). But he had now launched what was to be a major preoccupation of the 1890s. For some years, he had been giving summer school instruction to local teachers at Granton marine biology station on the Forth. This was the time of the University extension movement both in France and Britain, under different names, whether extra-mural education or universités populaires. In the late 1880s, Geddes began to expand the Granton courses into what became known as the Edinburgh Summer Meetings: an innovative kind of summer school, or vacation course, lasting for the month of August, which functioned annually for 14 15

Meller, Patrick Geddes, p. 69. On the Outlook Tower, see ibid., 102 ff and Chapter 4.

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more than a decade. At their intellectual and numerical peak between 1892-96, the Summer Meetings attracted about 150 students, but always had a solid core of regular attenders, many of them teachers, from a wide geographical radius. It was during these early years, when their range was widest, that they were at their most influential. The self-financing Summer Meetings were not connected to any formal institution, although they used the Old Town student residences of Edinburgh University (promoted as we saw by Geddes himself). They were interdisciplinary and wide ranging, but essentially based on Geddes’s ideas of direct observation and practical experience, including field trips and excursions in the afternoon, after expert lectures in the morning. Geddes invited both his scientific and his sociological contacts over from France, eliciting a remarkable response. The report on the 1891 Meeting announced that that year had marked the ‘beginning of international cooperation’, with lectures from Alfred Espinas of Bordeaux and Henri de Varigny, (who later translated The Evolution of Sex) from the Museum du Jardin des Plantes in Paris16 (see Figure 4.2). The French participation increased thereafter, with one of the early visitors being Geddes’s friend the Le Playist Edmond Demolins, who came over at least three times, in 1892, 1893, possibly 1894, and 1895, and has left a striking record in his letters and articles of the illumination his visits brought him.17 He was impressed by a number of aspects on his first visit, before many other French visitors had been recruited. A major point was informality. Of Geddes, Demolins wrote: ‘I have rarely met a man possessing to such a high degree the art of attracting and retaining people he has once won over’.18 He also noted the full part played in the enterprise by Anna Geddes, an accomplished musician herself, who invited others such as the singer of Hebridean songs Marjory Kennedy-Fraser. Anna Geddes’s presence contributed to the informal and almost family atmosphere: She is the devoted and necessary collaborator of her husband; she helps him in his correspondence which is considerable; she comes to […] the lectures; she organises musical and artistic gatherings and evening receptions, and some of the excursions; the

16

PGA/US, T/GED 7/8/19, prospectus for 1892; the Summer Meetings are discussed by all the biographers, see note 2 above, particularly Boardman, Esquisse, pp. 55 ff. There are many papers concerning them in PGA/US (see catalogue) and correspondence in the NLS. Geddes had had some financial assistance from the Edinburgh town council in 1892-93, but when he put on tableaux vivants to illustrate history, they withdrew the grant, disapproving of spectacles for ‘bairns’ (children); Boardman, Patrick Geddes, p. 163. 17 Demolins published his first impressions in letters printed in several numbers of his newsletter, Le Mouvement social (another Le Playist journal, often bound in with La Science sociale) in 1892-93 (pp. 77-86; 97-106; 126-133) (copy in Musée Social, Paris). See also B. Kalaora and A. Savoye, Les inventeurs oubliés: Le Play et ses continuateurs, Seyssel, Champ Vallon, 1989, esp. pp. 150-159; and Les Études Sociales, No. 127-8, 1998 (all available in the Musée Social, Paris). 18 Demolins, in Le Mouvement social, vol. 14, 1892, p. 80.

Figure 4.2

Group photograph of the Edinburgh Summer Meetings, c. 1895. Reproduced by permission of the University of Strathclyde Archives.

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young people of both sexes are as in touch with her as they are with Mr Geddes; her house is open to all and everyone is welcome there.19

Whereas French professors would feel they had to maintain a dignified distance from their students, in Geddes’s Summer Meetings by contrast, the pupils rub shoulders with the teachers; they are received by them in their own homes; they meet at excursions every afternoon and at the many evening meetings. The pupils themselves, girls as well as young men, invite the teachers and their families to gatherings where people play music, sing, act plays, drink tea, and I consider, dear friend, that these meetings are a useful complement to the morning lectures, even if I’m asking the august walls of the old Sorbonne to come crashing down on my head.20

The students, he noted, came from every social category: university students looking to improve their studies; professionals wishing to increase their scientific knowledge; manual workers eager to improve themselves. ‘Of the women, […] by far the largest number, are young unmarried women coming to find extra tuition, for what strikes me above all is the concern to acquire personal value which is met equally in both sexes. Some of these young women are primary school teachers, taking advantage of the holidays to improve their education’.21 Demolins was impressed that the course did not lead to any formal qualification, but was followed for a more general aim of self-improvement, which he considered a particularly British feature, compared to the more career-oriented structure of French education at the time. In Britain, ‘there is an innumerable public anxious to find anything that will help one get on, through the efforts of private initiative’.22 He also found much to admire in the programmes themselves and the seriousness with which they were taken. The lectures form a ‘fairly comprehensive programme, including geography, history, literature, physiology, hygiene, social science, anthropology, zoology and botany’.23 Edinburgh and the surrounding area were used as case studies ‘for scientific analysis of the social, biological and physical condition’.24 As the course outline stated: ‘we do not overload the pupils’ memories with a long list of geographical names and place, but present them with a living picture of the world with man as actor within it, and show them the reality and utility of it by basing ourselves on particular knowledge of every pupil’s own’.25 Many of Demolins’s observations related to relations between the sexes, which he found surprisingly free and easy, in particular the independence of unmarried ‘girls’ (he uses the term jeunes filles, though the women students were probably in 19

Ibid, p. 84. Ibid., p. 80. 21 Ibid., p. 81. 22 Ibid., p. 80. 23 Ibid., p. 82 (he could have added meteorology and chemistry, which were both tackled in the programme reproduced; ibid., p. 83). 24 Ibid., p. 84. 25 Ibid., p. 82. 20

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their early twenties). He had already noted their greater freedom of movement.26 On his return visit in 1893, Demolins remarked on the seriousness of the women students: whereas in France, an audience composed mostly of women might make one think the professor would aim to amuse rather than to instruct. And one has to recognise that this impression of the [female] public is not without foundation. Here, that point of view would be inaccurate. In no other country in the world is woman closer to man in terms of frame of mind, intellectual habit and practice of living. 27

Perhaps on this account, marriage customs even in the fairly middle-class milieu of the Summer Meetings, also differed from those in France. He had met an advocate who was engaged to be married to a primary school teacher from the next parish. ‘Do you know many advocates, doctors or engineers in France, who would marry or even think of marrying, a primary school teacher?’28 All these impressions had practical consequences. It was in Edinburgh that Demolins first met Cecil Reddie, headmaster of the progressive English school Abbotsholme, and through him the head of another unconventional school, Bedales. The impact of these encounters resulted in Demolins setting out to rethink his ideas on education. He wrote a famous, if controversial book on British education, A quoi tient la supériorité des Anglo-Saxons? [How are we to explain the superiority of the Anglo-Saxons? – that is, the British], published in 1897. This book characterized British education as child-centred, character-building, and non-directive – a view more influenced by the avant-garde than the norm, no doubt. His analysis also fitted the demographic debate in France, where demographic decline vis-à-vis Germany – the unwillingness to have more children – was seen as the sign of a negative attitude to progress. His book was reviewed in glowing terms by the Edinburgh Review, which saw in its analysis a critique of the prudent and ‘pennywise philosophy’ of the French, who needed to have more volunteers who would ‘go out in work in [the French] colonies … taking risks on their own heads’.29 In France, the book caused an outcry, with at least three volumes being published in reply. One reviewer accused him of ‘making us believe that our proud neighbours invented work, virtue and happiness’.30 Demolins followed up his ideas, and inspired the foundation of the private progressive school the Ecole des Roches in 1899 in Normandy.31 26

Ibid., 1892, p. 103, and see Chapter 8 below. Ibid., 1893, p. 83. 28 Ibid., 1893, p. 85. 29 Quoted in Martyn Cornick, ‘Distorting mirrors: problems of Franco-British perceptions in the fin-de-siècle’, in M. Cornick and Ceri Crossley, eds, Problems in French history, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2000, pp. 125-148, p. 135. 30 Quoted ibid., p. 36. 31 One of the first subscribers to the Ecole des Roches was Jules Siegfried (1837-1922), a key player in the Musée Social network in Paris (see Chapter 5), an influential group in Paris, to whom Geddes soon had some introductions, and which also had links to followers of Le Play. See Colette Chambelland et al., Le Musée Social en son temps, Collective publication, 27

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Edmond Demolins was also instrumental in bringing new recruits to the Summer Meetings. They included fellow-Le Playists the medical lecturer Jules Bailhache, and the Abbé Félix Klein, of the Catholic University of Paris, the latter coming first as a student, then as a lecturer. Geddes himself had recruited several other academics, some from Montpellier but also from Paris. By 1896, one observer wrote that 20 per cent of the participants were from abroad, so the Summer Meetings ‘are better known in Paris than in London’.32 One of Demolins’s important recruits was Paul Desjardins (1859-1940), a classical scholar teaching at the Collège Stanislas in Paris, who was also much concerned with the moral condition of his native country. Desjardins had recently published a much-remarked series of articles on the state of the French nation under the title Le Devoir present, and had founded the Union pour l’action morale in 1892. This group, largely formed from distinguished nonbelievers, also included some social Catholics. It is not known how Geddes and Desjardins first met, though they had several mutual acquaintances, including the Baroness Blaze de Bury, née Rose Stuart, (181394) a Scotswoman and writer, married to a French diplomat. Intelligent, dynamic and charming, Rose Blaze de Bury was fluent in Spanish, French and German, and attracted intellectuals and politicians to her international salons. She wrote for the Revue des deux mondes, the Revue de Paris and on European politics in the Daily News. After her death in 1894, her daughter Yetta took over her role. Desjardins certainly taught at the Summer Meeting of 1893, taking over for the last two weeks in August from Demolins who had taught there for the first two (but they overlapped long enough to make each other’s acquaintance). Desjardins’s subject was ‘la Renaissance morale de la France’.33 The following year, he did not come: ‘This year, unfortunately, I will not be free during August. I shall be a peasant for that month: rest and country air will be necessary. [Many French academics felt the same about their summer holiday.] So I will have to put off to another year the pleasure of seeing you again in Edinburgh’. He also referred to a conversation with Geddes in the glasshouses of the Edinburgh Botanical Gardens in 1893.34 But Desjardins returned, despite many warnings that he might not make it, in 1896.35 This acquaintance too was also to have quite considerable, if long-delayed consequences for French intellectuals. Paul Desjardins went on to buy the abbey of Pontigny in Burgundy in 1906 (after the Separation of Church and State in France); there he organized the famous ‘Décades de Pontigny’, between 1910 and 1913, then again from 1922 Paris, 1998, esp. pp. 43 ff. on Dick May, and Janet Horne, A Social Laboratory for Modern France: the Musée Social and the origins of the welfare state, Durham, University of North Carolina Press, 2002. 32 Revue Internationale de l’Enseignement, 15 May 1896, (copy in PGA/US). 33 Report on 1893 Summer Meeting, , PGA/US, T. GED 7/8/21. 34 Letter from P. Desjardins to Mrs Geddes, 2 March 1894, NLS, MS 10503, ff. 64-65. 35 Ibid., 14 Jan 1896: ‘I wish to come to Edinburgh and it is probable but only probable that I will be able to fulfil to this wish’; see report on 1896 Summer Meeting in PGA/US, T.GED 7/8/21. This letter dates from after the publication of The Evergreen, to which Desjardins contributed.

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to 1939. These ‘entretiens’ or as we might today call them, annual conferences, have been described as ‘a summit in the evolution of modern French intellectual networking, as well as in the history of European cultural reflection and exchange’.36 The first brochure for Pontigny makes it explicit that Edinburgh was one of the models, along with monastery retreats.37 Desjardins, like Demolins, was particularly struck by the informal family atmosphere, the outdoor life, the intensity of contacts, and the mixing of people from different horizons. It is not too fanciful to regard these ten-day meetings (décades), and their present-day successors at Cerisy-la –Salle in Normandy, bringing together writers and intellectuals, as having been inspired by Geddes’s Summer Meetings.38 Alongside French lecturers, of course, Geddes recruited native talent. He had a number of reliable colleagues in Edinburgh working alongside him in the Outlook Tower such as T. R. Marr, a former student and assistant. The art activities were masterminded by the Celtic-revival painter John Duncan (1866-1945), who was a regular there: in 1892, he had founded with Geddes the Old Edinburgh School of Art, which was devoted to producing art and to improving the Edinburgh Old Town, and to lecturing to the public. Alongside Duncan, the painters W. G. BurnMurdoch and Charles Mackie had been recruited: both were also involved in painting murals for Geddes and in public buildings. Other lecturers included William Sharp, Jane Hay, Lloyd Morgan, a fellow student under Huxley, and Andrew John (A. J.) Herbertson (1865-1915), later Professor of Geography at Oxford, but in 1892 Geddes’s demonstrator at Dundee and one of his closest disciples. Herbertson lectured on meteorology at the Summer Meetings of 1892 and 1893, and it was there that he met his wife, Dorothy Richardson – herself later the author of a biography of Le Play.39 While the Scottish colleagues whom Geddes invited to teach included 36

David Steel, ‘American Pontigny: Chautauqua and Edinburgh models for Paul Desjardins’ Entretiens’, unpublished article, seen with kind permission from the author. Relevant parts of this article have been published in David Steel, ‘Aux origines américaines et écossaises de Pontigny: Patrick Geddes et Paul Desjardins’, Bulletin des amis d’André Gide, vol. 34, no. 149, January 2006, pp. 33-52. 37 Quoted in D. Steel ‘American Pontigny’, note 33: ‘Of the Summer Meetings, … the Entretiens d’été retain the residential family character after the year’s hard professional work, the educational aim specific to [them]’. Geddes in turn had an American model in mind according to his biographer, Philippe Mairet: ‘vacation courses held at Chautauqua in New York state’, Pioneer of Sociology, p. 63. 38 Desjardins’s wife, Lily Savary, had inherited the estate of Cérisy-la-Salle in Normandy. After the Second World War, which saw the death of her husband and son and the pillaging of the Pontigny library, she sold up there and concentrated on restoring Cérisy. Thanks to the efforts of her daughter and grand-daughters, Cérisy too became the Centre International Culturel, which it still is today. Cf. D. Steel, ‘Ecrivains et intellectuels britanniques à Pontigny 1910-1939’, Bulletin des amis d’André Gide, vol. XXV, no. 116, October 1997, pp. 367-394. 39 See E. Baigent, ‘ Herbertson, Andrew J.’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004 (hereafter ODNB) ; Herbertson, like Desjardins, took the Summer Meeting idea forward, holding summer schools at Oxford between 1909 and 1914.

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several women, virtually all the French visitors, with the exception of Marie Bonnet, an old friend from Montellier days, and possibly Yetta Blaze de Bury, were men (unsurprisingly, considering the structure of the French universities at the time). During the first few years of the 1890s, then, Geddes multiplied his academic and philosophical contacts in France, bringing several of them over to Edinburgh, and meeting others in Paris, and entrusting them with students. When in 1895, he was drawing up a list of ‘the most effective people to whom I am accustomed to send students’, knowing that they would find ‘ a kind and helpful reception; you can see the list is small’, he listed about 15 names, some of whom were regulars at the Summer Meetings: Henri de Varigny, zoologist known for five years, ‘takes trouble over each man’; Mlle [Yetta] Blaze de Bury, who had come over to lecture in Dundee; Yves Delage, zoologist, ‘my old friend and fellow student’; LacazeDuthiers ‘no one is better known by the younger scientific men in the country’; Octave Gréard, academic administrator, but ‘antagonist of the preceding two!’; ‘my friend M. Espinas; M. Louis Weill, a young schoolmaster’ ; Edmond Demolins; M. Delaire, ‘the editor of La Réforme sociale but rival of the preceding, on account of a split within the Le Play camp’; Pierre Laffitte, comtiste, Professor of history of science at the Collège de France; Paul Desjardins; Dr Malassez; ‘and of course for general purposes, Monsieur Lavisse and M. Liard’; Richet, teacher of physiology, Ecole de Médecine. He also mentions Larroumet, the director of the Ecole des Beaux Arts and Sarcey.40 This remarkable list contains the names of the people Geddes trusted most closely – and indicates not only the disciplinary breadth of his contacts, but his closeness to people who really mattered in French educational and academic circles. For example, Louis Liard (1846-1917) was director of education at the French Ministry of Public Instruction, and Octave Gréard was rector of the New Sorbonne. They were closely linked to Ernest Lavisse and it was probably through Lavisse that Geddes knew both men. The list also reveals that he was in touch with people who were themselves at odds with one another – Geddes generally avoided taking sides in factional disputes. Given his academic connections, it is not surprising that Geddes should have used these networks to invite lecturers to the Summer Meetings. But maybe this eclecticism is a hint at a more surprising set of contacts, and indeed intimate links, requiring some explanation: certain prominent representatives of French anarchism The anarchist connection It may seem odd that Geddes, a radical in social and cultural respects, but one who steered very clear of official politics as much as he could, should have become closely linked to some celebrated French anarchists, during the middle 1890s, at a time 40 This list is in a memo sent by Geddes to Thomas Barclay, with a view to recruiting people who would support the Scots College in Paris and the proposed Franco-Scottish Society, (see Chapter 5), PGA/US, T.GED 12/2/40.

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when anarchism was in the headlines. The early 1890s saw an outbreak of terrorist scares in France perpetrated by people claiming to be anarchists – including a homemade bomb thrown into the French Assemblée Nationale, and the assassination of the French President, Sadi-Carnot, in 1894. Repressive measures were introduced against anyone connected to the anarchist movement. Geddes ended up sheltering one political anarchist from the French authorities under a false name, after some of these incidents, and was on close terms with others. It should be stressed that none of his personal contacts sanctioned violence, but they were still subject to arrest and pursuit by the authorities in more than one country, for their views. How did this ‘anarchist’ network come about? Probably through the international scholarship of geography. The two most famous anarchist geographers with whom Geddes became acquainted were the Russian Peter (Pierre) Kropotkin (1842-1921) and the Frenchman Elisée Reclus (1830-1905). Both men were essentially intellectuals, but not confined to ivory towers. Kropotkin and Reclus had been exiled for their views fairly early in their careers. They had developed their anarchism, in the 1870s in Switzerland, after the Paris Commune of 1871. Elisée Reclus had been captured when he was serving as an ordinary guardsman during the second siege of Paris, under the Commune, and sentenced at first to imprisonment, then, after international protests by geographers, to exile. His brother Elie had also been involved in the Commune, as director of the Bibliothèque Nationale. Kropotkin, back in France in 1882, did not instigate (or even really encourage) the events in Lyon, where a silk workers’ strike and uprising coincided with anarchist agitation, but at his trial he refused to condemn them, made a passionate speech and was sentenced to four years imprisonment. He visited Edinburgh in 1886, after his release from the French prison of Clairvaux, and wrote to his friend, fellow-geographer, and fellow-anarchist, Elisée Reclus, afterwards, praising Geddes’s installation in the Old Town and his social work with students.41 Both men were above all committed geographers. However, geography was not something that they, or Geddes, simply kept in a separate compartment of their lives. It was also a world view. Kropotkin loved what he called ‘the joy of scientific creation’, but, he wrote, ‘what right had I to these highest joys when all around me was nothing but misery and struggle for a mouldy bit of bread; when whatsoever I should spend to enable me to live in the world of higher emotions must needs be taken from the very mouths of those who grew the wheat and had not enough for 41 Boardman, The Worlds of Patrick Geddes, pp. 87 and 105. On Geddes’s links with Kropotkin, see Macdonald ‘Patrick Geddes’s generalism’ and James Mavor, My Window on the Streets of the World, vol. 2, London (publisher unknown), 1923, pp. 91-92 and 119-120. See Nicolas Walter, entry on ‘Peter Kropotkin’, ODNB; Kropotkin lived in England after 1886. On Reclus, works in English include M. Fleming, The Anarchist Way to Socialism: Elisée Reclus, London, Croom Helm, 1979; Béatrice Giblin, ‘Elisée Reclus 1830-1905’ in Geographers: Biobibliography, vol. 3, London, Mansfield, 1979, pp. 125-132; see also the entry on him in J. Maitron et al. eds, Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier français, Paris, Editions de l’Atelier (various years, hereafter DBMOF). The Geddes papers contain many letters to and from the entire Reclus family.

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their children?’ Reclus was also passionate about the natural world and experienced it as joy. His brother recalled how on a walking trip to see the Mediterranean for the first time ‘you bit my shoulder so hard that it drew blood’. He took a cosmic view. In his first book he wrote: ‘the meanders of a stream, the grains of sand in a dune, the ridges on a sandy beach do not tell us less than the bends in a great river, the mighty mountains and the vast surface of the ocean’.42 The anarchism of Kropotkin and Reclus shared with socialism the view that different classes in capitalist society had conflicting interests, leading to latent class war. They, like Marx, thought in terms of a revolution, an uprising of the oppressed, which would overthrow existing governments and ruling structures. They certainly agreed, as Proudhon had done, that property was theft and that the rich had inherited the earth – something that meant a lot to geographers. But whereas late nineteenthcentury socialists (whether agreeing or not with Marx) saw the road ahead as a political trajectory, accepted the need for political parties, and were usually prepared to work within parliamentary elections as a method, most anarchists took the view that a social revolution was needed, plus freedom from any kind of dictatorship (that of the proletariat included). Their key value was individual freedom, and what they were after was a cultural revolution alongside a material one: a change in hearts and minds, a coming together of free spirits without leaders and led. Kropotkin wrote that representative democracy had served its turn and could not deal with the present class divisions. ‘Anarchist communism’, as his views were called, took as its text ‘to each according to his need’. Both men also supported expropriation as the correct course of revolution and failing that, ‘la reprise individuelle’ – that is, the right of the poor to steal, because property is theft. This characteristic of theirs was intensified during the 1890s, when anarchism became for the chancelleries of Europe and indeed the general public something akin to ‘terrorism’ today. The outbreak of ‘propaganda by the deed’, as some anarchist characters called it, consisted of attentats or bomb attacks and assassinations, many of them in the French capital. These were not random, but linked in a chain of repression and revenge, almost always by people who called themselves anarchists. For the most part, their perpetrators were desperate marginal figures, isolated both from society and from any organization, but the press tended to combine them as a conspiracy, the ‘Black Hand’ of international terrorism. Much of this activity centred on France. Perhaps the most famous case was that of a man called Francis Konigstein, aka Ravachol, who in March 1892 left bombs at the Paris apartment blocks of magistrates who had sentenced demonstrators in 1891. Nobody was injured in these particular incidents but Ravachol was caught, tried for other crimes in which he was implicated, and executed. In December 1893, Auguste Vaillant threw a bomb into the Chambre des Députés, injuring several parliament members. He too was executed. Following that, 42

Quotation from Kropotkin, in Caroline Cahm, Kropotkin and the rise of Revolutionary Anarchism 1872-1886, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,1989, p. 24. Quotation from Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, ed. Béatrice Giblin, 2 vols, vol. 1, Paris, Maspéro/La Découverte, 1964, p. 31.

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Emile Henry threw a bomb into the Café Terminus at the Gare St Lazare, and was caught and executed in turn. An Italian anarchist, Caserio, stabbed the president of the French republic, Sadi-Carnot, in 1894 for failing to reprieve Henry. Elsewhere, a bomb was thrown in a theatre in Lyon, and in Barcelona, in 1900, the king of Italy and the Spanish prime minister were assassinated. ‘Dagger, dynamite and pistol’ were seen as a threat to society, and in France in 1894 a series of anti-terrorist laws (les lois scélérates) were passed, and a pre-emptive strike known as the ‘Trial of the 30’ launched, whereby the police set out to round up various people. Elisée’s nephew, Paul Reclus, who was on their list, as was his father Elie, described the 30 names as ‘a dozen burglars who called themselves anarchists; a dozen writers who had sent articles to anarchist papers; and a few comrades who were neither one nor the other’ – the usual suspects perhaps.43 By the 1890s, then, the term ‘anarchist’ was not a casual or innocent one. Although by modern standards, the bomb attacks caused little loss of life (though they might have), they certainly caused a moral panic, coming so soon after the Commune and other disturbances. Uncompromising characters, Reclus and Kropotkin declined to condemn acts of violence, even if they did not exactly condone them. Reclus wrote in a private letter, soon after Ravachol’s arrest: If you are talking about thinking anarchists, anarchists who weigh their words and their acts, who feel responsible for their behaviour towards the whole of humanity, it goes without saying that explosive fantasies cannot be attributed to them. Rockets that go off at random destroying staircases [a reference to Ravachol] are not arguments; they are not even intelligently used weapons, because they can be turned against the poor and not against the rich, they can hurt the slave and not the master […] [But] when an isolated man, transported by his anger, takes revenge upon the society which has brought him up in poverty, fed him poorly and advised him poorly, what can I say?

In another letter, he wrote, ‘If you read La Révolte, in which I write on occasion and the ideas of which I share, you will have seen that far from condemning Ravachol, on the contrary I admire his courage, his goodness and the generosity with which he forgives the people who have denounced him’.44

43

Paul Reclus, Les Frères Elie et Elisée Reclus, ou du protestantisme à l’anarchisme, Paris, Les Amis d’Elisée Reclus, 1964, p. 144. See the article on him in DBMOF. On anarchism in France, see Zeldin, France 1848-1945, vol. I, pp. 775 ff. and references. Zeldin prints a long summary of an interview with a rank-and-file anarchist called Lebrun, published in La Science sociale, the Le Playist journal in May 1905: the interview, by coincidence (?) was by Jules Bailhache, who as we have seen, was one of the lecturers at Geddes’s Summer Meetings. On the attentats of the 1890s, see Roderick Kedward, The Anarchists: the men who shocked an era, London, Library of the 20th Century, 1971. 44 First two quotations from a letter dated 1892, quoted in Giblin’s introduction to Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, p. 59; the quotation about La Révolte is from another letter of the same date, quoted in Reclus, Les Frères Elie et Elisée Reclus, p. 135, which also quotes the first letter.

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These views might be an embarrassment to his British friends. When Geddes came to write an obituary of Reclus in 1905, he played down his politics. He referred to him as ‘a young idealist of ’48, veteran of the siege of Paris, [note: what most people would understand by this was the first or Prussian siege, rather than, more accurately in Reclus’s case, the Communard defence against Versailles] the irreconcilable exile from the Commune’. He had to face it of course, eventually, but what he wrote was: ‘Of Reclus’s extreme political philosophy – his adoption and development of the doctrines of Anarchism – little need here be said’. There then followed a typical Geddesian digression about Reclus’s ‘higher idealism’, resolved into the phrase ‘Humanity as Individual’, only to twist again and claim that Reclus moved away from the ‘phase of negation represented by Bakounine’ in his final writings (L’Homme et la Terre, posthumous). Geddes also remarked that ‘the advent of well nigh every new doctrine in history has been discredited by the violence of fanatical adherents’. This cautious writing lets us know that Geddes was well aware of the context, but seeks to tell us he did not share Reclus’s views.45 Geddes was already an admirer of Reclus before he met him. It seems that he simply wrote to the latter, possibly mentioning Kropotkin’s name, in the early 1890s, inviting him to come and lecture in Edinburgh. Reclus was by this time world-famous for his pioneer works on environmental geography, which are rather neglected today, for example, La Géographie Universelle. By the 1890s, he was living and teaching in Brussels at a privately financed university, having been refused an official post on account of his political views. In his sixties but spry (he walked up Arthur’s Seat), Elisée Reclus came to the Edinburgh Summer Meetings on at least two occasions, in 1893 and 1895. On 16 August 1895, he wrote to his wife: In a few minutes I am going to give my second lecture. The first [geography] went off very well, before a sympathetic audience, made up of people who really seemed to understand French. My fourth lecture will have to be in English, and will be for an audience mostly made up of anarchist workmen. This will be the difficult part of the campaign.

Reclus also remarks that he has met the Le Playist Abbé Klein, who ‘would like to become an anarchist but does not dare’.46 It was presumably as a result of the close friendship between Reclus and Geddes, who admired each other’s achievements, that Reclus’s nephew Paul, son of Elie, using the name ‘George(s) Guyou’, took refuge in Scotland with his family during the 1890s. Wanted by the French police in connection with the anarchist outrages, with which he had nothing to do, Paul Reclus became one of Geddes’s right-hand men at the Outlook Tower, and a lifelong friend, later settling in Montpellier. The two families eventually intermarried. Geddes and Elisée Reclus were soon to have further prolonged contact over the project for Reclus’s Great Globe, planned for 45

Patrick, Geddes, ‘A great geographer: Elisée Reclus, 1830-1905’, The Scottish Geographical Magazine, Sept-Oct 1905, pp. 1-13 (contains a full chronology of Reclus’s life and publications); see also Giblin, ‘Elisée Reclus 1830-1905’. 46 Élisée Reclus, Correspondance, vol. 3, Paris, Costes, 1925, pp.188-189.

