Félix Vallotton's Murderous Life

Abstract

In 1907 the Franco-Swiss artist Félix Vallotton wrote La vie meurtrière (The Murderous Life), a mock-autobiographical novel with striking tropological connections to his fin-de-siècle prints. An examination of those connections reveals that Vallotton developed a unique visual language in both image and text for the relation between sight and social responsibility. The Paris crowd scenes that first established his artistic reputation attest to the largely unrecognized significance of the gawker (le badaud) as a modern type, a figure for the attractions and fraught ethics of urban spectatorship that is distinct from the far more studied flâneur.

Notes

1. Félix Vallotton, La vie meurtrière (Paris: Circé, 1998), 69.

2. The manuscript is dated January 1907–January 1908. Vallotton tried to find a publisher in 1909, without success. He entrusted the manuscript to André Thérive in 1925, just before his death, with the hope that Thérive would find someone to publish it. The novel first appeared in serialized form in Le Mercure de France (January 15–March 15, 1927) and was later published by Éditions des Lettres de Lausanne, along with seven drawings by the author (done about 1921) and a preface by Thérive, in 1930. A second edition was published in 1946 by Éditions des Trois Collines, Geneva and Paris. All of my citations are drawn from the edition published by Circé, Paris, 1998. Brief extracts of the novel are reprinted in Günter Busch et al., Vallotton (Lausanne: La Bibliothèque des Arts, 1985), 177–84. Vallotton's other two novels are Les soupirs de Cyprien Morus (Geneva and Paris: Trois Collines, 1945), written about 1900, and Corbehaut (Lausanne: Le Livre du Mois, 1970), written in 1920. Facsimiles of Vallotton's unpublished plays are available to scholars at the Fondation Félix Vallotton, Lausanne.

3. Sasha M. Newman published a few pages on La vie meurtrière in Newman et al., Félix Vallotton (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery; New York: Abbeville Press, 1991), 123–28. Newman (11, 124, 277) briefly addresses the important role of the gaze in Vallotton's art and in La vie meurtrière specifically, but acknowledges in a note that she does not intend “an in-depth analysis of the function of the gaze in Vallotton's work.” Dominique Brachlianoff has written the most sustained analysis of the novel in her essay “Vallotton romancier et peintre ou la juste distance,” in Le très singulier Vallotton (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2001), 64–68, arguing that Vallotton's novels use various formal, iconographic, and literary conventions as a “protective screen” through which he can distance himself from his representations of the darkest depths of human nature (73). I intend here to build on Newman's observations by investigating Vallotton's metaphorics of vision and perspective more thoroughly and to complicate her assertion, further developed by Brachlianoff, that “Vallotton remained always the detached observer” and “systematically disrupted traditional expectations with the insistent objectivity of a disenfranchised voyeur” (Newman et al., Félix Vallotton, 11, 39).

4. On the challenges inherent in using artists’ writings as a source or interpretative lens for understanding their work, see Linda Goddard's special issue, “Artists’ Writings: 1850 to Present,” Word & Image 28, no. 4 (October 2012), especially Goddard's introduction, 331–34, and “Artists’ Writings: Word or Image?” 409–18; and Charles Harrison, “The Trouble with Writing,” in Conceptual Art and Painting: Further Essays on Art & Language (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 3–34. Goddard (410) and Harrison (12) both mention the “fictionalized autobiographical writings” of artists like Paul Gauguin and Salvador Dalí as occupying a problematic position between documentation and literature. Goddard's approach is to see such writings as hybrid forms—blends of literature, documentation, theory, and art—rather than categorize them strictly, and to treat them as objects of analysis in their own right that can also shed light on the writer's broader artistic practice.

5. Brachlianoff (“Vallotton romancier et peintre,” 62) has noted the fundamentally narrative basis of Vallotton's art, describing his conception of the tableau as “a primarily narrative space.”

6. Vallotton, La vie meurtrière, 224: “Ce livre veut être une confession.”

7. On the relation between autobiography and prosopopoeia, see Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement,” Modern Language Notes 94, no. 5 (December 1979): 919–30.

8. Vallotton's title for the novel was, in fact, Un meurtre. Thérive and the editor of La Mercure de France changed the title to La vie meurtrière after Vallotton's death, when it was first published. Vallotton originally titled the fictional manuscript on which the novel was based Un amour: Récit d’une vie, but crossed out the subtitle on his typescript. “La vie meurtrière, tapuscrit annoté 1,” 5, Fondation Félix Vallotton, Lausanne. The Fondation Vallotton possesses two annotated typescripts of the novel, and the one labeled “tapuscrit annoté 1” matches the final version published by Thérive. The typescript labeled “tapuscrit annoté 2” appears marked by at least two hands (Vallotton's and Thérive's?), and several of its additions and deletions do not appear in the final text, suggesting that the “tapuscrit annoté 1” was the author's definitive edit. Thérive's preface to the 1930 edition confirms that the published version is faithful to Vallotton's revisions. André Thérive, preface to Félix Vallotton, La vie meurtrière (Lausanne: Les Lettres de Lausanne, 1930), x–xi.

