The Slapstick Routine of Parisian Monumentalism: Robert Desnos and Jacques-André Boiffard’s “Pygmalion and the Sphinx” (1930)

This essay considers the 1930 essay “Pygmalion and the Sphinx” by Robert Desnos, originally published alongside Jacques André-Boiffard’s photographs of Parisian monuments in the journal Documents. I focus on Desnos and Boiffard’s tragicomic depiction of the municipal council of Paris’ failure to reconcile a fragmented sense of national identity through the erection of public monuments. As implicated by its title, “Pygmalion and the Sphinx” compares the “statuemania” of the Third Republic to the Greek myth. As Desnos and Boiffard reveal, within the monumental form is an antagonism between the civic ideal of ‘Pygmalion’ and the brute substance of the statue’s material, or the Sphinx. This tension inevitably collapses the idealist endeavour of monumentalism; a moment of folly opened by the laughter it evokes. Boiffard focuses the pedestal of the monument, and the rigidity of its material when exposed against the urban landscape. These photographs launch a base materialist perspective repeated by Desnos in his comic imagination. This term is further contextualised by the writings of Georges Bataille in Documents, whereby laughter is integral to the critique of idealism. In this essay, I read Desnos and Boiffard alongside Bataille to illuminate how monumentalism prepares its toppling in the ‘fall’ of the slapstick’s laugh.

Download Full-text

Race and Identity: Appraisals in France of Meyerbeer on his 1891 Centenary

Nineteenth-Century Music Review ◽

10.1017/s1479409800001348 ◽

2004 ◽

Vol 1 (2) ◽

pp. 27-42

Author(s):

Kerry Murphy

Keyword(s):

National Identity ◽

Racial Identity ◽

Third Republic ◽

July Monarchy ◽

Short Discussion ◽

The Third ◽

Paris Opera ◽

Dreyfus Affair ◽

French Composers ◽

The Impact

This article examines the ways in which critics and music historians in the Third Republic wrote about Meyerbeer's national and racial identity focusing particularly on the period around the time of the centenary of his birth, the period just before the explosion of the Dreyfus affair. The centenary of Meyerbeer's birth was celebrated in November 1891, by a performance to a packed audience at the Paris Opéra. Critics marked the centenary by writing substantial articles about Meyerbeer.Although many of Meyerbeer's contemporary critics conferred honorary French citizenship on him, by 1891 a significant number saw him as lacking any national identity. This should be seen in the context of a period in which French composers were intensely debating the issue of their own national identity, and clearly since the Franco-Prussian war, they were no longer so complacent about welcoming a German as a Frenchman. Yet the perceptions of Meyerbeer's lack of national identity were also often motivated by negative associations of Meyerbeer as Jew.Derogatory stereotypes of the Jewish composer are present in Meyerbeer criticism from the July Monarchy onwards, but in the early days of the Third Republic they change slightly in focus and also, as might be expected, become more overtly stated. This article presents a brief overview of this change in focus and concentrates on a number of discrete topics: eclecticism, nationhood, originality and artistic capitulation. The examination of this last topic leads to a short discussion of the impact of Wagner on the musical world at this time, and the effect that this had on Meyerbeer reception. The centenary celebrations occurred only two months after the success ofLohengrinat the Opéra (16 September 1891) and the proximity of the two events caused many critics to ponder whether the celebrations marked the end of Meyerbeer's reign at the Opéra and the beginning of the reign of Wagner. The centenary event forced critics to take a position on Meyerbeer's current standing in the operatic world.

Download Full-text

The French RightThe Right in France from the Third Republic to Vichy, by Kevin Passmore. Oxford, UK, Oxford University Press, 2013. xvi, 391 pp. $136.50 US (cloth).The Aesthetics of Hate: Far Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism, and Gender in 1930s France, by Sandrine Sanos. Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 2012. xiv, 369 pp. $65.00 US (cloth).

Canadian Journal of History ◽

10.3138/cjh.48.3.473 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 48 (3) ◽

pp. 473-476

Author(s):

Samuel Kalman

Keyword(s):

Third Republic ◽

Stanford University ◽

Far Right ◽

Oxford University ◽

The Third ◽

And Gender ◽

Oxford University Press

Download Full-text

The Return of N’Guyen Van Binh

Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques ◽

10.3167/hrrh.2020.460203 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 46 (2) ◽

pp. 25-42

Author(s):

Geoff Read

Keyword(s):

Third Republic ◽

Forced Labor ◽

Political Prisoner ◽

Second Empire ◽

Indentured Servitude ◽

The Third ◽

Original Sentence ◽

French Colonial ◽

One Year

This article explores the case of N’Guyen Van Binh, a South Vietnamese political prisoner exiled for his alleged role in “Poukhombo’s Rebellion” in Cambodia in 1866. Although Van Binh’s original sentence of exile was reduced to one year in prison he was nonetheless deported and disappeared into the maw of the colonial systems of indentured servitude and forced labor; he likely did not survive the experience. He was thus the victim of injustice and his case reveals the at best haphazard workings of the French colonial bureaucracy during the period of transition from the Second Empire to the Third Republic. While the documentary record is entirely from the perspective of the colonizers, reading between the lines we can also learn something about Van Binh himself including his fierce will to resist his colonial oppressors.

Download Full-text