Gender, Generation, and Journalism in France, 1910-1940 9780773554016

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G e n d e r , G e n e r at io n , and Journali s m in F r a n c e , 1 9 10–1940

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Gender, Generation, and Journalism in France, 1910–1940

M a ry L y n n Stewa rt

McGill-­­Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

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©  McGill-­­Queen’s University Press 2018 ISB N 978-0-7735-5323-1 (cloth) ISB N 978-0-7735-5401-6 (eP DF ) ISB N 978-0-7735-5402-3 (eP UB) Legal deposit second quarter 2018 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from Simon Fraser University.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Stewart, Mary Lynn, 1945–, author Gender, generation, and journalism in France, 1910–1940 /  Mary Lynn Stewart. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISB N 978-0-7735-5323-1 (cloth) – IS BN 978-0-7735-5401-6 (eP D F ) – ISB N 978-0-7735-5402-3 (eP UB) 1. Women journalists – France – Paris – History – 20th century.  2. Journalism – France – Paris – History – 20th century.  I. Title. PN4784.W7S 74 2018    070.4082    C2018-900774-5  C 2018-900775-3 This book was typeset by Marquis Interscript in 10.5/13 Sabon.

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Contents

Figures vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction 3 Pa rt One   Ge ne r at i ons, Me n to rs , an d M o t h e rs 1 Pioneers and Mentors: Séverine and Durand, 1880s–1909  21 2 Mother and Daughter 1: Séverine and Capy, 1910–1940  37 3 Mother and Daughter 2: Colette and Beaumont, 1910–1940 53 4 Family Business: Andrée, Gustave, and Simone Téry, 1890s–1940 71 Pa rt T wo  Ge nde r a nd F ro n t-P ag e Re p o rt i n g 5 Gender and Grand Reporting: Andrée Viollis and Albert Londres on Asia, 1930s  97 6 Gender, Politics, and Racism in Colonial Reporting, 1930s  121 7 Family and Diplomatic Reporting: Geneviève Tabouis, 1930s 143 Pa rt T h r e e   Ge nde r o n O t h e r Be at s 8 Gender and Social Reporting: La Mazière, Clar, and Moran, 1922–1939 163

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vi Contents

9 Women’s Pages: Rosine, Magda, and Chandet, 1918–1940  182 Conclusion 199 Notes 205 Bibliography 249 Index 277

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Figures

3.1 Colette: © Albert Harlingue/Roger-Viollet / The Image Works. 54 3.2 Germaine Beaumont: © Alinari Archives / The Image Works. 55 4.1 Andrée Viollis: © Albert Harlingue / Roger-Viollet / The Image Works. 72 4.2 Simone Téry: © Henri Martinie / Roger-Viollet / The Image Works. 73

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Acknowledgments

Because the eight years of research for this book began with the press clippings assembled in the Fonds Bouglé at the Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris, I begin by expressing my gratitude to the librarians there who made ten boxes of the press clippings available for consultation despite the poor condition of the collection. I am also thankful to the archivists and librarians at the Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand who brought me dozens of biographical dossiers and many dossiers of letters, typescripts of speeches, and other documents about journalists, as well as books, articles, and other source material. Ultimately, more time was devoted to reading runs of newspapers at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and key information came from the private archives of newspapers and individual journalists at the Archives nationales de France and the police archives at the Archives de la préfecture de police in Paris. As always, I acknowledge my debt to these institutions. Two scholars and friends read chapters of the manuscript, made useful suggestions, and recommended – and lent copies of – useful sources for this book. I am grateful to Karen Offen and Linda Clark for their advice and assistance and for decades of comradeship. Karen also lent me copies of two informative reports on women journalists at the fin de siècle. Marilyn Boxer, who commented on an early version of one chapter of the book, also sent me references to pursue and copies of sources I found difficult to access. Her contributions corrected an error in that paper and saved me precious time. I especially thank her for the follow-up material that she sent me. Commentators on three other papers and reviewers of four articles on aspects of the journalists profiled in the book have provided