9. Vallotton, La vie meurtrière, 13–14.

10. On the role of the author as witness and (sometimes unwilling) observer in autobiography, see Francis R. Hart, “Notes for an Anatomy of Modern Autobiography,” New Literary History 1, no. 3 (Spring 1970): 510.

11. Self-Portrait at Age 20, 1885 (Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne). Vallotton, La vie meurtrière, 43: “un profil assez fin,” “une moustache retardataire,” “des paupières maladives,” and “un tout petit menton raté, d’un mauvais petit menton de hasard, qui entache l’ensemble et le tare de sa défaillance.” The mane of brown curls differentiates Verdier from Vallotton, whose hair was straight and blond.

12. Vallotton, La vie meurtrière, 47: “Une excessive timidité. …”

13. In 1884 a close friend of Vallotton's wrote to his father: “He is intelligent, diligent, and well mannered. I have only one reproach for him: a bit of timidity in his work that sometimes paralyzes his efforts. I am convinced this timidity will disappear as soon as his family demonstrates their confidence in him and encourages him. [Il est intelligent, laborieux et bien élevé. Je n’ai qu’un seul reproche à lui adresser, c’est un peu de timidité dans le travail qui parfois paralyse ses efforts. Cette timidité disparaîtra j’en ai la conviction du jour où il sentira que sa famille a confiance en lui et l’encourage].” Jules Lefebvre to Adrien Vallotton, July 25,1884, in Gilbert Guisan and Doris Jakubec, eds., Félix Vallotton: Documents pour une biographie et pour l’histoire d’une oeuvre, 3 vols. (Paris: La Bibliothèque des Arts, 1973), vol. 1 (1884–99), 28, quoted in Newman et al., Félix Vallotton, 269. Thadée Natanson also recalled the artist's reserve; Guisan and Jakubec, vol. 1, 29. According to Jerome Hamilton Buckley, this confusion of autobiography and fiction was typical of Vallotton's fin-de-siècle moment: “As the twentieth century approaches, it proves increasingly difficult to distinguish between the autobiography invaded by fiction and the first-person fiction involving the autobiography of the author.” Buckley, The Turning Key: Autobiography and the Subjective Impulse since 1800 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 115.

14. De Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement,” 919–30.

15. Ibid., 921.

16. Vallotton, La vie meurtrière, 23–24.

17. For a fascinating discussion of the shadow as “an expressive entity” in itself rather than a mere accessory to form in late nineteenth-century Parisian visual culture, see Nancy Forgione, “‘The Shadow Only’: Shadow and Silhouette in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris,” Art Bulletin 81, no. 3 (September 1999): 490–512.

18. Vallotton's novel skillfully exploits a central feature of autobiography as theorized by Hart (“Notes for an Anatomy,” 492): “Every autobiography can appropriately and usefully be viewed as in some degree a drama of intention, and its dramatic intentionality is another component of the autobiographical situation for the interpreter to attend to.”

19. Vallotton, La vie meurtrière, 25–29.

20. In his typescript, Vallotton eliminated a sentence in which Verdier announces Hubertin as his “first victim”: “Poor Hubertin! … And to think he was my first victim! [Pauvre Hubertin! … Et dire qu’il fut ma première victime!]” “La vie meurtrière, tapuscrit annoté 1,” chap. 1, 8. This excision suggests two possibilities: either Vallotton added the story about Vincent to an earlier draft and forgot to remove this sentence, or the sentence was there to indicate that Verdier saw Vincent's fall as purely accidental but blamed himself for Hubertin's death. By removing the sentence, Vallotton allows the matter of guilt and responsibility to remain ambiguous, better preserving his novel's central source of dramatic suspense. In the same vein, he preserves the mystery of Verdier's moral conscience by removing the damning phrase “my passive conscience was not yet quivering [ma conscience amorphe ne vibrait pas encore]” as well as the unnecessary clarification “No one knew the exact truth; the dead man was quite dead, and the secret stayed between him and me [Personne ne connut l’exacte vérité; le mort est bien mort, et le secret demeure entre lui et moi].” Ibid., chap. 1, 16.