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the 1900 Paris Exposition, (see Chapter 6), and they remained in close touch until Reclus’s death in 1905.47 Another prominent anarchist, the journalist Augustin Hamon (1862-1945), was recommended to Geddes by Paul Reclus, probably through the Brussels connection. Hamon was editor of a review which would have been called ‘advanced’ in Britain: Humanité Nouvelle (in which Geddes later published, being in this context a biologist and specialist on sex, along with Havelock Ellis). Tipped off about his forthcoming arrest in summer 1894, Hamon briefly took refuge in London, He was particularly sought by the police because of his anti-militarist writing (another point on which libertarians and anarchists were very active in these years, encouraging soldiers not to reply to the French draft). Paul Reclus (as ‘Georges Guyou’) wrote to Geddes on 2 January 1895, suggesting that Hamon stay in Edinburgh for a month in one of the University Halls. There Hamon quickly made friends with the artist John Duncan and the Geddes circle and was very taken with the atmosphere at Riddle’s Court. By the time he left, he had been engaged to give ten lectures on ‘la France actuelle’ (‘Contemporary France’) at the Summer Meeting that year, 1895.48 The anarchists with whom Geddes was in touch were of a special kind. They were not rich, but they earned a living by the pen and had the respect of a powerful intellectual community which launched petitions to get them out of fixes. They were family men, and in their everyday lives irreproachably law-abiding and the most charming of companions. George Bernard Shaw said of Kropotkin that he was ‘amicable to the point of saintliness’. And Elisée Reclus was described, by Geddes again, as ‘generous, almost to excess’. A report on one of the Summer Meetings referred to ‘lamblike anarchists’.49 In some ways, the anarchists were closer in their thoughts to Geddes’s Scottish intellectual and artistic colleagues than to his French ones. And indeed the Geddes circle in Edinburgh was a much more mixed one culturally than his French contacts. In France, apart from the anarchist intellectuals, he was mainly in touch with the official academy, men of letters or science, whereas in Edinburgh his circle was of free-thinking progressives, including many artists and especially women – new women, craftswomen, singers. At any rate, Hamon in his letters to Lucien Pissarro refers principally to artistic matters, rather than science or politics. He refers to Geddes ‘my friend and [John] Duncan’s, and an art lover, who wishes to turn

47

On Paul Reclus, see DBMOF and Meller, Patrick Geddes, pp. 15-16. Cf. Belinda Thomson, ‘Patrick Geddes’s ‘Clan d’Artistes’: Some elusive French connections’, in Fowle and Thomson, Patrick Geddes: the French Connection. On Hamon’s introduction to Geddes, see the correspondence with ‘Georges Guyou’ in NLS Ms 10564 for January 1895. Hamon was a radical thinker, hard to pigeonhole. With his wife Henriette, he translated all George Bernard Shaw’s plays into French. For details see P. Gaillou, doctoral thesis, ‘G.B. Shaw et Augustin Hamon: les premiers temps d’une correspondance’, Université de Bretagne Occidentale, Brest, 1998, and the same author’s ‘Une itinéraire politique, Augustin Hamon’, Kreuz, no. 10, 1999, pp. 200-227. See also the article on Hamon in DBMOF. 49 The Educational Times, October 1897, cutting in T/GED/12/2/40. 48

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Edinburgh into an artistic centre’. As he put it, ‘there is a whole clan of artists around Geddes’.50 The artists and The Evergreen Geddes was already an admirer of the Glasgow School in the 1880s: in an essay of 1888, he had claimed that it showed signs of being ‘the most important contemporary movement in Scottish perhaps British art’.51 He set out to encourage local Edinburgh artists at the same time. When his Edinburgh Social Union had been concerned with the beautification of public buildings, he had encouraged artists such as Phoebe Traquair and Charles Mackie to decorate hospitals, university residences and orphanages with murals. He published a guide to the Manchester Exhibiton of 1887 and the Glasgow International Exhibition of 1888: Every Man His Own Art Critic. In 1889, he addressed the second Arts and Crafts movement’s conference in Edinburgh on ‘The Advancement of Art and its Application to Industry’. He himself, like John Duncan, was an ardent admirer of Puvis de Chavannes who had done the murals for the New Sorbonne and for the newly-decorated Pantheon in Paris. Geddes admired Puvis principally for his mural painting, which fitted both ideologically and artistically his social schemes; mural painting was available to all, not just a few rich collectors; and Puvis’s symbolism appealed to Geddes intellectually. Privately, too, for his Ramsay Garden flat, Geddes commissioned mural decorations, from Charles Mackie, John Duncan, William Burn-Murdoch, Mary Hill Burton (and possibly also Robert Brough, Robert Burns, E. A. Hornel and others).52 50

Pissarro archives, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, letters of 22 January and 3 February 1895, reference kindly provided by Belinda Thomson, who alerted me to the links between Geddes and Hamon. Hamon was closely connected with both Pissarros, who maintained a sympathetic but non-active contact with the anarchists. 51 P. Geddes, Every Man His Own Art Critic, Edinburgh, William Brown, 1888, p. 37, quoted in D. and F. Irwin, Scottish Painters At Home and Abroad, London, Faber & Faber, 1975, p. 372. 52 See Clare A. P. Willsdon, Mural Painting in Britain 1840-1940: Image and Meaning, Oxford, Oxford University Press. 2000, p. 322. Willsdon remarks that Duncan’s Celticlegend-inspired murals for the Common Room in University Hall made a ‘highly original and distinctive contribution to mural painting in Britain […] one of the closest counterparts to French Nabi decoration’, ibid., p. 277; and that Duncan and Mackie were both in tune with European symbolism, which saw mural painting as ‘an affective medium, affording entry into dreams or emotional states’, ibid., pp. 326-327. On the Geddes family’s appreciation, see Thomson, ‘Patrick Geddes’s ‘Clan d’Artistes’, p. 66, note 5; Paul Desjardins had arranged for posters of Puvis’s Sainte Geneviève murals to be pasted up in Paris streets as a moralizing force, and they were also reproduced by Patrick Geddes and colleagues in 1896, see ibid., p. 39; see also Elizabeth Cumming, ‘Patrick Geddes: cultivating the Garden of Life’ and in particular Frances Fowle, ‘The Franco-Scottish Alliance: Artistic Links between Scotland and France in the late 1880s and 1890s’, in Fowle and Thomson, Patrick Geddes: The French Connection, pp. 13-26 and 27-46, for further remarks about the influence of Puvis on Duncan

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In the mid-1890s, alongside all his other activities, Geddes had launched a publishing house, Patrick Geddes and Colleagues. In 1895-96 it published four numbers (spring, summer, autumn, winter) of an illustrated review, The Evergreen. The venture was short-lived, yet it was a ‘unique vehicle for the dissemination of [his] theories – especially the notion of “synthesis”, but also of science and socialism, ideas which were nurtured and reinforced by his artistic and anarchist contacts in France’.53 The Evergreen was remarkable not only for its eclectic content and its design, but also for the degree to which it represented a Franco-Scottish collaboration. If one lists only the items with a French connection, the first number, Spring 1895, included an etching by Nabi painter Paul Sérusier (1863-1927); it was followed by a piece by Dorothy Herbertson called ‘Spring in Languedoc’; Charles Saroléa, the newly appointed head of French at Edinburgh University, contributed an essay in French on modern literature. The second volume, also 1895, contained a translation by William Sharp of a piece by Belgian writer Charles van Lerberghe, and an article in French by Abbé Félix Klein, the Le Playist Catholic priest, on ‘Le dilettantisme’ – a piece critical (as might be expected) of such secular writers as Renan and Anatole France. Then comes a fable by Elisée Reclus called ‘La Cité du Bon Accord’. The summer volume of 1896 contained a piece by Klein on religion, and an illustration in black and white by John Duncan, depicting Joan of Arc and her Scottish guard (which was to play a role in diplomatic contacts, see Chapter 5). The ‘Book of Winter’, 1896, contains ‘Il neige’ by Desjardins; an article called ‘Pourquoi des guirlandes vertes à Noèl’ by Elisée’s brother (and Paul’s father) Elie Reclus, and one by Catherine Janvier called ‘A devolution of terror’, plus an article in English by M. Clothilde Balfour, ‘The black month’, on Breton customs.54 As Anna Geddes remarked, ‘All Pat’s projects are linked’.55 For a list of his contacts see the appendix to Chapter 6, below. Several of these names are of lecturers at the Summer Meetings. Israel Zangwill in 1896 described Geddes and colleagues as wishing to organize life as a whole, expressing themselves through educational and civic activities, through art and architecture, and to make of Edinburgh the ‘Cité du Bon Accord’ dreamed of by Elisée Reclus; it was to usher in a Celtic renaissance and revive the ‘old Continental sympathy of Scotland’,56 though as observers noted, some of these projects foundered in the ‘East-windy, West-endy’ city of Edinburgh. The bewildering range of contacts and activities surrounding Geddes is possibly and others. Cf. Irwin, Scottish Painters, pp. 376-7 on the dominance of Puvis de Chavannes in conversations about Parisian art. Murals for Glasgow City Chambers were done by Glasgow Boys Roche,Walton, Lavery and Henry. 53 Fowle ‘The Franco-Scottish Alliance’ in Fowle and Thomson, Patrick Geddes: the French Connection, p. 34. 54 This summary is based on that by Macdonald in ‘Patrick Geddes’s Generalism’, pp. 83-85. 55 ‘All Pat’s projects are linked’, Anna Geddes, copy of letter dated 5 August 1900, NLS, MS 10577. See Cumming, ‘Patrick Geddes’, p. 20, and reference to exhibition of April 1895, PGA/US, T.GED 5/1/21; on Duncan and Old Edinburgh School of Art. 56 The Pall Mall Magazine, 1896, quoted Mairet, Pioneer of Sociology, p. 67.

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unique, yet through it all runs the thread of wanting Scotland to be connected to the most advanced thought in France (which for Geddes was Europe). It enables us to some extent to reconcile the awkward fact that while Geddes was on very friendly terms with political exiles, and actually sheltering, almost as one of the family, Paul Reclus who was actively wanted by the same French Third Republic, he was at precisely the same time engaging with aristocrats and French government ministers in the late 1890s, in hopes of furthering the Franco-Scottish Society, the subject of the next chapter.

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CHAPTER FIVE

A ‘Petite Entente’? The Origins of the Franco-Scottish Society This astonishing obsession with the legitimacy of your dominance over all points of the known universe is a feature peculiar to your race. The world is your oyster, the oceans belong to you, people are your enemies when they refuse to be your humble subjects. Wherever one of your people sets foot, wherever he can hold a drop of salt-water in the palm of his hand, he feels at home and says ‘This is mine’.1

This passage is from the entry on ‘Angleterre’, England, in Larousse’s Grand Dictionnaire Universel, published in the mid-1860s. Although the British and French had been on the same side in the Crimean War of the 1850s, it was taken for granted that they might in future clash in war, and then ‘we will see not only two sets of interests, but two races, two philosophies, and even two separate civilizations’.2 French detestation of ‘le perfide Albion’ and British disdain for ‘Latin races’, considered to include the French, fuelled many speeches and articles on both sides of the Channel. Such feelings were particularly sharply revived in the last years of the nineteenth century, when it seemed as though France and Britain were the two powers most likely to clash in colonial theatres of war (the time of Fashoda and the Boer War). The kind of cultural links made by private individuals, whether artists or intellectuals, noted in previous chapters, were fragile bases on which to build international understanding. Yet by 1904 there had been a volte-face of a kind, when the Entente Cordiale was signed. There might appear to be little in the way of perceptible links between the subject of this book and this geo-political about-turn of 1904, which was largely determined by considerations about spheres of influence in North Africa (Egypt and Morocco), and helped along by the personal intervention of Edward VII. It would certainly be foolish to claim that the Franco-Scottish Society, founded in 1895-96, and still in existence today, had very much to do with the eventual outcome. But there is a 1

Quoted in Martyn Cornick, ‘Distorting Mirrors: French-British Perceptions in the finde-siècle’, in M. Cornick and Ceri Crossley, eds, Problems in French History, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2000, pp. 125-148, p. 131. Scottish, Welsh and Irish readers will probably be aware that the usage ‘Angleterre’ to mean all of Britain was commonplace in France, and remains so even today. Its actual inclusiveness as a term varies in practice. Paul Morand in his essay on the belle époque, in 1900, Paris, Editions de France, 1931, wrote: ‘The French, so divided among themselves at this time were agreed on one point only: their hatred of England (l’Angleterre)’, p. 197. 2 Ibid., p. 132.

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strong case for seeing it as one of a number of dry runs or cultural links, fostered by certain elite circles in both countries. The Franco-Scottish Society (known in France as the Association Franco-Ecossaise) was not confined to Paris and Edinburgh: but in its early days, the two capital cities played a leading part in its creation and activities. Its origins lay partly in the academic world, but it had connections and ramifications extending into the spheres of commerce and politics, in the years before the Entente Cordiale proper.3 Patrick Geddes was – predictably – one of those concerned with the beginnings of the society. As mentioned earlier, his interest in student exchanges went back a long way. In the wake of the 1889 Paris Exhibition, he had joined the historian Ernest Lavisse and the scientist Louis Pasteur to form a ‘Comité franco-écossais’, mainly relating to such exchanges. Its administrator was to be Paul Melon. This bilateral Franco-Scottish group did not in the end formally meet, since in 1890 Paul Melon, who was also the director of the Alliance française, decided to organize a much wider committee to oversee all foreign students in Paris (see Chapter 8 below). Pasteur became its president and Lavisse also joined it. In the same year, Geddes liaised with Principal Donaldson of St Andrews University and others in setting up a ‘Scots College and foreign residence committee’, which would both advise Scottish students going abroad and foreign students in Scotland.4 During the next few years, a number of convivial gatherings for senior students and lecturers were held in Paris. Geddes’s friends, Ernest Lavisse and Henri de Varigny, were particularly active in welcoming Scottish visitors to Paris.5 And the 12 students visiting in 1892 were also invited to weekly receptions at the home of another friend of Geddes’s, the Baroness Blaze de Bury.6 Back in Edinburgh, the number of French students was increasing, some of them drawn by Geddes’s

3

On the Entente Cordiale, see Christopher Andrew, Théophile Delcassé and the Making of the Entente Cordiale, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1968; P. M. H. Bell, France and Britain 1900-1940: Entente and Estrangement, London, Longman, 1996; Philippe Chassaing and M. L. Dockrill, eds, Anglo-French Relations 1898-1998: from Fashoda to Jospin, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2002; Maurice Vaïsse, ed., L’Entente cordiale: de Fachoda à la Grande Guerre dans les archives du Quai d’Orsay, Paris, Editions Complexe, 2004. 4 Transactions of the Franco-Scottish Society 1898-1901, vol. I, Edinburgh, FrancoScottish Society, 1898. Copy consulted in the National Library of Scotland (hereafter NLS), Acc 10638 /A 16, pp. 227 ff. ‘A short history of the Society’. The archives of the FrancoScottish Society are in NLS Acc 10638, various items. 5 Ibid., p. 228: at the first Scots College dinner, in 1891 a vote of thanks was passed to Professor Lavisse ‘who had received all the Scots students’ and Dr Henri de Varigny, who had ‘helped the medical graduates’. 6 See Chapter 4 above and David Steel’s entry on Rose Blaze de Bury in E. Ewan, S. Innes and S. Reynolds, eds, The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2006; ‘all the Scots students were invited to the Baroness Blaze de Bury’s weekly receptions from the beginning of 1891’, Transactions, p. 228.

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Summer Meetings, others Protestants doing part of their theological courses, or medical students at the University.7 Scots in Paris These links were fostered by academics on both sides of the Channel, who were to become some of the first members of the Franco-Scottish society. Nevertheless most accounts agree that the idea itself came from a Scottish lawyer living in Paris, Thomas Barclay (1853-1941). Barclay, born in Dunfermline, was an almost exact contemporary of Geddes. Both men were now in their energetic forties. Barclay had studied at University College London, married a Frenchwoman, Marie-Thérèse Teuscher, and was from 1876-82 a correspondent for The Times. After the events described in this chapter, he went on to be president of the British Chamber of Commerce in Paris (1889-1900), was knighted in 1904, and became a Liberal MP at Westminster in 1910. In the 1890s, however, as a member of the Société historique, he was particularly interested in the historic links between France and Scotland. One of his dreams was to buy and revive the Collège des Ecossais (Scots College) in Paris, founded in the Middle Ages and removed in the 1690s to a building in what is now the rue Cardinal Lemoine. It had remained Catholic after the Reformation, housing relics of James II and VII, and was confiscated as such during the Revolution.8 By his own account, Barclay ‘unfolded this plan’ in 1894 to a few French friends in political circles. They included the veteran academic and politician Jules Simon (1814-96) and Barclay’s contemporary, Léon Bourgeois (1851-1925). Bourgeois, a centre-left politician, was an important ally. He had already been minister for education, and minister of justice, in centre-left republican administrations, and would soon, in 1895, become prime minister of France, if only for a short while; he was identified with, and principal theorist of the philosophy known as Solidarism, which dominated thinking during the last decade of the century.9 On the Scottish side, Barclay contacted Principal Donaldson of St Andrews, who must have put him in touch with Geddes – like Barclay a world-class networker, but whom he had not met before. Geddes immediately sent Barclay a list of French academics to whom he had reliably entrusted students (see Chapter 4), and in particular put him in touch 7

See Chapters 4 above and 8 below. On the Scots College and its history, see Thomas Barclay, Thirty Years: Anglo-French reminiscences 1876-1906, London, Constable, 1914, pp. 129 ff. and pp. 366 ff., article ‘On the Scots College in Paris’, published in The Times, 28 October 1895. 9 Theodore Zeldin, France 1848-1945, 2, vol. I, Ambition, Love and Politics, Oxford, Clarendon, 1972, devotes an entire chapter, pp. 640 ff., to Solidarism, the philosophy formulated by Léon Bourgeois: essentially it reposed on the notion of the ‘social debt’ which all citizens owed society. This formulation paved the way eventually for taxation to provide social welfare, but could be perceived at the time as a benevolent form of conservatism, since it opposed any form of socialism. It was, however, warmly embraced by the republicans of the fin de siècle, whose sentiments were liberal, in the sense of protecting democratic freedoms. 8

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with Paul Melon: ‘He [Melon] worked in the educational world, I in the political, with the result that before long, we secured the support of all the most prominent men in France’.10 Barclay’s other personal contacts, including the former governor of Bombay, Lord Reay, and Professor Burnet, helped him to ‘enrol Scotsmen’. On 18 October 1895, a letter signed by Reay, Sheriff Mackay, Barclay, Geddes and Professor Kirkpatrick of Edinburgh University, among others, called an inaugural meeting of the Scottish branch, to be held in the Court Room in Edinburgh’s Old College. About 40 people attended, mostly elite men in the universities or politics. In time, the Franco-Scottish society would have many women members, but at the first meeting, the only women were Edinburgh School Board member, Flora Stevenson, and Geddes contact, Jane Hay. Lord Reay indicated from the chair that one aim of the society would be to publish historical records dealing with both France and Scotland. Barclay read a paper about the Scots College. Thereafter a constitution was drafted, and an invitation was received from Octave Gréard to a reception in the Grand Amphitheatre of the New Sorbonne, which was to be the joint inaugural meeting.11 About 40 Scots made it to this meeting, which lasted 3 days in April 1896. The roll-call sounds like a branch meeting of the ‘république des professeurs’ combined with the ‘high heidyins’ of (mostly academic) Scottish society. Among the French were a swathe of eminent academics and administrators: Gréard, of course, and Lavisse; the Hellenist Alfred Croiset; the scientist Emile Duclaux, director of the Institut Pasteur (successor to Pasteur himself who had died in 1895); Emile Boutroux, Charles Gide, and Louis Liard, architect of university reform in France. Most of these men had already been recruited by Geddes for one or other of his exchange schemes. Alongside them, were several members of the aristocracy from both countries, as well as some politicians of varying allegiance. Those present did not include Geddes, as it happened.12 Jules Simon’s welcoming speech dwelt on a vanishing world, contrasting the new Sorbonne with the old (where Balzac and Voltaire had sat on the benches) but also pointing out that his old tutor Victor Cousin had been indebted to the ‘Scottish School’ of philosophy (Reid, Ferguson, Dugald Stewart and Hamilton).13 To indicate that a new age was beginning, Nénot, 10

Barclay, Thirty Years, p. 130. Paul Melon (1844-1915) was a Protestant from Montpellier (like several people known to Patrick Geddes) and devoted his life to various forms of cultural exchange, see obituary in Bulletin de l’Association franco-écossaise, 1916, in NLS, Acc 10638. 11 Ibid., pp. 129 ff. Transactions, p. 231; see also the account of the first two meetings in Alan Steele, ‘The Franco-Scottish Society and the Edinburgh university department of French’, Franco-Scottish Bulletin , 24 (centenary issue), May 1995, pp.12-20. Lord Reay (Donald Mackay) (1839-1921 was also the first president of the British Academy. Octave Gréard (1828-1904), ‘a powerful civil servant’, (Zeldin, France, II, p. 179) was recteur of the Sorbonne. 12 Transactions, p. 231. 13 On the influence of these thinkers on Cousin during the July Monarchy, see the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004 (hereafter ODNB),

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its architect, showed the party round the new Faculty of Sciences. They later had tours of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques. On the evening of 18 April, a banquet was held, the first ever inside the Sorbonne, the occasion for much Franco-Scottish decoration (tartans) and pageantry. Although at this time French banquets were often all-male affairs, at this one ‘several ladies were present’, mostly the wives of key players, including Mme Gréard, Mme Melon, Mrs Donaldson, Mrs Scott Dickson and Mrs Burnet.14 Jules Simon then spoke again, referring to the recent Women’s Congress, and then ‘paid a glowing tribute to the heroism of Frenchwomen as displayed by Joan of Arc’. He also ‘defended the character of French women against misrepresentations’ – presumably a reference to ‘gay Paree’ and the supposed disapproval of British visitors.15 Joan of Arc figured prominently at this gathering, since it had been decided that those attending should all receive a reproduction of a drawing by John Duncan, the close associate of Geddes in the Old Edinburgh School of Art. Entitled The Way to Rheims, it showed Joan of Arc surrounded by her guard of Scottish archers on her way to the coronation of the Dauphin at Reims (1429) (see Figure 5.1).16 At a function later that evening, an artist’s proof of the same drawing was presented to the President of the Republic, Félix Faure, who ‘asked many questions about places in Scotland which he had visited or heard of while resident in that country’.17 The Joan of Arc reference alarmed Barclay, however, who had longer-term views, and found himself worrying that ‘indiscreet Scottish patriots’ might turn the occasion into an ‘anti-English manifestation’, on account of the Auld Alliance between France and Scotland. (Joan had been burnt at the stake by the English at Rouen in 1431, that

as follows Fania Oz-Salzberger, ‘Ferguson, Adam’; A. Ryan, ‘Hamilton, Sir William Stirling’; Paul Wood, ‘Reid, Thomas’; Michael P. Brown, ‘Stewart, Dugald’. Reid was in particular seen as the contradictor of David Hume: scepticism was not in favour during the July Monarchy. 14 Transactions, p. 236. 15 Two international congresses on women’s rights had been held in Paris during the 1889 exhibition. The term ‘feminist’ in reference to the international women’s movement began to be used in the 1890s and in April 1896, a Congrès féministe international was held in Paris. This was presumably the one to which Simon referred: it had attracted a good deal of press coverage. See Karen Offen, European Feminisms 1700-1950: a political history, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2000, pp. 184-185, and Chapter 8 below. 16 The Joan of Arc idea had come originally from Andrew Lang (1844-1912) and was passed on by Geddes: ‘What do you say to a picture suggested by Andrew Lang of the FrancoScottish society, of Joan of Arc with her bodyguard of Scots archers?’ letter from Geddes to Duncan, 18 November 1895, NLS, MS 10508; as noted above, the illustration was included in a number of The Evergreen. Lang was a Scot who had settled in London; he had spent a few years in Edinburgh, but was more connected with the Borders and St Andrews. A man of broad culture and a prolific writer, he later published a book on Joan of Arc which was published in French in the Nelson Collection; see Chapter 7 below and William Donaldson, ‘Lang, Andrew’ in ODNB. 17 Transactions, p. 237.

Figure 5.1

John Duncan, black and white drawing, ‘The way to Rheims’, in The Evergeen: the book of summer, 1896, p.99. © Estate of John Duncan/DACS, London 2008. Reproduced by permission of the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland.

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is, 2 years after the coronation), so he ‘concocted an attenuating verse which was hurriedly printed and slipped into the envelope with the print’.18 Barclay’s concern was indeed further-reaching than those of most of his colleagues. The society’s constitution, drafted by him and formally adopted at this 1897 meeting, set out its aims, which looked quite modest. They were to ‘bring the universities of the two countries into connection with each other, by encouraging interchange of students’; to bring about intercourse between members; to promote historical research concerning the ancient relations between the two countries and, ‘in general, by periodical meetings held in France and Scotland, and all other means, to renew, as far as possible, the bonds of sympathy between the two countries’. These terms are vague. What Barclay had really planned, in a memorandum to himself in 1894, according to his own account, was much more political, and more akin to some version of the entente cordiale. He planned to ‘work first on the Franco-Scottish tradition’, encouraging historical research. But he added that ‘opportunities [were to] be utilized of drawing the English into the work.’ He then referred to imperial conflicts of interest between Britain and France, in Egypt, Morocco, New Caledonia and so on, ‘which might easily be solved if the two peoples were friendly’. Further points to develop would be trade, literature and sport. But point 4 of his memo specified the ‘necessity of proceeding without exciting opposition or jealousy of authorities, first steps to be as secret as possible’. In short, as he later wrote, his idea was to ‘create an atmosphere favourable for removing the causes of friction’.19 In a disingenuous letter to The Times, sent in July 1897, when the next joint meeting was held in Edinburgh, Barclay wrote: No doubt the efforts which are being made to bring about an entente cordiale between Great Britain and France will be warmly appreciated and forwarded on the other side of the Channel; all the sympathy of Scotsmen, just as much as that of Englishmen, with be with such a movement. I would however point out, if it is not already abundantly clear, that the Franco-Scottish Society is quite distinct from associations connected with any such movement. Its objects are purely academic and historical, and though it may have excellent results in promoting good feeling between the two countries, this, however desirable, will only be the accidental consequences of a movement devoid of any political object, colour, or design.20

He then, however, went on to argue that this could be seen by the combination within the Franco-Scottish society of politicians of ‘such different political hues’ as Casimir-Périer (millionaire and former President of the republic), the Prince d’Arenberg (conservative rallied to the Republic), M. de Franqueville, M. Ribot,

18

Barclay, Thirty Years, p. 131. Ibid., p. 195 ff.; it is hard to know how much Barclay exaggerated his role. His knighthood in 1904 might shed light on this. 20 Barclay, Thirty Years, Appendix, p. 373; note that the term entente cordiale, originally coined by Lord Aberdeen in the 1840s was widely used during the 1890s. 19

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and M. Hanotaux (former foreign minister, who had been at odds with CasimirPérier during his brief presidency).21 Parisians in Edinburgh The return visit, with some 60 French visitors coming to Edinburgh in July 1897 was the occasion of much planning by the Scottish branch, especially of the various banquets and excursions. Although some of the French top brass had to pull out at the last minute (Gréard, Liard, Lavisse, Casimir-Périer), the delegation was led by the Comte de Franqueville, an expert on the British constitution, along with Emile Boutroux, professor of philosophy in the Faculty of Letters in Paris (and brotherin-law of Henri Poincaré); Alfred Croiset, professor of Greek eloquence at the Sorbonne and close associate of Lavisse; Duclaux of the Pasteur institute; and Paul Melon. Madame Chalamet, director of University Hall, Paris, attended as well as ‘several ladies [unnamed wives of delegates] who had wished to enliven with their grace the sometimes severe meetings of the association’.22 The visit had begun with the reading of some quite serious academic papers – among others they included one by Kirkpatrick on the French constitution, and by Boutroux on the influence of Scottish philosophy in France: he explained that Victor Cousin, ‘grand master of the university’ under the July monarchy, being anxious about the spread of atheism, had specified that the ‘spiritualist doctrine of the Scottish philosophers’ – Reid, Dugald Stewart, and Hamilton – should be included in the philosophy syllabus of the French lycées. Charles Saroléa (1870-1953), the young, recently arrived, and energetic head of the French department of Edinburgh University, countered with a paper saying that the best prose stylists in Britain owed a great deal to the French classics. He made it an occasion to lament that most Modern Language departments in British universities (still in their youth and seeking respectability) concentrated on romance philology rather than literature. Saroléa would go on to be an enthusiastic member of the society, and to foster links with the French department, which he was just setting up. (Saroléa would also later be involved in a Franco-Scottish publishing project, see Chapter 7). In this connection, a surprising absence from the Franco-Scottish Society 21

Ibid., p. 373. Most of those named in this list were in fact on the right of centre, though they had clashed at times. But the Franco-Scottish society did have the support of centre-left politicians, such as former prime minister, the radical Léon Bourgeois, mentioned earlier, who presided over its 1896 meeting; see ibid., p. 131 (contains misprint of 1897 for 1896). Jean Casimir-Périer had resigned as President in 1895 after only a few months, both because he was subject to personal attacks, and because he felt he was being left in the cold by his ministers, who included Hanotaux. Casimir-Périer was to speak in Dreyfus’s defence, contradicting General Mercier in the Rennes re-trial of 1899; it has been suggested that if he, rather than the mediocre and anti-Dreyfus Félix Faure had been president, matters might have taken a different course during the Affair. 22 Jules Valéry, account of the meeting, in Revue française d’Edimbourg, Sept-Oct 1897, p. 285, copy in NLS, Acc 10638 (the Revue française was edited by Charles Saroléa).

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is the Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature, George Saintsbury (1845-1933) who had also just been appointed to Edinburgh. He was already the author of a Short History of French Literature (1881) and was also the chief contributor on French Literature to the then current 9th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1875-89). What was more, he was a considerable expert on wine. Particularly well-placed to foster relations between French and British scholarship, Saintsbury appears nowhere in the records of the Society, however, nor on the full list of Scottish members for 1901 (in the Society’s Transactions). It is possible that his absence can be explained either because he was not Scottish, or, possibly, because he did not see eye to eye with Saroléa.. As well as listening to papers, the visitors were taken on various excursions in and around Edinburgh, including visits both to board schools and to merchant company schools, conducted by Flora Stevenson. They were treated to several banquets with elaborate menus, including a lunch offered by the Lord Provost and a banquet in Edinburgh Castle (secured by the good offices of various well-placed committee members). The banqueting hall had been newly decorated thanks to a donation from publisher–printer William Nelson, whose daughter sat at the high table.23 The general bonhomie and the decidedly elite character of the proceedings drew some criticisms. In his description of the visit, published in Saroléa’s shortlived Revue française d’Edimbourg, Jules Valéry, law lecturer from the University of Montpellier, and older brother of the writer Paul Valéry, agreed that there were some ‘esprits chagrins’ (faultfinders), who thought the whole thing an excuse for some ‘junketings without importance and without consequence’. He countered with the view that the Society was a step in the right direction of helping to dispel misunderstandings and promote sympathy between peoples. He did, however, have one or two observations to make, which point up sharply the very Parisian character of the delegation: the French branch had not thought fit to introduce the delegates to each other in advance; and the Scottish organizers were not always aware of the 23

Ibid. and other accounts of this visit and banquet in the same archive; on the teaching of French, see R. G. Wakely, ‘Modern Language Studies at Scottish universities; the early days’, in R. G. Wakely and P. Bennett, eds, French and German in Scotland, Edinburgh, Dept of French, University of Edinburgh, 1996, pp. 1-21; on Sarolea see Chapter 7, below, and Peter France, ‘Saroléa, Charles’, ODNB; On William Nelson, see Alistair McCleery, ‘The Nelson family’, ODNB, and see Chapter 7 below. On Saintsbury, see Alan Bell, ‘Saintsbury, George’, ODNB. In his inaugural address at Edinburgh in 1895, Saintsbury, while often alluding to European literature, spoke as follows: ‘When I hear persons whom I respect championing English or French or German, or all together, as substituted for Greek or Latin, I am obliged to interpose an uncompromising denial. […] As the modern languages are not a substitute for the ancient, so the ancient are not a substitute for the modern.’ He went on to say that he aimed to deal, in his role as Professor of Rhetoric, (as distinct from English) not only with English literature but with ‘the earliest examples of European literary forms in time, the furthest removed in country’. Perhaps he considered the separate establishment of a French (literature) department, as Saroléa intended, to be poaching. The address is in George Saintsbury: the memorial volume, London, Methuen, 1945.

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‘rank’ of their visitors, so that the ‘règles de préséance’ (protocol) were not always observed – which had led to little moments of froissement (umbrage). Finally, significantly, he complained (and it is clear that this comes from one of the few provincial guests) that the society seemed to operate ‘as if Paris was the only city in France with a university, the only city interested in Scotland, or which possessed men appropriate to represent France outside our frontiers’, an observation which indicates how narrowly focused the Society was in these early years.24 In its first year or so after this, there was a great deal of generalized goodwill, more elite fraternization, and a few good-humoured events. When the first French rugby team ‘crossed the border’ in February 1898, for example, the Society arranged a welcome and a dinner at the Balmoral Hotel, with a long French menu. Mr J. Brander Hatt, an enthusiastic member of the society, had taken two Scottish XVs over to Paris in 1896 and 1897, when rugby was still a relatively new sport in France, but this was the first ‘international’. Among the Scottish players was Tommy Nelson, son of printer–publisher William Nelson (see Chapter 7 below). This was the beginning of a sporting association which would be long-lasting and probably productive of considerable contacts.25 In parallel, the society could claim some serious success on the academic front, with a ‘decided increase in the number of Scottish students, both male and female, visiting France, and vice versa’.26 By the late 1890s, Geddes’s Summer Meetings in Edinburgh were slightly changing in character, but in no way losing their French accent: in fact by becoming, with help from the Society, ‘Modern Language Summer Schools’, they were becoming more French if anything, for the benefit of British students. The 12th Edinburgh Summer Meeting’, in which Geddes was still participating, took place in August 1898, and had become a comparative school on Great Britain and France, though still including some field trips. But the scientific character of the meetings had vanished. Fifteen of the 110 cosmopolitan students were French or French-speaking, while at least eleven of the lecturers were from France, and were specialists on literature and philosophy. They included faithful regulars like Henri Mazel and René Doumic, with MM. Caudel and Viallatte from the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques. In August 1900, by which time Geddes had virtually desisted from organizing (and was in any case in Paris most of the time), ‘the Summer School of Modern Languages’ was in session as usual and had a clearly 24 Valéry, account of meeting, pp. 301-303, see note 22 above; clearly in its early days the society concentrated very much on Paris and Edinburgh. In later years, Glasgow was brought in to a greater extent; visits were arranged to other French cities and eventually the society did acquire a much more widely based membership in both countries. There are a large number of accounts of the 1897 visit in the Society’s Edinburgh archives; Valéry’s is perhaps the most objective. 25 The Student, 3 January 1898, on the French Rugby Union, by then with 25,000 members, (non-playing) and several athletic clubs, for example, Stade de France and the Racing Club, fielding teams. Oxford and Cambridge universities had sent teams over too; see cutting in NLS, Acc 10638/B7. 26 Steele, ‘The Franco-Scottish society’.

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‘comparative civilization’ character. New French representatives included Léon Marillier, Bazalgette, Firmin Roz, Mansion and Delvolvé. Professor Kirkpatrick continued to be a leading lecturer.27 The Society, it appears then, held the commitment of academics. Alongside the summer schools, it regularly arranged bursaries, exchanges, visits and awarded prizes to university students.28 The Scottish branch’s Transactions regularly list the awards made, and, apart from social events, education continued to be the society’s chief activity, under its active educational committee. There was initially a scheme to rent some rooms in the Latin quarter as a club for Scottish students, pending the hoped-for revival of the Scots College, but mainly for practical reasons this did not materialize.29 It is possible that politics also played a part, for although in general the educational activities survived and prospered, unforeseen problems overtook the Franco-Scottish rapprochement in 1898, as Franco-British relations in general hit a stormy patch. ‘He could not guarantee we would not be hissed’ In terms of foreign affairs, the Jameson raid of 1895 in the Transvaal had already fluttered the dovecotes, (and prepared the way for the French reaction to the Boer War.) As Barclay put it later, it excited a feeling in France ‘of the perfidious character of British policy’.30 Then in July 1898 came the Fashoda (Fachoda) confrontation, when Captain Marchand arrived in Fashoda, on the White Nile in the Sudan, having led a remarkable expedition across from French West Africa. France’s original intention had been to provoke a showdown over Egypt. Marchand and General Kitchener, who met him with a British force, in fact sat down to wait for their respective governments to sort it out, which they did, after a fashion, in November. But the autumn was tense, with Britain and France almost reaching a declaration of war. Sitting in their committee rooms in George Street, Edinburgh, the officers of the Scottish branch of the Franco-Scottish Society hesitated over whether they ought to send any message to their French opposite numbers. They ended up, probably correctly, thinking that any form of wording might be viewed by some party or other ‘in a wrong light’, and maintained a studious inactivity. As the chairman, the Marquess of Lothian explained to the annual general meeting a few months later in February 1899, they had hoped matters would settle, but that any expression of 27

Léon Marillier was a specialist on religion, whose promising career was cut short in a train crash in 1902. He was a family connection of the historian Charles Seignobos (18541942), whose address was on Patrick Geddes’s list in 1900 (see Chapter 6 below) and this was no doubt the connection. The other names also recur as organizers. The faithful Marie Bonnet, of Montpellier, who was an intimate of the Geddes family, continued to teach French. 28 See Steele, ‘The Franco-Scottish society’ on this. 29 NLS, Acc10638/A1, loose letter from J. Milne in Paris, 5 May 1899, setting these out. 30 Barclay, Thirty Years, p. 141.