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x Acknowledgments

feedback that is much appreciated; several of their suggestions have been incorporated in the final manuscript. I also benefitted from the reports of the press reviewers of the book. I acknowledge and thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada that provided me with two research grants, one to explore the possibilities of a book on gender and journalism, and the second and larger one to conduct the research. These grants allowed me to take four research trips to Paris and employ two graduate students as research assistants. SSHRC’s reviewers also provided a useful direction for some of this research. I am obliged to my two research assistants, Michael Lanthier and Mary Shearman. I am also indebted to Kyla Madden, senior editor at McGill-Queen’s University Press, for her steadfast support of the manuscript of this book; Kathleen Fraser, associate managing editor at the press; Joanne Muzak, the most thorough copy-editor I have encountered in a fortyfive-year writing career; and all the others at McGill-Queen’s who contributed to the production of this book. Finally, I alone am responsible for any errors or misinterpretations of material in this book.

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G e n d e r , G e n e r at io n , and Journali s m in   F r a n c e ,   1 910–1940

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Introduction

The principal subjects of this book are ten Frenchwomen who had bylines for at least five consecutive years in nine national daily newspapers between 1910 and 1940.1 They are Germaine Beaumont, Marcelle Capy, Henriette Chandet, Magdeleine Chaumont, Fanny Clar, Colette, Denise Moran, Geneviève Tabouis, Simone Téry, and Andrée Viollis. Other women might have been profiled, but the absence of records like those of a Women’s Press Club and the lack of scholarship on them made it necessary to concentrate on regular as opposed to occasional journalists (of which there were many). It was also impossible to read all sixty-five national dailies, so nine dailies that employed women reporters and columnists were surveyed, and other papers were consulted for articles written by the subjects of the book. National dailies were published in Paris but distributed throughout France, often to the detriment of regional and local papers.2 None of these ten women were pioneer newspaper columnists or reporters, though two were the first and one the only Frenchwomen to cover their “beat” or type of reporting before the Second World War. Instead, they were part of the second or third generation of women writing for the dailies. There is some scholarship on the pioneer women in daily newspapers, Séverine and Marguerite Durand, and on the reporters that Durand employed at her daily newspaper La Fronde, but very little beyond biographies of the two most prominent members of the second and third generation. Preoccupation with occupational pioneers leaves the impression that these women were “exceptions” who paved the way for succeeding generations of women, and underestimates the problems faced by the second and third generations.3

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4

Gender, Generation, and Journalism in France

Gender, Generation, and Journalism begins to rectify the scholarly silence about these two generations of newspaper women. All the profiled women lived interesting lives because of their careers in journalism and liked their occupation because it opened portals into the world beyond the private sphere commonly allotted to women. Their assignments ranged from traditional (hence masculine) literary columnist to the new (and feminine) women’s columnist, from the oftenfeminine court reporter to the only woman doing diplomatic reporting in the dailies, and from “girl-reporter” stunts such as dressing in costume to penetrate workplaces and institutions closed to them or all journalists, to the more celebrated facets of reporting such as travelling around the world covering wars and colonial struggles. To understand these women, this book examines the state of newspaper journalism at a time when newspapers were the main news source. All but two of the nine national dailies were initially left-wing, though three of the seven were more conservative by the 1930s. These newspapers ranged from informational dailies like Le Petit Parisien, which boasted the largest circulation in the world, with 1.4 million readers in 1910, through Le Matin, with 70,000 readers in 1910, and Le Figaro, with 37,000 readers in 1910. They include political dailies such as L’Humanité (72,000 readers in 1910), and second-tier informational dailies such as L’Intransigéant (670,000 in 1910).4 Others became dailies later: L’Oeuvre in 1915, Le Populaire in 1916, Le Peuple in 1921, and L’Ère nouvelle in 1922. All these newspapers hired women, though they assigned most of them to women’s pages. Historiography proclaims that the Great War was a significant rupture, and many historians of women, particularly those focused on “the modern woman” phenomenon, make the same argument.5 However, the leading historian of French journalists, Marc Martin, limits the impact of the war to more unionization after the war.6 This book will demonstrate that the war also had a modest impact on women in journalism. Although Louise Weiss (1893–1983) began her journalistic career in dailies during the war, after which she switched to weeklies and feminist reviews,7 only four subjects of this book wrote for the daily press during the war, and two of these women wrote only occasionally then. Whereas many women took up masculine jobs in war industries and nursing when men went to the front lines,8 the departure of many men did not improve employment opportunities for women in newspaper journalism, because many newspapers shrunk to four pages and appeared irregularly, and some