21. Vallotton, La vie meurtrière, 27: “Il demeurait inerte, mais l’œil immense continuat à vivre, et me fixait.”

22. Ibid., 27–29: “La chose n’ayant pas eu de témoins, rien n’autorisait à douter de ma parole. …”

23. Ibid., 34–38.

24. Ibid., 38, 40: “Je reçus un coup de fouet dans les jointures, les objets s’effacèrent devant mes yeux, et je m’écroulais. …” “J’étais brisé. … je ne savais plus, je ne percevais plus, je n’existais plus.”

25. For example, Vallotton redacts metaphors such as “the death knell of dark days began to ring again in my heart [le glas des mauvais jours se reprit à battre dans mon coeur],” and “on the young flower of love, I poured my first tears [sur la jeune fleur d’amour, je versais mes premières larmes],” as well as grisly details such as “the terrible odor, the stain of flesh sizzling on the stove [l’odeur atroce, la tache de graisse crépitant sur le poële].” “La vie meurtrière, tapuscrit annoté 1,” 59, 67, 93. When these edits were made by Vallotton is unknown. He wrote the novel in 1907 and 1908, but it was not published until shortly after his death, so the changes could have been made at almost any time in the intervening years, although perhaps most likely either soon after completion or about 1921, when the illustrations were added.

26. “La lente succession des accidents nerveux et sanguins. …” The quote is from Émile Zola's preface to La fortune des Rougons (1871), the first novel of the twenty-novel series. For an introduction to Zola's novels, see Brian Nelson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Zola (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

27. Vallotton, “La vie meurtrière, tapuscrit annoté 1,” 174: “Quel virus … à quelles hérédités maléfiques devais-je un si lugubre pouvoir! …” La vie meurtrière, 174: “Quel virus m’infectait, et de quelles hérédités maléfiques étais-je l’instrument?”

28. “La vie meurtrière, tapuscrit annoté 1,” 127: “Et cela, je l’avais fait!” La vie meurtrière, 129: “Et de cette douleur j’étais responsible, moi!” Vallotton also cuts half of the subsequent sentence, presumably to maintain some level of ambiguity surrounding Verdier's intentionality: “So what was I worth, nothing more than a lame toy, bounced around by the least little breeze. … [Que pesais-je donc de n’être ainsi qu’un jouet mauvais, ballant à tous les souffles. …]” (“tapuscrit annoté 1,” 127), changing it to “What diabolical curse condemned me always to harm to do evil! … [Quel sort diabolique me condamnait à nuire faire le mal toujours! …]” (La vie meurtrière, 129). Finally, an edit near the end of the novel concerns Verdier's attempt and failure to write a confession to a woman he has infected with a fatal disease (she does not yet know why she is ill). The original sentence—“At the end of my rope, I gave myself over to Destiny, and left everything else to chance [A bout de ressources, je m’en remis à la Destinée, et pour le reste attendis le hasard]” (“tapuscrit annoté 1,” 226)—becomes “At the end of my rope, I tore up the paper and cast my lot with destiny [À bout de ressources, je déchirai le papier et remis mon sort à la destinée]” (La vie meurtrière, 223). The element of chance is removed. See also n. 20 above.

29. Vallotton, La vie meurtrière, 63–64.

30. For his first assignment as an art critic, Verdier describes his wish to write an essay on “the Sensuality of line. I have observed, in the course of many discussions, that painters and even sculptors seem to deny line all value other than its architectural capacity to suggest silhouettes. For them only color can awaken sensual desire, by giving represented objects or figures their substance and flesh. As if the curve of a hip or a breast were not as evocative in its defined contour as the infinite nuances of the skin! [la Sensualité exprimée par le trait. J’avais observé, au cours de maintes discussions, que les peintres et même les sculpteurs semblaient dénier la ligne toute valeur autre qu’évocatrice de silhouettes, architecturale par conséquent. Selon eux, la couleur, en donnant aux objets ou êtres représentés leur qualité de substance et leur pulpe, avait seule pouvoir d’éveiller le désir des sens. Comme si le fléchissement d’une hanche ou d’un sein n’était pas aussi suggestif en son strict contour que les nuances, fussent-elles infinies, de la peau!]” Ibid., 63. In 1907 Vallotton wrote on the “hypnotic and quavering line [trait hypnotique et chevrotant]” of Henri Matisse's Luxe, Calme, et Volupté, 1904–5, exhibited at the Salon d’Automne, Paris. This is another instance of Vallotton transferring aspects of his life and career into Verdier's story. Vallotton, “Au Salon d’Automne,” La Grande Revue (Paris), October 25, 1907, 920, reprinted in Rudolf Koella and Katia Poletti, eds., Félix Vallotton, 1865–1925: Critique d’art (Milan: 5 Continents, 2012), 132.