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sympathy to their French friends would be open to misinterpretation. He now judged that the ‘friction was disappearing’. He stated firmly, taking refuge in an apolitical stance, that ‘what they were trying to do, absolutely and only, was to do all they could to assist Scottish students in France and French students in Scotland to lead more comfortable lives in every way’.31 The planned meeting of 1899 in France did not take place at all. As Thomas Barclay later wrote: Its third joint meeting was to have taken place in France in 1899 and I struggled to get the French section to move, but the resentment over the Fashoda affair was felt most keenly just among the class of men who were members of the society. Comte de Franqueville, the author of a French work on English judicial institutions which is almost a classic, President of the French section of the society, told me that he could not guarantee we should not be hissed, if we met before the resentment had calmed down.32

More was to follow. As Barclay noted, ‘the whole country was [also] in a state of high nervous tension on account of the Dreyfus conflict and everything was out of focus’.33 The Dreyfus affair, which had not yet became a cause celèbre in 1896 or even in the summer of 1897, was by 1898 monopolizing French politics. Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, had been accused of spying in September 1894. Having been found guilty, at a court martial, on secret evidence, he was serving a life sentence on Devil’s Island. As it started to appear that the army had acted hastily and that the spy might be another officer, the press began to take an interest. The newly-implicated officer, Count Esterhazy, was, however, acquitted by another court-martial in autumn 1897. It was in response to this attempt at a cover-up that the novelist Emile Zola published his famous article, ‘J’Accuse’, on 13 January 1898. Subsequently, Zola was prosecuted for libelling army officers, and fled to escape imprisonment, taking refuge in the south of England. As events unfolded, the revelation came in August 1898 that documents relating to Dreyfus and held on file had been forged and rearranged by a staff officer in the counterespionage section, Major Henry. When he was arrested and called to account, Henry committed suicide while still in custody. Renewed calls for a retrial of Dreyfus, whose guilt now seemed in doubt to many liberals, were by then sharply dividing France. One one side were those, including many Catholics, who thought the French army should be supported in the interests of national security, on the other, those who called for republican justice, and accused the army, amongst other things, of anti-semitism. Parisian political and academic circles were particularly split, with petitions being signed and counter-signed by rival teams of professors. Some of the prominent members of the Franco-Scottish Society found themselves on different 31

Minute book, NLS, Acc 10638/A1, AGM, February 1899, p. 51. Barclay, Thirty Years, p.134; On reaction in France to the Boer War, see references in D. Brooks, The Age of Upheaval: Edwardian Politics 1899-1914, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1995. 33 Barclay, Thirty Years, p. 134. 32

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sides. As for British public opinion, it was massively on the side of a retrial, and in favour of Dreyfus: ‘in England, pro-Dreyfusism raged as anti-French fever’.34 When the French government, led by premier Waldeck-Rousseau, finally ordered a retrial, Dreyfus was brought back to France in the summer of 1899. For fear of disturbances if it was held in Paris, the retrial, a second court-martial, was held in the Breton city of Rennes. When, in September 1899, this second court-martial also found Dreyfus guilty, albeit with the absurd rider that there had been ‘extenuating circumstances’, there was an outburst of anti-French public feeling in Britain. This did not fail to make an impact on the Franco-Scottish Society. In his address to the Annual general meeting of February 1900, Professor Kirkpatrick, who was a well-informed observer, had to report as follows: I regret to say there has been one slightly jarring note. Several of our members were so indignant at the judgment of the court-martial at Rennes that they proposed to resign their membership and thenceforth to renounce all interest in France and the French, and I understand that one or two members actually did resign. Well, I quite understand their feelings.

He went on to argue, however, that comprehension should be shown to those (antiDreyfusards) who were chiefly showing their ‘loyal devotion’ to their Church and their army. He also pointed out that the Protestants and the ‘foremost reformers and lovers of liberty and justice were unanimously Dreyfusards, or revisionists, or intellectuals, [so] there remains but a small residue of forgers and perjurers and haters of the Jews and enemies of justice’.35 The feelings over Dreyfus subsided, particularly since in order to avoid further trouble, the long-suffering captain had been given a free pardon by the French President (by now Emile Loubet, and not Félix Faure, the anti-Dreyfusard President, who had died in February 1899). But it appeared that any major ambitions for the Franco-Scottish Society on the diplomatic front, despite its elite membership, were not to be fulfilled. ‘The Franco-Scottish scheme had a good beginning, but it had not taken deep enough root to resist the storm which broke out the following years’ as Barclay put it.36 Then October 1899 saw the outbreak of the Boer War: French public opinion was and remained pro-Boer, seeing Britain as the aggressor in a Davidversus-Goliath conflict. 1900 was a difficult year. The relief of Mafeking in May was not greeted with enthusiasm in France, and British visitors initially appear to have boycotted the Paris Exhibition (see Chapter 6 below). Nevertheless, looking back in January 1901, Lord Kelvin, chairing the Scottish branch of the Society noted that ‘a year ago there might have been some cloud over 34

Ibid., p. 136. See also M. Cornick, ‘La réception de l’Affaire en Grande-Bretagne’ in M. Drouin, ed., L’Affaire Dreyfus de A à Z, Paris, Flammarion, 1994, pp. 575-580. The Daily Mail called the Rennes verdict ‘a moral Sedan’. 35 Transactions, 1900, p 120-121. 36 Barclay, Thirty Years, p. 45.

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the entente cordiale between the peoples of Great Britain and France’ (though he did not think it was shared by the members of their society), but he was now touched by the sympathy shown by the French press, as Queen Victoria lay dying. A telegram of sympathy at her death was dispatched by Casimir-Périer from the French branch.37 The real entente cordiale, when it came, was, as Christopher Andrew has argued, mostly a question of Realpolitik. A major role was played by Edward VII’s visit to Paris in June 1903. The rapprochement was greeted with satisfaction, naturally, by the officers of the Franco-Scottish Society.38 But neither Barclay nor Geddes, in the end, saw the Society as fulfilling their hopes. Barclay was indeed active in the run-up to the entente cordiale and got his knighthood thereupon – though Andrew regards him as having much exaggerated his role. The dream of reviving the Scots College did not come off, and while Geddes was pleased with the Society’s academic support for students, it did not become the exciting cultural forum he would have wished. However, that is not the end of this particular story, since the sequence – if sequence there was – leading from the Franco-Scottish Society to the Entente Cordiale took a detour via the unexpected channels of the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris. Certain political and academic elites had been drawn into cooperating with their equivalents in Britain. Many of the same people would be drawn into further cultural cooperation, during the Exhibition, in a different set of schemes launched by Geddes, which can be seen as weaving another set of fine threads linking France and Scotland, Paris and Edinburgh.

37

Transactions,1900; caricatures of Queen Victoria in the French press during the Fashoda-Boer War period had been a cause of much friction.. 38 Minute book, Council, 3 May 1908, p. 108, NLS, 10638; on the events of 1903-04 see references in note 3 above.

CHAPTER SIX

Professor Geddes Goes to the Fair: The Globe, the Assembly and the Rue des Nations at the 1900 Paris Exhibition Grand exhibitions were a feature of the late nineteenth century. The key players were France, Britain and the United States. It has been argued that the French choice of title ‘exposition universelle’ indicated a wish to be encyclopedic, the British ‘international exhibition’ division and competition, and the American ‘World’s Fair’ an ambiguous balance between entertainment and instruction.1 These mammoth displays had begun with the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London in 1851, and thereafter became competitive showcases for progress, science and the arts, taking place more often than not in Paris, which hosted its first major exhibition in 1855 under the Second Empire. London was the site of the 1862 exhibition, followed by another Parisian occasion in 1867, which went beyond its predecessors in conception and execution. Other cities held large-scale exhibitions – Vienna held a fair in 1873, then Philadelphia was the United States venue for the Centennial Exhibition of 1876. Chicago hosted the 1893 World’s Fair, which was another celebration, this time of Columbus’s voyage. European countries sent exhibits across the Atlantic, but for most Europeans, who could not hope to make the crossing, Paris set the recurring model with its three great exhibitions in 1878, 1889 and 1900, all of which were marked by efforts to create a visual impression. It became customary to erect a number of impressive but temporary structures, ‘pavilions’ either with a national or thematic identity, to be demolished when the fair was over. But in Paris the city was, and in many respects still remains, marked by permanent structures dating from exhibitions.2

1 Marcel Galopin, Les Expositions internationales au XXe siecle, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1992, p. 8. The 1900 exhibition was in fact the last to describe itself as ‘universal’, and the largest in terms of numbers attending. This chapter expands my contribution to Martyn Cornick and Ceri Crossley eds, Problems in French History, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2000: ‘After Dreyfus and before the Entente: Patrick Geddes’s Cultural Diplomacy at the Paris Exhibition of 1900’, pp. 149-167. 2 See also Brigitte Schroeder-Gudehus and Anne Rasmussen, Les Fastes du Progrès: le guide des Expositions universelles, 1851-1992, Paris, Flammarion, 1992 pp. 132- 139 and 141-43, for facts and figures concerning the 1900 exhibition; Pascal Ory, Les Expositions universelles de Paris, Paris, Ramsay, 1982.

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Visiting Paris for the 1878 exhibition, the Italian Edmondo de Amicis had immediately fallen under the thrall of the city itself, reflecting that it was extraordinary that this city ‘which one day seemed to have sunk entirely under the maledictions of God’, should only 7 years later be ‘so grand, so proud, so full of blood, gold and glory’.3 The reference to blood is ironic, for the destruction to which he refers was the semaine sanglante or Bloody Week, at the end of the Paris Commune. It was to erase this spectacle that the conservative republic of the 1870s prepared the festivities put on in 1878. An extraordinary palace, the Trocadéro – demolished in the 1930s to make way for the Palais de Chaillot – was created to impress visitors. Its style has been described as ‘Romano-Spanish-Moorish’ and to have created the fashion for ceramic decoration, with its round tower, framed in metal and faced with ceramic brick (see Figure 6.1).4 For the 1889 Paris exhibition, inspired by the commemorative American Centennial Fair of 1876, the event commemorated was the 1789 Revolution. This led to its being officially boycotted by most of the crowned heads of Europe, but other visitors came in greater numbers than ever before. What the Trocadéro had been in 1878, metal construction was in 1889. There were two extraordinary examples, the Galérie des Machines on the Champ de Mars – still standing in 1900, but demolished in 1910 – and the Eiffel Tower. The de facto ‘clou’ or centrepiece of the 1889 exhibition, the Eiffel Tower was chosen to demonstrate the revival of French technology, and was intended as a temporary exhibit.5 In 1900, then, all three of these grandiose monuments were still visible, but by the time of this, the last great Paris exhibition before the First World War, the emphasis had largely moved from engineering to art, and indeed to a sort of revival of ‘ornate classicism’.6 The Pont Alexandre III combined the two, since its metal arch of 107.5 metres was an impressive single span, designed to impress France’s German competitors, but the pillars at each corner were decorated with the most elaborate figurative stone sculpture, winged horses, putti, and so on. Across the Seine from the Esplanade des Invalides, two new palaces, the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais, were built to display art treasures, and still fulfil this function today. The Gare d’Orsay, although serving as a functional railway station, was another much ornamented building (now the Musée d’Orsay). What was more, the entry to the whole exhibition was a huge Porte Monumentale, of striking vulgarity according to some observers, topped by a statue of ‘la Parisienne’, depicted as a woman of fashion, wearing a hat in the shape of the ship which figures on the city’s coat of arms (see Figure 6.2).7 This exhibition, of which many photographic records remain, is the one that many people remembered when they thought of Paris, for good or ill, as embodying ‘la belle époque’. Although the general tone of the exhibition was 3 Norma Evenson, Paris: a century of change 1878-1978, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1979, p. 8. 4 Ibid., pp. 128-129, illustration. 5 On the Eiffel Tower, see Chapter 1 above, note 1. 6 Evenson, Paris, p. 136. 7 See Chapter 8 below.

Figure 6.1

The Trocadéro, still standing in the belle époque, demolished in the 1930s. Postcard, private collection.

Figure 6.2

The Paris Exhibition, 1900, the Monumental Entry Gate. Postcard, private collection.

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florid rather than modern, a few art nouveau pieces – really nouveau at the time – were shown, in the pavilion organized by Siegfried Bing. It also happened that Sir George H. Donaldson (1845-1925) the art collector, originally from Edinburgh but a long-time Paris resident, was vice-president of the furniture section, having already been a jury member in 1867 and 1889: he later donated his collection of art nouveau furniture from the Exhibition to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, where it raised eyebrows.8 Not everyone was in favour of the extravaganza. Maurice Barrès described this apotheosis of progress under the Republic as ‘lemonade and prostitution’; André Hallays called it ‘Pornopolis’ and professed himself nauseated by the ‘delirium of sculpture … the profusion of garlands, pilasters, flowers, animals, allegories, balconies and loggias, minarets, a cacophony of every style … which pleases the crowds’ (see Figure 6.3).9 Patrick Geddes, by contrast, compared the exhibition favourably with the recent Peace Congress at the Hague, when he wrote that ‘here is a more real Peace congress … a gathering of workmen and architects and artists have silently made peace more interesting than war’.10 He, like Amicis, had visited Paris for the 1878 exhibition and been captivated. He returned for the next one in 1889, and made many useful contacts. But in 1900, he was thoroughly involved and brought his Edinburgh ideas to the very centre of the Exposition. The Great Globe Geddes had already become involved in a scheme which was not his own, but that of his friend, the French geographer Elisée Reclus (see Chapter 5 above). One of the original ideas for the ‘clou’ to the 1900 Exposition Universelle had been none of the buildings mentioned above, but a spectacular, yet scientific project. It was perhaps remarkable that official sanction was accorded to an anarchist who had been sentenced to deportation after the Paris Commune. Reclus had been working for some time on the idea of a ‘Great Globe’: a relief Globe of the earth, built to large and visibly significant scale, which therefore had to be 1:100,000. On anything smaller, the visible relief surface of the earth would almost disappear: even Mount Everest would be a tiny bump. Flat two-dimensional maps did not correspond to reality, and most relief maps and globes for educational purposes are, of course, distorted in scale. Reclus believed strongly that children should be taught the truth: ‘Children 8

See Sorrel Hershberg, ‘Donaldson, Sir George’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004, (hereafter ODNB); on Bing see Debora Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France, Berkeley, University of Calfornia Press, 1992, Chapter 14. 9 Barrès quoted in Ory, Les Expositions universelles, p. 29; André Hallays, En flânant à travers l’Exposition, Paris, Perrin, pp. xvi-xviii and 13. 10 Patrick Geddes, ‘Thoughts at the Exposition’, University of Strathclyde, Geddes papers, (hereafter PGA/US): T.GED 6/1/6, galley proof of newspaper article, n.d., but May 1900.

Figure 6.3

The Paris Exhibition, 1900, the ‘moving pavement’, a travelator, which was a sensation. Postcard, private collection.

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have to recite the names of the five principal rivers in France, without any idea what they look like. … If I was a teacher, I would take them outside: … we would be able to look at the river bank, the current, see the ridges form on sand, the erosion of the bank, etc.’Reclus wanted the Globe to fulfil a scientific aim, but also to be beautiful: ‘Let us rule out any solution that isn’t elegant’.11 He wanted it to be visible from a distance, if possible set at the top of a hill, and to have a frame, made of metal, and a skin to protect it. His original vision looks something like a Fabergé egg (see Figure 6.4). The Globe would have to rotate and have observation galleries for viewers. Reclus had his engineer nephew Paul help with the technical specifications. One needs to remember that at this time, the planet was still only fairly recently explored: Australia had been on maps only for 100 years; the interior of Africa, the Arctic and Antarctic were still being prospected and much still remained to be properly mapped.12 The leftwing Paris city council enthusiastically embraced the notion in 1897, saying that ‘it used to be said that the Frenchman could be recognized by his small moustache and his absolute ignorance of geography. M. Elisée Reclus and his collaborators will give talks which will attract and influence many.’ The council also put a spin on it that Reclus would probably not have liked: ‘our colonial possessions so little known … will certainly be the subject of public lectures’.13 However there was no denying that it would be very expensive; the money was justified by Reclus as follows: This sum [estimated at approximately £200,000, a huge amount for the time] does not frighten us, because it represents useful work, which humanity cannot do without, if it is to acquire perfect knowledge of its environment, and we already know, alas, how much our human wealth has been wasted on futilities and crimes. So we launch an appeal to men of good will to help create this proposed project.14

This was where his friend Geddes came in. Having worked with Reclus in the early 1890s, he took up the cause enthusiastically, and tried to raise funds for it. He had always been convinced of the educational value of great exhibitions. ‘There can be no better standpoint for an intelligent survey of modern progress than that afforded by an international exhibition’, he had written in 1887, going on to say that organizers had a choice of constructing exhibitions:

11 Elisée Reclus, Projet de construction d’un globe terrestre à l’échelle du CentMillième, Paris, 1895, p. 8, copy in PGA/US, T.GED 13/2/3; see also the introduction to his La Terre, reproduced in E. Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, ed. Béatrice Giblin, Paris, Maspéro/ La Découverte, 1982, p. 31. 12 Reclus, Projet de Construction d’un globe terrestre, p. 8. See also Geddes papers, National Library of Scotland (NLS), correspondence with Elisée Reclus, MS 10564. 13 Report by M. Thuillier, 25 December 1897; the council voted unanimously to provide a site at the Trocadéro, papers in NLS, MS 10625; possibly this was because until May 1900, the Paris council was dominated by radicals but also included Reclus’s old acquaintance, exanarchist turned moderate socialist, Paul Brousse. 14 Reclus, Projet de construction d’un globe terrestre, pp. 8-9.

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Figure 6.4a Elisée Reclus’s project for a Terrestrial Globe for the 1900 Paris Exhibition, 1897-98. Reproduced by permission of the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland (MS 10625).

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Figure 6.4b The plan for the Globe, enlarged. It was to be located at the Trocadéro. Reproduced by permission of the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland (MS 10625).

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PARIS-EDINBURGH either on the one line, as an extended shop window, music saloon, and refreshment bar of unparalleled lustre and magnificence; or on the other, as a true museum, somewhat less partial and confused, of real material and social progress in the immediate past and a school, somewhat more effective and inspiring, of these in the immediate future.15

He judged that Edinburgh’s modest attempt at an ‘International Exhibition of Industry, Science and Arts’, which had been held in the West Meadows in 1886, did not really measure up to his hopes, and judged it ‘acutely provincial’, although noting that it was without vulgarity and ugliness, and admiring the French and Dutch art on display, as well as the recreation of ‘Old Edinburgh’; but he felt it had missed an educational and encyclopedic opportunity.16 (He did not mention the ‘Parisian’ main hall of this exhibition, designed by J. J. Burnet.)17 In 1900, Geddes set out to fulfil this vision of what an exhibition ought to provide with no fewer than three separate projects, the first being that of Elisée Reclus’s Globe. For Geddes, the Globe summed up what geography ought to be about: Fascinating as it was to listen to Reclus upon some great theme, […] it was on his globe that he surpassed himself. He had thought out how this was to be constructed as comprehensive summary of geodetic and cartographic science, how the panels must be arranged to be kept continually up to date, and thus form the permanent, yet ever-progressive record of geographic exploration and survey; how it should be oriented and revolved, lit and displayed, visited and studied; what should be its accessory resources, galleries, studies, reference collections and so on; in short, so as to meet every imaginable requirement of science, special and general, educational and popular. […] But then came the vivid phrase which brought all this mass of detail together; and the great globe rose beneath its mighty dome before his and his listeners’ inward sight – a universal geography indeed. […] The most monumental of museums, […] the microcosm of the macrocosm.18

There is a vast correspondence about the Globe in the Elisée Reclus papers in Paris, running from 1895 to 1899.19 It mainly concerns the financing, or rather lack of it. Patrick Geddes threw himself into fundraising with characteristic energy, travelling widely and hoping to procure support for the Globe and other projects (see below). He approached, among others, William Arrol, constructor of the Forth Bridge. One aim was to find eccentric philanthopists, but even in America, they were hard to find. On his visit to the United States in early 1900, Geddes explained 15 Patrick Geddes, Industrial Exhibitions and Modern Progress, Edinburgh, David Douglas, 1887, p. 15. 16 Ibid., pp. 8-9. 17 See Chapter 2 above, and David Walker, ‘Scotland and Paris 1874-1887’, in John Frew and David Jones, eds, Scotland and Europe: architecture and design 1850-1940, St Andrews, St Andrews Studies in the History of Scottish Architecture and Design, 1991, pp. 15-40, p. 30. 18 Patrick Geddes, ‘A great geographer: Elisée Reclus, 1830-1905’, The Scottish Geographical Magazine, Sept-Oct, 1905, pp. 1-13, pp. 8-9. 19 Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, Département des Manuscrits: NAF 22916, papiers Reclus.

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the project to a well-disposed businessman, Francis Leggett, with whom he and his wife were staying, but was floored (for once) by the query, ‘How would it help my or anyone else’s business?’ Sponsorship was less well-developed back in 1900.20 There were various attempts in France to get backing, or to combine it with a less scientific Globe – partly behind Reclus’s back. In April 1898 he admitted defeat, writing to his friend the photographer Nadar a year later, on 18 April 1899 that ‘our sons and grandsons will do greater works than we can’.21 It wasn’t going to happen. Eventually what happened was that another rather spectacular, but less scientific, celestial Globe (i.e. with the constellations marked on the outside), by Frédéric Galeron, replaced it at the 1900 Exhibition. As Gary Dunbar puts it: Both Reclus and Geddes were regarded by their contemporaries as brilliant but impractical visionaries, notably lacking that one ingredient that the success of the Globe scheme depended upon – shrewd business sense. Who knows what would have been done with the scheme if a lesser man, but one with greater financial acumen, had been at the helm?22

But the Globe remained a dream and a symbol. It was very clearly paralleled by Geddes’s view of the Outlook Tower in Edinburgh, as he specifically recognized: a visual representation of the world, showing clear awareness of human impingement on it. He later tried to promote the idea, again unsuccessfully, for the Glasgow Exhibition of 1901. The significant aspect of Reclus’s approach, which distinguished him even from Kropotkin, and from Vidal de la Blache, who come to eclipse him in French geographical world, was his view of the impact of industrialism and human settlement on geography. The international assembly As it became clear that the Globe would not be built, Geddes concentrated on another plan he had been considering for some time: his own most ambitious project to date, the International Assembly or Ecole internationale: in effect a four-language Summer School running throughout the exhibition. This represents in a way both the culmination and the apogee of Geddes’s cultivation of his French networks, noted in other chapters. As outlined in Chapter 5 above, official relations between France and Britain were barely lukewarm as the year 1899 drew to a close. After Fashoda, during the Boer War, and in the wake of the second Dreyfus court-martial, British visitors were tempted to boycott the Paris Exhibition which opened in the spring of 1900 (Mafeking was relieved in May). Geddes initially feared for his project. ‘This lamentable war […] will put back all culture and may spoil our kettle of fish’.

20

Philip Boardman, Patrick Geddes, maker of the future, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1944, pp. 221-222. It is true that Geddes had suggested a sum of a million dollars. 21 Elisée Reclus, Correspondance, vol. III, Paris, Costes, 1925, p. 210. 22 Gary Dunbar, The History of Geography, Utica, Dodge-Graphic, 1996, p. 21.

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However, he was soon activating his contacts. Among his papers from 1900 is a handwritten list of private addresses in Paris, which indicates a range of interlocking circles. The names listed there include those of (presumably) Scottish women helpers and teachers at the Summer School: Miss McPherson, Miss Davidson, Miss White, Miss Fowler, alongside the addresses of Professors Lavisse, Delage and Seignobos, Jules Siegfried, Emile Duclaux, Paul Desjardins (see Figure 6.5).23 Since the early 1890s, Geddes had been expanding his acquaintance among progressive educationists and liberal republicans in France. He had his Edinburgh guests as a first line of recruits to be called upon. And through the Franco-Scottish society, he had subsequently gained access to political circles, as well as to administrators like Gréard and Liard, both of whom were close associates of Ernest Lavisse. These contacts also intersected with another important Parisian network. The middle 1890s saw the foundation in Paris of the Musée Social, a French ‘thinktank on social affairs’, as it would be called now. Geddes already knew several of the individual members of this institution, which still exists at its base in the rue Las Cases in the VIIth arrondissement. It was a centre both for eminent philanthropists and social thinkers. The 1889 Exhibition had once more been the catalyst: in this case, it had been the exhibit on ‘the social economy’. The Musée Social received private financing from the Comte de Chambrun, (1821-99) a republican aristocrat, and heir to the Baccarat Crystal Works.24 Created in 1894, it was launched officially in 1895, and its inauguration – contemporary with the Franco-Scottish Society – was attended by some of the same people: Jules Simon, Alexandre Ribot, the prime minister, and various elites in favour of republican social reform. We have already encountered the radical leader Léon Bourgeois, in the early talks about the Franco-Scottish society. He was indisposed on this occasion, but sent a message: he would be a central figure both in the Musée Social and on the committee for Geddes’s International Assembly. Bourgeois published his first series of articles on Solidarism the same year (see Chapter 5 above). The members of the Musée Social were ‘striving first and foremost to achieve order and peace’.25 They wanted to work outside, or rather across, party politics and religious differences, and to attract support from various social backgrounds. In fact, they were mostly moderate republicans, with a few more radical individuals covering the centre of the spectrum, 23

Address list, PGA/US, T/GED 6/1/5; quotation from Geddes letter to T. R. Marr, 2 October 1899, NLS, MSS 10566; see Martyn Cornick ‘Distorting mirrors: French-British perceptions in the fin-de-siècle’ in Cornick and Crossley, eds, Problems in French History, pp. 125-148. 24 On the Musée Social see Janet Horne, A Social Laboratory for Modern France: the Musée Social and the rise of the Welfare State, Durham, NC and London, Duke University Press, 2002; the page references here are from Janet Horne’s PhD thesis of the same title, consulted at the Musée Social before publication. The aims of the Musée were: ‘to reinforce the networks of associational life; to inspire an enlightened elite to pursue solutions to the social question; and to assemble a broadly-based documentation on social movements in France and abroad’, Horne, ‘A Social Laboratory’, p. 143. 25 Ibid., pp. 144, 149.

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Figure 6.5

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Patrick Geddes’s handwritten address list, Paris, 1900, two pages. Reproduced by permission of the University of Strathclyde Archives (T.GED 6/1/5A and 5B). Continued

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Figure 6.5

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Concluded

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with few real conservatives, monarchists or socialists. Nor were there any women: until 1914 the Musée Social was gender-exclusive – a fraternity of republican men: although before very long social reform was to become a female domain. Geddes thus had access to a new network of social science.26 The Musée Social’s Grand Council advisory members included key Geddes contacts like Liard and Brouardel. The section dealing with missions and surveys was influenced by Le Play’s methodology, if not his ideology: it included Emile Boutmy, director of the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques, who had welcomed the FrancoScots in 1896, and Paul de Rousiers, a contact of Edmond Demolins, who headed one of their first missions to look at English trade-unionism in 1895.27 It also brought together social Catholics and social Protestants such as Jules Siegfried and Geddes’s friend Charles Gide, who was vice president at its first meeting.28 On the council of Geddes’s International Assembly in 1900 was Léopold Mabilleau, who had just become the director of the Musée Social that year. As well as social reformers, the Musée Social called on regular French academics. Among those already known to Geddes, besides Gide, was another friend, Alfred Espinas, professor at Bordeaux and later the Sorbonne (where he had been brought in by Lavisse to teach social economy, with an endowment from Chambrun).29 The origins of the International Assembly project go back at least to an attempt by French academics during the 1889 exhibition to lay on special educational lectures for visitors. It seems that Geddes, with the experience of the Summer Meetings behind him, was the moving spirit this time. There was no shortage of goodwill in scientific circles on both sides of the Channel. Both the British Association for the Advancement of Science and its French counterpart were involved in the forward planning: discussion took place first in Edinburgh then at the twinned meetings of both Associations at Dover and Boulogne in September 1899. Even then, the Dreyfus Affair threatened to derail the scheme. As Geddes put it, ‘in the suspense of the Dreyfus Case and then in the movement against France and the Exposition as a whole which followed the judgement, all attempts towards promoting the proposed International Assembly were delayed’, but the scientists were prepared to take a stand ‘against the reactionary British opinion which condemned all of France because of the Dreyfus scandal’ and backed the scheme.30 Geddes had also been busy recruiting in America. During his visit in January 1900, he recruited an American secretary, Robert Erskine Ely, to provide a large American committee of patrons – mostly university professors but also private individuals, many of them women. Indeed he wrote to Ely reminding him of this: 26

The story of the opening of the Musée Social to women is told in a special number of Vie sociale, nos 8-9, 1988, by Françoise Blum and Janet Horne: ‘Féminisme et Musée Social (1916-1939)’. 27 Horne, ‘A Social Laboratory’, pp. 170, 178. 28 Gide was vice-president of the Association protestante pour l’étude pratique des questions sociales, founded in Nîmes, in1888. See ibid., pp. 221-224. 29 Ibid., p. 242. 30 Memo of Patrick Geddes, n.d., PGA/US, T.GED 6/2/2; see Philip Boardman, Patrick Geddes, maker of the future, p. 211.

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PARIS-EDINBURGH Wretched man! why have you left out the ladies? … Put them in again if not too late. they were our initial members in Chicago. And get many other capable ladies who are coming over. We will get far more real work and real help from them than from many Presidents!31

The scheme needed both ‘Presidents’ for prestige, and patrons, to help raise funding. Fortunately for Geddes, when he had recently been in Perthshire winding up family affairs after his father’s death, he had met the dyeworks and dry cleaning magnate, Sir Robert Pullar (Pullar’s of Perth), who generously donated £3,000, which proved an invaluable float. Geddes enlisted two eminent Scottish patrons, Liberal MP James Bryce, and geologist Sir Archibald Geikie.32 The president of the French section of the School was none other than Léon Bourgeois. Others who allowed their names to be added to the committee of patrons included several men involved in the FrancoScottish society, such as Duclaux, Liard, Gréard, as well as the ubiquitous Lavisse. The aims of the International Assembly were to provide information about the various scientific congresses being held in Paris; to offer expert lectures on arts and science related to the displays; and to offer to delegations of workers and to parties of students an educationally tailored guide to the exhibition. It would give what is known in French as ‘une leçon de choses’, a practical demonstration. ‘The Assembly has a popular as well as an academic side, offering privileges not only to men of science, but also to the intelligent public’. German- and Russian-language groups were also to be formed (the enterprise was to operate in four languages) and premises were found in the Palais des Congrès basement, near the Place de l’Alma (see Figure 6.6). In mid-April 1900, Geddes reported that (in the nick of time), the Commissaire Général of the Exhibition, Alfred Picard, had agreed to provide 3,000 francs for fitting out the headquarters.33 The English-language group began its lectures on 14 May, a month after the Exhibition opened, and carried on right through until the end of October. The French group began on 4 June. As can be seen from the sample weekly programmes, the courses were wide-ranging and ambitious, covering fine arts, science and social science, with guided visits to displays, local churches and museums. There was a solid core of regular lecturers in both English and French, with specialists coming in for one-off sessions. Regular lecturers included close associates of Geddes such as Thomas Marr from the Outlook Tower, John Duncan the artist, and among American specialists, Jane Addams from the Chicago Settlement’s Hull House.34 As for Geddes 31

NLS, MS 10509, copy of letter from Geddes to Ely, 27 April 1900. On these men see Christopher Harvie, ‘ Bryce, James’, John McG. Davies, ‘Pullar, Sir Robert’; David Oldroyd, ‘ Geikie, Sir Archibald’. in ODNB. 33 Geddes had already met Alfred Picard at a British Association meeting in September 1898, see report in PGA/US, T.GED 6/1/1, and Philip Mairet, Pioneer of Sociology, the life and letters of Patrick Geddes, London, Lund Humphries, 1957, pp. 89-90. Picard’s official report (see note 37 below) is sympathetic to all the Geddes enterprises. 34 Marr bore the brunt of organizing. See Helen Meller, Patrick Geddes: Social Evolutionist and City Planner, London, Routledge, 1990, p.17; John Duncan 1866-1945 was beholden to Geddes for his Chicago post; Jane Addams (1860-1935) was a pioneer of the US 32

Figure 6.6

Map of the Paris Exhibition 1900. Reproduced by permission of the University of Strathclyde Archives (T.GED 6/1/7). The Place de l’Alma is on the north (right) bank of the Seine, centre left of the map. The Pont de l’Alma is the fourth bridge from the right.