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Introduction 5

merged with other papers while several closed. Heavily censored and hyper-patriotic war coverage replaced serial novels and “news in brief” items as well as sports and women’s pages. All these sections of the paper, except the sports pages, had employed women before the war. While all reporters were excluded from warfront reporting, men had greater access to the war ministry and war office propaganda, which was the major source for war correspondents.9 The few women reporters wrote about hospitals treating the wounded and conditions on the home front. After the war, more women were hired, though rarely to replace men lost in the war. Instead, many were assigned to the women’s pages that proliferated after the war. In addition to introducing these forgotten women, Gender, Generation, and Journalism offers insights into the occupation of journalist in France. Using the “new biography” approach,10 this book contextualizes these women’s lives and careers with information about the daily newspapers where they worked, how newspapers operated, and what the various “beats” or assignments entailed. Several studies of the press or the dailies in the interwar period assisted this exercise, though none of them focus on women.11 Paying attention to the setting makes it apparent that daily newspapers were struggling during the 1920s and 1930s, and that some of the solutions to declining or stagnant circulation created opportunities for women to be employed in the business without removing all the barriers to entry and limiting their placement and advancement in newspapers. How these women overcame these challenges and, in some cases, flourished in these conditions is the main storyline.

D e f in it ions Rather than presenting linear narratives about these extraordinary lives, this book uses the women’s stories as material for an analysis of how gender, generation, and mentoring affected their careers and written work. Each of these central constructs requires some definition. Gender here means the behaviours expected of and usually performed by either men or women at the time. In the early 1900s, these expectations included notions that women’s natural vocation was being maternal and domestic as well as ideas about women’s inherent weakness and “special sensitivities.” These essentialist concepts affected women’s opportunities to do certain kinds of reporting and how their journalism was perceived. One of the purposes of this

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Gender, Generation, and Journalism in France

volume is to debunk any lingering essentialist notions about women’s entry into journalism because of their special qualities as opposed to structural reasons such as newspaper owners and directors seeking to expand their readership just as more women were receiving a secondary education and were therefore both literate enough to read the newspapers and more eligible to work for them. Another purpose is to query familiar claims about a single feminine style as opposed to many different feminine voices in the dailies. When the term feminine is used by contemporaries or historians about their written work, I have left the word as is. When masculine or feminine is used to describe, say, a predominantly male or female workplace, I have used the term masculine and feminine, as labour historians commonly do. When I am querying the term feminine, I put it in quotation marks to indicate my doubt about the term. Three definitions of generation are used in this book. The word denotes a group of individuals born and living in the same period. Only two of the ten major subjects, both women’s page columnists, could not be identified by date of birth and death.12 Four were members of the second generation of women in national dailies – that is, those born in the 1870s who began their careers in the 1890s – and the remaining four were members of the third generation – those born in the 1890s who started in journalism during or shortly after the First World War. The word generation connotes a group of individuals that shares a worldview due to exposure to the same events and similar life experiences. The second generation lived through the expansion of newspaper circulation and the first phase of hiring women to ensure such expansion, while the third generation got positions in the dailies as the newspaper business struggled to recover from the disastrous decline in readership during the war and held on to these positions in the difficult years of the Great Depression. Julia Kristeva has a third interpretation of generation, one that does not emphasize chronology so much as people in the same “signifying space,” like the waves of feminism.13 Seven of the profiled women whose opinions on feminism are known were moderate suffrage feminists and two ­others were more radical – pacifist and communist – feminists. Moreover, three of the third-generation women, and one of the second generation, were engaged in other progressive political struggles. Finally, most of them socialized with one another and read and reviewed each other’s books.