31. Vallotton, La vie meurtrière, 65: “Je saisis l’occasion, heureux, d’échapper au moins par la vue à ce cauchemar.” The character of Jeanne recalls Vallotton's working-class mistress, Hélène Chatenay, a seamstress who appears in several of his paintings of the 1890s. Vallotton's nickname for Chatenay was “la petite,” and Verdier refers to Jeanne as such at several points in the novel, making the link between her and his character overt. After living with Chatenay for many years, Vallotton left her to marry the wealthy widow Gabrielle Rodrigues-Henriques, of the Bernheim family of art dealers, in 1899, a crushing blow to Chatenay, who never fully recovered, emotionally or financially. Vallotton's enduring concern for Chatenay is indicated in his correspondence (he never blames himself overtly for her plight, but his mentions of her suggest considerable guilt) and was a likely source of inspiration for The Murderous Life. See Guisan and Jakubec, Félix Vallotton: Documents, vol. 1, 186–88, vol. 2, 126–28, 169; and Newman et al., Félix Vallotton, 33–36.

32. Vallotton, La vie meurtrière, 69: “J’étais d’heure en heure plus pénétré de cette foi, qu’en moi résidait un principe de mort, que je portais la mort dans mes yeux et la répandais aux alentours” (emphasis mine).

33. Michael Fried examines a similar association of sight lines and death in “Géricault's Romanticism,” in Géricault: Louvre conférences et colloques, ed. Regis Michel (Paris: La Documentation Française, 1996), 649–50, 659–60 n. 4. Fried uses “the emphasis on sightlines” in Jacques-Louis David's The Lictors Returning to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons (1789) as a reference point for analyzing “the close association of looking with killing” explored by Théodore Géricault in his lithograph Paralytic Woman (1821), whose subject Fried describes as “a certain dread of looking, though as always dread implies fascination” (649). Fried interprets the woman's “haunted backward stare across the empty middle of the composition as expressing a mixture of fear of contagion-through-looking and something like guilt for what she sees: as if for Géricault in 1820–21 vision as such were essentially two-way, a source of vulnerability … and a channel of power, and as if the effects of seeing were therefore incalculable, contradictory, out of control” (650).

34. Vallotton, La vie meurtrière, 70–73.

35. After seeing Jeanne in great pain and hearing her not only predict her own death but also blame him for it, Verdier states (ibid., 75): “Je reçus un coup d’assommoir sur les yeux.” The original typescript (“La vie meurtrière, tapuscrit annoté 1,” 69) extends the sentence to directly link the visual blow to a blow to his conscience: “Je reçus un coup d’assommoir sur les yeux, et ma conscience s’écroula d’un bloc.”

36. This carriage accident echoes an earlier moment in the novel when Verdier meets a man (at Mme Montessac's home) who describes in bloody detail how he killed a young woman in a carriage accident. Verdier barely listens, bored by his chatter, reinforcing the idea that his moral sensibilities are immune to things he cannot see. Vallotton, La vie meurtrière, 87–88.

37. Ibid., 209–15

38. Ibid., 224–31.

39. Ibid., 231–35. Note that Vallotton's former mistress Hélène Chatenay (see n. 31 above) was hit by a car in 1907, after Vallotton had begun to write La vie meurtrière. The accident seems to have intensified his latent guilt over leaving her. See his letter to his brother Paul Vallotton, 1899, in Guisan and Jakubec, Félix Vallotton: Documents, vol. 1, 186. It seems likely that this event inspired Mme Montessac's accident at the end of the novel, adding another layer of autobiography to the story.

40. Paris Intense is a series of seven lithographs published by L. Joly, Paris, in 1894. For more on this series, see Richard Field, “Exteriors and Interiors: Vallotton's Printed Oeuvre,” in Newman et al., Félix Vallotton, 61–65. Field's fine work on Vallotton's prints has informed my thinking here.

41. This particular definition of affective ambivalence is borrowed from Sigmund Freud, “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” (1915), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. 14 (1914–16; London: Hogarth Press, 1974), 109–40.

42. On Vallotton's alleged detachment from his subjects, see Newman, introduction to Newman et al., Félix Vallotton, 11; Field, “Exteriors and Interiors,” 43–44, 51, 54–55, 60–61, 68, 72–73; Linda Schädler, “L’observateur en retrait,” and “Distance glaciale,” in Félix Vallotton: Idylle au bord du gouffre (Zurich: Kunsthaus Zürich, 2007), 9–18, 47–51; and Brachlianoff, “Vallotton romancier et peintre,” 62–77. Vallotton's alleged coldness as an artist, in tension with the sensuality and sexual drama of much of his painted oeuvre, was the overarching theme of the recent exhibition and catalog Félix Vallotton: Le feu sous la glace (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux–Grand Palais, 2013).