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himself, his colleagues described him as ‘perpetually in the breach’, lecturing daily, taking parties round the exhibits and liaising tirelessly with his co-secretaries. His correspondence shows that he was handling hundreds of individual requests and queries on matters both important and trivial. He lectured virtually every day at ten o’clock on a range of topics, including ‘the True France’, in which he argued that the fact that the Dreyfus affair had become public was to the honour of the French. In Britain or America, he suggested, there might have been a more hypocritical coverup.35 His energy kept him going through a gruelling hot Paris summer, marked too by a series of personal tragedies, including his wife’s miscarriage, and the sudden death from appendicitis of his young colleague Robert Smith, who was replacing him at Dundee for the summer term. After all this effort, it was a little disappointing that the English language sessions had comparatively few takers, and even the French ones were slow to take off at first. The organizers wondered whether visitors to the exhibition came just for fun rather than improvement. ‘Things are going along rather quietly’, Marr wrote to Sir Robert Pullar in August, ‘but the number of students attending has shown a distinct increase.’ Some of Pullar’s money had been used to provide tickets for a group of ‘workmen students of the Passmore Edwards Settlement in London … and it is really quite encouraging to hear how much they have enjoyed visiting some of the sections […] under the charge of our lecturers.’36 By the end of the summer, however, attendance had improved and the success of the whole enterprise was summed up by the academic Emile Bourgeois in his report. It had operated for 4 months, employing 100 lecturers, eight secretaries, and ten other staff, laying on 300 formal lectures, 800 talks, and 450 guided visits to a total of visitors/students running into tens of thousands: ‘Many a university does not offer as much in a semester’, as Geddes later said. The official report on the exhibition by Picard acknowledged the ‘generous and high-minded work of this institution […] In carrying out its educational mission, the School neglected no opportunity to spread a spirit of fraternity among people’ (see Figures 6.7 and 6.8).37 It obviously fulfilled a need – for those who took the trouble to enrol, since there was no other official attempt to make sense of the exhibits. André Hallays, a writer who wandered disconsolately around the shows, and who evidently had no knowledge of the Assemblée Internationale, deplored that the chance to provide a leçon de choses had been missed. ‘Many people would have been prepared to put up with fatigue if someone had taken the trouble to guide and instruct them. but there were no catalogues or explanatory notices’.38 Settlement movement – and an inspiration to Geddes and Octavia Hill; she was later a leading peace and women’s rights campaigner, and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. 35 PGA/US, T.GED 6/2/16 and Boardman, Patrick Geddes, p. 219. 36 Copy of letter from Marr to Pullar, 16 August 1900, PGA/US, T.GED 6/1/5. 37 Alfred Picard, Rapport général (Le bilan d’un siècle 1801-1900), 6 vols, vol. 6, Paris, 1906-07, p. 29 (copy in Musée Social, Paris), and see copious material in PGA/US, T.GED, Section 6. 38 Hallays, En flânant à travers l’Exposition, p. xiii.

Figure 6.7

Sample Programme, 25-30 June, for Patrick Geddes’s International Assembly, Paris Exhibition 1900. Reproduced by permission of the University of Strathclyde Archives (T.GED 6/1/5A).

Figure 6.8

Sample Programme, 10-15 September, for Patrick Geddes’s International Assembly, Paris Exhibition 1900. Reproduced by permission of the University of Strathclyde Archives (T.GED 6/1/5A).

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Among their activities, both the French- and the English-speaking sections of Geddes’s Assemblée arranged visits to the landmark one-man show by Auguste Rodin, in which Edinburgh art student Ottilie McLaren was closely involved. The sculptor was by now finding renown, but was disenchanted with official commissions, after the refusal in 1898 by the Société des Gens de Lettres to accept his statue of Balzac. During the 1900 Exhibition, he had works showing in the official display of contemporary French art, but took the risky decision of launching his own show. Hoping to attract international buyers, he had invested heavily in a purpose-built temporary pavilion, very near the International Assembly, on the Place de l’Alma. According to Ottilie McLaren, he was ‘very hard up and hoping for great things of it’.39 This retrospective show was in its way revolutionary, mixing plaster casts, drawings and photographs. In a departure from the usual way of displaying, Rodin included large and small sculptures, some from the past, some unfinished, carefully but casually displayed to indicate work in progress; many of them were on high plinths. It was a huge success, did lead to more commissions, and established Rodin securely for the rest of his life. But the completion of the simple but elegant pavilion was a race against the clock and the opening was postponed several times, with much need for last-minute help. Ottilie McLaren, who was by this stage working very closely with Rodin, was called upon to help him in a practical way, along with her American fellow-student Sarah Whitney. Ottilie’s letters give a blow-by-blow account of preparations: ‘I was just about to write to thee when I got a telegram from Rodin asking if I would come and help him to address and send off invitations to his reception. As we have offered our services, we must go at once’ (27 May); ‘I have been writing hard against time for Rodin even since Sunday at noon.’(29 May). On the day before the opening on 1 June: the poor old dear was so rushed and so tired and this was one thing we could take entirely off his hands […] I think we can help in hanging some drawings […] It is nice wandering about among his men and receiving his orders and being ‘in it’. Whenever he wants to rest a few minutes, he comes and sits down beside us and watches us work and wonders at how quickly […] and systematically we go […] We are harder worked than ever now, making ground plans of the rooms very carefully and arranging catalogues and numbering the works [...] Tomorrow is the opening day and I fear that we shall be working all morning and in the afternoon we are to take care of things and see that things don’t get knocked about by the crowd. After that we have complimentary season tickets to send out.40

Clearly the two students were being unpaid personal assistants, with a few lunches and introductions to museum directors as rewards, plus a guided tour of the exhibition with Rodin on 26 June. The opening of the Alma exhibition went well, despite its 39

Letter to William Wallace, 11 May 1900. For full details of this one-man-show, see the centenary catalogue issued by the Musée Rodin staff, Rodin en 1900, L’exposition de l’Alma, catalogue of the re-creation of this exhibition at the Musée du Luxembourg, 2001. 40 Letters from Ottilie McLaren to William Wallace, of 27 and 29 May, 31 May, NLS MS 21543.

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being held on a ‘horrid wet afternoon’. Soon afterwards Rodin was sending ‘for us to come and catalogue his drawings’ (19 June); they were still at it on 22 June, though ‘learning a lot from it’, and the work ran into July, although Ottilie McLaren was still receiving tuition in Rodin’s studio.41 She left for the Highlands at the end of July, having been associated with what was in retrospect a turning point in Rodin’s career. The McLaren family had been among the early Scottish visitors to the Exhibition; after a slow start, more Britons started crossing the Channel by the end of August. The Rue des Nations Geddes was an observer in the Exhibition at many levels. He was an active participant at the International Conference on the Social Sciences, (30 July to 4 August) organized by a remarkable woman, Jeanne Weill (1860-1925) who had adopted the pseudonym ‘Mlle Dick May’, and whose networking talents were equal to his own. She was friendly with Lavisse, Chambrun, and others, and had in 1895 become the secretary of the Collège libre des sciences sociales, which dispensed a complementary lecture course to students enrolled elsewhere; both Comte and Le Play were among its inspirations. In the aftermath of the Dreyfus affair, which radicalized her thinking, Dick May decided to found the Ecole des hautes études sociales,(an early version of institutions which emerged more clearly in later years) combining a practical and a theoretical approach. She launched the idea at the 1900 Conference, where it met much sympathy. Her address book overlapped strongly with Geddes’s, and almost all his academic contacts were present at the conference (those attending included Seignobos, Ch. Gide, Durkheim, and politicians such as Clemenceau and Millerand). This was a gathering which has described by Christophe Prochasson as the ‘Republican establishment in session’. Having spent almost the whole year in Paris, Geddes now had occasion to make further intellectual contacts with leading French thinkers, notably Emile Durkheim and Henri Bergson, with whom he later corresponded. It was probably here that he began campaigning for his third project.42

41

See ibid., letters of 3 June, 19 June, 20 June, 22 June, 26 June, and so on. Christophe Prochasson, Les Années électriques (1880-1910), Paris, La Découverte,1991, pp. 230-231; on Dick May, a remarkable but also historically rather obscure woman, see Christophe Prochasson, ‘Dick May et le social’ in Colette Chambelland et al., Le Musée Social en son temps, Paris, Presses de l’ENS, 1998, pp. 43-58; Geddes had met her by late 1899: a letter from Marie Bonnet to Anna Geddes indicates how unconventional she appeared to many: ‘I know that M. Geddes is in Paris, Mr [Célestin ] Bouglé [of the ENS] met him at Dick May’s. Is she going to be involved in the enterprise? […] Between ourselves, I would not receive her at home for any money […] and many other women would not be keen to queue up behind such a person’; Marie Bonnet therefore warned the Geddes about inviting Dick May to lecture at the Assembly, NLS, MS 10577, letter of 6 December 1899. On other Geddes contacts, see Meller, Patrick Geddes, p. 115. Politician Alexandre Millerand, and academics Seignobos, Charles Gide and Emile Durkheim, among others attended and Geddes 42

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While the Summer School was an extraordinary feat of organization but hardly controversial, the last of Patrick Geddes’s Paris schemes in 1900 was quixotic, ambitious and provocative. Had it succeeded, as one of his biographers remarks, it would have given him a job for life; another described it as a forerunner of UNESCO.43 Specially designed and much admired national pavilions, showing cultural displays for each country, had been built along the left bank of the Seine, opposite the Grand Palais, for the duration of the Exhibition, ‘turning the Seine into a Venetian canal’ as Picard put it. Known as the ‘Rue des Nations’, the Street of the Nations, the pavilions there were due to be demolished when the Exhibition closed (see Figure 6.9). Geddes proposed, as the official report explains, to save at least some of them in permanent form, after the Fair closed in the autumn. He suggested they should become international museums (one for peace, one for the sea, one for experimental science, one for geography, and so on).The idea was to de-nationalize them, with their original identities being absorbed into international and ‘peaceful’ concepts. The national symbolism of each pavilion would have to be dismantled and replaced with a thematic display, from all over the world, corresponding to a Geddesian-type ‘Index Museum’, such as he had in miniature in the Outlook Tower. This was a countervailing concept in an age when museums were becoming more national rather than less, more identified with national heritage, and less with ideas. Picard described it ‘a fine programme, a generous conception, based on the authority of eminent men’, and thought it ‘the most attractive’ of all proposals regarding the exhibition’s after-life.44 Geddes campaigned energetically, and once more worked his address-book during the latter part of 1900 and early 1901. No doubt he started via his original contacts: we know that Lavisse, Gréard, Liard and Duclaux all helped him. The latter wrote to Geddes on 2 November, begging him to stay in Paris: ‘nobody can replace you’. He also argued: It is best that the project should be conceived and realized by someone who is not French and who is supported, as you are, by a committee with a majority of foreigners. That way, the proposals will have the character of an act of international courtesy, which will make negotiations easier and less costly … for myself, although I am snowed under with work, I will do all that is within my power.45

More surprisingly, perhaps, Geddes was supported by a range of heavyweight French politicians. Léon Bourgeois, as we have already seen, was a most useful contact. was on the standing commission, PGA/US, T. GED 6/1/10. Many of those attending later supported his Rue des Nations project. 43 Meller, Patrick Geddes, p. 116. 44 Picard, Rapport général, vol VI, pp. 287 ff. See also the short pamphlet by L. Herbette, Mémoires et notes concernant l’organisation à Paris de Musées ayant un caractère international en exécution de propositions ou projets provoqués par l’Exposition Universelle de 1900, Paris, Imprimerie nouvelle, 1901. 45 Duclaux to Geddes, 2 November 1900, NLS, MS 10531.

Figure 6.9

The Paris Exhibition 1900. The rue des Nations, temporary pavilions, seen from the West. Postcard, private collection.

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His work on Solidarism had been quoted by President Loubet at the opening of the Exhibition in April, and he had been the French envoy to the 1899 Hague peace conference. What was more, Geddes was supported by four current French cabinet ministers, as an article in Le Figaro reported. They included the former socialist Alexandre Millerand, and three others: Leygues, Baudin – and most significantly in this context the French foreign minister, Théophile Delcassé, who had been appointed to the Quai d’Orsay just before Fashoda. Delcassé was to play a long and devious game, in the years leading to the Entente Cordiale of 1904.46 At this stage, although the Quai d’Orsay had probably abandoned any thoughts of anti-British intervention in South Africa, Delcassé was still very far from any open rapprochement with Britain. To find him among the signatories of Geddes’s audacious project is perhaps indicative of a slight but significant shift in the log-jam of official Franco-British relations, indicating that there were some fragile links between official diplomacy and the kind of cultural diplomacy practised by Geddes. For the time being, however, Delcassé’s opposite number was unimpressed. The scheme was supported by a range of British contacts, mostly Liberals, who were out of power after the ‘khaki’ election of September 1900. They included Geddes’s supporter James Bryce MP, who as a former President of the Board of Trade was a heavyweight in his own party – but who had expressed hostility to the Boer War in the House of Commons during the summer, only just holding on to his Aberdeen constituency in the election. Bryce rightly guessed therefore that he would carry no weight with the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, or with Lord Lansdowne, the new Foreign Secretary. Another Geddes supporter was the radical journalist and editor of the Review of Reviews, W. T. Stead. However, he too was a liability. The Socialist aristocrat, Lady Warwick, had written to the Prince of Wales, at Anna Geddes’s request, but reported back that ‘the real stopper to the whole question is that Mr Stead wrote to Lord Lansdowne and as you know he is in very bad books just now [over the Boer War]’.47 Lansdowne (who would still be Foreign Secretary at the time of the entente cordiale, as Delcassé’s opposite number) vetoed the matter from the British side, and was backed up by a cold-water memo from the Foreign Office, alleging practical grounds: 46

Le Figaro, 22 November 1900, lists a whole column of other supporters including Léon Bourgeois, Liard, Lavisse, Duclaux, Roland Bonaparte, Herbette, Gaston Moch – and Alfred Picard. Along with Delcassé, Alexandre Millerand (1859-1943) is one of the more interesting supporters: a socialist who agreed to join Waldeck-Rousseau’s government in 1899, in the interests of republican solidarity, he caused a scandal in left-wing circles, and later became a controversial President of the republic (1920-24). See J.-F. Sirinelli, ed., Dictionnaire historique de la vie politique au XXe siècle, Paris, PUF, 1995, for his career. Bourgeois wrote supportively to Geddes in the February, hoping for the success of the scheme ‘so that there will be a solid second link in the chain of which you have been the first and most stalwart artisan in Paris’, copy of letter to Geddes, PGA/US, T/GED 9/284, 17 February 190[1] – the copyist had written 1900, but this is clearly incorrect. 47 On these exchanges, see PGA/US, T.GED 6/3/1, 6/3/3 correspondence relating to the Rue des Nations, letter from Lady Warwick, 22 November 1900.

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PARIS-EDINBURGH It is evident that those who advocated the scheme as far as the British Pavilion is concerned did not ascertain the real state of affairs from any of the British commissioners on the spot […] It appears that the building is a mere make-believe without any real foundations and hardly weatherproof […] The […] fittings in the interior belong to the various tradesmen who placed them. In these circumstances, the realisation of the scheme is obviously impracticable, but were it otherwise, it is improbable that the offer of such a building would be taken as a compliment by the Paris Municipality.48

The latter body, the Paris municipal council, was indeed hostile to the project. Following local elections in May 1900, its majority had shifted from left to right, and it was now ‘nationalist’ (i.e. anti-Dreyfusard), whereas most of the supporters of the scheme were republicans and Dreyfusards. One of Geddes’s chief opponents was the notorious Edouard Drumont, anti-Dreyfusard, author of La France juive, and editor of an anti-Semitic newspaper, La Libre Parole. Drumont, who was a determined adversary of anything that smacked of internationalism, wrote a ferocious article in La Libre Parole, saying in effect, ‘I don’t presume to tell Professor Geddes how to re-arrange the skyline of Princes Street’.49 There were, however, also genuine legal and technical objections, to do with the leasing of the land, the need for the boat companies to regain their riverside moorings, and the problem of railway land, which eventually prevented the scheme from being possible. Nor was the Foreign Office entirely wrong in pointing to the makeshift structures of several of the pavilions, not only the British one. In some ways, it is remarkable that the scheme got as far as it did, but as Picard’s report concluded, it was probably just too utopian and launched at too short notice. Conclusion The names of the people approached in support of Geddes’s final initiative of 1900, the Rue des Nations appeal, indicates what is not always obvious: the political threads of his networking in Third Republic Paris. Although he was studiously non-affiliated to any political party, Geddes could not help being attached to liberal progressive causes. During the late 1890s, as noted earlier, Britain and France were at odds, each country considering the other to be in the wrong. Geddes’s contacts were chiefly among those who took the side of ‘justice’ and liberalism, against the prevailing mode of their own country’s official policy. His British allies, such as James Bryce and W. T. Stead, tended to be radical, that is to say non-Unionist and non-colonialist Liberals, opposed to the Boer War. His French contacts tended above all, during the 1890s, to be supporters of the Dreyfus cause, which divided France so deeply. Some, like Duclaux, were very strongly committed: he could not sleep 48

PGA/US, T.GED 6/3, 10 November; see also description of the building – made of steel plates covered with plaster. 49 Cutting in PGA/US, T.GEd 6/3/5; see also David Watson, ‘The Nationalist movement in Paris 1900-1906’ in D. Shapiro, ed., The Right in France (St Anthony’s Papers, 12), Oxford, St Antony’s Papers, 1962, pp. 49-84.

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until he had expressed himself in public on the Affair, and his students, when they met nationalists in the streets, apparently used to shout ‘A bas les microbes!’ (‘Down with the germs!’).50 Several other figures, such as the Geddes family friend Marie Bonnet, were members of the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, founded in the wake of the Affair, and still active today. Two of Geddes’s most powerful contacts, by contrast, were rather cautious in their approach. Ex-premier Léon Bourgeois has been described as only ‘a closet Dreyfusist in 1898’, and Lavisse studiously avoided taking sides, and preached reconciliation.51 On the other hand, as already noted, one of the most ferocious anti-Dreyfus forces, the anti-semitic Edouard Drumont, had taken a dislike to Geddes’s schemes. There was therefore a sort of ‘freemasonry’ of an informal kind linking Patrick Geddes’s French networks. They almost all took the side of Dreyfus during the Affair (1895-99). And they cut across the usual hierarchies which marked the French university system for example, so that humble lecturers from the provinces taught alongside eminent professors from the Sorbonne at the Summer Meetings. Geddes, with the particular advantage in France of being a foreigner, appears to have been equally at home with the marquesses and earls who joined the Franco-Scottish society, with the mild-mannered but determined anarchists whom he welcomed to his Summer Meetings, or with the working men whom he encouraged to come to the International Assembly, as well as with a whole procession of French academics and politicians. Appendix: Principal members of Geddes’s French networks (MS = attached to the Musée Social; D= identified as being pro-Dreyfus) Scientific: H.Lacaze-Duthiers; L.Pasteur; C.Flahault (Montpellier); Y.Delage; later Émile Duclaux (D) Le Playists: E. Demolins; P. de Rousiers; Abbé Klein; Bailhache; Poinsard (links to Jules Siegfried (MS)) Anarchists: P. Kropotkin; Elisée Reclus; Paul Reclus; A.Hamon Summer meetings: Most of those in 2 and 3 above, plus A. Espinas (D) (MS); Paul Desjardins (D); G. Monod (D); H. Trocmé; H. Mazel; L. Marillier (D); Firmin Roz; Delvolvé; Caudel; Mlle Marie Bonnet (D) (and others) Franco-Scots: E.Lavisse; L. Pasteur; Bardoux; Beljame; Bichat; Boutmy (MS); Boutroux; Bréal (D); Brouardel; Bufnoir; Alfred Croiset (D); Duclaux (D); Espinas (D) Comte de Franqueville; Ch. Gide; Himly; Gréard; Liard; Jules Simon; Paul Meyer (D); de Vogué (and others) Paris International Assembly 1900: patrons/committee (not lecturers): Léon Bourgeois (D); Emile Bourgeois (D); Gréard; Liard; Prince R. Bonaparte; 50

Douglas Johnson, France and the Dreyfus Affair, London, Blandford, 1966, p. 220, and Prochasson, Les Années électriques. 51 On Lavisse and Bourgeois during the affair, see J. D. Bredin, The Affair, trans J. Mehlman, New York and London, Braziller, 1987, p. 235.

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Espinas (D); Lyon-Caen (D) (MS); Malet; Brouardel; Lavisse; H. Poincaré; J. Clarétie; Mabilleau (MS); Ch. Gide; G. Perrot; J. Siegfried; P. Melon; Mlle Dick May (MS; Conf. Soc. Sci) (and others) Rue des Nations project: Millerand, Delcassé, Cauvin; L. Bourgeois; Liard; Duclaux; Prince R. Bonaparte; Coppée (non-D); E. Bourgeois; L. Herbette; G. Moch; Ch. Normand; J. Labusquière; F. Schrader (and others) Patrick Geddes’s address book, 1900: Caudel; Siegfried; Seignobos(D); Lavisse; Duclaux; Delage; Desjardins; Schrader; Planes; Le Foyer; Plessat; Metin; Guerard (and others)

CHAPTER SEVEN

An ‘Entente Cordiale’ in Publishing, or a Scottish Victory? Nelson’s French Collection One of the prominent members of the Franco-Scottish Society, mentioned briefly in Chapter 5, was Charles Saroléa (1870-1953), the first head of the French Department at Edinburgh University. Belgian-born, Saroléa was widely-travelled, multilingual, and prolific in both scholarly and journalistic writing. Appointed to his Edinburgh post in his mid-twenties in 1894, he created the French syllabus from scratch. (It is an indication of the still lowly status of modern languages within the University that no chair was appointed until later: Saroléa was only a lecturer in status.) In particular, he established a year abroad as part of the course, and, like Patrick Geddes, believed in exchanges of students, sending graduates as lecteurs or lectrices to French universities. Saroléa, who maintained relations with French intellectuals throughout these years, was a man of wide acquaintance and irrepressible energy. In a very different mode from Geddes, he played a key role in an initiative which is little-known and indeed rather surprising: the invasion in 1910 or so of the French publishing scene by the Edinburgh printer–publisher firm of Thomas Nelson and Sons. The Scottish firm referred to this venture – rather inaccurately – as an ‘undertaking resulting from an entente cordiale’ in the publishing world. It is perhaps more accurately described as a buccaneering incursion into a Parisian publishing world which was ‘still in the nineteenth century’.1 1 On Saroléa see Alan Steele, ‘The Franco-Scottish society and the Edinburgh University Department of French’, Franco-Scottish Society Bulletin, no. 24 (centenary issue), May 1995, pp. 12-20; Peter France, ‘Saroléa, Charles’ in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004, (hereafter ODNB). This chapter is adapted from a jointly authored article, ‘Nelson’s Victory: a Scottish invasion of French publishing’ by Peter France and Siân Reynolds, first published in Book History, vol. 3, 2000, pp. 166-203; see also Sabine Wacquez, ‘Les Editions Nelson à Paris ou une aventure écossaise en France 19091939’, master’s thesis, Université Paris I, 1993: thanks to the author and her supervisor JeanYves Mollier for access to this master’s thesis, which is chiefly concerned with the fortunes of the Collection after the First World War, but also contains information about the early years, especially relating to sales. For the ‘entente cordiale’ reference, see below, p. 159 and note 31; for the reference to the Paris publishers as being ‘nineteenth-century’ in outlook, see JeanYves Tadié, Marcel Proust: a life, translated by Euan Cameron, New York, Viking, 2000, p. 580.

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‘The very cheapest books in the world’ We have already encountered one or two mentions of members of the Nelson publishing family. Edinburgh had become a major British centre for book printing and publishing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, in the wake of the Scottish Enlightenment, much aided by the fame of Sir Walter Scott. By 1837, there were over 80 letterpress printers in the city. They included the house of Thomas Nelson (originally Neilson), whose bookshop opened in 1798, and began to publish cheap editions of non-copyright works. From the start, the first Thomas Nelson had concentrated on low-cost production, efficient distribution and technical innovation (one of his sons perfected a rotary press in 1850). In mid-century, many Scottish publishers had moved to London, and Nelson’s kept a branch there too, but like other printing firms kept their printworks in Edinburgh, and had a good reputation: in the 1880s, Edinburgh printers offered ‘the finest work without asking a fancy price for it’, while in 1908, as one guidebook put it: ‘Since publishing betook itself to the south, the printing trade in Edinburgh has increased by leaps and bounds, and if one cares to look at the back of books produced in London, the chances are that it will be found that Edinburgh printers have been entrusted with the putting into type of more or less immortal works’.2 Most of the largest Edinburgh firms, employing hundreds of workers – Constable’s, Ballantyne and Hanson, R. &. R. Clark, Neill’s, Morrison & Gibb – had began to hire women compositors at lower rates than men in the 1870s. This recruitment, which gave them a competitive edge over London, effectively ended in 1910, with a strike by male compositors.3 The introduction of mechanical composing machines (Linotype and Monotype) at about the same time, and then the effects of the Great War, saw Edinburgh start to lose ground to low-cost provincial centres in England, in what was later to turn into a terminal decline. In the 1900s, however, the printing industry was still one of the city’s major industries. And Nelson’s was one of the largest single employers in the city, employing over a thousand workers, skilled and unskilled, men and women, at its Parkside works on the eastern edge of town. The workforce was made up of compositors and printers (mainly men) and bookbinders, paper folders and unskilled workers, many of them women. It was in many respects an old-fashioned, paternalist firm – and was to remain so for many years. A recent study based on oral history, and interviews with employees from the middle years of the twentieth century, notes that the firm had a ‘strong social fabric’, providing a range of social and welfare facilities for its workers, including an institute and a bowling club.4 2 Scottish Typographical Circular, 1888, p. 710; Anthony Keith, Edinburgh of Today, Edinburgh, William Hodge & Co, 1908, p. 10. 3 See Siân Reynolds, Britannica’s Typesetters: women compositors in Victorian and Edwardian Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1989, for a full account of this episode in the Edinburgh printing trade. 4 See Heather Holmes and David Finkelstein (eds) Thomas Nelson and sons: memories of an Edinburgh publishing house, East Linton, Tuckwell Press, 2001, p. xi. See also Alistair

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Alone among its competitors, Nelson’s never employed women as compositors. In part, this could be seen as cooperating with the unionized men who opposed such cost-cutting policies by the other firms. But in the case of Nelson, it had no need to cut corners, since its profitability lay elsewhere: in the technologically advanced printing and binding process it had perfected. The secret of its success was that it combined this remarkably modern production process with editorial control of its own best-selling series of books. From the 1870s, in response to the British Education Acts, it had been producing school readers: over 80 per cent of its profits came form the educational market. Its long fiction list made less money, but was solidly and attractively produced, and sold at relatively low prices. Nelson’s books were mass-produced, but never shoddy. The company always favoured clear typefaces and good paper and included illustrations. The little books in its popular series suited the pocket, both in size and price. One key feature introduced in the 1890s as an economy of scale was a standard book size for all the popular ‘libraries’ (i.e. collections): they were to measure 6.5 by 4.25 inches. In 1903, Nelson’s launched its Sixpenny Classics, later the Nelson Classics, as a reprint series of out-of-copyright works. In 1907, it launched a copyright reprint series, the Sevenpenny Library. That year it built an entirely new factory made of ferro-concrete and of advanced design, alongside the existing Parkside works dating from the 1880s. In the new factory, under Arthur’s Seat. with its large airy rooms and specially designed machines, large-scale production was now possible on an unprecedented scale. The firm jealously concealed its machines from competitors’ eyes, but boasted about them in prospectuses. The underlying principles were standardization and automation. The page layout (imposition) was such that it could be transferred to a very large rotary plate. Each gathered section was of 96 pages, 48 being printed on either side of one big sheet. Typesetters and layout designers were instructed to see that all books worked out at a multiple of 96 pages, by closing up or spacing out chapters, and if necessary leaving pages blank or printing advertisements. The sections were then folded, gathered, and stitched, all by machine, before being mechanically guillotined, rounded, backed and glued. The uncovered pages then moved to an ingenious casing-in machine which gave the book its hard cover. Some delays were inevitable (for print and glue to dry) but the firm claimed that it was ‘ordinary practice … to print a book in the morning and bind it in the afternoon. Reprints of 10,000 copies are habitually completed in 24 hours’, and 100,000 copies or more could be produced in a week. In 1912, it was described as an ‘object lesson in the advantages of standardization’, producing ‘the very cheapest books in the world’.5 This super-mechanized book factory, combined with Nelson’s global McCleery,‘The Nelson family’, ODNB. 5 Nelson’s of Edinburgh, a short history of the Firm, reprinted from The British Printer, n.d. but 1912, copy in SAPPHIRE deposit, 1999/56, Edward Clark collection, Napier University. See also Guide to the Parkside Works, copy in Nelson Archive, University of Edinburgh, Special Collections, file 473 (Paris House). The Nelson Archive runs to hundreds of files, and the information about the French collection(s) is scattered in many of them. Much

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distribution network, based on the British Empire, made it a world-class enterprise. The publishing firm was far from innovative in cultural terms. Nelson’s rarely signed up any authors for original works, but it was unrivalled for cheap, sturdy and attractive reprints. By the same token, very large print runs were essential to justify the investment in machinery and materials. In order to keep the presses and bindery turning, new markets were constantly needed. And this is where the story of the French collection begins. Starting a French collection It was in 1908 that a French publisher of low-priced books, Aranyi, first approached Nelson’s managing director, George Mackenzie Brown, to suggest that the Edinburgh firm print and distribute French-language books in Britain. Brown was a cousin of the Nelson family, and had come over from Canada to run the firm in the 1890s, during the minority of the younger generation of Nelsons, brothers, Thomas or Tommy (1877-1917) and Ian (1878-1958).6 Both Nelson brothers, now partners, were drawn into these early negotiations, as was the writer John Buchan (1875-1940), whose role was crucial. He was at this time virtually the firm’s editorial director, based in London, and was on the brink of making his name as a writer, first with Prester John (1910) then with The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915).7 The Aranyi plan came to nothing, but the seed of an idea had been sown, and Brown began to wonder whether translations of English best-sellers into French might be sold in France. To break into the French cheap book market would not be easy. The French luxury book trade was probably unrivalled in the world, but so expensive that its books were beyond the pocket of most readers. However at the cheap end, there was plenty of competition. Paris was the centre of the book trade, and the Paris publishers – Juven, Ollendorff, Fasquelle, Fayard, Flammarion, and the biggest of all, Calmann-Lévy – already had cheap series of both classical and modern texts. Calmann-Lévy had pioneered cheap reprints in the Collection Michel Lévy, priced at 1 franc in the 1860s. But cheap French books, all bound in thin paper covers, instead of hard covers, were usually printed in what British readers considered old-fashioned typefaces, on poor quality paper, and their pages were uncut. By comparison, the of it is in the ‘Paris House’ file, 473. The archive will hereafter be abbreviated to UEd/Nelson and the number of the file. I am grateful to David Finkelstein for his friendly cooperation on the history of Nelson’s. 6 George Brown was also a Liberal MP at Westminster (1900-06); Thomas Nelson (1877-1917) was the same Tommy Nelson who had played in the rugby match of 1898, see Chapter 5 above. 7 On John Buchan, see Janet Adam Smith, John Buchan, a biography, London, HartDavis, 1965, (re-isssued Oxford University Press, 1985) and H. C. G. Matthew, ‘Buchan, John’ in ODNB. Buchan’s papers relating to Nelson’s are separately catalogued in Edinburgh University Special Collections, and are referred to hereafter as UEd/Buchan followed by the file number, for example, B/1.

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existing Nelson hardback libraries in English looked rather a luxury product. Nelson might therefore hope to exploit the gap in the French market by offering readers attractive little volumes at low prices.8 In the first instance, the Nelson team thought in terms of combining forces with a Paris publisher, simply to print books for them, whether French originals, or popular English books translated into French. During the early months of 1909, the Scots made several approaches. They generally met with responses ranging from indifference to hostility, and almost gave up. What kind of books did the team have in mind? Finding suitable English titles was in fact easy enough and the rights could be quickly acquired. The first names suggested included popular authors like A. E. W. Mason, Rudyard Kipling, Andrew Lang, Joseph Conrad, and Conan Doyle. But when the team (enlisting the help of Katherine Douglas, a young woman working for Curtis Massie literary agents on the Boulevard Raspail) scanned publishers’ catalogues and magazines for suitable French titles, they found that ‘the French books they issue are mostly very indecent’.9 This is a reminder of the gulf between the kind of literature acceptable in France compared to Britain. Not so long before, in 1889, the London publisher Henry Vizetelly (1820-94) had been prosecuted, fined and eventually imprisoned for publishing translations of ‘indecent’ novels by Emile Zola, the leading novelist of Naturalism.10 In January 1909, John Buchan (who was much better read than the Nelson directors) wrote as follows, suggesting that the Scottish firm print French books under the name of a French publisher, while maintaining an ‘unsullied’ collection under its own imprint: It seems to me that we might do very good business with Pierre Lafitte. The kind of library he wants to publish is the kind of book which is popular with the average Parisian – not indecent as the French mean indecent, but at the same time of the kind to which we should not like our name attached. Typical books would be works by Anatole France, Maupassant’s short stories, etc. etc., books which every educated person in this country reads, but which are not given to young girls. If we get him to confine his library to this class of work, which is what he wants to do, we might easily manufacture for him. Our own collection would be confined to English books [i.e. in French translation] and irreproachable French books or books which are suitable for household reading.11 (My italics)

A draft prospectus of Nelson’s own French Collection insists on the same point: 8 On Paris publishers, see Roger Chartier and Henri-Jean Martin (eds), Histoire de l’édition francaise, vols 3 and 4, Paris, Fayard, 1991, esp. vol. 3, pp. 578 ff. and 4, pp. 180 ff.; Jean-Yves Mollier, Michel et Calmann Lévy ou la naissance de l’édition moderne (18361891), Paris, Calmann-Lévy 1984; see France and Reynolds ‘Nelson’s victory’, note 15 for further details. 9 UEd/Buchan B/1: Buchan to T. Nelson, 26 Jan. 1909 and to G. Brown 7 April 1909. 10 On Vizetelly’s troubles, see T. Secombe, rev. P. Edwards, ‘Vizetelly, Henry’ in ODNB. He published translations of 17 novels by Zola which ‘affronted Victorian notions of propriety’, ibid. 11 UEd/Buchan, B/1: Buchan to Brown 13 Jan.1909.