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Introduction 7

The term mentoring is used by sociologists whose research explores the feminization of previously masculine workplaces. Most useful, for this analysis, is Nathalie Lapeyre, Les professions face aux enjeux de la féminisation, which discusses mentorship as a vector of socialization for women entering predominantly masculine occupations.14 Included in the concept of mentoring is direct assistance such as hiring or recommending the (usually) younger women aspiring to become a journalist, but also indirect forms of assistance such as modelling good work habits. Since this concept had not been identified and studied in the first half of the twentieth century, neither the women that mentored nor the women they mentored used the term. However, they do speak about learning from their female predecessors and about being inspired by some of these predecessors to become journalists. Accordingly, I have sought the direct testimony, wherever possible, but also inferred from descriptions of behaviours that fit the definition given above.

F r e n c h N e w s pa p e rs and Journali s ts A brief history of the emergence of national dailies in the nineteenth century identifies some distinctive features of French journalism as they apply to the gender of journalists. For nearly thirty years, the 1852 press law restricted the periodical press by requiring a deposit from all periodicals other than literary, scientific, and artistic reviews, and by imposing the payment of a stamp tax on issues of political papers. These two impositions raised the price per issue. Enforcement was uneven, and 63 political journals and 703 non-political journals existed in 1866.15 Most periodicals were monthly reviews full of opinion columns and reflective essays, often by fiction writers. Not surprisingly, there were many similarities between periodical and literary writing. The connection between journalism and literature would continue well into the twentieth century in France, long after it faded in Germany, England, and North America other than Quebec.16 Indeed, some scholars argue that the effects of the literary origins of French and continental European journalism are present today, in the preference for comment, interpretation, and evaluation over the “objective” facts of events.17 Both journalists and fiction writers were referred to as men of letters. The masculine representation of writers did not preclude women from writing, but it did affect the kind of work that they managed to

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Gender, Generation, and Journalism in France

publish. As Martine Reid has demonstrated, publishers accepted manuscripts by women for collections of work intended for women readers or as educational tracts, since the education of young children was considered suitably feminine.18 In journalism, most of the women were employed by women’s reviews.19 Gender stereotypes, combined with publishers’ preferences, meant that much of what women published fell in the categories of sentimental novels or society and fashion chronicles, subgenres deemed to be appropriate to women’s assigned sphere. In both fiction and journalism, women’s contributions were confounded with their allegedly feminine traits of sentimentality and domesticity.20 Not coincidentally, literary critics did not regard sentimental novels or domestic subjects as serious literature or journalism, just as journalists did not regard fashion and society chronicles as news. In her analysis of the literary histories compiled between the 1890s and the 1930s, Reid found that this trivializing attitude toward women who wrote fiction continued after the Great War. Although these histories identified nearly 1,400 authors, only 91 of them were women, and half of them were illustrious women who were not professional or dedicated writers. Many women’s works were dismissed as too spontaneous, too popular, or insufficiently intellectual. Elided from the canon were almost all the women whose novels examined women’s lives and condition. If these kinds of novels were mentioned, they were labelled popular or women’s novels, not truly literary works. Yet Jean Largnac, author of the first index of French women writers, published in 1929, argued that novels and poems reflected women’s special genius.21 The present study of newspaper women’s oeuvre and its reception will document parallels in the reception of women’s journalistic and fictional writing. In 1836, the first modern dailies appeared in France. La Presse and Le Siècle fell into the category of the “opinion press,” signifying that they advocated for a political party or tendency, but these dailies paid more attention to current affairs than opinion weeklies or monthlies. Political coverage was assigned to men, but Denise de Girardin invented chronicles in dailies when she wrote for La Presse from 1836 to 1848. Because of her gender and because her subject matter was fashionable social life, the chronicle was deemed to be feminine.22 When an influx of women followed her example, writing chronicles became so identified with feminine authorship that men the stature of Émile Zola signed their columns with women’s names. This