43. L’Assiette au Beurre 48 (Paris, March 1, 1902). Lithographs from this series were also sold separately as a special supplement of the journal.

44. For information on where and when Vallotton's work was published in the press, see Maxime Vallotton and Charles Goerg, Félix Vallotton: Catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre gravé et lithographié (Geneva: Bonvent, 1972); and Mary Anne Stevens, The Graphic Work of Félix Vallotton: 1865–1925 (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1976).

45. The assassin, Santo Caserio, was executed on August 16, 1894, in Lyons. See Laurence Madeline's discussion of this work in a catalog entry in Crime & Châtiment, ed. Jean Clair (Paris: Gallimard; Musée d’Orsay, 2010), 199.

46. See Michel Foucault, “The Spectacle of the Scaffold,” in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Modern Prison (New York: Vintage, 1995), 32–69; and Pieter Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of Repression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 198. The last public execution in France took place in 1939. A guillotine did not appear in public again until 2010, as part of the exhibition Crime & Châtiment at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, spearheaded by the former French justice minister Robert Badinter.

47. In the early 1890s, when Vallotton's work was most political, he was often linked with Théophile Alexandre Steinlen, Henri Ibels, and Maximilien Luce, all artists with antimilitary anarchist-socialist views. He also contributed prints to anarchist journals such as Le Père Peinard, Les Temps Nouveau, and La Revue Anarchiste, and worked for the outspoken anarchist Félix Fénéon at La Revue Blanche. See Newman et al., Félix Vallotton, 21, 72.

48. Abbé Faure, Au pied de l’échaufaud: Souvenirs de la Roquette (Paris: Dreyfous et Dalsace, 1896). The advertisement was for the newspaper Le Matin, which published Faure's book in serialized form.

49. For a rigorous philosophical examination of the relation between individual guilt and collective responsibility, including the role of bystanders, see Christopher Kutz, Complicity: Ethics and Law for a Collectivist Age (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

50. A number of Vallotton's prints represent policemen as villains or forces of fear and oppression, including The Charge (La charge), 1893; The Anarchist (L’anarchiste), 1892; and The Demonstration (La manifestation), 1893.

51. The population of Paris doubled between the mid-1870s and 1905; Louis Chevalier, La formation de la population parisienne au XIXe siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950). Theodore Zeldin provides a useful bibliography of primary sources written by doctors and social scientists “revealing the mental torments of people in this period,” many of which were linked to urban life, in France 1848–1945: Anxiety & Hypocrisy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 417.

52. See Naomi Schor, Zola's Crowds (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).

53. Hippolyte Taine, Les origines de la France contemporaine, 6 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1876–94).

54. Gabriel Tarde, Les lois de l’imitation (Paris: Alcan, 1890); and Gustave Le Bon, La psychologie des foules (Paris: Alcan, 1895), trans. as The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (New York: Dover, 2002). For an excellent history of the development of crowd psychology in France, including Le Bon's unacknowledged borrowings from Tarde and others, see Susanna Barrows, Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981); and Robert Nye, The Origins of Crowd Psychology: Gustave Le Bon and the Crisis of Mass Democracy in the Third Republic (London: Sage, 1975).

55. “Society is imitation and imitation is a kind of somnambulism.” Tarde, Les lois de l’imitation, 77.

56. For a history of the lesser-known leftist branch of fin-de-siècle crowd psychology led by the work of the Italian Scipio Sighele, whose work—in contrast to Le Bon's—centered on an idea of the crowd as a force of social progress, see Olivier Bosc, La foule criminelle (Paris: Fayard, 2007).

57. Sigmund Freud, Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse (1921), trans. James Strachey as Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (New York: Norton, 1989). Benito Mussolini read Le Bon's text multiple times, citing it as “an excellent work to which I frequently refer” (quoted in Barrows, Distorting Mirrors, 179), and Edward Bernays, the founding father of modern public relations, drew heavily on Le Bon's work as well as that of Freud, his uncle, in developing theories of advertising and propoganda that are still widely used (Larry Tye, The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations [New York: Crown, 1998]). For a study of the broad and continuing impact of Le Bon's text on fields such as political sociology, modern marketing, and the development of media, see Jean-François Phelizon, Relire la psychologie des foules de Gustave Le Bon (Paris: Nuvis, 2011).