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PARIS-EDINBURGH only one category of works will be excluded: those which might shock delicate moral feelings or offend legitimate sensibilities. The Collection Nelson will above all attempt to compete victoriously with that low commercial literature which outside France, draping itself in the French flag, does harm to the good name of France … [it] will be accessible to every purse and fit to be placed in every hand.12

But by the middle of 1909, it was looking as if the project had no future; no Parisian publisher was prepared to join forces with the Edinburgh firm. It was at this stage, when the plans seemed to be abandoned, that the charismatic Charles Saroléa was recruited by Nelson’s. He completely revitalized affairs, persuading Brown that as a ‘French [sic] man of letters’, he had extensive contacts in the literary world. He was effectively appointed literary editor in December 1909, with instructions to propose titles of suitable French books in or out of copyright, and English titles which might be translated. He was also expected to negotiate with French publishers, to edit and if necessary cut down books ( a common practice at the time), and to recruit translators from the English, and eminent writers of prefaces. The difference between Saroléa’s approach and Brown’s can however be gauged from the latter’s comment in a letter to a third party: ‘Saroléa regards this Library as a great scheme for the expansion of French and the diffusion of French literature, but I am afraid that we are taken up with the more sordid idea of selling as many copies of the books as we can to the French public.’13 Saroléa, watched rather anxiously by his Edinburgh colleagues, had immediately left for Paris and set about turning his many contacts to good use. He soon proposed ‘a tremendous collection of books’, not only classics by such as Balzac, Daudet and Chateaubriand, but also prestigious living authors, such as Paul Bourget, Maurice Maeterlinck, Henry Bordeaux and (in French translation) Tolstoy. All of these, including Tolstoy (who died later that year), were personally known to Saroléa. He tended to approach authors directly, bypassing their publishers, who were not best pleased – the files show traces of their annoyance – and the Nelsons had to rein him in from time to time, to limit the damage. But he had a sure touch. His compatriot Maurice Maeterlinck, for example, was soon afterwards, in 1911, to win the Nobel Prize for literature – proving a better investment than he had seemed to the sceptical Buchan, who thought him a writer for elite coteries. Saroléa negotiated for a Maeterlinck anthology, introduced by the writer’s wife, Georgette Leblanc, commenting, when he had managed to acquire the rights to print extracts from one book, that Maeterlinck’s French publisher, Fasquelle, ‘will certainly squeal like a plucked guinea-fowl’.14

12 There are several drafts of this in all the archives; this is the first published version (spring 1910). 13 Letter from Brown to Hugh Miller, 22 March 1910, UEd/Nelson, 60. 14 Saroléa archives, University of Edinburgh Special Collections, file 27, Saroléa to Maeterlinck,11 August 1910. The Saroléa archive contains 233 files; much of the Nelson material is in file 89: this archive is hereafter referred to as UEd/Saroléa plus file number.

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Having abandoned any thought of getting such established Parisian firms to cooperate, Brown had now (early in 1910) decided to set up a Paris branch of Nelson’s. Since the books would be in French, he hired a young freelance, J. J. Hutton, to sound out French printers, in order to get the typesetting done in Paris. The plan was that electrotypes and stereotypes (lightweight moulded sheets made by taking an impression from metal type set up by French compositors) would be made and transported to Edinburgh for the rest of the production process. At the same time, Brown entered into negotiation with an unlikely figure, a man who was to become one of France’s best-known publishers, Bernard Grasset (1881-1955). Grasset was a new force on the Paris publishing scene: brilliant, if unstable and difficult, he introduced new methods of publicity and promotion, and ended up publishing some of the major writers of the twentieth century. In 1913, he was to gain a place in publishing history by accepting the first volume of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, rejected by more established publishing houses – and published by Grasset only at the author’s expense. (As it happens, Proust’s future translator, the Scotsman C. K. Scott Moncrieff was during these years a student at Edinburgh University, studying English with Professor Saintsbury.) In 1910, Grasset was still up-and-coming, and short of funds. He himself recalled the contact with Nelson as having been made via the literary critic Emile Faguet, but it may have been through Saroléa. The Scottish publisher agreed to set Grasset up at number 61 rue des Saints Pères, in the VIth arrondissement, the prime publishing district, renting two floors of the building for offices and book storage. Grasset would enjoy premises rent-free and have a salary of 5,000 francs as Nelson’s agent. This idea was partly promoted by fear of incurring import duties, but the Edinburgh team also wanted to have an energetic French agent to promote their books. Grasset hired a manager, a secretary and warehousmen, and shared his office with Hutton and a book-keeper. Such a staff represented a fairly important establishment in Paris in May 1910.15 Early success The first four titles in what was to be Nelson’s French collection had been typeset in the Netherlands, (since no Paris firm had been signed up in time), then printed and bound at the Parkside Works in Edinburgh. They were Balzac’s Peau de chagrin; General de Ségur’s book on Napoleon’s Russian campaign; St François de Sales’s Introduction à la vie dévote, and Alphonse Daudet’s Lettres de mon moulin. The 15

On Grasset, see Gabriel Boillat, La Librairie Bernard Grasset et les lettres françaises, Paris, Honoré Champion, 1989 [1974], esp. pp. 89 ff. (although the account of the Nelson affair there contains several errors), and Jean Bothorel, Bernard Grasset, Vie et passions d’un éditeur, Paris, Grasset, 1989. Cf. also Chartier and Martin, Histoire de l’édition française, vol. 4, pp. 206-209. There are many letters to and from Grasset in the Nelson archive, none of which have been used by his biographers to my knowledge. One interesting possibility is that the link with Grasset may have been through Elie Reclus, brother of Elisée. On Scott Moncrieff in Edinburgh, see Peter France, ‘Scott Moncrieff, Charles, K.’, ODNB.

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volumes were in the French bookstalls by June 1910. Produced in the standard Nelson pocket size, they combined sturdiness with elegance, being bound in the cream cloth which was their trademark, with a green-embossed pattern on the cover and gold lettering on the spine. They compared favourably in material terms with French low-cost books: the paper was fine, the typeface bold and clear, the stitching solid and the first titles – all sure sellers – had illustrated wrappers. The design had been carefully considered and at 1.25 francs each the little books were offered at giveaway prices. The average price of a French novel at the time was 3 francs 50. Buchan wrote to Tommy Nelson on 4 June that ‘it is the best thing we have done and that is saying a good deal’.16 French publishers were reported to be furious, but they had to agree that the product was impressive. A French review said: ‘We have never before had in France books sold at such cheap prices and published with such care. It is the first time the public has been offered in this luxurious and convenient format works which one could not obtain before because of their high price’.17 The first titles were followed soon after by such works as Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina in French; another book on Napoleon, Bourget’s Le Disciple, and the Maeterlinck anthology which came in at number 11. Saroléa had commissioned introductions to several of these books by famous writers, and wrote some himself. He suggested classics for reprinting – they soon turned up on the syllabus for the French Department of Edinburgh University – and made selections from long works like Chateaubriand’s Mémoires d’outre-tombe. While Nelson’s jibbed at the cost of these prefaces and soon dropped them, they fulfilled the important function of giving the collection literary prestige in France. As Saroléa later remarked over a misprint in an advertisement, ‘It is in your interest that nothing should remind the French public of the foreign nature of the French collection’.18 Advertising was in fact a striking aspect of the project: the kind that Nelson introduced to France was not habitual for books. It included investment in posters for railway stations – since the books were being marketed as the ideal travelling companion. The firm also bought and adapted an ‘autocarrier’ (a motor van) for deliveries inside Paris. By January 1911, the van was ‘attracting a lot of attention’.19 Most innovative of all was the use of a film inserted into Pathé actualités, a programme of newsreels which showed at the Pathé company’s cinemas in Paris. The idea was inspired by an English newsreel company which had filmed the Parkside Works. By spring 1911, Nelson’s was negotiating with Pathé to have a short film (250 metres, a few minutes in length) showing the advanced processes in use in Edinburgh. Pathé sent over Jean Nédélec, then just embarking on his long career as a newsreel cameraman. Negotiations over the exact form of the film, the scenario and appropriate text for inter-titles (it was silent of course) lasted several 16 17 18 19

UEd/Buchan, B/ 2, Buchan to Brown, 4 June 1910. Cutting, Journal des Débats, UEd/Nelson, 437. UEd/Saroléa, 89: Saroléa to Brown 17 November 1911. On the van, see UEd/Nelson, 473, Hutton to Brown, 31 January 1911.

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months, not without hitches. Finally the film was scheduled for a premiere, as part of the usual news programme in a Paris cinema, running from 17 to 20 October 1911. Nelson’s bought 200 tickets and distributed them to its customers, the French retail booksellers. On 26 October Hutton reported to Brown that the ‘three-day season of the Pathé show was very successful. I was there two nights out of three and saw many customers of ours. They were all very pleased and profuse [in] their thanks for our kindness’.20 However, the promising start had in fact run into trouble very soon. The first problem – surprisingly – was the number of misprints introduced by first the Dutch, and then the Parisian typesetters, with whom contracts had later been signed. Brown had complained from the start of their incompetence and inaccuracies. That he was not imagining things is borne out by the stream of complaints that started to come in almost immediately from readers about the misprints in the early volumes. The archives contain many letters from private individuals, both French and English speakers, praising the enterprise but deploring the typos. The third French master at Berkhamsted school (where the 6-year-old Graham Greene’s father was headmaster) wrote to say that he could not speak too highly of the value of the collection, but ‘the books simply bristle with misprints’. As a teacher, he was used to reading pencil in hand, ‘and marking … all the typographical errors. Many of your books I have already marked, but Anna Karenina appalled me, and I gave up in despair’.21 Early in October 1910, Brown was already writing to Hutton that ‘the correctors [proofreaders] we are employing in Paris are not first-rate’. What was worse, the printers sometimes used the wrong font (typeface) to correct. By December he was writing: ‘We find French printers so unsatisfactory that we have decided to set the books here in future … we have found a first-rate [proof] reader – an Englishman with twenty years’ experience in the French printing trade’. But it was not until May 1911 that he could extricate the firm from the contracts signed with French typesetters: ‘in a short time we shall be making all the plates of all the books in Parkside, and I hope shall not then be worried any more over these endless mistakes’. It is not the least surprising aspect of the whole venture that the compositors who set these books, in French, from mid-1911 for many years were Scottish working men. Nelson’s probably used other Edinburgh firms (which used women as compositors) to do the work, as well as using in-house compositors, but none of them was likely to be fluent in French. They were, however, thought to be competent at foreign-language setting, when associated with good proofreaders.22

20

There was a large correspondence throughout the summer of 1911 about the film: see for example UEd/Nelson 473, passim, summer months, and Hutton to Brown, 26 October 1911; on Pathé-Journal and Nédélec see M. Huret, Ciné-Actualités; histoire de la premiere presse filmée 1895-1980, Paris, Veyrier 1984, pp. 28-38. 21 UED/Nelson 475, (Continental Letters), letter from Arthur Leigh. 22 UEd/Nelson 473, Brown to Hutton; Brown to Saroléa, 16 Dec. 1910, etc. For indications that Edinburgh compositors (both men and women) were well-used to setting in foreign languages, see Edinburgh employers’ evidence to the 1908 Fair Wages Committee,

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The second major problem was more predictable, but harder to resolve: deterioration of relations with Grasset, who was not an ideal agent on behalf of anyone except himself. Even in the spring of 1910, complaints from him over the agreement were reaching Edinburgh. By the autumn, he was being described as ‘unreasonable’. Tommy Nelson reports: ‘I fear we have made an error in putting the lease in Grasset’s name […] and he shows every sign of taking any possible advantage of this, and I very much fear we may have difficulty at the end of the year.’ In November, a long and embarrassed letter from Hutton to Henry Scheurmier, manager of Nelson’s London office, complained that relations in the office were fraught. Worse still, in replying to a query from an official at the French ministry of Education about the Collection Nelson, ‘Grasset had quietly ignored our collection’. Following a row, Grasset wrote furiously to Edinburgh that ‘relations between your firm and mine have reached such a point that the vicinity of these two administrations offers the most serious hindrances for your business as for my own’. By January 1911, the only question was the terms on which the partnership was to be severed.23 Nelson’s finally moved out in May that year, taking up residence in a large new building at 189 rue Saint-Jacques, near the Pantheon, slightly on the edge of the main publishing district. The firm developed its Paris office here, and it was soon employing 15 people, making it one of the larger publishing enterprises in the French capital at the time. As for Grasset, he stayed on with a very small staff at 61 rue des Saints-Pères, where the firm he established became one of the major fiction publishers in France. Though now taken over by a larger conglomerate, it is still to be found at the same address today. Thanks to his individual and enterprising style, Grasset went on to have an eventful, but on the whole successful career. It was clear that each side had badly misjudged the other over the Nelson agreement. On one hand, their publishing philosophies were very different, and Grasset was unlikely to be content with a subordinate role, basically selling books, for long. On the other hand, the deal had provided him with some pump-priming financial backing, good premises and publicity at a critical moment, and it had enabled Nelson’s to get a foothold in France, so it had served some purpose. However, Nelson’s now had to face a hostile publishing environment in Paris, and was still concerned over import duties. So it is not surprising that the firm re-opened talks with one of its larger rivals, Calmann-Lévy, and in view of Nelson’s dynamism, the French firm appeared to have a change of heart. In May 1911, Gaston CalmannLévy sent to Edinburgh a list of 66 titles from his list, in response to proposals from Nelson’s, along with a cautious letter about setting up a ‘Société Nelson-CalmannLévy’. In October 1911, an agreement was reached whereby some copyright books from the Calmann-Lévy fiction list (presumably those ‘fit to be given to young girls’) would be jointly published. Nelson’s would contribute the technology, printing Parliamentary Papers (1908) xxxiv, p. 4587. Nelson’s of Edinburgh reported at that date that proofreaders were brought over from the continent, though their head reader was English. 23 UEd/Nelson, 473, Hutton to Scheurmier 7 November 1910, and much other correspondence in the same file.

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and manufacturing them at the rate of 15 volumes a year during the contract. One clause specifically addressed import duty: any such would be jointly payable, but if it was so large as to wipe out two thirds of the profits the whole agreement would be cancelled. The imprint on all these books would a Franco-Scottish one: ‘NelsonCalmann-Lévy’.24 The arrangement was for 6 years, and it was renewed thereafter, so it greatly affected the nature of the Nelson list: of the first 100 titles, not a few bear the joint imprint. It has to be seen in the context of competition within the Paris book trade; by now all publishers were seeking to increase sales of popular books at affordable prices. None of them had the production features which enabled Nelson’s to prosper. The Edinburgh firm had to maintain a good rate of book production in order to keep the Parkside Works in business. They therefore launched a series called ‘Collection Lutétia’, of older French classics, out of copyright. And in February 1911, they secured a coup, by buying up rights from the family of Victor Hugo to issue his Oeuvres complètes (Complete Works). This would be the only version available in French, at the standard price of 1.25 francs per volume. The deal was worth 150,000 francs and the Hugo collection ran to 51 volumes, designed to be collected as a set and issued at the rate of two volumes a month, alongside the regular two titles of the Collection Nelson, and in exactly the same format. Trade advertising, anticipating later book-society publicity, showed a picture of a handsome bookcase holding the entire collection (see Figure 7.1).25 Saroléa changes sides Competition now took the fight right inside the Nelson camp. Consternation was caused there in 1912, by the resignation from his advisory role of Charles Saroléa, who transferred his services to the London firm of J. M. Dent. He left initially because Joseph Mallaby Dent, the firm’s patriarch, had offered him the exciting opportunity to edit a literary journal, Everyman, with the same title as the classic English literature collection which Dent had been publishing since 1906. But the Nelson team was even more taken aback when Saroléa also became involved with Dent’s decision to launch a French series, a direct rival both to Nelson’s original collection, and to the Collection Lutétia (the non-copyright French classics such as Molière and Racine). Dent’s series was to be called the Collection Gallia..26

24

UEd/Nelson 473 contains a copy of the agreement, undated but probably October

1911. 25 The French trade journal, Journal général de l’imprimerie et de la librairie, carried regular advertising for both the Hugo works and the collection Lutétia. See Wacquez, ‘Les Editions Nelson’, Appendix 24, which shows that Nelson’s took out over 50 pages of advertising a year in 1912 and 1913. 26 J. M. Dent (1849-1926) was a publisher more original and idealistic than the Nelson family, but was their regular competitor in some markets. His Everyman’s Library, of classics,

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This initiative was unequivocally modelled on Nelson’s project. It was a three-way enterprise, between Dent, Saroléa and a Parisian publisher and bookseller, Georges Crès. Crès, whose bookshop had opened in 1908 on the Place de la Sorbonne, only a stone’s throw from the rue Saint-Jacques, was a specialist in limited editions for bibliophiles. Not an obvious choice as agent for a cheap series, he was nevertheless contacted by Saroléa in January 1913. Crès enlisted his banker’s wife, Mme Le Roy Dupré, as a sleeping partner and, in April, the firm of G. Crès et Cie agreed with Dent to produce a new collection. A handwritten draft of the contract actually refers to the collection as ‘of the Nelson kind, printed in England’. Receiving an injection of cash, Crès moved to larger premises down the road at 119 Boulevard SaintGermain, and later that year an advertisment appeared in Bibliographie de la France for a clothbound series of mostly classic French titles (by Pascal, Balzac, Perrault, Constant, and so on). The Gallia collection was described in terms that might apply to the Nelson collection: ‘typographical beauty’, ‘elegant format’, ‘modest price’ of 1.25 francs, ‘worthy to be laid on the family table’. The volumes looked remarkably similar, hardbound in cream and green, with a Marianne motif replacing Nelson’s familiar ‘N’ in a cartouche on the spine. The collection, with Saroléa as literary director, was launched in August 1913, with La Fontaine’s Fables and Emile Faguet’s Petite histoire de la litterature française, ‘written specially for Gallia and containing everything one needs to know about the history of our literature’. Dent printed the books at the Temple Press in Letchworth.27 Thirty Gallia titles did indeed appear. But production stopped in 1915 after only 2 years. Crès worked far harder than Bernard Grasset had, as a promoter and agent, and Saroléa too was fully committed. But the project soon suffered from disagreements between Dent and Saroléa over the Everyman review (which ceased publication), plus a series of misunderstandings and poor dispatching and bookkeeping at the English end. Crès wrote that Gallia had become ‘a nightmare’. The fact that war broke out a year after the launch was itself a heavy blow. Crès was called up, and by December 1914 was ‘sleeping on straw’ in the French army, while his assistant ran the business. Dent’s memoirs say only that Saroléa was too busy with other things, and that ‘the booksellers did not sell the books quickly enough’. Saroléa himself had already noted that booksellers were lukewarm about this kind of initiative, since several had already complained that the Collection Nelson was too cheap to afford them any serious profit margin.28 George Brown at Nelson’s watched these developments with anxiety at first, correctly predicting that Dent would start with a classical series. He thought about launching a Molière collection as a riposte and also apparently dropped the price of Lutétia volumes to one franc, to try and edited by Ernest Rhys, was a landmark in publishing. See his The Memoirs of J. M. Dent, London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1928, and Jonathan Rose,‘Dent, Joseph M.’ ODNB. 27 On Crès’s background, see Chartier and Martin, Histoire de l’édition, vol. 4, pp. 222223. His first known letter to Saroléa is dated 27 January 1913. See UEd/Saroléa, files 9498. 28 UED/Saroléa, 95; Dent, Memoirs, pp. 157-61.

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Figure 7.1

Nelson Collection Catalogue, cover from first year; later catalogue showing lists of first 96 titles and the Victor Hugo and Lutetia collections. This page reproduced by permission, special collections, University of Edinburgh (pages 155–8); following from author’s private collection.

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AN ‘ENTENTE CORDIALE’ IN PUBLISHING, OR A SCOTTISH VICTORY? 159

spoil the market. But Gallia faded from sight, and Nelson’s stayed alone in the field as the only British firm operating this kind of scheme.29 Balance-sheet The Nelson launch was financially surprisingly successful, during what remained of the belle époque, contributing to the firm’s rising profits up to 1914. Only partial sales figures have come to light, but the accounts for the year ending March 1911, following the original launch in June 1910, show that sales totalled £20,107; production costs were £11,282 and the expenses of running the Paris office were £1,870, so the overall profit was about £7,000. The following year saw sales and profits almost double: sales of £35,565, production costs £18,232, Paris house expenses £33,538, and overall profits just short of £14,000.30 What does this story tell? It demonstrates conclusively that the Edinburgh firm was technologically streets ahead of its French competitors. The massive investment in modern machinery, bankrolled by canny exploitation of the educational market in Britain and the Empire, made the project thinkable. In this respect, Edinburgh was sending something to Paris. In another way of course, it was acquiescing in recognizing Paris, and France more generally as a cultural market, worth capturing in the post-entente cordiale climate: It will be an international library because the French language is itself par excellence the international language and the interpreter of the masterpiece of all nations. It will include translations of English, German, Italian and Russian authors. Thus the Collection Nelson, an undertaking resulting from an entente cordiale and a fruitful solidarity between French and English [sic] publishers [a slightly rose-coloured version] will serve at once the diffusion of the French language and of world literature.31

The collection can also be seen as promoting a certain version of French culture. This was essentially Saroléa’s in the first instance, but it also reflected a prudent Scottish 29 Nelson’s also launched libraries in other languages, including Spanish and German, but these ventures, beyond the scope of this account, did not last as long. 30 Balance book, SAPPHIRE deposit, Edward Clark collection, Napier University, Acc 1999/124 (thanks to David Finkelstein for this reference). These are the only 2 years when figures in money, rather than copies sold are available under the heading ‘French books’. They indicate that in 1912 for example, they accounted for about one quarter of the firm’s total operating profit of £48,000. For turnover figures see Wacquez: her Appendix 14 shows that one salesman in France, M. Tessier, sold over 29,000 books in 1911, 57,000 in 1912 and 67,000 in 1913, some in English, but most in French. The First World War, of course, affected publication, but the series recovered; the Second World War dealt it further blows, but titles continued to be published until the 1950s. See note 33 below. 31 Prospectus, Collection Nelson, UEd/Nelson, 473; the following paragraphs are based on Peter France’s section of our joint article ‘Nelson’s victory’; see this for a much fuller account of the literary profile of the collection, and a list of the first 100 titles.

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– but also British – vision of France. Saroléa later published a series of essays called The French Renascence (1916), to reaffirm the ‘essential’ values of French literature. His agenda was to dispel the dominant identification of French culture as ‘degenerate’, whether the pessimistic materialism of the Naturalist movement, or the amoral aestheticism of the symbolists and post-Symbolist decadents. As against this, Saroléa’s choices were a crusade for a ‘true France’ as he saw it. In the early list of books for Nelson, French history starts with Joan of Arc, newly celebrated by the Protestant Scot Andrew Lang, via the Richelieu of Hanotaux’s La France en 1614 and Louis XIV (through the eyes of Saint-Simon) to Napoleon, who dominates the historical vista. Little space is given to the republican and revolutionary tradition. The Revolution figures in the classic liberal study by Mignet, the Franco-Prussian war and 1871 Paris Commune in the memoirs of the conservative Francisque Sarcey, Le Siège de Paris. The Dreyfus affair is completely absent, though two well-known anti-Dreyfusards, Paul Bourget and Brunetière, figure in the list. The collection conveys, then, a traditional, even somewhat reactionary image of French history and culture. This would have been evident to contemporaries from the list of people whom Saroléa approached to write prefaces: aristocratic titles and membership of the Académie Française are prominent in the early lists. Several of them were contributors to the Revue des deux mondes which under Brunetière’s editorship from 1893 had become rather a bastion of traditionalism. Outside the frame were Zola’s novels – although they had been suggested by Buchan’s friends at the outset. Even in the inter-war period, only Zola’s most inoffensive works, Le Rêve and Une page d’amour, made it into the collection. Nor were the decadents among Nelson’s authors. In fact the avant-garde in general is strikingly absent from the Nelson list: the years up to 1914 saw publication of the early works of Apollinaire, Gide, Colette and Claudel, and of course Proust, but that was a different literary world from that of the Collection Nelson, essentially confined to middlebrow culture, much like Nelson’s English-language titles, rather than catering for the up-to-date Parisian clientele. What made it slightly distinctive was the right-wing idealism brought to bear on it by Saroléa. Once he had left, the list became a more run-of-the mill affair in cultural context. Nevertheless, it remained a remarkable adventure in publishing terms. As John Buchan recalled in his memoirs, Memory Hold-the-Door (1940): We were a progressive concern, and in our standardised Edinburgh factories we began the publication of cheap books in many tongues. On the eve of the war, we must have been one of the largest businesses of the kind in the world, issuing cheap editions of every kind of literature, not only in English, but in French, German, Magyar and Spanish, and being about to start in Russian.32

In this context, the Nelson French enterprise was a lastingly successful venture, with an educational slant. Schools, colleges, universities and libraries in France, 32 Quoted in Alistair McCleery, Introduction to Holmes and Finkelstein, Thomas Nelson and sons, pp. xix-xx.

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Scotland and England, continued to fill their shelves with these little cream-coloured volumes which will be familiar to many readers even today. The number of titles had reached 425 volumes by 1939, not counting the complete works of Victor Hugo, or the Lutétia classics. Children’s titles were added, as were special editions for school prizes. Although production continued after the Second World War for a while,33 the glory days were, however, over. They were remembered with nostalgia on both sides of the Channel. Albert Camus, in his unfinished autobiographical novel, Le Premier Homme, remembered the municipal library of his Algerian childhood in the 1920s: ‘Every book had a special smell from the paper it was printed on, a subtle secret smell in each case, but so singular that J. could have told a book from the Collection Nelson from the popular editions published by Fasquelle with his eyes shut’.34 And in a letter to The Times commenting on the death of Saroléa, the historian Denis Brogan wrote: ‘There must be many who got their first taste of French literature from that great series … there must be many like myself who still possess treasured volumes in what was once white and gold, though suffering now from the “contagion of the world’s slow stain”’.35

33 34 35

See Wacquez, ‘Les Editions Nelson’ for the subsequent fortunes of the French office. Albert Camus, Le Premier Homme, Paris, Gallimard, 1994, p. 228. The Times, 14 March 1953.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

New Women, Old Men? The extravagant archway through which visitors passed as they entered the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1900 was decked with newly invented electric light bulbs, and crowned with a statue known as ‘la Parisienne’. Paul Morand, a small boy at the time, later described this effigy in his book 1900 as ‘a siren, wearing a hat representing the City of Paris [a ship], a straight skirt, and flinging to the winds her evening cloak trimmed with false ermine’.1 The Parisienne – unlike the female allegories referred to in Chapter 2 above – was fully-clad, in contemporary costume. Despite her symbolic hat, she was recognizable as a ‘real’ woman, and a rather forceful one, yet at the same time fashionable and frivolous. Paris was already becoming a centre for the latest fashions; the statue’s dress was designed by Jeanne Paquin and the exhibition featured a Pavillon de la Mode.2 The exhibition also included the Palais de la Femme, literally ‘Palace of Woman’, aiming to inform the public about the ‘moral, intellectual and material work of woman’. The official report described it as showing in the basement ‘a series of tableaux in the Grévin style [with waxworks] depicting the day of a society lady, from her morning cup of tea to the hour of dressing for the theatre or the ballroom, by way of the drive to the Bois [de Boulogne] in an impeccably turned-out victoria [a small two-wheeled open carriage]. Lingerie, lace, furs, dresses, shoes and jewels were all represented by fine specimens.’ The ground floor showed paintings by women artists and contained a reading-room stocked with books by female authors, while the first floor was a theatre, ‘since the theatrical art plays such an important role’ in women’s art.3 The first ‘Woman’s Buildings’ had originated in the United States, at the World’s Fairs of Philadelphia and New Orleans, and especially in Chicago, at the Columbian Fair in 1893. There the President of the Board of Lady Managers was Mrs Bertha Potter Palmer, (1850-1921), the celebrated doyenne of Chicago society, collector of French painting, and philanthropist – who had been a contact of Patrick Geddes. This was a much more far-reaching pavilion than the French one, containing a vast display of exhibits, as well as a crèche, kindergarten and workshop, with the

1

Paul Morand, 1900, quoted in Pascal Ory, Les Expositions universelles à Paris, Paris, Ramsay, 1982, pp. 81-82. 2 Valerie Steele, Paris Fashions, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 149. 3 Alfred Picard, Rapport général (Le bilan d’un siècle 1801-1900), 6 vols, vol. VI, Paris, 1906-07, pp. 212-213.

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emphasis very much on women’s place in society.4 The French version in 1900, in the shadow of La Parisienne, was organized by Madame M. Pégard. Her name is not well known, yet it crops up in several contexts at this time. She combined an interest in the arts with participation at the feminist congresses, for which she acted as stenographer. She has been described as a ‘familial feminist’, but had been much impressed by her visit to Chicago in 1893, and her 1894 report to the Union Centrale des Arts décoratifs has been analysed by Debora Silverman as being torn between a more active defence of women’s rights, on the American model, and an acceptance of woman as homemaker and taste-former, within an essentially French status quo.5 The French ‘Woman’s Building’, which reveals a certain tension between women as consumers and producers of the arts and gracious living, serves to symbolize the gap between French and Anglo-American views about the status of women and gender relations in the belle époque. From the preceding chapters, it will be evident that there were differences, but how far did these register at Paris and Edinburgh level? To keep the comparison manageable, this chapter will single out three subjects, viewed comparatively: physical mobility in the city; higher education and the acquisition of cultural capital; and the movement for women’s rights. Were there distinctly Parisian and Edinburgh models of the New Woman? Gender in the city: getting about This chapter is essentially concerned with women of the middle classes, the equivalent of most of the men in this study, and the sector of society to which the term of ‘New Woman’ was, rightly or wrongly, attached. In a pioneering article on the French ‘woman of the people’ in the nineteenth century, Michelle Perrot drew a distinction between the bourgeois woman –‘la femme comme il faut’, as Balzac describes her 4 For a full account of the Chicago Women’s Building, see Century of Progress International Exposition, The Book of the Fair, Chapter 11: ‘Woman’s Department’, online from the Paul V. Galvin Library, Chicago, Digital History Collection, www.gl.iit.edu. Of the kindergarten, the report remarks: ‘Such is one of the many good works that the Board of Lady Managers has accomplished, and this it has done through its own unaided efforts, formulating its plans, erecting and furnishing its building, and raising the funds entirely through its own exertions’ (p. 31). It also reported that ‘of all the lessons of the Exposition there are none that will be longer remembered than those which the Woman’s Department has taught us, and to none is more credit due than to the Board of Lady Managers, forming, […] an organization of women for the common benefit of woman-kind such as has never before existed in the history of the world. Theirs was the hardest task of all, and never perhaps was success more hardly won; never were the barriers of prejudice and apathy more difficult to overcome’ (p. 29). 5 Debora Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin de Siècle France, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1992, pp. 189, ff. See also Laurence Klejman and Florence Rochefort, L’Egalité en marche: le féminisme sous la troisième République, Paris, FNSP/des femmes, 1989, p. 138, which describes Mme Pégard as the ‘very moderately feminist’ secretary of the 1900 Congrès des oeuvres et institutions féminines, held during June at the1900 Exhibition, but points out that she was against protectionist approaches to women’s work.