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Introduction 9

phenomenon had disappeared by the 1890s, except for a couple of men reporting on fashion. But when the dailies hired women in the new century, they assigned many of them to chronicles or, as they were now called, columns, and eventually gathered these columns under a new caption, the woman’s page. Chapters 3 and 9 explore the nature of women’s pages and four of these columnists’ work. The conflation of masculinity with serious literature and journalism meant that women often signed masculine names to their written work. The famous example is Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin (1804– 1876), better known by her pen name George Sand. In addition to forty-one novels and eleven plays, Sand published almost four hundred articles between 1831 and her death in 1876. Her articles appeared in prestigious periodicals like La Revue des deux mondes and daily papers like La Presse, Le Siècle, and Le Temps.23 Like four of the novelists profiled in this book, she worked in the media to ensure a steady income, and like two of the subjects of this book, she also used the press to engage in personal and literary polemics.24 Most of Sand’s journalistic output consisted of literary and musical criticism for periodicals and was personal and reflective in tone, in conformity with the prevailing style of criticism (though, in her case, the criticism was particularly generous and empathetic). Like many novelists, she balked at the deadlines and word limits for articles in the daily press.25 While her articles and series for dailies were informational in that they described social groups and events, they were more meditations on these groups and events. She did not report in the sense of going to observe events herself, to interview participants, or to write “on the run.” Claudine Grossir captures her approach: “her journalism does not refuse the event but uses it as a springboard for reflection.”26 As a dauntingly prolific and multitalented pioneer, Sand was a challenging role model for other women who aspired to be writers and journalists. Adding to the problem, two developments re-­ emphasized the masculine image of journalists around the time of her death. First, the popular and sensational “petit presse” gained ground. As early as 1863, Le Petit Journal entered the scene, declared itself non-political to avoid the stamp tax and thus charge one-third what the other dailies did (five vs fifteen centimes). Its tabloid format was easier to read and it was sold in the evening, even at factory gates. From the beginning, Le Petit Journal filled much of its space with faits divers, “news in brief” items culled from police reports and judicial bulletins, and feuilletons, serial novels with mass appeal. The faits

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Gender, Generation, and Journalism in France

divers often conflated hearsay and rumour with fact, playing on popular fears about chance and violence. From 1869 on, Le Petit Journal reported more fully on horrific crimes and nearly doubled its circulation to five hundred thousand.27 Serious crime reporting was assigned to men. Second, a new type of journalist emerged: the reporter who went on assignment, described events from an eye-witness point of view, interviewed participants in these events, and submitted copy quickly. The rushed and topical nature of reporting differed significantly from the leisurely and reflective kind of essays in monthlies and bimonthlies. Almost all reporters were men, because reporters operated in the public sphere, witnessed scandalous events, and interviewed participants, behaviours that newspaper editors and the public believed were unseemly for women.28 Breaching this barrier began with the pioneer women profiled in chapter 1 and continued long after the Second World War.29 A third development was modestly more positive for women reporters. The liberalizing press law of 1881 encouraged the mass circulation press known as the “informational” press. Informational papers were not aligned with a party but did have biases, and, in the 1930s, many were subsidized by parties. These papers took advantage of technological changes in paper production, printing, and communications to lower prices and expand circulation. In 1883, an American businessman created Le Matin, which relied upon the telegraph to gather news quickly, emphasized reporting, and increased the number of faits divers. These innovations were perceived as “the Americanization of news.” Compared to Britain or the United States, criticism of sensational or sentimental writing as feminine was attenuated by a competing interpretation of the new mass dailies in France as American imports.30 Between 1880 and 1900, the number of French journalists doubled to 2,800, of which perhaps 200 were women.31 The number of Frenchwomen was less than a quarter the number of women journalists in the United States (about 900), and both the number and the percentage of women reporters would continue to be lower than in Anglo-Saxon countries.32 Some of these 200 women were widows in the provinces who inherited newspapers from their husbands, or they were the wives of directors and editors of newspapers who assisted their husbands. At least 25 others used pseudonyms. In a new twist,