58. Trans. in Le Bon, The Crowd, 16. Le Bon, La psychologie des foules, 24: “Parmi les caractères spéciaux des foules, il en est plusieurs, tels que l’impulsivité, l’irritabilité, l’incapacité de raisonner, l’absence de jugement et d’esprit critique, l’exagération des sentiments … que l’on observe également chez les êtres appartenant à des formes inférieures d’évolution, tels que la femme, le sauvage et l’enfant.”

59. Le Bon preserves a rhetorical distance from the crowds he describes throughout his text as their “psychologist” (The Crowd, 64), and his chapter on leaders makes clear his belief that certain individuals with “prestige” can transcend crowd behavior and even manipulate it at will (Le Bon, La psychologie des foules, 105–27).

60. Pierre Larousse, Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, vol. 2, 1867, s.v. “Badaud,” 39: “Celui, celle qui s’étonne de tout, qui admire tout, passe son temps à regarder niaisement tout ce qui se rencontre. … Le badaud est curieux … et il montre sa contentement ou sa surprise en tenant sa bouche ouverte, en bayant.” Although the term is gendered male in the latter part of this entry, I have translated the definition as gender-neutral in accordance with the initial definition (“celui, celle”), and indeed, the activity was ascribed to both men and women in literature, journalism, and works of art.

61. Émile Littré, “Badaud,” Dictionnaire de la langue française, vol. 1 (Paris: Hachette, 1873), 276: “Badaud: Qui s’arrête à considérer tout ce qui lui semble nouveau. [Gawker: Someone who stops to look at anything new.] Les badauds de Paris, locution qui vient de ce que, à Paris comme dans les grandes villes, une foule s’amasse rapidement autour de quoi que ce soit.”

62. Victor Fournel, Ce qu’on voit dans les rues de Paris (Paris: Adolphe Delahays, 1858), 261–63.

63. On the distinction between flânerie and badauderie, see Auguste de Lacroix, “Le flâneur,” in Les français peints par eux-mêmes: Encyclopédie morale du dix-neuvième siècle, vol. 3, ed. Léon Curmer (Paris, 1841), 66; and Fournel, Ce qu’on voit dans les rues, 268–75.

64. The literature on the flâneur is vast. Important historical and theoretical approaches to the subject include (but are not limited to) Laurent Turcot, “Promenades et flâneries à Paris du XVIIe au XXIe siècles: La marche comme construction d’une identité urbaine,” in Marcher en ville: Faire corps, prendre corps, donner corps aux ambiances urbaines, ed. Rachel Thomas (Paris: Éditions des Archives Contemporaines, 2010), 65–84; Aruna D’Souza and Tom McDonough, eds., The Invisible Flaneuse? Gender, Public Space, and Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006); Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, “The Flâneur: The City and Its Discontents,” in Paris as Revolution: Writing the Nineteenth-Century City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 80–114; Keith Tester, ed., The Flâneur (New York: Routledge, 1994); Elizabeth Wilson, “The Invisible Flâneur,” New Left Review 191 (January–February 1992): 90–110; Susan Buck-Morss, “The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering,” New German Critique 39 (1986): 99–140; and Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: NLB, 1973). Despite the widespread significance of badauderie as a subject for writers and artists in nineteenth-century France, the only historians to give the badaud substantive attention are Gregory Shaya, “The Flâneur, the Badaud, and the Making of a Mass Public in France, circa 1860–1910,” American Historical Review 109, no. 1 (February 2004): 41–77; and Christopher E. Forth, “The End of the Flâneur,” in The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 105–10. A rare instance of the badaud's appearance in art historical literature is Robert L. Herbert's identification of the figure at left in Edgar Degas's Place de la Concorde (1875) as a “badaud, an onlooker who is easily distracted by what comes within his notice.” Herbert, Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 35.

65. Lacroix, Les Français peints par eux-mêmes, 66: “Le badaud ne pense pas; il ne perçoit des objets qu’extérieurement.”

66. In addition to the works already mentioned, see, for example, The Paris Crowd (La foule à Paris), 1892; Print Enthusiasts (Les amateurs d’estampes), 1892; Parading through the Streets in Single File (Le monôme), 1893; Street Singers (Les chanteurs), 1893; Absolution (L’absoute), 1894; The Suicide (Le suicide), 1894; and Fireworks (Le feu d’artifice), 1901.

67. La Revue Blanche, Paris, 1891–1903. For more on this journal, see Paul-Henri Bourrelier, La Revue Blanche: Une génération dans l’engagement, 1890–1905 (Paris: Fayard, 2007); and Georges Bernier, La Revue Blanche (Paris: Hazan, 1991).