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in the 1830s – and the ‘femme du peuple’. The former had to be careful going about in the city: she was ‘encased’ in corset, tailored clothes, gloves and hat, and liable to be observed by neighbours and servants. The unmarried girl had to be chaperoned, and even the married woman was held within a confined space. To justify going out of her way, she needed to resort to subterfuge, like Madame Bovary. By contrast, Perrot describes ‘la femme du peuple’ as follows: The woman of the people had more freedom of movement. Her body was unfettered by a corset; her ample skirts were handy for concealing items … the [working-class] housewife went out hatless, indifferent to the dictates of fashion … hardly even troubling with cleanliness, something hard to achieve anyway because of inadequate water supplies. She was quick to gesticulate and answer back. For this constant picker-up of trifles, the city was a forest in which she tirelessly foraged, always in search of food and fuel.6

This kind of distinction was still to some extent in force in Paris at the turn of the century, and to a lesser extent in Edinburgh. ‘Respectable’ women were expected to observe certain rules not generally applied to women of lower classes. If we leaf through a Baedeker Paris Guide dated 1904, it would seem as though little had changed over the century. A series of warnings is delivered in the section on cafés, shops and restaurants: Cafés form one of the great features of Parisian life … Most of the Parisian men spend their evenings in the cafés, where they partake of coffee, liqueurs and beer, meet their friends, read the newspapers or play at billiards … The best cafés may with propriety be visited by ladies, though Parisiennes of the upper class rarely patronize them.7

Safer places were patisseries or teashops: ‘the customers who frequent them in the afternoon, to enjoy their goûter (cakes & pastry) are chiefly ladies and children’. The Bouillon Duval restaurants ‘are very popular with the middle and even upper classes and may without hesitation be visited by ladies’. Department stores were much visited, since they retail ‘all kinds of materials for ladies’ dress’. Even so, foreigners were advised that it was best to enter Parisian stores with another woman as companion ‘two ladies at least should be together’, as even Patrick Geddes’s guide to the exihibition warned.8 Cabarets in Montmartre however were ‘hardly suitable for ladies’. As for the bals publics or dance halls (such as the Moulin de la Galette in Montmartre or Bal Bullier in Montparnasse), ‘it need hardly be said 6

Michelle Perrot, ‘La femme populaire rebelle’ [1979] reprinted in M. Perrot, Les Femmes ou les silences de l’histoire, Paris, Flammarion, 1998, pp. 153-176, quotation on p. 166. On everyday life for working-class women in Edwardian Edinburgh, see S. Reynolds, Britannica’s Typesetters: women compositors in Edwardian Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1989, Chapter 10. 7 K. Baedeker, Paris Guide, Leipzig, Baedeker, 1904, pp. 23 ff. 8 Guide to Paris, the Exhibition and the Assembly, London and Edinburgh, Paris International Assembly, 1900, p. 28; the text is mostly by Stoddart Dewey and, perhaps, by Patrick Geddes.

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that ladies cannot attend these balls’.9 Geddes also suggested that ‘for music-halls and other resorts, mainly of the fast world, it is better that the men of the party should first judge by themselves, as it is somewhat shocking, even in Paris, to see grey-haired matrons chaperoning young women at some of these places’.10 A local guidebook, Paris-Parisien, published in 1898, informs us additionally that the righthand pavement of the boulevard Saint-Michel was reserved for women only.11 There was obviously still some sense of a gendered space for ‘respectable society’, and the Baedeker Guide of 1913, even on the eve of the First World War, repeated exactly the same warnings. ‘Non-ladies’, whether working-class women or women attending or performing at these places of pleasure, were assumed not to be included in the term ‘respectable’. Nevertheless, there is some danger of assuming too much from such prescriptive sources. They represent a moral policing of what ‘ladies’ could and couldn’t do, which is unlikely to correspond to what was happening on the ground. The presumed middle-class lady who is the recipient of advice generally had a mind of her own, especially by the turn of the century, when means of transport were enlarging her horizons. Lynda Nead, who has examined the iconography of Victorian London, has argued that ‘we should not allow this particular conception of Victorian femininity [separate spheres] to blind us to the existence of different, sometimes conflicting, versions of female respectability in this period. She quotes the case of a cartoon published as early as 1865, in which a woman standing alone is approached by a clergyman assuming she is a fallen woman: ‘Bless me sir, you are mistaken. I am not a social evil, I am only waiting for a bus.’12 She also argues that the over-heavy use made of Baudelaire’s male flâneur by cultural historians, plus the vast literature on shopping, has led to some kind of historical fiction that the only women who walked alone along a city street, whether in London or Paris, were marginal or deviant characters, or even prostitutes, unless they were heading for a department store or grand magasin.13 The iconography of both Paris and Edinburgh from photographs 9

Baedeker Paris Guide, 1913 edition, p. 40. Guide to Paris, p. 30, my italics. 11 Christophe Prochasson, Paris 1900: essai d’histoire culturelle, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1999, p. 58. 12 Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: people, streets and images in nineteenth-century London, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 2000, pp. 62 ff. For the ‘flâneuse’ in a French context, see Melanie Hawthorne, ‘Women’s movements: the gendered sub-text of anomie’, in Barbara Cooper and Mary Evans, eds, Moving Forward, Holding Fast: the dynamics of 19th-century French culture, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 1997, pp. 153-168. 13 Prostitution is a topic outside the range of this book, but was of course a major feature of Paris, as in London and other large cities; in Edinburgh, the number of prostitutes was smaller, but prostitution had long been well-established in the city; on Paris, see Alain Corbin, Filles de noce,: misère sexuelle et prostitution aux 19e et 20 siècle, Paris, Aubier, 1978; on Edinburgh, Linda Mahood, ‘The wages of sin: women, work and sexuality in the nineteenth century’, in Eleanor Gordon and Esther Breitenbach, eds, The World is Ill-divided: women’s work in Scotland in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Edinburgh, Edinburgh 10

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of streets taken in the 1880s through to 1913 provides ample evidence that the city streets were a place where straightforwardly respectable women of various social categories, were abroad, singly, in pairs or groups, in ways that the ‘angel in the house’ model fails to record. It is evident, for instance, from Ottilie McLaren’s letters that she was able to walk about Paris unchaperoned without trouble, once she was used to it. The development of modern forms of transport helped. Horse-drawn omnibuses with two decks had been in circulation since the 1830s. Only when these acquired staircases later in the century did the top deck become accessible at last to women. Previously, men had climbed up a ladder to smoke on the impériale, the setting for Maupassant’s sad story of treachery, La Dot (The Dowry), written in the 1880s: a naïve provincial bride sits inside a Paris omnibus, while her new husband goes to sit on the top deck, holding her dowry in a brief case. He hops off, invisibly to her, and is never seen again. Guidebooks advised foreign visitors to take a cab (horsedrawn until the 1900s), since one had to know the routes well to get about by public transport. But during the belle époque, electric trams, which first appeared from the 1880s, and then motorbuses (1905), provided a more regular and predictable service than the omnibuses. We probably underestimate the extent to which this opened up the city for women: it was easier to take a tram than to call a cab, find an omnibus, or own a carriage. The mother of the painter Paul Sérusier wrote to him in June 1891: ‘When I left you on Sunday, I found a tram which took me to Bastille and then to the Madeleine, with one change. I was much better off with that than in these wretched cabs, which I do not like at all. I was home by 10.30 [p.m.].’14 That said, there is a case for saying that the warnings about Paris, as a major tourist city, were necessary for foreign female visitors, in view of the different manners and assumptions of French men. Men in Paris, as the guide books often warned, might spot an unwary tourist and regard her as prey. A propos the Batignolles railway tunnel on the outskirts of Paris, before the coming of lighting in trains, one commentator remarked: ‘[O]nly those condemned to death, or women who are sitting face to face with a ruffian in darkness, know how long a minute can be.’15 For a woman, Scottish or foreign, to walk or travel around Edinburgh alone would be quite normal, and on the whole she would not fear being accosted, unless she crossed the path of someone very drunk, as the young Kathleen Bruce did to her alarm (though without harm).16 The city had fewer tourists but it is clear from the University Press, 1990, pp. 29-48, and ‘Lady child-savers and girls of the street’, in Eleanor Gordon and Esther Breitenbach, eds, Out of bounds: women in Scottish society 1800-1945, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1992, pp. 42-64. 14 Clémence Sérusier, letter of 8 June 1891, Getty Archives (860131), reference kindly provided by Belinda Thomson. 15 Quoted in Norma Evenson, Paris: a century of change, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1979, p. 115. 16 Louisa Young, A Great Task of Happiness: the life of Kathleen Scott, London and Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1995, p. 11: ‘in Edinburgh at that time [the 1890s] it was difficult to avoid drunks’.

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remarks of French visitors that they found the freedom of Scottish women surprising. In 1898, Mme Quinet, on arrival at St Pancras Station en route for Edinburgh, was handed into a ‘Ladies’ Only’ compartment, and remarks that ‘in this country, there is such respect for women, […] that even very young girls travel alone, under the safeguard of the moral code’.17 Mme Quinet also reported that she never tired of strolling (‘flâner’ is the word she uses) in Princes Street, unaccompanied.18 As noted in Chapter 4 above, Edmond Demolins was surprised to find young women unchaperoned at Patrick Geddes’s Summer Meetings. He expanded his observations into a section on ‘Les jeunes filles et le mariage’ in reports home from Edinburgh in 1892. Demolins had spoken with Mary Rose Hill Burton (1857-1900), an artist and friend of the Geddes family, and made a number of observations about the freedom of movement of women in Edinburgh: [Here] the young girl comes and goes, and leaves the house alone; that surprises us. What astonishes them even more is the cloistered or subordinate regime to which we submit our daughters, and which they accept. Mlle Burton has been to Paris, spending several months with her compatriots in a French boarding school. She was astonished at the regime. Close supervision, long hours of class, short recreation in a walled courtyard and hardly any games […] ‘We English girls [sic] would not have been able to support this regime. Our health would have suffered. They had to change the rules for us.’19

He also described a mixed expedition to the Forth Railway Bridge, when the party had to ‘get across some difficult passages at dizzy heights’ before being lowered in a sort of cage down to the water, where they continued by boat. None of the ‘girls’ on the trip asked for assistance, or made the ‘squeaks of fear’ that a self-respecting French girl would have uttered’.20 The kind of difference both these French observers were noting between the two cities in fact reflected both the greater cosmopolitanism and attendant dangers of Paris, and much broader social differences between the French and British bourgeoisie in attitudes towards the raising and marital prospects of their daughters.21

17

Mme Edgar Quinet, De Paris à Edimbourg, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1898, p. 16. Ibid., p. 41. 19 Le Mouvement social, 1892, p. 103 (for fuller reference see Chapter 4 above, note 17); the reference must be to the late 1870s. 20 Ibid. In fact, these were the very early days of the bridge’s existence: parties visited it frequently, but by 1900 the engineer ‘measuring the girth of Victorian skirts against the narrowness of the footpath pressed for a total exclusion of ladies from the bridge’, regarding them as in danger from trains, and after that ‘No Ladies’ became a Forth Bridge tradition, J. Thomas, The North British Railway, 2 vols, vol. 2, London, David & Charles, 1975, p. 30. 21 See Christophe Campos, The View of France, from Arnold to Bloomsbury, London, Oxford University Press, 1965, for many reflections on the latter, See also, on nineteenthcentury France, Michelle Perrot, ed., Histoire de la vie priveé, vol. IV, De la Révolution à la Grande Guerre, Paris, Seuil, 1987, for a wealth of detail on the French bourgeois family, with a comparative chapter on Britain by Catherine Hall. 18

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The New Woman, the bicycle and sport The expression ‘New Woman’ came into vogue in English in the 1890s, and took off after an article in the journal North American Review in 1894. As Mary Louise Roberts has remarked, ‘it was not long before she became reified in the public imagination’ in hundreds of magazine articles: Bespeckled, [perhaps a combination of ‘bespectacled’ and ‘freckled’?], bookish and austere in dress, the New Woman combined […] plainness with dandyish habits such as cigarette smoking. Garbed in bloomers, she was frequently depicted riding a bicycle, the new plaything of the middle classes.22

She was also much depicted in drama and fiction. The most celebrated case, avant la lettre, was Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879). The closest to the British reallife version was perhaps Vivie in Bernard Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession (written in 1894, not performed until 1902). Shaw’s stage directions describe Vivie as ‘a sensible, able, highly-educated young middleclass Englishwoman. Age 22. Prompt, strong, confident, self-possessed’, she shakes hands with a ‘resolute and hearty grip’. Vivie rides a bicycle, prominently displayed on stage, has just ‘tied with the third wrangler at Cambridge’, but intends to be an actuary and make a lot of money.23 In France, too, the expression ‘la femme nouvelle’ was certainly used, yet it does not seem to have had quite the same connotations. In both countries, it is true, the underlying idea was of emancipation and independent-mindedness. But as the caricature above suggests, the English – or Scottish – New Woman was perceived as austere and sporting. This image was always going to be rather difficult to fit with the self-image of French women. In her remarkable study of some famous ‘disruptive’ women of the period in France, Mary Louise Roberts has characterized the French New Woman as at once more intellectual and more sexy. Her focus was chiefly on two arenas, both very Parisian, journalism and the stage, and she notes that the Anglo-American version could be seen in France as an ‘alien import’.24 Paris was, of course, the destination of many independent-minded young women from abroad at the turn of the century, who might be described as ‘alien imports’. If we look at the example of Ottilie McLaren, an alien import from Edinburgh, we have someone who perhaps falls between the two extremes above. Born in 1875, she was exactly of an age in the mid-1890s to represent a New Woman. She had been 22 Mary Louise Roberts, Disruptive Acts: the new woman in fin-de-siècle France, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2002, p. 21 and notes, p. 257; two journalists, Ouida and Sarah Grand, could claim to have coined the phrase, see also Sally Ledger, The New Woman: fiction and feminism at the fin-de-siècle, Manchester, MUP, 1997 and Karen Offen, European Feminisms 1700-1950, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2000, p. 188 and note. 23 George Bernard Shaw, Plays Unpleasant, London, Penguin, 1946, pp. 212-215. 24 Jane Misme, quoted in Roberts, Disruptive Acts, p. 20, and see ibid. pp. 21 ff. on the reception of the New Woman in France; it seems clear from this that there were distinctive ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and French versions.

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sent, like her older sister Katie, to the Scottish girls’ boarding school, St Leonards, in St Andrews, which was the very model of a British girls’ school of the period, and the first in Britain to be organized like a boys’ public school (founded in 1877).25 Katie then attended Girton College, Cambridge, another place for New Women, but thereafter married and devoted herself mainly to her home and children. But Ottilie went alone to Paris, where she single-mindedly pursued her career as a sculptor, maintaining a long and very egalitarian engagement with William Wallace. Her letters indicate a mature attitude to sexuality, while at the same time she was careful to observe the proprieties. But she regularly smoked cigarettes (her fiancé writes of watching her ‘brown fingers making cigarettes’, the first time they met) and she certainly rode a bicycle.26 There is plenty of material associating New Women and bicycles during these years, on both sides of the Channel. The link with emancipation is constant. A famous cartoon from Le Grelot entitled ‘Off to the feminist congress’ of 1900, shows a pert young woman in a tucked-up skirt, smoking a cigarette, and wheeling her bicycle out of the home, where a harassed husband is left amid a scene of domestic chaos? (see Figure 8.1)27 Turn-of-the-century poster artists found the combination of young women and bicycles irresistible. There were more poster advertisements for bicycles than for any other product, though they are more remarkable for the fantasies they seem to have encouraged than for any practical demonstrations of cycling. Bicycle manufacturers sought to break into the female market, so they tried to associate women and bicycles in their advertising. In reality, women constituted a small proportion of bicycle owners in either France or Britain: perhaps 1 per cent of cyclists in 1890s Paris. One summer Sunday in 1893, a survey of the bikes going out of Paris on the Saint-Cloud road reported 5,653 cyclists, of whom only 192 were women.28 Women were specifically barred from cycle racing, which became a major spectator and participant sport for men – the Tour de France started in 1903.29 Nevertheless, 25

On such schools, and with many references to St Leonards, see Martha Vicinus, Independent women: work and community for single women 1850-1920, London, Virago, 1985; see also Kathleen McCrone, Sport and the physical emancipation of English Women 1870-1914, London, Routledge, 1988; and for details, Julia Grant et al., St Leonards School, 1877-1927, London, Oxford University Press, 1927. 26 In one of his earliest letters to Ottilie McLaren, her fiancé William Wallace remarked, ‘At Hilders, among the heather, I watched your brown fingers making cigarettes’, National Library of Scotland (NLS), MS 21503, letter of 1 May 1896; later he sent her various kinds of tobacco in Paris. He also admonished her, ‘Take care of yourself on your bike’, ibid., 26 April 1896. 27 Reproduced in many books on this period; see for example Roberts, Disruptive Acts, p. 24. 28 Christopher Thompson, ‘Un troisième sexe: les bourgeoises et la bicyclette dans la France fin-de-siècle’, Le Mouvement social, no. 192, 2000, pp. 9-40, see p. 28; but 1893 was still very early for the women’s safety bicycle. Ownership exploded after 1895 or so: the bicycle was becoming the mobile phone of the age. 29 Ibid., p. 31.

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young and go-ahead girls persuaded their parents to buy them bicycles, learnt to ride in vélodromes (often former horse-riding stables), and the new invention was soon figuring in popular romances. In Britain, by 1900, it has been argued, while men were always the majority of cyclists, women of all classes were finding it possible to ride bicycles as a means of getting about far more freely than in the past. La Fronde, the all-women newspaper edited by Marguerite Durand, may have been exaggerating when in the same year it proclaimed that ‘The Parisienne of today goes everywhere, does everything, is interested in everything. Her life has changed completely,’ but it did by then reflect some real change, if only for a youthful and well-off minority of the capital’s women.30 Real-life women did not always look like the posters, however. They did not wear floating garments, which would have caught in the spokes. Ottilie McLaren, who took her bicycle to Paris in the 1890s, wrote home: ‘I bike à l’américaine, as the nicest French people [read ‘women’] do: a short skirt about 4 or 5 inches below the knee and long gaiters which go right to meet the knickerbockers in case of one’s skirt blowing up. I always strap mine down’.31 Photographs show soberly clad women in similar skirts, or sometimes early versions of trousers or breeches.32 Bloomers, which became famous, were originally meant to be worn under skirts. Costume played a part in the alarm occasioned by women teachers riding bikes to school. The director of education for the Seine département in 1897 issued a statement saying that, while it was permissible for women primary-school teachers to cycle at the weekend, they should not ‘turn up at school on a bicycle at the start of the day, not only because we do not allow them to take classes in the special costume, but because they might have some accident within the sight of their pupils, which would not add to their authority’.33 30

Quoted in Susan Foley, Women in France since 1789: the meanings of difference, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2004, p. 163; See McCrone, Sport and the Physical Emancipation of English Women, pp. 177 ff. 31 NLS, MS 21535, letter of 27 November 1897. On posters, see Jack Rennert, 100 Years of Bicycle Posters, London, Hart-Davis, 1973. 32 Cf. Elizabeth Haldane, From One Century to Another, 1937, quoted in Leah Leneman, Into the Foreground: a century of Scottish women in Photographs, National Museum of Scotland, 1993, p. 21, under photograph of cyclists at Bridge of Cally in 1899: ‘our full skirts and petticoats were not well adapted for the work [of riding a bicycle.] […] Various means had to be adopted of so fastening [the female cyclist’s] skirts on her legs as to prevent them entangling themselves in the back wheel or worse still, showing her legs to the public, an unforgiveable offence’. 33 ‘Les institutrices et la bicyclette’, La Fronde, 25 December 1897. The other autonomous form of transport was the new motor car. But few women, even in Paris, seem to have taken the wheel themselves in the early years. One set of figures for driving licences for Paris issued between 1911 and 1914 tells us that only about 300 were taken out by women, for a population of 2.8 million (1.5 million women). Almost all came from the well-off districts of the city and the number was in any case small: ‘a microphenomenon’, see Alexandre Buisseret, ‘La femme et l’automobile à la belle époque’, Le Mouvement Social, no. 192, 2000, pp. 41-64, pp. 49-50. For more on Parisian transport, see my article ‘Vélo-Métro-Auto: Women’s mobility

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The bicycle can be seen both as a means of transport and as a form of sport. Again, the difference between Paris and Edinburgh was that in Scotland, women were expected and encouraged to engage in sports and outdoor activities. Indeed in France there was much medical head-wagging over their riding bicycles: articles were written about the possibility of masturbation, defloration or damage to women’s internal organs by this somewhat shocking machine. ‘For women’, wrote one doctor, ‘the velocipede will always be a mechanism not to be recommended, a sterility machine’.34 There were similar murmurs in Britain, but without as much public resonance. Demolins wrote from Edinburgh in the 1890s, ‘Here girls take part in all the many games young men play. Any family with a garden large enough puts in a tennis court. In the walks we go on, the girls are as good walkers as the young men; they can walk quickly.’35 As for organized sports, Mary Lynn Stewart has argued that while French boys were being encouraged by the late nineteenth century to go in for athletic sports, in part because of a nationalist and military agenda by the public authorities, ‘Frenchwomen took up organized sports decades later than Englishwomen [and Scots] did’.36 Many Frenchwomen indeed despised competitive sports (although at the same time Baron Coubertin was reviving the Olympic Games, and the 1900 Paris games were the first at which women were allowed to compete). The 34 normal schools in France training women teachers did not require physical education.37 In Edinburgh schools, by contrast, sports were part of the curriculum: The 1910 prospectus of Craigmillar Park College in Edinburgh emphasized outdoor pursuits: Besides Garden Games, Tennis and Net Ball, the college is close to Blackford Hill and Arthur’s Seat, where the boarders are taken during the week, as well as for other country walks. They may also arrange a day’s skating, etc. Arrangements may be made for swimming and riding lessons.38

St Leonards School, where the bourgeoisie of Edinburgh sent many of their daughters, was a pioneering boarding school of the sporting kind. Swedish drill was introduced in 1891 ahead of the rest of the country, and the girls regularly played cricket, hockey, lacrosse, tennis and golf. They did so competitively, being organized into house teams which fought for an annual shield, the stuff of ‘school stories’ in belle époque Paris’, in Diana Holmes and Carrie Tarr, eds, A Belle Epoque? Women and Feminism in French Society and Culture 1890-1914, Oxford, Berghahn, 2006, pp. 81-94; I am grateful to the editors and other contributors for insights from their papers in this collection. 34 Quoted in Jean-Francois Laplagne, ‘La femme et la bicyclette à l’affiche’, in P. Arnaud and T. Terret, eds, Histoire du sport féminin, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1996, pp. 83-94, p. 83, and see Mary Lynn Stewart, For Health and Beauty: physical culture for Frenchwomen 1880s1930s, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001, p. 163. 35 Le Mouvement social, 1892, p. 103. 36 Stewart, For Health and Beauty, p. 151. 37 Ibid., p. 159, and see McCrone, Sport and the Physical Emancipation of English women, for a contrasting story. 38 Leneman, Into the Foreground, p. 46.

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Figure 8.1

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Cartoon from the magazine Le Grelot, 1900, showing a woman going ‘off to the Feminist conference’, held during the 1900 Exhibition.

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for several generations. Outside school, many young women engaged in outdoor sports. The Scottish Ladies’ Golfing Association was formed in 1904 and the Ladies’ Scottish Climbing Club was started in 1908 by the seasoned Edinburgh mountaineer Jane Inglis Clark (c. 1860-1950) and her daughter: it was the first club to encourage independent climbing by women (i.e. without male companions). Edinburgh-born Dorothy Campbell Hurd, born in 1883, was playing golf with her elder siblings by the age of 5, and went on to be an international champion.39 A painting of Ottilie McLaren, aged about twelve, shows her holding skates. She came from a privileged home, but open air activities were by no means confined to the middle classes in Edinburgh. Among the women compositors whom I interviewed in the 1980s, who had been girls at the turn of the century, several recalled playing golf (which was virtually free of charge in Scotland) and walking on the Pentland hills.40 Edinburgh ‘New Women’, perhaps as a result of their emphasis on the outdoor life, lacked coquetry, as Samuel Peploe later noted with despair: ‘They seem to look for convenience above all in their clothing. Some girls even wear a cloth cap, like the men. Others put or rather ‘throw on’ hats which stay on any old how and are manifestly there just to cover their heads and not to contribute to showing off their features. A Parisienne who saw them would faint’.41 In the French context, this was an understandable reaction.. An idea of the approach to sport for women in France can be gleaned from a plea for more of it in La Fronde in one of its earliest articles in 1897: Sport and Women! Two words that clashed when they were put together, just a decade ago and which today, evoke only very pleasant and gracious images. Illustrations and sculpture have popularised the harmonious and slender lines of our women cyclists and yachtswomen. Tennis, horseriding, hunting, even the motor car, have thousands and thousands of practitioners in feminine circles.42

As the tone of this extract indicates, sport had to look harmonious to appeal to French women. Edmond Demolins was lastingly struck by the independence of Scottish young women and the fact that they were accustomed to be brought up more or less alongside their brothers, as he saw it (this would not always be the case). But this seemed to him to explain a certain Puritanism (he calls it ‘reserve’) which he detected among men, who did not joke about women as young Frenchmen would, even when on their own. He was, of course, in the rather rarefied atmosphere of a Geddesian summer school, not a rugby club. But the emphasis on sport and outdoor living was not imagined. He was impressed by the sporting prowess of the daughters of 39 See the entries on both these women in Elizabeth Ewan, Sue Innes, Siân Reynolds and Rose Pipes, eds, The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2006, (hereafter BDSW). 40 Cf. Reynolds, Britannica’s Typesetters, p. 104. 41 Quoted in Guy Peploe, Samuel John Peploe, Edinburgh, Mainstream, 2000, p. 106. 42 La Fronde, 9 December 1897 quoted by Foley, Women in France since 1789, p. 159.

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his hosts, while also pointing out that in France serious men were afraid of looking ridiculous: ‘I can assure you that Professor Geddes does not look at all ridiculous playing tennis.’43 But if we can – as we surely should – see the women present at Patrick Geddes’s Summer Meetings as good examples of the Anglo-Saxon model of the New Woman, it is clear that they differ quite a lot from the French model. As Mary Louise Roberts has argued, the women who campaigned most energetically for women’s rights in this period in France, sought to do so with some traditional weapons, such as coquettishness. She has made famous a quotation by Marguerite Durand, pioneer feminist and founder of La Fronde (see below for further details): ‘Feminism owes a great deal to my blond hair.’44 Getting an education: the New Woman and university medical schools Universities in both cities had long been confined to men. The following description of a lecture in Edinburgh refers to 1913, by which time more than a thousand women students had passed through the University, yet it conveys quite strongly the sense of a male-gendered occasion: It is four o’clock on an afternoon of late November or early December. ... The bell that marks the beginning of a lecture rings across the quadrangle […] The Edinburgh fog has seeped into the room, and the lights do not dispel it […] There is a swish of gown and a sweeping movement as a mortar-board is taken off, and a tall figure […] hastily mounts the platform. there is a stamping of feet from the class as he [Professor Saintsbury] enters … At first we were engaged by superficialities: the striking face with the long, straggling grey beard framed in the light from two electric bulbs […] and as we listened to that voice, we began, here and there, if we really tried to ‘set our minds to his’, to see English Literature through the eyes of one who knew it and delighted in it as much as any man ever did.45

This description is of a lecture in the Arts faculty, where most of the University’s women students were enrolled by then, but they were still quite a small minority, about 18 per cent of the whole student body. In Paris, too, while women were admitted to the university in the 1890s, ‘their presence in the lecture theatre still caused a sensation’.46 This period was nevertheless a critical one for the acquisition, by a much wider range of women than in the past, of the cultural and educational capital which would make later changes possible. 43

Le Mouvement social, 1893, p. 99. Roberts, Disruptive Acts, p. 49. 45 John W. Oliver, ‘The Professor’, in George Saintsbury: The Memorial Volume, London, Methuen, 1945. 46 George Weitz, The Emergence of Modern Universities in France, 1863-1914, Princeton, Princeton University Press,1983, p. 360; women students were 10 per cent of the total in France in 1913, and Weitz argues that overall, feminization of the university was faster in France than in Britain or Germany, p. 242. 44

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Enabling legislation had made it possible for women to take degrees at Scottish Universities from 1892 (they had been able to attend lectures earlier), but that was the outcome of a long campaign. Edinburgh – like Glasgow – had had a Ladies Educational Association (the ELEA), one of a number of such associations throughout Britain, which acted as informal support groups for women teachers, and to promote the education of girls. The ELEA was founded in 1867-69, and later renamed the Edinburgh Association for the University Education of Women (EAUEW, 1877) by a group of middle-class women allied with a number of sympathetic professors at the University. One of their greatest champions was Professor David Masson (1822-1907) who was appointed to the chair of Rhetoric and English Literature in 1865, holding the post for 30 years (George Saintsbury, referred to above, was his successor). He and others gave lecture courses organized by the ELEA/EAUEW, enabling women to have some access to academic discourse and the syllabus. The fact that the lectures were given by professors wearing gowns was reported to give them some credibility they might otherwise have lacked. In these early days, the Edinburgh University authorities invented a special certificate in 1872 for women who had reached a certain standard in literature, philosophy and science. Masson’s daughter Flora was one of the first to acquire one, and indeed professors’ wives and daughters were among the first to engage in higher education. (In 1876, St Andrews University introduced its successful LLA, ‘Lady Literate in Arts’, certificate for Arts students, on similar lines, which lasted 50 years.) The first eight women – all students of the EAUEW, who had already been following a number of courses – graduated in 1893.47 Most women at Edinburgh studied Arts subjects (including many who studied Modern Languages with Charles Saroléa) and the same was true in Paris, where women began enrolling in the Faculties once they were able to take the baccalauréat, the entry qualification.48 In the rest of this section, however, I shall concentrate on medical students, since while both Paris and Edinburgh were major centres for medical training and welcomed foreign students, there are some significant differences in their approaches to women entering medicine. 47 Carol Dyhouse No Distinction of Sex? Women in British Universities 1870-1939, London, UCL Press, 1995, pp. 13-16; On Edinburgh, see Sheila Hamilton, ‘The first generation of university women 1869-1930’, in Gordon Donaldson, ed., Four Centuries: Edinburgh University Life 1583-1983, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1983, pp. 99-115, and Sheila Hamilton, ‘Women and the Scottish Universities, c1869-1939, a social history’, University of Edinburgh PhD, 1987. 48 See Karen Offen, ‘The second sex and the baccalauréat in republican France 18801924’, French Historical Studies, vol. 13, no. 2, 1983, pp. 252-288; see also Collective, Universités et grandes écoles à Paris, Les Palais de la Science, Paris, Action artistique de la Ville de Paris, 1999, and Albert Guigne, La Faculté de lettres de l’Université de Paris, Paris, Alcan, 1935, for figures of students reading Lettres (literature, plus law,) p. 8. In 1893, there were 1101 Frenchmen and 93 foreign men enrolled, and 141 French women and 23 foreign women. In 1913, there were 1413 French men, and 449 foreign men; the numbers of women had risen: 572 French women and 673 foreign women.

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‘Paris, during the first half of the 19C seems to have been a mecca for foreign students, especially in medicine.’49 Following the Franco-Prussian war, however, thought to have been lost partly through the inferior education and know-how of the French army, France had a crisis of confidence in its educational system, and aimed to bring it up to the level of Germany, which was now attracting more foreign students. Hence there was a whole set of educational reforms in the 1880s, including compulsory primary education, but also affecting the university sector. The New Sorbonne (see Chapter 2 above) was part of this initiative. France now wanted to attract more foreign students, in order to show France was still a cultural power.50 By 1890 to 1900, there were about 1500 foreigners in French universities, about 9 per cent of the total. In 1899, an information office in the Paris medical faculty was created, to attract North American students. After 1900, the figure went up (11 per cent in 1908, 15 per cent in 1914 and more later.) Most of them were studying either medicine or law.51 Among foreign medical students, women while never numerous, were a special category, since France, as distinct from other countries, (which for a long time included Scotland) allowed them to enter medical school, possibly for the reasons above. The first women had been authorized to do medical studies in France quite early on, in 1868 – at exactly the same time as Sophia Jex-Blake was launching an unsuccessful campaign in Edinburgh (described below). Between 1868 and 1882, nineteen French doctorates were granted to women, only five of whom were French nationals. Elsewhere in Europe, they could only be auditors.52 One British woman who did manage to qualify in France in these early days was Elizabeth Garrett (later Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, 1836-1917), who had tried without success to matriculate at the Universities of Edinburgh, St Andrews and London in the late 1850s. In 1870, she became the first woman to be awarded an MD from the University of Paris, having been one of the four original women admitted to study in 1868-69. Of the other three, one was American, one Russian, and one French: Mme Madeleine Brès (1842-1922), whose thesis was on breastfeeding, indicating that early women doctors often specialized in female medicine. The numbers crept up: the Paris Faculty of Medicine had thirty-two women students in 1878, 121 in 1888-89, 228 in 1904-05 and 578 in 1913. Many of these were foreign students, particularly Russians. In the 1890s, the rules were tightened against foreigners (men or women) practising in France, as some had managed to do: from then on, all doctors had to have the French baccalauréat (secondary-school leaving certificate, not yet open to girls’ lycées in its standard form, but which could be taken by French women independently). In 1882, there were seven women doctors in practice in France; in 1888 there were eleven 49

Weitz, The Emergence of modern universities in France, p. 254. Ibid., p. 252. 51 Ibid., p. 258. 52 Ibid., p. 242; see J. Poirier and R. Nahon, ‘L’accession des femmes à la carrière médicale, fin XIXe siècle’, in J. and J. Poirier, eds, Médecine et philosophie à la fin du 19e siècle, Paris, 1981. 50

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in Paris; in 1903, there were a total of ninety-five in France, thirty of them in Paris. Many women doctors worked unpaid for charitable bodies – for bourgeois French women to work professionally could still be seen as losing caste.53 In Paris, then, there was no barrier to the formal training of women as doctors, at least for their initial qualifications. Once they qualified, it was a different story and the objections from the medical profession were considerable. Foreign medical students who trained in France, were welcomed to study for their initial qualification, because, it was argued, they would go back home and prescribe French drugs, order French books and recommend French spas. And those who had already done preliminary training elsewhere were particularly welcome to do postgraduate work. Summer courses were offered in Grenoble and Montpellier.54 The intention was not that they should practice in France, however, competing with French doctors. Even for French women, because of objections from the medical profession, the barrier came at the point of entry to a hospital post. When in 1885 Blanche Edwards-Pillet (1858-1940) applied to be a hospital intern, ninety interns and doctors signed a petition against her; she was burned in effigy in the Bal Bullier (the one ‘ladies’ could not attend.)55 The Paris municipal council allowed her case and Eugène Poubelle, the prefect of the Seine departement (the same one who organized receptacles for collecting rubbish which now bear his name) signed the order, opposed by the entire medical profession, ratifying the admissibility of women to Parisian hospital internships on 31 July that year. But it took many years before they were accepted. As late as 1900, a medical textbook opined that: These colleagues in skirts do not seem prepared by their sex to fulfil the functions of a practitioner. The woman doctor (doctoresse) is one of those weeds which have invaded the flora of modern society … she imagined that opening a few books and dissecting a few cadavers was going to provide her with a new brain.56

The career of Parisian doctor Madeleine Pelletier (1874-1939) is a story of frustration, overcome only by exceptional determination. The daughter of small shopkeepers, brought up in some poverty near the central market, she had a haphazard education. In her twenties, she went to listen to lectures at the Paris School of Anthropology, where she was encouraged to take her baccalauréat (including Latin), successfully

53 Figures from Edmée Charrier, L’Evolution de l’intellectuelle féminine, Paris, Mechelink, 1931, pp. 150 ff.; cf. J. Rabaut, Féministes à la belle époque, Paris, Editions FranceEmpire, 1985, p. 96; Les premières femmes médecins en France, brochure, Bibliothèque de l’Académie Nationale de Médicine, 1975, p. 5, copy in Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand, Paris. 54 Agnes McLaren (1837-1913), Ottilie’s aunt, who despite living in Edinburgh could not train there, went to Montpellier in 1878 for medical training. See the entry on her in the BDSW, cf. note 39 above. 55 Rabaut, Féministes à la belle époque, p. 97. 56 Charles Flessinger, Médecine moderne, 1900, p. 81, quoted in Les premières femmes médecins, p. 10.