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Introduction 11

some of these pseudonyms were feminine, often symbolic first names such as Francine used to “sign” a new feature, women’s columns.33 This is when the second generation of women entered the dailies. Publishers and directors of newspapers hoped that women’s columns would increase readership among women and men by inducing bourgeois women to allow newspapers into their homes. Ladies frowned upon newspapers’ sensationalism, obsession with scandals, and advertisements for sexual services and products on the back pages. Young ladies were not supposed to read them.34 Once newspapers targeted women readers, many of the “obscene” ads were replaced with ads for household cleaning products, over-the-counter family medicines, cosmetics, and department stores. This substitution occurred at the same time as fashion journalists and taste-makers in fashion and women’s magazines were trying to disseminate “taste” and construct a new image of the bourgeois housewife as a consumer.35 Fashion and food dominated women’s page reporting. However, editors and journalists considered these subjects (apart from the seasonal couture collections) “soft” news. Some women worked on two features intended to increase readership of men and women. Uncounted women worked in “petit reportage,” mainly compiling faits divers culled from reports in police and judicial bulletins. Most items ran on the inside pages of newspapers but as their number rose to twelve per issue, some moved to the more prestigious front page of mass circulation dailies.36 Since these items were not signed, few petits reporters can be identified unless their autobiographies or obituaries mention this kind of employment, and few of them do. At least one novelist, Colette Yver (1874–1953), and two of the subjects of this book, compiled faits divers early in their careers. Women also contributed to another popular feature, feuilletons, which women readers especially enjoyed.37 One-tenth of the female authors used a pen name that did not signify gender, making them nearly impossible to identify unless their memoirs or obituaries mention their feuilletons.38 In short, most women working in dailies were invisible, and critics who noticed petit reportage and feuilletons dismissed the first as sensational and the second as sentimental. But this kind of criticism was less common in France than in the United States, due to competing and more compelling accusations about the venality of the press, especially during the Dreyfus Affair, when such accusations were laced with anti-Semitism.

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Gender, Generation, and Journalism in France

M e t h o d o l o gi es To answer questions about how the women’s gender hindered their entry into and tainted their experience of the newspaper business, I have constructed short biographies of the two pioneers in newspaper reporting to establish a baseline for when the second and third generation entered the dailies. In addition, shorter profiles of ten other women writing irregularly for national dailies help identify common features in their careers and those of the main subjects. These women are Louise Bodin, Maryse Choisy, Germaine Decarie, Marc Helys, Madeline Jacob, Hélène Gosset, Alice la Mazière, Jane Misme, Madeleine Vernet, and Maria Vérone. Incorporating some of their biographical details and journalistic output permits some tentative generalizations about women writing for the dailies. One result of this kind of lateral comparison is recognition of the principal subjects’ commitment to their careers, in contrast to their colleagues who freelanced or wrote only polemically, usually episodically, in many newspapers. A stellar example of the committed type is Andrée Viollis, whose career in journalism lasted over fifty years and who was a front-page reporter for Le Petit Parisien, the national tabloid with the largest circulation in the world, for fifteen of these years. She reported from Ireland, India, Afghanistan, China, and Spain while battles raged in these countries, as well as from Japan and the colonies of Indochina and Tunisia after or in the middle of colonial unrest. The lateral comparisons identify similarities in how women managed to access their unusual jobs, which was, in many cases, through family. For the third generation, and one member of the second, the key to their entry was holding degrees from newly available secondary and post-secondary education. Here Jo Burr Margadent’s work on women teachers and Linda Clark’s book on professional women confirmed my impression that women with education degrees filled many positions in journalism.39 Conversely, the lateral comparisons show that there was much variety in their practice and performance of their jobs. One theme of this work is that there was almost as much variety in women’s as in men’s experience in the dailies. Gender analysis must include comparisons to men in similar positions, a process facilitated by the existence of autobiographies and biographies of male reporters and a group study of grand reporters, the highly regarded “stars” who travelled and investigated conditions in many regions of the world.40 The former provided essential