68. Octave Uzanne, ed., Badauderies parisiennes: Les rassemblements; Physiologies de la rue, with contributions by Paul Adam, Alfred Athys, Victor Barrucand, Tristan Bernard, Léon Blum, Romain Coolus, Félix Fénéon, Gustave Kahn, Ernest La Jeunesse, L. Muhlfeld, Thadée Natanson, Edmond Pilon, Jules Renard, Pierre Veber et Veek (Paris: H. Floury, 1896). For a discussion of this anthology in the context of the history of illustrated books, see Luce Abélès, “Tradition et modernité: Les rassemblements, un livre de transition,” in L’illustration: Essais d’iconographie; Actes du Séminaire CNRS, Paris (GDR 712), 1993–1994, ed. Maria Teresa Caracciolo and Ségolène Le Men (Paris: Klincksieck, 1999), 311–25. Although the Vallotton prints in Badauderies parisiennes look like woodcuts, as they adopt various features of the artist's style in that medium, and despite the fact that they are advertised as “gravures” on the book's title page, they are probably relief prints made photomechanically from drawings. See Field, “Exteriors and Interiors,” 273 n. 26.

69. Uzanne, “Prologue: Félix Vallotton et l’origine de ce Livre des Rassemblements; La bibliophilie et la jeunesse littéraire contemporaine,” in Uzanne, Badauderies parisiennes, i–v: “L’idée me vint de lui demander une série d’estampes brutalistes sur la Badauderie parisienne. …”

70. On Vallotton's early fame as a graphic artist, see Marina Ducrey, “Honneur au graveur,” in Félix Vallotton, 1865–1925: L’oeuvre peint, vol. 1 (Milan: 5 Continents, 2005), 243–45.

71. Lucien Muhlfeld, “L’affichage moderne,” in Uzanne, Badauderies parisiennes, 70: “Il faut l’image pour retenir le regard au hasard accroché.”

72. Romain Coolus, “Les affiches lumineuses,” in Uzanne, Badauderies parisiennes, 113: “Aussi la perspective de quelques heures noires, bien reposantes, bien pacifiantes nous-est-elle comme un refraîchissement. On pourra déambuler à l’aveuglette, en tâtonnant délicieusement, sans être forcé de rien voir, sans être tenu de rien regarder. La bonne nuit nous protège.”

73. Ibid., 114: “La nuit avait vaincu l’affiche; l’affiche triomphe de la nuit; elle en surgit victorieuse, lumineuse et despotique; l’écran—un écran d’arrêt—nous agrippe au passage. … la projection nous persécute; elle nous assène du spectacle. …”

74. “Romain Coolus,” in “Complete Index to World Film,” www.citwf.com/person39983.htm (accessed July 20, 2014).

75. Coolus, “Les affiches lumineuses,” 115: “Il s’imbibe les yeux de lumière; et si, lorsqu’il repose, on les pressait comme des éponges, ils égoutteraient de l’image.”

76. Le Bon's chapter “Idées, raisonnements, et l’imagination des foules,” in La psychologie des foules, 48–59, deals most directly with the power of images to influence the crowd.

77. Paul Adam, “L’ivrogne,” in Uzanne, Badauderies parisiennes, 66: “C’est l’idiotie de la plèbe, la bassesse de la plèbe, la méchanceté de la plèbe, en pleine évidence. … Et voici les petits rendus fiévreux par la convoitise de meurtrir le faible, de tuer. …”

78. Félix Fénéon, “L’incendie,” in Uzanne, Badauderies parisiennes, 159–64.

79. For a detailed account of the charges against Fénéon and the ensuing trial, see Joan U. Halperin, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete & Anarchist in Fin-de-siècle Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 267–95.

80. Fénéon's faits divers were first collected and published by Jean Paulhan in his edition of the writer's complete works: Oeuvres (Paris: Gallimard, 1948). They have since been translated by Luc Sante as Novels in Three Lines (New York: New York Review Book Classics, 2007). For an insightful analysis, see Julian Barnes, “Behind the Gas Lamp,” London Review of Books 29, no. 19 (October 4, 2007): 9–11.

81. See Rudolf Koella, “Félix Vallotton, un ‘artiste-critique’ au tournant du siècle,” in Koella and Poletti, Félix Vallotton, 1865–1925, 3–9.