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passing it in 1896-67. A scholarship enabled her to start studies at the Ecole de Médecine: of the 4,500 students in 1899, 129 were women, 100 of them foreigners. Having overcome very great obstacles and written a well-received thesis, she chose to specialize in mental illness, but hit the first serious obstacle when she applied to do the competitive exam for internships in mental hospitals in 1902. Women had already taken internships elsewhere by then, but for asylums, the rules stated that applicants must be in possession of their ‘civic rights’. Originally intended to exclude men deprived of their rights for various reasons, this automatically excluded women. Madeleine Pelletier was supported by the feminist newspaper La Fronde and also (probably more helpfully) by members of the medical jury. After a yearlong campaign, she won her cause and successfully passed the exams. She went on thereafter to have a remarkable career both in private practice in poor areas of Paris, and as a pioneer feminist of the first half of the twentieth century, though her life, as a maverick in both roles, was often unhappy.57 In Edinburgh, the hostility of the medical establishment was first expressed in the form of organized opposition to any training at all for women. In 1867, the faculty of medicine accepted the application of Sophia Jex-Blake (1840-1912), a 27-year-old well-educated Englishwoman, to attend classes, but was overruled by the University Court, which argued that she could not attend men’s classes, and that it was impractical to hold classes for one student. Consequently, Jex-Blake recruited several other women, all with good academic records, who enrolled with the intention of acquiring full medical training. They became known as ‘the Edinburgh Seven’, being taught in separate classes. In November 1870, when walking together to an examination in the Surgeon’s Hall in Nicolson Street, the seven women students were met with a hostile crowd of male students who hurled mud and insults at them. The incident later known as ‘the Surgeons’ Hall Riot’ gained some public sympathy for the women, and made their studies a cause célèbre. But the real opposition was from the medical profession, which feared competition from an influx of women doctors: it was no doubt feared that large numbers of profitable women patients might prefer a doctor of their own sex. In 1872, the University announced that it would not award degrees to women medical students, even if they passed the examinations; in appeals to higher courts, the University’s case was eventually upheld. Most of the seven did later complete medical training in Ireland or abroad. Three of them – Emily Bovell Sturge (1840-85), Mary Adamson Marshall (1837-1910) and Matilda Chaplin Ayrton (1846-83) – completed their MD in Paris in the 1870s, like the other foreign women students referred to above. Several of them were also associated with the London School of Medicine for Women which Sophia Jex-Blake established in London. She also founded a School for Medicine for Women in Edinburgh in 1886.58 57

See Charles Sowerwine and Claude Maignien, Madeleine Pelletier, une féministe dans l’arène publique, Paris, Les Editions Ouvrières, 1992; Felicia Gordon, The Integral Feminist, Madeleine Pelletier, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1990. 58 See entries by Shirley Roberts on ‘Blake, Sophia Jex-’ and by M. A. Elston on ‘Anderson, Elizabeth Garrett’ and on the ‘Edinburgh Seven’ in Oxford Dictionary of National

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The Russell Gurney Enabling Bill of 1876 allowed British university medical boards to admit women as candidates, but separate education continued for some time. While women could follow courses, they were not allowed formal qualifications until the 1890s. The first two Scottish women to be granted a medical degree were Marion Gilchrist, and Lily Cumming, students at Queen Margaret College, affiliated to Glasgow University, in 1894. A photograph taken in 1911 of the final-year students at Edinburgh University Medical School shows about 120 male students and four women – all posed in the front with their professors. Isabel Emslie, later Lady Hutton (1887-1960), who had entered the school in 1905, later wrote: ‘the women doctors had to put up with very cavalier treatment by their men colleagues, who criticized, patronized or were even blatantly rude to them … the plain dowdy women students were on the whole preferred, for the men could then hoot with laughter and label them all as freaks, jokes or monsters.’59 The first women doctors who sought to practise in Edinburgh encountered frustrations comparable to those of their French contemporaries. The most famous of Sophia Jex-Blake’s early pupils in Edinburgh was Elsie Inglis (1864-1917), 10 years older than Madeleine Pelletier, who gained a ‘Triple Qualification Licentiateship of the Royal Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons of Edinburgh and the Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow’ in 1892 (the only qualification then available to her). After working as house surgeon in the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson’s Hospital for Women in London, and some midwifery experience at the world-famous Rotunda Hospital in Dublin, Elsie Inglis set up medical practice in Edinburgh in 1894, in partnership, and went on in 1899 to acquire her MBChM from Edinburgh University, once it was open to women. She lectured on gynaecology in the Edinburgh Medical College for Women, which she had helped found, and travelled to Vienna and the USA to gain further experience. Back in Edinburgh, she established the Hospice in the High Street, a nursing home and maternity centre: within 5 years it was a recognized training centre for midwives. But she could not occupy a regular hospital post – women were still barred from taking posts in the Edinburgh Maternity Hospital, and in general the first generation of women who qualified met the same difficulties as in France, often being unable to find openings even in general practice, let alone become specialists.60 Another Scottish doctor, Elizabeth Bryson, who was not offered a hospital appointment in 1907 because of her sex, wrote, ‘It appeared to be “the dawn of

Biography, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004 (hereafter ODNB), and on Sophia JexBlake in the BDSW. 59 Quoted from Isabel Hutton, Memories of a Doctor in War and Peace, 1960, in Leneman, Out of the Background, p. 47, which shows the photograph. See also Sheila Hamilton ‘The first generations of University women’, p. 113; and Wendy Alexander, First Ladies of Medicine, Glasgow, University of Glasgow & Wellcome Trust, 1987. 60 See Leah Leneman, Elsie Inglis, Founder of battlefield hospitals run entirely by women, Edinburgh, NMS Publishing, 1998.

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61

nothing”.’ Elsie Inglis went on to found the Scottish Women’s Hospitals during the First World War – after being told ‘My good lady, go home and sit still’, by the governor of Edinburgh Castle. An initiative little-remarked outside Scotland, this did for women doctors essentially what Florence Nightingale had done for nurses: the hospitals, set up with most of Britain’s allies, and based in France, Serbia and elsewhere, but not used by the British War Office, were entirely staffed by women, as medical officers (MOs), nurses and orderlies (Isabel Emslie was one of the MOs). Thereafter however, in Edinburgh, Paris and virtually everywhere else, opportunities to join the profession in any meaningful way continued to be meagre for some years, even during the inter-war period, as Carol Dyhouse remarks.62 From this brief summary, it can be seen that the University of Paris medical school was prepared to accept women students from early on, whereas Edinburgh put up prolonged resistance. But most of the students in Paris were from abroad and posed no threat to French male doctors, since they would not go on to practise in France. A number of Scottish women did some part of their training in Paris. The real obstacles came later on, as the French profession, especially the hierarchical hospital establishment, sought to prevent women reaching salaried positions. In Edinburgh, the opposition to women students, although expressed at an earlier stage in the process, was similarly based on the fear of competition once they qualified. In this example, despite superficial differences, with Paris seeming a more liberal establishment than Edinburgh, the advance was perhaps more apparent than real. At the same time, it should be acknowledged that in both centres, there were sympathetic medical professors prepared to teach women students, even if they were in the minority; opposition was more vociferous from fellow-students. Getting the vote: suffrage agitation in Paris and Edinburgh Both Paris and Edinburgh were caught up in national campaigns for women’s rights during the belle époque. In both cities, there was considerable activity at times, reflecting the wider picture in France and Scotland. The rights concerned were by no means confined to the campaign for suffrage; indeed for many women, other questions of civil, legal and familial rights took precedence. In France in particular, married women were discriminated against by the Napoleonic Code Civil of 1804. In this brief comparison, however, and on a topic which has been much written about, the focus will chiefly be on suffrage, since in this respect there were some notable differences between France and Scotland, both in terms of the campaigns and in terms of their results.63 61 Quoted by Carol Dyhouse, ‘Driving ambitions: women in pursuit of a medical education, 1890-1939’, Women’s History Review, vol. 7, no. 3, 1998, pp. 321-343, p. 335. 62 Ibid. See Leah Leneman, In the Service of Life: the Story of Elsie Inglis and the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, Edinburgh, Mercat, 1994. 63 Among the many studies of campaigning for women’s rights in Britain and France in this period, see Klejman and Rochefort, L’Egalité en marche; Steven Hause with Anne

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In Britain, the Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884 had enlarged the scope of manhood suffrage for parliamentary elections to male householders, without yet reaching the universal manhood suffrage which had been introduced in France in 1848. But in British municipal elections, women were entitled to vote on the same terms as men: this measure was introduced in England in 1867, and in Scotland in 1881-82. As for the parliamentary vote in Britain, the women’s suffrage question was throughout the years from 1867 until 1918 bedevilled by the existence of a limited male suffrage, based on a property qualification (rate-paying), which effectively disenfranchised many men. Since the early women’s suffrage campaigners mostly proposed receiving the vote on the same terms as men, thinking this a more immediately achievable aim, their proposal would also effectively have ruled out most married women. In the later stages of the campaign, the question of universal suffrage for both men and women was raised. The eventual legislation in 1918 enfranchised all men over 21 and all women over 30, without any property qualification, and was extended to all women over 21 in 1928. In France, throughout our period the gulf between men and women was more stark, all men over 21 having had the vote since the Second Republic of 1848, but no women, either at parliamentary or local level. French women finally gained access to both the municipal and parliamentary vote only in 1944. In both countries, in these different circumstances, the last years of the nineteenth century saw increasingly active movements for women’s rights, culminating in pressure for the suffrage which reached a high pitch in the decade or so before the outbreak of the First World War. In both cities, there was an explosion of feminist or quasi-feminist groups and associations during this period. The major difference, however, between Paris and Edinburgh is that in France feminism in general, and Kenney, Women’s Suffrage and Social Politics in the French Third Republic, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1984, which gives a wide spectrum of other campaigns; Claire Goldberg Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1984; Sandra S. Holton, Feminism and Democracy: women’s suffrage and reform politics in Britain 1900-1918, Cambridge, Cambridge University Pres, 1986; Jennifer Waeti-Walters and Steven Hause, eds, Feminisms of the Belle Epoque, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1994; Leila Rupp, Worlds of Women: international women’s organizations 1888-1945, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1998; Sandra S. Holton, Suffrage Days: stories from the women’s suffrage movement, London, Routledge, 1996; Karen Offen, European Feminisms 1700-1950: a political history, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2000, (comparative; bibliography); James F. McMillan, France and women 1789-1914; gender society and politics, London, Routledge, 2000; Susan Foley, Women in France since 1789, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2004; Holmes and Tarr, A Belle Epoque? On Scotland, see in particular Elspeth King, The Scottish Women’s Suffrage Movement, Glasgow, People’s Palace, 1985 [1978], and ‘The Scottish Women’s Suffrage movement’ in Eleanor Gordon and Esther Breitenbach, Out of Bounds: women in Scottish society 1800-1945, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press; Leah Leneman, A Guid Cause: the women’s suffrage movement in Scotland, revised edn, Edinburgh Mercat, 1995; and Lynn Abrams, Eleanor Gordon, Deborah Simonton and Eileen Yeo, eds, Gender in Scottish History, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2006; Jane Rendall and Sue Innes, ‘Women, Gender and Politics’, in Abrams et al., Gender in Scottish History, pp. 43-83.

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suffrage agitation in particular, was concentrated on Paris, while Edinburgh was only one city among many in Britain caught up in a national campaign, both before and after 1903, when the militant campaign of direct action started. The French feminist movements – of which several were formed in this period – were mostly narrowly based, being organized by metropolitan women from middle-class and often political backgrounds. Their activities were by no means insignificant, and reached a peak in 1914, while never attracting the attention of the British militant campaign, and deliberately eschewing violence. A thorough repertoire of these movements giving the addresses of the headquarters shows that they were virtually all based in Paris, and run by Parisians.64 All the national suffrage groups listed have Paris addresses only. Edinburgh, by contrast, while it was certainly an important centre for suffrage agitation, was part of a much larger network, both within Scotland, (where the other cities, especially Glasgow, saw much campaigning) and within Britain as a whole. Neither suffrage campaign saw success in these years before the First World War, but in Britain the vote came at war’s end, while France had to wait over 20 years. The reasons for France’s longer resistance to women’s suffrage have often been rehearsed, although it should be pointed out that a majority in the French National Assembly did vote for enfranchisement in 1919. The delay until after the Second World War was partly because the Senate, or upper house, refused to ratify it, for reasons which combined conservative reaction with fears on the part of republican anti-clericals that women would vote in the interests of the Catholic church.65 In the period that concerns us, one element which constrained suffrage campaigning was, similarly, that many leading French feminists were themselves liberal republicans, often from Protestant or Jewish rather than Catholic families. The early Third Republic periodically resorted to calls for solidarity to defend the regime against its enemies, usually on the right, particularly during and after the Boulangist episode (1888-89) and the Dreyfus Affair in the late 1890s. Consequently, suffrage itself was not on the feminist agenda to the same extent as in Britain. One figure who did call for full voting rights, Hubertine Auclert, remained isolated in the 1880s, and even later, while during the 1890s many of the mushrooming women’s rights groups in France called rather for reforms in the law over matters such as paternal affiliation cases, married women’s property and other rights, and civil responsibility. There was indeed some legislative movement on all these issues between the mid-1890s and 1914.66 64 Françoise Blum et al., eds, Mouvements de femmes (1919-1940), guide des sources documentaires, special number of Vie sociale, nos 11-12, 1984 (Musée Social, Paris). 65 See note 63 above and Paul Smith, Feminism and the Third Republic: women’s social and political rights in France 1918-1945, Oxford, Clarendon, 1996; Foley, Women in France since 1789, pp. 148 ff.; S. Reynolds, France between the wars: gender and politics, London, Routledge, 1996, Chapter 8. 66 See McMillan, France and Women, pp. 188 ff, and 217, for a full list of the groups. On socialism and women in France, which had a complex relation to the suffrage, see Charles Sowerwine, Sisters or Citizens? Women and socialism in France since 1876, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982.

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Only a minority of French feminists were prepared to talk about votes in the 1890s. When, in 1897, Marguerite Durand founded the feminist daily paper La Fronde, she was not at first in favour of the suffrage, and actually spoke against it for a number of years. She had, however, been converted to feminism by reporting for Le Figaro on the 1896 Paris women’s congress. The women’s congress or conference, sometimes with international delegates, was one of the major campaign features of the times, attracting press coverage. For many women this kind of occasion was their first experience of cooperating with others in a public forum, speaking from a platform and occupying some space on the national stage, Paris had seen two such conferences in 1889, another in 1892, and one in 1896. In 1900, during the Exhibition, three separate conferences were held, again all in Paris, which served to raise the profile of the French women’s movement: one was centred on Catholic women’s philanthropy, but raised issues on women’s rights; the second had a similar title relating to ‘good works and institutions’, and was organized largely by Protestant and republicans, but also embraced the word ‘feminist’. At the third, the Congrès International de la Condition et des Droits des Femmes, with delegates from abroad, a whole range of reforms was called for, relating to women’s work and education, but also now including the suffrage, which the sympathetic independent socialist député, René Viviani, promised to raise in the National Assembly. The fragmentation along the lines indicated above, which always marked the French movement, was to some extent countered soon afterwards in 1901, by the formation of an umbrella association, the Conseil National des Femmes Francaises, as the French section of the International Council of Women – for most of the belle époque period presided over by a Scotswoman, Lady Aberdeen, who made many visits to Europe, including Paris in this capacity.67 One of the major signs of a change towards greater militancy after 1900 was the protest campaign by women against the centenary celebrations of the Napoleonic Code Civil (1804), which the French government held in 1904. Marguerite Durand organized a banquet with speeches, and there was a small street demonstration in Paris at the official ceremony. From 1906, there were more determined moves towards peaceful campaigning for political rights, at a time when there was constant news of spectacular suffragette actions across the Channel, and the question of the municipal vote was raised, but taken no further than committee, in the French 67 On the conferences, see the works mentioned in note 63 above, especially Offen, European Feminisms, and Klejman and Rochefort, L’Egalité en marche. On Lady Aberdeen (1857-1939) see the entry on her in BDSW. Lady Aberdeen had never heard of the ICW when she was asked to lead it in 1893, but she ‘stuck to it with a vengeance’, serving until 1936 with two breaks (1899-1904, 1920-22), Rupp, Worlds of Women, p. 15, and providing much finance from her own pocket. Patrick Geddes was (apparently) in touch with Mme Durand: ‘I have not yet succeeded in meeting the organisers of the two women’s Congresses’, he wrote in April 1900. ‘I have made calls, without finding them in.’ One of his colleagues complained of Mme Durand that ‘apparently she has not done one half of what she was requested to do’, and another that ‘these congress secretaries are frightfully unbusinesslike’, University of Strathclyde, Geddes Archive, T.GED, 6/1/5, letters of 28 April, 6 July, 18 July 1900.

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National Assembly. A minority of women, including once more Hubertine Auclert, and Madeleine Pelletier, were in favour of trying to launch a campaign of direct action on British lines, but a congress on women’s rights attended by 800 delegates rejected violence in 1908, accurately reflecting the views of most French campaigners. In 1909, the Union Française pour le Suffrage des Femmes was founded, the first specifically suffragist association. It is fair to say that these years saw a much higher profile for women’s rights in France, supported by male allies, and bolstered by the growing numbers of women teachers, who would be the backbone of future feminist movements. La Fronde, with its eclectic mixture of sophisticated writing and serious comment, had made a real impact during its 6 years as a forum for serious discussion.68 Women who stood as candidates in parliamentary elections in Paris, an attention-seeking tactic, attracted publicity, though not many votes, in 1910 and in local elections in 1912. But during the May 1914 general election, in a mock ballot for women conducted by the Paris newspaper Le Journal, it was claimed that over half a million would-be voters had sent in a postal vote.69 In July that year, French feminists held what is often seen as the culminating point of pre-war agitation, the demonstration honouring Condorcet, the philosopher who during the French Revolution had been one of the very few voices advocating rights for women. The moment was one of optimism, as Viviani was now prime minister. Some 5,000 or 6,000 women attended a procession in central Paris to lay wreaths at his statue on the quai Conti. Marguerite Durand and the journalist Séverine (Caroline Rémy) carried bouquets and it was a rare show of unity by the various groups. The choice of Condorcet was astute, since he was revered as a republican, and the campaign to make his statue a feminist lieu de mémoire (site of memory) might have persisted had it not been for the outbreak of war. Most historians of this period agree that the French movement, which was comparable, on a smaller scale, to the moderate movements in Britain, was having some success in reaching public opinion, but that the context for most of the period was deeply unwelcoming to the whole idea. In Edinburgh, the suffrage cause did not have to fight such a hostile environment. The ELEA, already mentioned, was a potent nursery of women campaigners. It had grown out of what would today be called a ‘book group’, the Edinburgh Essay Society, set up by a number of very young women in the early 1860s, and chaired by the 18-year-old Sarah Siddons Mair (1846-1941). It became first the Edinburgh Ladies’ Debating Society, then the ELEA, meeting regularly in Miss Mair’s New Town drawing room for about 70 years. One of its aims was to be ‘a training school

68 See Roberts, Disruptive Acts, especially Chapter 3, for the really spectacular impact this paper made on the political scene. See also Maggie Allison, ‘Marguerite Durand and La Fronde: Voicing Women of the Belle Epoque’ in Holmes and Tarr, eds, A Belle epoque?, pp. 37-50. 69 505, 972 for, 114 against, according to Klejman and Rochefort, L’Egalité en marche, p. 286; see McMillan, France and Women, p. 215.

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for women to fit them for public speaking’.70 The list of its members contains the names of virtually all the women in Edinburgh who participated in campaigns for girls’ education, university entrance, and women’s rights during the period, underlining how cohesive the Edinburgh network was. When they began meeting, as Sarah Mair later recalled, there were no School Boards, no university Education for Women, no women doctors, no Jubilee nurses … no woman sat on town Councils and no woman voted in the Parliamentary election or sat in Parliament. All these activities have been reflected in our debating Society. There was scarcely any advance made by women that did not find ours a friendly stage on which to air its ideas.71

The list of its proposed debating questions gives a fascinating overview of what was ranging from the trivial to the important, though it is far from revealing a picture of radical thought. The debating society discussed many individual authors from Macaulay to Marie Corelli, Byron to Tolstoy. Questions for debate included ‘Has French literature qualities which compensate for the greater depth of German literature?’ (Answer Yes, 18-12). ‘Can the French Revolution be justified?’ (A narrower victory, somewhat surprisingly perhaps, for yes, 20-19 in 1906). On the other hand, ‘Should we evacuate Egypt?’ was defeated 31-1, and ‘Has Impressionism been carried too far in art?’ carried the day 11-8. More tellingly, the debaters did not like the idea that the legal profession should be opened to women as late as 1904. On women’s suffrage, the very earliest debate in 1866 went against the motion, but from 1884, it always won a majority in debate.72 The first Scottish women to be elected to public office were members of the new School Boards after the 1872 Education Act (Scotland). Jane Arthur was elected in Glasgow in 1872, closely followed by Phoebe Blyth and Flora Stevenson in Edinburgh a year later. Flora Stevenson (1839-1905), who was a member of the Franco-Scottish society from the start, remained on the Board for 30 years, and was a noted figure in Edinburgh public life.73 Although women could not vote in parliamentary elections, nor until 1907, could they be elected to local councils, they could and did work within political parties. The first Scottish branch of the Primrose League (Unionist) was founded in 1885 and the first branch of the Scottish Liberal Federation in 1890. In the Labour movement the Scottish women’s Cooperative Guild (founded 1892) had over 12,000 members by 1913, and the Independent Labour Party (ILP), particularly strong in Scotland and headed by James Keir Hardie, was the most woman-friendly

70

Lettice Rae, Ladies in Debate: being a History of the Ladies’ Edinburgh Debating Society 1865-1935, Edinburgh, Oliver & Boyd, 1936, p. 9. 71 Ibid., pp. 8 and 33. 72 Ibid., appendix, for full list of topics with dates. 73 On Flora Stevenson, see the entry on her in the BDSW.

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of the left-wing movements, being in favour of the extension to women of votes, even initially on the same terms as men.74 The first generation of Edinburgh suffrage campaigners counted as one of its leaders Priscilla Bright McLaren (1815-1906) – step-grandmother of Ottilie McLaren the sculptor, and sister of John and Jacob Bright. Having supported John Stuart Mill’s 1867 amendment, Mrs McLaren was the first president of the Edinburgh National Society for Women’s Suffrage (ENSWS) set up after its defeat. The cause met comparatively little open opposition within Edinburgh, being ‘embedded in the city’s moderate reform culture’; all the local MPs were in favour. The first public meeting in Edinburgh in support of women’s suffrage, in January 1870, was chaired by Priscilla’s husband, Liberal MP (and former Lord Provost of the city) Duncan McLaren. Priscilla Bright McLaren did not speak from the all-male platform. Professor Masson did so, as did the local MPs and Edinburgh town council (also Liberal) petitioned in favour. Priscilla’s stepdaughter, Dr Agnes McLaren, became joint secretary of the ENSWS with Eliza Wigham. Two thousand signatures were collected in Edinburgh and more petitions followed When the municipal vote was granted in 1882, Priscilla Bright McLaren addressed a 7,000 strong meeting in Glasgow, saying that Scotland ‘has witnessed many a noble gathering in the cause of liberty, but never one nobler than the one I look upon tonight’. She became exasperated with the Gladstonian Liberals’ failure to support the cause of suffrage in the 1880s, and reported that her husband looked ‘very sorrowful’ about it. Priscilla McLaren took a radical approach, favouring the vote for married women and universal adult suffrage. She also favoured setting up an international movement, and was untiringly active in Edinburgh, inclining towards the militant wing, although she died before the Women’s Social and Political Union (WPSU) was active.75 One incident can perhaps symbolize the flavour of Edinburgh women’s rights agitation, which was largely, though not exclusively, that of educated middle-class women. At the 1906 general election, the Women Graduates of the Scottish Universities Committee argued that women graduates had the right to the parliamentary franchise within the university electorates which returned four MPs. Its secretary was Chrystal Macmillan, a philosophy graduate from Edinburgh University. When their petition was rejected by the Court of Session, Macmillan and four other women – Margaret Nairn, Dr Elsie Inglis, Frances Simson and Frances Melville, at the time Warden of University Hall, St Andrews, – raised £1,000 to appeal in November 1908 to the House of Lords. Macmillan, labelled a ‘modern Portia’, acted as senior counsel. Although unsuccessful, the case generated much publicity and sympathetic support. 74

This section is based on the chapter by Jane Rendall and Sue Innes, ‘Women, gender and politics in Scotland 1701-2000’, in Abrams et al., Gender in Scottish History. 75 On Priscilla Bright McLaren, see the entry on her by Edward Milligan in ODNB, and the entry in BDSW. She supported other causes including abolition, Josephine Butler’s campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts, and temperance, but suffrage was her chief interest. See Leneman, A Guid Cause, pp. 12 and 27; there are many references to her and the family in Holton, Suffrage Days, which describes her as ‘generally liked and conciliatory’, p. 59.

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The temporary arrangements put in place barring women from physically entering the Parliament buildings (because of suffrage agitation) were suspended.76 This was an example of seeking to work within the existing machinery, just at the time when exasperation led to calls for more violent action. The WSPU had been formed in 1903 in England and began to engage in militant tactics, led by the Pankhursts, Emmeline and Christabel. A Scottish branch was formed in 1906, and the elderly Priscilla MacLaren sent the Scottish WSPU a message of encouragement from her deathbed.77 However, the autocratic methods of the Pankhursts led to a split and the formation alongside it of the Women’s Freedom League, which became particularly strong in Scotland. It was led there by Teresa Billington-Greig, whose influence was greatest in Glasgow and West of Scotland, but who campaigned all over Scotland. Both these associations were prepared to use direct tactics to publicize the cause. Some of these were relatively peaceful if flamboyant campaigns. At the beginning of 1909, the WSPU leadership had issued a sort of challenge in its paper, Votes for Women: ‘Beautiful, haughty, dignifed, stern Edinburgh, with your cautious steadfast people, you have not yet woken up to take part in our militant methods.’78 In October 1909, there was a grand suffrage pageant and procession in central Edinburgh, called by the suffragettes (WSPU). The event was organized by Arran-born Flora Drummond, nationally known in Britain as ‘The General’, a member of the ILP, and who described herself as ‘a married woman and a socialist in a hurry’.79 All the banners were carried by women, who also played the bagpipes. Its theme was what women ‘have done and can do and will do’. There were groups of women dressed in their occupational garb, and a historical section, representing famous Scotswomen. The city’s population apparently lined up to see the procession – a photograph shows crowds about half-a-dozen deep, all along Princes Street. The Edinburgh Evening Dispatch reported: The imposing display achieved its object. It advertised to tens of thousands the aim of the suffragettes … [B]ehind this movement there is a solid phalanx of resolute and unflinching womanhood bent upon obtaining the vote and fully determined that they will triumph over every obstacle.79

The same paper was less enthusiastic about the speeches which closed the day, calling them ‘foolish Pankhurst heroics’.80 Edinburgh certainly had some active 76

See Leneman, A Guid Cause, p. 69; on Chrystal McMillan see the entry on her in

BDSW. 77

Obituary, The Times, 7 November 1906. Quoted, Leneman, A Guid Cause, p. 71. 79 Quoted by Elspeth King, ‘The Scottish women’s suffrage movement’, p. 135. On Flora Drummond, (1878-1949), see the entry by Krista Cowman in ODNB, and the entry in BDSW. She was also nicknamed ‘Bluebell’ after the Scottish brand of matches, as she was ‘more than a match’ for cabinet ministers. 80 Quoted, Leneman, A Guid Cause, p. 81, see the photograph, ibid., p. 83. 78

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suffragettes prepared to break the law. One active suffragette and a former pupil of Sophia Jex-Blake, Dr Grace Cadell (1855-1918), was President of the Leith Branch of the WSPU in 1907, before aligning herself with the Women’s Freedom League. In 1912, in protest against the withholding of the franchise, she refused to pay taxes and her furniture was seized and sold under warrant at the Mercat Cross, Edinburgh. Her response was to rally her friends and turn the occasion into a suffrage meeting.81 During the Scottish campaign of attacks on buildings in 1912-13, Grace Cadell was the doctor who treated suffragettes released under the Cat and Mouse Act. One such was Ethel Moorhead, suspected fire-raiser. She was held in Calton Jail, Edinburgh in 1914, and having been on hunger strike for several days, contracted double penumonia after forcible feeding – the first time such feeding was employed in Scotland. A few hours after her release in a very sick condition, the medieval church of Whitekirk in East Lothian was burnt down by militant suffragists. This act was unpopular even with sympathizers, but it was not the first of such dramatic incidents, which included arson attacks on Scottish racecourses. Leah Leneman listed 70 incidents, between March 1912 and July 1914, ranging from tampering with pillar-boxes to trying to blow up the Glasgow main water pipe from Loch Katrine. About 18 such incidents took place in and around Edinburgh, and were mainly quite minor, though they included a bomb at the Royal Observatory and a fire at Fettes College (a boys’ public school).82 In 1912, a women’s march from Edinburgh to London captured favourable press headlines, receiving a massive send-off from spectators in Edinburgh as they walked along Princes Street (10,000, according to the Daily Mail), and no hostility was shown.83 This was an example of consensus, but the opposite could occur. Early in 1914, an Edinburgh audience ‘almost entirely composed of women, many of them mere girls, rapturously applauded speeches which for violence, lawlessness and reckless incitement to crime, we have never heard matched in any public meeting’, as the Edinburgh Evening Dispatch reporter wrote. ‘All male creatures were represented to be contemptible cowards and fools.’84 Conclusion ‘I wish it were correct to live all alone. It’s far the best form of existence’, wrote the young Kathleen Bruce, who did contrive to live alone and to lead a very free existence in the early years of the twentieth century.85 The contradictions between expectations and reality that can be picked up from the foregoing examples indicate that in gender relations, the belle époque was a complex and paradoxical time. Taken all in all from 1880 to 1914, it saw greater changes in the lives of women than in those of men, yet 81 King, ‘The Scottish women’s suffrage movement’, pp. 40-41; on Grace Cadell, see the entry in the BDSW. 82 Leneman, A Guid Cause, pp. 178-181, 274-278. 83 Ibid., p. 122. 84 Ibid., p. 183. 85 Young, A Task of Great Happiness, p. 23.