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Introduction 13

information for comparisons between men and women; the latter began the process of reintegrating some of the women profiled here into history. One obvious similarity and one obscure difference emerge. Many of the men, like the women, were inspired by family members who were journalists or relied upon family members to ease their way into the dailies or to hire them. In contrast, the men were less likely to have a higher degree upon entering the job and relied more on “good old boy” networks for information about job openings, introductions to editors, and sociability on assignments. Considering the reporting techniques of men and women together reveals more similarities than might have been expected, including the use of theatrical methods like stunts – though not called stunts when men did them – and both sexes exhibiting courage by travelling in distant and war-torn lands, going to battlefields, and investigating working and social conditions in working-class communities and colonial enclaves. Comparing men’s and women’s journalism requires more than generalizations about their output. The methodologies of four scholars inspired my approach to style and tone. One was Dominique Mangueneau’s emphasis on intertextuality, or the interrelationship between texts, how they may influence, resemble, or differ from each other.41 The second was content analysis as developed by the English school around Stuart Hall.42 The style analysis borrows from deixis, or the deployment of nouns, pronouns, and grammatical marks to express relationships and emotions, as used by Marie Borroff in literary studies.43 Fourth, I used the insights of literary scholar Charles Forsdick, who contends that comparisons of male and female travel writers should focus on accounts of the same itinerary, undertaken at approximately the same time.44 In Gender, Generation, and Journalism, a combination of these methods was applied to investigative series and books by two or three reporters – sometimes all women, sometimes two men and a woman – who covered the same event and place and published within a year or so of one another. Content analyses found a lot of overlap on major issues but also women’s greater interest in women, children, and victims. Literally counting the numbers of times, and how, reporters used the first-person singular and exclamation points demonstrated some differences in both phenomena, yet in neither case was the difference outstanding. More conventional textual analysis did confirm empathy as a more common characteristic in women’s journalism.

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Gender, Generation, and Journalism in France

Although this project began with a gender analysis, it turned into a study of intersectionality, not in the sense of several, interconnected forms of oppression, but in the open-ended sense that all people are shaped by more than their gender. Including factors such as class background, educational attainment, and family support explains why eight of the major subjects, and other women included in the analysis, broke into reporting or remained in the ghetto of women’s page journalism. Factors like literary genre and political persuasion helped account for differences in style and interpretation of events. Conventionally, intersectional analysis has prioritized race. So far as can be ascertained, all the journalists in this study were white, so race (if there is such a thing as race) might distinguish them as a group, but does not account for differences between them. Most of these journalists expressed racialist ideas, meaning that they accepted the reality of race, and others were racists who believed in a hierarchy or hierarchies of races. In addition, a few of them criticized racialism and racism. Their attitudes toward race are addressed in some detail in chapter 6 on colonial reporting and chapter 8 on social reporting. The following paragraph provides some context for their attitudes. As Carole Paligot has demonstrated, racial thinking (raciologie) was ubiquitous in Third Republic France. It extended far beyond the often-studied phenomena of the racial theories of the new science of anthropology and of turn-of-the-century anti-Semitism and antirepublican nationalism, to inform other disciplines and political supporters of the republic, including the socialist left. In general, these theories built on widespread biological ideas about the importance of heredity, evolutionary theory, and the results of comparative skeletal and cranial anthropometry. These ideas were popularized in anthropological museums; international and colonial expositions; adventure, exotic, and colonial literature; political rhetoric; and school texts. By the early twentieth century, anthropologists themselves questioned their discipline’s very slippery definitions of race as well as the dubious methods of measuring and comparing brain sizes, facial slant, and other physical measurements by race. Physical anthropology turned to equally problematic biochemical and physiological differentiations such as by blood types, and a subfield, cultural anthropology, turned away from anatomic and physiological determinants of racial differences to cultural and psychological determinants.45 Outside of academe, and notably in newspapers, racial ideas were commonplace throughout the period under review.