82. As a critic, novelist, and playwright, Vallotton embodied the close relationship between artists and writers in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France. For an excellent analysis of the relations between art, literature, and criticism as competing and intersecting “cultural fields” in this period, including a discussion of the “fin-de-siècle crisis in artist-writer relations,” see Dario Gamboni, The Brush and the Pen: Odilon Redon and Literature, trans. Mary Whittall (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

83. Scholars have argued that Zola, Guy de Maupassant, and Maurice Barrès culled material for their novels from faits divers. See Louis Mandin, “Les origines de Thérèse Raquin,” Mercure de France 297 (May 1, 1940): 282–98; Charlotte Schapira, “Maupassant et le fait divers,” Hebrew University Studies in Literature and the Arts 15 (Spring 1987): 23–32; and Ida-Marie Frandon, “Fait divers et littérature: En marge d’une exposition,” Revue d’Histoire Littéraire de France 84 (1984): 561–69. For a broad study of the relation between French literature and faits divers with an emphasis on the twentieth century, see David H. Walker, Outrage and Insight: Modern French Writers and the “Fait Divers” (Oxford: Berg, 1995).

84. Le Grand dictionnaire universel, 1872, quoted and trans. Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 36.

85. Ibid.

86. Anne-Claude Ambroise-Rendu, Petits récits des désordres ordinaires: Les faits divers dans la presse française des débuts de la IIIe République à la Grande Guerre (Paris: Seli Arslan, 2004).

87. Dominique Kalifa, L’encre et le sang: Récits de crime et société à la Belle Epoque Paris (Paris: Fayard, 1995). See also Kalifa's collection of essays that looks at the culture of crime in nineteenth-century France more broadly, Crime et culture au XIXe siècle (Paris: Perrin, 2005).

88. In 1890, Le Petit Journal introduced a subsection of its faits divers rubric titled “Les écrasés” or “Chapitre des écrasés,” an indication of the fin-de-siècle fascination with traffic accidents and their victims. Ambroise-Rendu, Petits récits des désordres ordinaires, 191–92.

89. Ibid., 107–16.

90. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Sur les faits divers” (1954), in Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 388: “Le goût du fait divers, c’est le désir de voir, et voir c’est deviner dans un pli de visage tout un monde semblable au nôtre. / Mais voir, c’est aussi apprendre que les plaisirs, que les douleurs sans limites qui nous remplissent ne sont pour le spectateur étranger qu’un pauvre grimace. On peut tout voir, et vivre après avoir tout vu. Voir est cette étrange manière de se rendre présent en gardant ses distances, et sans participer, de transformer les autres en choses visibles. Celui qui voit se croit invisible: ses actes restent pour lui dans l’entourage flatteur de ses intentions, et il prive les autres de cet alibi, il les réduit à quelques mots, à quelques gestes. Le voyeur est sadique.”

91. Ibid., 389: “Ce qui est caché, c’est d’abord le sang, le corps, le linge, l’intérieur des maisons et des vies, la toile sous la peinture qui s’écaille, les matériaux sous ce qui avait forme, la contingence et finalement la mort.”

92. Ibid., 389: “Ces nuances dans l’absurde sont un spectacle fascinant— mais après tout ne nous apprennent que notre parti pris de regarder sans comprendre.”

93. Ibid., 388: “Peut-être n’y a-t-il aucun fait divers qui ne puisse donner lieu à des pensées profondes. [Merleau-Ponty then recalls seeing a man commit suicide in an Italian train station, and the way the crowd of witnesses swarmed around him only to be beaten back by militia.] A voir mourir un inconnu, ces hommes auraient pu apprendre à juger leur vie.”

94. Roland Barthes, “Structure of the fait-divers” (1962), in Roland Barthes: Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 187.

95. Ibid., 194.

96. Ibid., 188–91.

97. Ibid., 194.

98. Vallotton, La vie meurtrière, 243.

99. Ibid.: “Their silhouettes detached in sharp relief, the violence of which shocked me; still sunk in my torpor, I continued not to hear, and the silence of this macabre agitation gave it the unreal appearance of a nightmare [Leurs silhouettes s’enlevaient avec un relief dur, dont la violence me choqua; toujours plongé dans ma torpeur, je continuais à ne pas entendre, et le silence de cette agitation macabre lui donnait une apparence irréelle de cauchemar].” By giving this closing scene the “unreal appearance of a nightmare,” Vallotton acknowledges once again his novel's duplicity as autobiography and fiction.

100. On the latter theme, Vallotton also produced a portfolio of ten woodcuts titled Intimités (Intimacies), 1897–98, a striking contrast to his scenes of crowds and public life in Paris. On this series, see Field, “Exteriors and Interiors,” 43–91.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bridget Alsdorf

Bridget Alsdorf is associate professor at Princeton University. She is the author of Fellow Men: Fantin-Latour and the Problem of the Group in Nineteenth-Century French Painting (Princeton University Press, 2012) and articles on Poussin, Cézanne, Degas, and Bonnard [Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, McCormick Hall, Princeton, N.J. 08544, [email protected]].