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at times movement seemed impossible or was blocked. In retrospect, historians have come up with nuanced explanations. By looking, even briefly, at some examples from these two cities, we can see that there are some striking differences, but within an overall European context which was fairly uniform. In terms of physical mobility, and freedom from supervision, while Paris was the place for foreign students to go for adventure, it kept its native daughters rather more closely watched. Edinburgh was a place of greater everyday liberty. There had always been adventurous women travellers of course, of both nationalities: Isabelle Eberhardt (1877-1904), Jane Dieulafoy (1851-1916), or Edinburgh-based Isabella Bird (1831-1904).86 And as Michelle Perrot pointed out, in some ways working-class women had been more free to move within the city. What was distinctive about the belle époque was that it extended the possibilities of both long-distance travel once the privilege of the very rich (between our two cities for instance) and of the desire on the part of the new generation of educated women to move outside the domestic circle. In this respect, the ‘femme comme il faut’, or middle-class woman, was in fact becoming freer than the ‘femme du peuple’, the woman of the people, by the end of the period, the latter being much more confined to locality by her low income and demands on her time. In terms of education and the acquisition of cultural capital, Paris and Edinburgh both offered something which a rising generation of women was anxious to acquire. In both cities, the educational authorities, for different reasons, could be quite encouraging of more education, even at higher level, for women. But – parallel with other disputes in the labour market – when professional interests were threatened, as in the case of medicine, there was a closing of ranks.87 In terms of the suffrage, the overall atmosphere was far more sympathetic, and the campaign much more energetic in Edinburgh than in Paris, reflecting national differences. Carole Pateman has written that ‘to explain the subjugation of women is also to explore the fraternity of men’.88 That fraternity, while present as an underlying context took different turns in our two cities, the republican fraternity in the political and parliamentary circles of France being more solidly united against women’s political rights. The paradox can be seen as embodied in Patrick Geddes, whose various fraternities have been examined earlier. Geddes as a scientist took a very traditional view of women’s destiny as being essentially familial and domestic, and made great demands on his own wife as a support system for his work, yet at the same time he 86 On the French travellers see Michelle Perrot, ‘Sortir’ in Les Femmes ou les silences de l’histoire, pp. 227-258. On Isabella Bird, see the entry on her in the BDSW. 87 The opposition of the medical profession had parallels in various previously allmale trades, including printing. This was a period when in both Britain and France, women were being hired as compositors, a skilled trade, and since employers paid them less, were threatening men’s jobs. On France see Charles Sowerwine, ‘Workers and women in France before 1914: the debate over the Couriau affair’, Journal of Modern History, vol. 55, 1993, pp. 411-441; in Edinburgh a strike by male compositors in 1910 prevented the recruitment of further women to the trade, see Reynolds, Britannica’s Typesetters. 88 Carole Pateman. ‘The Fraternal Social Contract,’ in J. Keane ed., Civil Society and the State: New European Perspectives. London, Verso Books, 1988, p. 121.

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deliberately offered opportunities to women in his circle, both as students and as colleagues in many of his ventures. If they were ‘New Women’, he does not fit the image of the ‘Old Man’. Mary Louise Roberts has argued persuasively that the outspoken, sometimes ‘histrionic’ actions of the Parisian women she studied, including Marguerite Durand and Sarah Bernhardt, although isolated, were ‘much more influential than we suppose’. At the same time, she sees them giving way to the post-war ‘Modern Woman’ who was of a very different cast.89 It could be argued that, in some respects, the line running from the New Woman to the post-war Modern Woman was a clearer one in Edinburgh than in Paris. Charlotte Carmichael, later Stopes (1846-1929) joined Sarah Mair’s Edinburgh Essay Society in the 1860s, and became a member of the Rational Dress Society (for abolishing corsets), and a committed suffragist. Her daughter, Marie Stopes (1880-1958) – whose Edinburgh birth and parentage are not well-known – became the famous birth-control campaigner of the 1920s. Even more famously attached to Edinburgh is Muriel Spark’s fictional character, the independent-minded Miss Jean Brodie. The inspirational teacher on whom she was based, Christina Kay (1878-1951), was an almost exact contemporary of Ottilie McLaren, and one of the generation of Edinburgh school teachers trained in the late 1890s, who taught the ‘modern girls’ of the 1920s.90

89

Roberts, Disruptive Acts, pp. 247-249. See BDSW entries on Charlotte Stopes, Marie Stopes and Christina Kay; and Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, 1961. 90

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Afterword Comparative history is fraught with difficulties. Conclusions in particular run the risk of being over-general and open to plenty of objections. This book originated in separate pieces of research I was doing in both Scottish and French history, while commuting between Paris and Edinburgh, where the bulk of sources are located. Gradually more general ideas about connections started to make some kind of sense, and the themes in the book were pursued to see where they would lead. Most of the chapters in the book are about connections rather than comparisons, although comparisons keep popping up, even when unbidden. And in this case, the comparisons might appear far-fetched and uneven. In the early twentieth century, Paris was at the height of its cultural supremacy, possibly reaching an unrepeatable high point. London and Vienna too had claims to be strong contenders in the Europe of 1900, but Paris’s wealth of cultural capital in the belle époque, whether in literature, art, music and thought, has usually been judged particularly glittering. It also had a side to it that I have scarcely discussed at all, but to which most books on the period devote a great deal of space: that of the entertainment world and alternative culture, the world of the Boulevard Rochechouart, where Le Chat Noir cabaret flourished, along the road from Pigalle, down the hill from Montmartre. The pleasures of Paris have been brilliantly captured and pictured so often that it seemed superfluous to repeat here a summary of other people’s work.1 And of course that Paris appeared to be at the opposite end of the spectrum from Edinburgh. The Edinburgh of 1900, as noted at the outset, does not have a very high profile, retrospectively, compared to the eighteenth century, when Edinburgh was at the heart of the action, or the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of Scott, extending into the 1830s.2 After that, the Scottish capital has often been judged a city whose glories lay well back in the past. It sometimes seems, from reading cultural historians, as if Edinburgh, embedded in respectability, represented in the early twentieth century everything the ‘Scottish Renaissance’ around Hugh MacDiarmid was against, in his efforts to revitalize Scottish culture in the 1920s. In 1993, David Daiches wrote: [Edinburgh’s] position as the capital of a country that was itself part of a larger political unit dominated by English influences remained undefined, and Victorian Edinburgh lost the cultural confidence of the Golden Age and nourished itself on nostalgia … [In the

1 See, for example, among many others, Charles Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Epoque: Entertainment and Festivity in Turn of the Century France, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986 and Adrian Rifkin, Street Noises: Parisian Pleasure, 1900-1940, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1995. 2 See for example, Mary Cosh, Edinburgh: the golden age, Edinburgh, John Donald, 2003.

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It has been part of the agenda of this book to explore this apparently calm surface to see whether things were stirring underneath, using the French connection as a guiding light. The irrepressible Patrick Geddes decided to celebrate in 1912 the ‘semi-jubilee’, that is, twenty-fifth anniversary, of the student hall of residence, University Hall, which he had initiated in 1887. This took the then-fashionable form of a pageant, ‘The Masque of Learning’. It was performed for several evenings by over 650 actors, musicians and singers, to full houses of Edinburgh schoolchildren in the Synod Hall. So many thousands of people failed to get in that more performances were put on, and the performing community formed an association. The next year a revised version was staged in the University of London. The masque brought to life the traces of the past, supposedly quoted from an Edinburgh boy’s school-bag, and interpreted by a ‘friendly Professor’ who becomes the narrator. (I think the reader will guess who played this part). The pageant took spectators through from ‘primitive’ times via the ancient civilizations, then Greece and Rome, to the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Encyclopedists and up to the present. In the course of the pageant, Geddes’s text often dwells on Paris, seeking to make it clear that Paris and Scotland needed each other. Evoking Athens, he remarks on the arrival in Paris during the days of the Encyclopédie of two of our greatest fellow-countrymen David Hume and Adam Smith […] Our previous insistence on the importance of Paris, far beyond Oxford or London, for the education of the Scot, is surely here vividly confirmed […] Hume’s philosophic influence was thus fully brought to bear on France; while the nascent economics of the Physiocratic School was thus brought home to Scotland, there to be transformed anew into the Wealth of Nations.

The Masque ends with a clarion call on Edinburgh to become a new Paris, a ‘CultureCity’: ‘L’Université de Paris’ has a twofold meaning, not simply that of its legal corporation with the Sorbonne […] It is beginning also to be a general name for the whole cultureresources of Paris. [It] includes the Institute of France and all the learned societies – the Louvre, Luxembourg […] the Bibliothèque Nationale and other libraries – the Opera, the Comédie Française – and much else. From these again rises naturally a third meaning, widest of all – that of the great city itself; despite all blemishes and limitations, WorldUniversity and Culture-Metropolis – Ville Lumière. Similarly to interfuse its own great City, with its modern wealth of resources, its significant traditions and to express, in widening senses, as for Paris, its vast possibilities and resources, is surely the supreme task before a Metropolitan and Civic University. 3 Entry on ‘Edinburgh’ in Daiches, ed., A New Companion to Scottish Culture, Edinburgh, Polygon, 1993 edn, pp. 86-87.

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Hence the City’s sequel to the University’s procession of the Past, her evocation of her Present culture-institutes, and even of Future ones. These begin with the crafts, the fundamental industries and activities, commonly reckoned humbler but of which the craft and art of printing here, affords, as of old, the natural transition to education and higher studies. […] Our Masque thus closes with renewed beginnings […] expressing the interaction of the simple world of life and labour, with the high intricacies of research, the infinitude of thought. And all these set forth, as united in no mere abstract sense, but in the collective and individual life of a Culture-City.4

His vision of the Scottish city as expanding to unite its educational and cultural links in something resembling the Parisian model was not immediately fulfilled. Despite the Scottish literary Renaissance, seen now as important, but scattered among writers who often lived outside Scotland, the following years were not on the whole propitious for civic-cultural renewal. My copy of the Masque (7th edition, originally published in 1913) was typeset, in Madras, in 1923. This was not for economic reasons as it would be today, but because by then Patrick Geddes was in the Department of Sociology and Civics in the University of Bombay (now Mumbai). His later life took him far away from both Edinburgh and Paris, though he chose to spend his last years in Montpellier in a new Collège des Ecossais.5 This book contains other examples of those who left the city, like John Duncan Fergusson, who returned often enough to his birthplace but never to live there, and preferred to end his days in Glasgow. Ottilie McLaren married her composer William Wallace in St Giles in 1905, and his work kept them mostly in London, where John Buchan and Kathleen Bruce (now Scott) also continued to live. The Franco-Scottish society, bolstered by the founding of the French Institute in Edinburgh after 1945, is still a lively group, though not perhaps in the sense that its founders hoped for. The firm of Nelson’s remained in Edinburgh after the Second World War, but was taken over by the Thomson Organisation in 1962 and the publishing side followed many of its predecessors to London. The printing division was sold to another Edinburgh firm (now also gone) in 1968 and the Parkside works was demolished.6 Scotland would have to wait until after the Second World War for its National Library (Edinburgh), and even longer for a National Opera (Glasgow) and National Theatre. And as Geddes was aware, the honours would be divided between Glasgow and Edinburgh: his Masque pays homage to Glasgow too, though perhaps he would not have foretold in 1912 that Glasgow would be Europe’s City of Culture some 80 years later. Yet

4

All quotations from Patrick Geddes, Dramatisations of History, London & Edinburgh, Patrick Geddes and Colleagues, 7th edition, 1923, esp. pp. 157-158; 178-179. My thanks to Elizabeth Cumming for her kind gift of this book. 5 See Helen Meller, Patrick Geddes Social Evolutionist and City Planner, London, Routledge, 1990, for details and references on Geddes’s later career. The revival of interest in Geddes in recent years has been remarkable. 6 Alistair McCleery, introduction to Heather Holmes and David Finkelstein, eds, Thomas Nelson and Sons: memories of an Edinburgh publishing house, East Linton, Tuckwell Press, 2001, pp. xxi-xxii.

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there is a sense in which one can extract something prophetic from Geddes’s vision, again taking Paris as a point of comparison. For the rest of the twentieth century, the French capital undoubtedly remained both a place of cultural pilgrimage and the centre of vanguard cultural movements, from Surrealism to Existentialism. It retained its attraction for generations of artists and writers for decades. Arguably, after the First World War, however, Paris was no longer quite so unchallenged either on the European or the world stage. It had become one pole, an important one to be sure, in a more multipolar cultural landscape, where American and Russian cultures, to name but two, exercised a pull in new directions. Even today, when the French language is under threat from the use of English, Paris remains one of the world’s great cultural sites, though perhaps it is becoming more of a site of memory, a lieu de mémoire, in certain respects. Some detected the signs of a change in Paris’s domination of the cultural world as early as 1900. Paul Morand, a right-wing moralist, identified it as the unwelcome invasion of France by foreign literature (Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Ibsen).7 One could put it another way as the globalization of cultural change, with increased literacy and travel, combining with efforts to boost national cultures. It is clear enough that in putting together material on these two cities from the belle époque, this book has been concerned with entities of very different pulling power within the force field of European culture. But what it has aimed to do, is to show that while like all of Europe, Edinburgh experienced the magnetism of Paris, and was influenced in many ways by Parisian norms, whether in its buildings or its painting, there were nevertheless some indications 100 years or so ago of a changing world. Much has been written about the Modernist turn in fin-de-siècle Paris, as identified by J.D. Fergusson for example in the art world. Modernism is not a word readily associated with turn-of-the-century Edinburgh. But we may detect signs of it in the combined nationalism and internationalism of Patrick Geddes’s enterprises, often running against the grain; in the way his Summer Meetings inspired new thinking among French intellectuals; in Fergusson’s aim of remaining Scottish in Paris, and becoming part of a group of painters whose stock has grown massively; in the entrepreneurialism of Nelson’s compared to the approach of French publishing; and perhaps most of all in gender relations, where the New Woman to be found in Edinburgh, whether student or activist, was looking forward to the way things would later move. If there is a continuity here, however, it has been a rather hidden one. It was not predictable even as late as the 1970s or early 1980s that Edinburgh would change as fast as it has in recent years, nor that the extraordinary phenomenon of the Edinburgh Festival, started in 1947, and seen at first as a sort of alien body, is today enclosed within a much more confident Scottish culture. Devolution and the Scottish Parliament have accompanied though not exactly caused the change. But both Glasgow and Edinburgh could be said to have moved a great deal further towards Geddes’s vision: in the much more multipolar cultural world of today, the

7

Paul Morand, 1900, Paris, Editions de France, 1931, p. 167.

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two cities of the Scottish Central Belt have some claim to be, as Paris still is, among the many magnetic poles of modern European culture.88

8

For estimates of post-1980 cultural change in Scotland, see the articles on ‘Culture’ by Richard Finlay, Cairns Craig and others in Michael Lynch, ed., The Oxford Companion to Scottish History, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001, and Christopher Harvie, ‘Scotland after 1978, from referendum to millennium’, in R. A. Houston and W. W. J Knox. eds, The New Penguin History of Scotland, London, Penguin Press, 2001, pp. 494-531.

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Index

Aberdeen, Ishbel Gordon, Lady 184 Adam, Robert 36 Addams, Jane 130 and n. Agulhon, Maurice 45 Albert, Prince 48 Amicis, Edmond de 2, 116 Anderson, Elizabeth Garrett 177, 180 Anderson, Robert Rowand 36 and n., 37, 39, 58 Andrew, Christopher 114 Antliff, Mark 74 Apollinaire, Guillaume 30, 160 Aranyi, publishers 146 Arenberg, Prince Auguste d’ 107 Arrol, William, 1n., 124 Arthur, Jane 186 Auclert, Hubertine 183, 185 Ayrton, Matilda 179 Bailhache, Jules 88, 94n., 141 Baker, Benjamin 1n. Bakst, Lev 75 Bakunin, Mikhail 95 Balfour, Clotilde 98 Balzac, Honoré de 16, 41, 46, 104, 135, 148, 149, 164 Barclay, Thomas 41n., 103-107, 111-112 Bardoux, Agénor 141 Barrès, Maurice 119 Bastien-Lepage, Jules 59 Baudelaire, Charles 166 Baudin. Pierre 139 Beattie, William Hamilton 32, 41, 52 Beljame, Alexandre 141 Benjamin, Walter 2 Bennett, Andrew 61 Bergson, Henri 74, 136 Bernhardt, Sarah 191 Bichat, Ernest 141 Billington-Greig, Teresa 188 Bing, Siegfried 119 Bird, Isabella 190

Blanc, Georgette (Mme Maeterlinck) 148 Blanc, Hippolyte 42 Blanche, Jacques-Emile 62, 73 Blaze de Bury, Rose 89, 102 and n. Blaze de Bury, Yetta 89, 91 Bliss, Douglas 48, 51 Blyth, Phoebe 186 Bombay (Mumbai) 195 Bonaparte, Prince Roland 129, 141, 142 Bonnet, Marie 91, 111, 136n., 141 Bonnard, Pierre 77 Bouglé, Célestin 136n. Bouguereau, William 58, 72 Bourdelle, Antoine 40, 59n., 77 Bourdieu, Pierre 19 Bourgeois, Emile 132, 141, 142 Bourgeois, Léon 103 and n., 108n., 126, 130, 137, 141, 142 Bourget, Paul 148, 150, 160 Boutmy, Emile 129, 141, 142 Boutroux, Emile 104, 108, 141 Bréal, Michel 141 Brès, Madeleine 177 Brodie, Deacon 51 Brogan, Denis 161 Brouardel, Paul 129, 141, 142 Brough, Robert 72, 94 Brousse, Paul 121n. Brown, George Mackenzie 146-161 passim Browne, George Washington 34, 36 Bruce, Kathleen 62-64, 69-70, 167, 189, 195 Brunetière, Ferdinand 160 Bryce, James 130, 139, 140 Bryson, Elizabeth 180 Buchan, John 146 and n., 147-161 passim, 195 Bufnoir, Claude 141 Burn-Murdoch, Morag 65 Burn-Murdoch, William 90, 97 Burnet, John James 29-30, 36n., 42, 124 Burnet, Professor 104-105 Burns, Robert, poet (1759-1796) 17, 38

214

PARIS-EDINBURGH

Burns, Robert, painter (1869-1941 ) 61n., 97 Burton, Mary Rose Hill 97, 168 Cadell, Francis 71 and n., 77 Cadell, Dr Grace 189 Calais 14 Calmann-Lévy, publishers 146, 152-153 Cameron, Mary Margaret 61 Campos, Christophe 17 Camus, Albert 161 Capper, Stewart Henbest, 36 and n. Carlyle, Thomas 17, 38 Carmen, Académie see Rossi, Carmen Carmichael, Charlotte 191 Carnegie, Andrew 17 Carpeaux, Jean-Baptiste 42, 43 Carolus-Duran (Charles Durand) 59 Carr, Emily 77 Caserio 94 Casimir-Périer, Jean 107, 108 and n., 114 Caudel, Maurice 110, 141, 142 Chabaud, Auguste 73, 75 Chalamet. Mme 108 Chalmers, Thomas 48 Chambers, William 48 Chambrun, Comte de 126, 129, 136 Chateaubriand, Francois-René 148, 150 Chicago 115 Cimino, Emilia 66n. Clarétie, Jules 142 Clark, Jane Inglis 174 Claudel, Camille 66 and n. Claudel, Paul 160 Clemenceau, Georges 136 Colarossi, Académie 62, 64 and n., 65, 72 Colette, Sidonie-Gabrielle 160 Comte, Auguste 83, 136 Condorcet, Jean-Antoine Nicolas, marquis de 185 Conrad, Joseph 147 Coppée, Francois 142 Coubertin , Pierre de 172 Courtois, Gustave 61 Cousin, Victor 104, 108 Crès, Georges 154 Croiset, Alfred 104, 108, 141 Crowley, Aleister 71 Cumming, Elizabeth 11 Cumming, Lily 180

Curie, Marie 35 Daiches, David 193 Dalou, Jules 45, 59n. Daudet, Alphonse 17, 148, 149 Davidson, Miss 126 Delacroix, Eugène 45 Delage, Yves 82, 91, 126, 141, 142 Delaire, M. 91 Delcassé, Théophile 139 Delvolvé, Jean 111, 141 Demolins, Edmond 83, 85-89, 91, 129, 141, 168, 172, 174-175 Dent, Joseph Mallaby 153-154 Derain, André 73, 75, 77 Desjardins, Paul 89-90, 91, 97n., 98, 126, 141, 142 Devine, T. M. 9, 28 Dickson, Mrs Scott 105 Dieulafoy, Jane 190 Dismorr, Jessica 74 Donaldson, Sir George 119 Donaldson, Principal James 102, 103 Dott, Peter 77 Douglas, Katherine 147 Doumic, René 110 Dover 14 Dow, Thomas Millie 59 Dreyfus, Alfred, and Dreyfus Affair 5, 19, 108n., 112-113, 129, 141, 160, 183 Drummond, Flora 188 Drumont, Edouard 140 Duclaux, Emile 104, 108, 126, 130, 137, 139n., 140-142 Dumas, Alexandre 16 Du Maurier, George 17 Dunbar, Gary 125 Duncan, Isidora 63 Duncan, John 74, 90, 96, 97 and n., 98, 105, 106, 130 Dundas, Henry, 1st Viscount Melville 48 Dundee 86, 132 Dunfermline 12 Dunoyer de Segonzac, André 74 Dupré, Mme Leroy 154 Durand, Marguerite 20, 171, 175, 184n., 185, 191 Durkheim, Emile 136 Dyhouse, Carol 181

INDEX Eberhardt, Isabelle 190 Edward VII 1 and n., 101 Eiffel, Gustave 1 and n. Elliott, Patrick 57 Ellis, Havelock 96 Ely, Robert Erskine 129 Emslie, Isabel 180, 181 Espinas, Alfred 85, 91, 129, 141 Esterhazy 112 Faguet, Emile 149, 154 Fashoda (Fachoda), Sudan 19, 111, 112, 125, 139 Fasquelle, publisher 146, 148 Faure, Félix 25, 105, 108, 113 Ferguson, Adam 13, 104 Fergusson, John Duncan 2, 20, 59, 60, 62, 71-77, 78n, 195, 196 Ferry, Jules 34 Flahault, Charles 82 Flammarion, publisher 146 Fowler, Miss 126 Fowler, Sir John 1n. France, Anatole 16, 98 Franqueville, Amable Charles, comte de 107, 108, 141 Fry, Roger 77 Gambetta, Léon 46 Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri 75 Geddes, Anna (nee Morton) 81, 84, 85, 87, 98, 132, 136n. Geddes, Patrick 11, 15, 20, 28, 74, 7999 passim, 102, 110, 111n., 114, 115-141passim,164-166, 168, 175, 190-191, 194-197 Geikie, Sir Archibald 130 Gérôme, Jean-Léon 59 Gide, André 83 Gide, Charles 83, 104, 129, 136, 141, 142 Gilchrist, Marion 180 Gladstone, William Ewart 48, 49, 50 Glasgow 4, 5, 8, 16, 29, 30, 31, 41n., 59, 97, 125, 183, 186, 195 ‘Glasgow Boys’ 59, 98n ‘Glasgow Girls’ 60 Gounod, Charles 46 Grasset, Bernard 149-154 Gray, Eileen 63

215

Gréard, Octave 35n, 91, 104, 108, 130, 137, 141 Greene, Graham 151 Guimard, Hector 25, 28, 31 Guthrie, James 59 Guthrie, Thomas 48 Hallays, André 119, 132 Hamilton, William 104, 108 Hamon, Augustin 96-97, 141 Hamon, Henriette 96n. Hanotaux, Gabriel 108, 160 Hardie, James Keir 186 Hardy, Léopold 29 Hatt, Brander 110 Haussmann, Georges-Eugène 7, 8, 21-22, 24 Hay, Jane 90, 104 Henry, Emile 94 Henry, Commandant Hubert 112 Herbertson, Andrew John 90 and n. Herbertson, Dorothy 90, 98 Herbette, Louis 142 Hérold, Ferdinand 36 Hill, Octavia 132n. Himly, Auguste 141 Hole, William 38 Hornel, E. A., 97 Hugo, Victor 16, 37, 153 Hume, David 12, 105n., 194 Hunter, Leslie 71 and n., 77 Hurd, Dorothy 174 Hutton, J. J. 149, 151 Huxley, T. H. 81, 82, 90 Ibsen, Henrik 169, 196 Inglis, Elsie 180-181, 187 Injalbert, Jean-Antoine 46, 65 and n. Janvier, Catherine 98 Jex-Blake, Sophia 177, 179, 180, 189 Jenner, Charles 41, 51, 52 John, Gwen 65 Jones, Colin 7 Julian, Académie 62n, 64-65 Kay, Christina 191 Kelvin, William Thomson, Lord 113 Kennedy, William 59 Kennedy-Fraser, Marjorie 85

216

PARIS-EDINBURGH

Kennet, Kathleen see Bruce, Kathleen King, Jessie M., 74 Kipling, Rudyard 147 Kirkpatrick, Professor John 104, 108, 111, 113 Kitchener, General Horatio Herbert 111 Kjellberg, Pierre 45 Klein, Abbé Félix 89, 95, 98, 141 Knox, John 12 Koechlin, Maurice 1n. Kropotkin, Peter (Pierre) 92-95, 125, 141 Labusquière, John 142 Lacaze-Duthiers, Henri de 82, 91, 141 Lafitte, Pierre, Professor 91, Lafitte, Pierre, publisher 147 Landowski, Paul 77 Lanfranchi, Jacques 46 Lang, Andrew 105n., 147, 160 Lansdowne, Petty-Fitzmaurice, Henry, 5th marquess of 113, 139 Larroumet, Gustave 91 Laurens, Jean-Paul 59, 62 and n. Laurie, Simon Somerville 79 Lavery, John 59, 98n. Lavisse, Ernest 35, 83, 91, 102 and n., 104, 108, 126, 129, 130, 136, 137, 139n., 140, 141, 142 Lebourg, C. A. 54 Leggett, Francis 125 Leith 13 Leneman, Leah 189 Le Play, Frédéric 83, 129, 136 Lerberghe, Charles van 98 Leygues, Georges 139 Liard, Louis 91, 104, 108, 129, 130, 137, 139n., 141 Littlejohn, Henry 8n, 34 London 14-15, 31 Lothian, Henry Kerr, Marquess of 111 Loubet, Emile 113, 139 Lynch, Michael 11 Lyon-Caen, Charles 141 Mabilleau, Léopold 129, 142 MacDiarmid, Hugh (Christopher Grieve) 193 MacGillivray, James Pittendrigh 48, 49, 50, 64, 77

Mackie, Charles 90, 97 and n. McLaren, Agnes 178n., 187 McLaren, Duncan 187 McLaren, John (Lord) 64, 66 McLaren, Katie 170 McLaren, Ottilie 14n., 15, 17, 20, 46, 62n, 64-71, 135-136, 169-171, 174, 187, 191, 195 McLaren, Prisicilla Bright 187-188 Macmillan, Chrystal 187 Macmillan, Duncan 77 MacMonnies, Frederick 65n Macpherson, James 12 McPherson, Miss 126 Maeterlinck, Maurice 148 Mair, Sarah Siddons 185-186 Malassez, Dr 91 Malet, Albert 142 Manet, Edouard 10, 72 Mansfield, Katherine 75, 77 Marchand, Colonel Jean-Baptiste 111 Marillier, Léon, 111 and n., 141 Marqueste, Laurent 77 Marquet, Albert 75 Marr, Thomas R. 90 130, 132 Marshall, Mary A. 179 Marx, Karl 93 Mary, Queen of Scots 12, 38 Mason, A. E. W. 147 Masson, Professor David 176, 187 Masson, Flora 176 Matisse, Henri 73, 74, 77 Maupassant, Guy de 1n., 167 May, Dick ( Jeanne Weill) 89n., 136 and n. 142 Mazel, Henri 110, 141 Melon, Paul 101, 104 and n., 108, 142 Melville, Arthur 59, 71 Melville, Frances 187 Mercier, General Auguste 108n. Meyer, Paul 141 Mill, John Stuart 187 Millerand, Alexandre 136, 139 and n., 142 Moch, Gaston 139, 142 Molyneaux, Bessie 62 Monod, Gabriel 141 Montpellier 195 Moore, George 17 Moorhead, Ethel 189

INDEX Morand, Paul 163, 196 Morgan, Lloyd 90 Morham, Robert 34 Murry, John Middleton 75 Musset, Alfred de 46 Nadar 125 Nairn, Margaret 189 Napoleon Bonaparte 17, 150 Nead, Lynda 166 Nédélec, Jean 150-151 and n. Nelson, Ian 146 Nelson, Thomas, printing firm 20, 54, 143161 passim, 195 Nelson, Tommy 110, 146 Nelson, William 109, 110 Nénot, Henri-Paul 35, 104 Newbery, Francis 60 Nightingale, Florence 181 Normand, Charles 142 Nouguier, Emile 1n Ollendorff, publishers 146 Palin, William 36 Palmer, Bertha Potter 163 Pankhurst, Christabel 188 Pankhurst, Emmeline 188 Paquin, Jeanne 163 Pascal, Jean-Louis 29, 36n Pasteur, Louis 35, 82, 102, 104, 141 Pateman, Carole 190 Paterson, Nora 61 Paterson, Robert 36n Paulin, George 62 Peddie, J. Dick, 36n Pegard, Mme M. 164 and n. Pelletier, Madeleine 178-179, 180, 185 Peploe, Samuel J. 2, 59, 71-75, 77, 174 Perrot, Georges 142 Perrot, Michelle 164, 190 Pessard, Gustave 46 Philadelphia 115 Picard, Alfred 130 and n., 132, 137 Picasso, Pablo 73, 75 Pissarro, Lucien 96, 97n Playfair, William 36, 37 Poincaré, Henri 142 Poinsard, Léon 141

217

Pontigny, Burgundy 89-90 Poubelle, Eugène 178 Preble, Marie 66 and n., 69 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 93 Proust, Marcel 16, 149, 160 Puech, Denys 46, 65n Pullar, Sir Robert 130, 132 Puvis de Chavannes, Pierre 35, 38, 97 and n. Quinet, Edgar 10n Quinet (Hermione), Mme Edgar 10n, 16, 20, 24, 48, 168 Ramsay, Dean 51 Ravachol (François Konigstein) 93, 94 Reay, Lord (Donald Mackay) 104 Reclus, Elie 92, 94, 98, 149n. Reclus, Elisée 20, 92-96, 98, 119-125, 141, 149n. Reclus, Paul (aka Georges Guyou) 94, 95, 97, 121, 141 Reddie, Cecil 88 Reid, Thomas 13, 104, 108, 109 Renan, Ernest 98 Rennes 113 Rhind, John 48 Ribot, Alexandre 107, 126 Rice, Anne Estelle frontispiece, 72, 74, 75 Richet, Dr 91 Richier, Germaine 59n Rixen, André 61 Roberts, Mary Louise 169, 175, 191 Roche, Alexander 59 Rodger, Richard 8, 44 Rodin, Auguste 20, 46, 58, 63, 66-71, 77, 135-36 Ross, Daniel 51, 54 Rossi, Carmen 65 Rousiers, Paul de 129, 141 Royds, Mabel 61n Roz, Firmin 15, 111, 141 Ruskin, John 1n Rutter, Frank 73 Sadi-Carnot, Marie-François 92, 94 Saintsbury, George 12, 109 and n., 149, 176 Salisbury, Robert Cecil, third marquess of 139 Sand, George 17

218

PARIS-EDINBURGH

Sarcey, Francisque 91 Sarolea, Charles 20, 98, 108, 109n., 144-161 passim, 176 Scheurmier, Henry 152 and n. Schrader, Franz 142 Schwabe, Ottilie (Lady McLaren) 64 Scott, Gilbert 42 Scott, Kathleen see Bruce, Kathleen Scott, Capt. Robert Falcon 63 Scott, Sir Walter 12, 17, 38, 48, 144 Scott Moncrieff, C. K. 149 Seignobos, Charles 111n, 126, 142 Sérusier, Paul 98, 167 Sérusier, Clémence 167 and n. Sévérine (Caroline Rémy) 185 Sharp, William 90, 98 Shaw, George Bernard 96 and n., 169 Siegfried, Jules 88n., 126, 129, 141, 142 Silverman, Debora 164 Simon, Jules 13, 22, 103, 104, 105, 126, 141 Simpson, James 4 Simson, Frances 187 Skene, William 58n. Smith, Adam 12, 194 Smith, Angela 77 Smith, Robert 132 Spalding, Frances 77 Spark. Muriel 191 Stead, William T. 139, 140 Steel, Sir James 28 Steell, Sir John 48 Steichen, Edward 71 Stein, Gertrude 2 Stevenson, Flora 104, 108, 186 Stevenson, Robert Louis 3, 17, 18, 51, 63n Stewart, Dugald 13, 104, 108 Stewart, Mary Lynn 172 Stopes, Marie 191 Sturge, Emily 179 Taylor, E. A, 74 Teuscher, Marie-Thérèse (Mrs Barclay) 103 Tholoniat, Richard 18 Thompson, Lady 63 Thompson, Marguerite 74

Thomson, Adam 62 Thomson, J. Arthur 81, 84 Tolstoy, Lev 148, 150, 196 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de 73 Traquair, Phoebe Anna 64, 97 Trocmé, Henri 141 Turnbull, John 62 Tweeddale, Marchioness of 1 Vaillant, Auguste 93 Valéry, Jules 83n, 109 Valéry, Paul 83, 109 Varigny, Henri de 85, 91, 102 and n. Verlaine, Paul 17 Verne, Jules 12 Vialatte, M. 110 Victoria, Queen 18, 37, 48, 114 Vidal de la Blache, Paul 125 Vienna 115, 194 Viviani, René 184, 185 Vizetelly, Henry 17, 147 Vlaminck, Maurice de 73, 77 Vogüé, Melchior de 141 Vuillard, Edouard 77 Waldeck-Rousseau, René 113, 139n Wales, Prince of see Edward VII Walker, the Misses 42 Wallace, Sir Richard 51 and n. Wallace, William (composer) 64, 135n, 170 and n., 195 Walton, Cecile 62, 73 Warwick, Lady 139 Weill, Jeanne see May, Dick Weill, Louis, 91 Weir, Wilma 62 Whistler, James McNeill 65, 74 White, Miss 126 Whitney, Sarah 65-6, 135-6 Wigham, Eliza 187 Wilson, Robert 34 Woolf, Virginia 58n Zangwill, Israel 98 Zola, Emile 9, 17, 41, 112, 147, 160