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Introduction 15

S o u rces The primary sources for this book go beyond autobiographies, biographies, and books written by the journalists profiled here. In addition to the nine daily newspapers surveyed, I drew heavily on the collections of press clippings and documentary evidence on these newspapers, individual reporters, and their associations held in the Fonds Bouglé of the Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris (BH VP ), in the Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand (BMD), and in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (B NF ), as well as at the Archives nationales de France (AN) and Archives de la préfecture de police (APP). The source material, particularly in the Fonds Bouglé and the Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand, was admittedly slanted toward women in the feminist circles around Marguerite Durand, and more generally toward women journalists who were on the left of the political spectrum. I acknowledge the absence of women journalists of a more conservative persuasion and hope that other scholars will fill that unfortunate lacuna in our knowledge.

O r g a n iz at io n of the Book The book is divided into three parts. Part 1, “Generations, Mentors, and Mothers,” begins with the two pioneers, Séverine and Marguerite Durand. It examines how they modeled the role of reporter for the women who worked at La Fronde and other newspapers where Séverine and Durand worked between the 1890s and the late 1920s, and how they mentored them in the associations that they fostered. One issue is why the pioneers and their successors chose what the French call “mixité” or mixed-gender occupational organizations over women’s press clubs, so common elsewhere. The second chapter untangles the  mentoring relationship between Séverine and Marcelle Capy and follows Capy through her career of journalism and pacifist agitation. The third chapter looks at Colette, an outstanding example of the second generation in the traditionally male role of literary columnist, and Germaine Beaumont, an example of the third generation writing a new feature, the women’s page. This chapter also introduces a mother–adoptive daughter form of mentoring, for Colette treated Beaumont as a daughter and advanced Beaumont’s career. Another theme is the use of journalistic writing to perfect style for literary output, which these journalists, and many others, did. The fourth

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Gender, Generation, and Journalism in France

chapter describes a mother–biological daughter relationship and a father–biological daughter relationship. A comparison of their careers, and two of the mother and daughter’s investigative series, shows that the mother modelled a career in journalism for the daughter but did not impose her model on her daughter, who crafted a different career trajectory and ultimately influenced her mother’s career path. Part 2, “Gender and Front-Page Reporting,” begins with a comparison of the careers and journalism of the premier grand reporter Albert Londres, and the leading woman recognized as a grand reporter, Andrée Viollis. A systematic analysis of their reporting on Shanghai in 1931–32 shows how many characteristics they shared but also that Viollis paid more attention to women and expressed more empathy. The sixth chapter, “Gender, Politics, and Racism in Colonial Reporting,” compares Viollis’s reporting on Indochina after the Yen Bay mutiny of 1930 to that of two male colleagues from her newspaper who reported from Indochina after 1930. This comparison reveals more differences than the preceding analysis, differences between the men as well as between them and Viollis. One key explanation for the variations was their politics. Viollis is also found to be less racist and more sympathetic to the Vietnamese rebels. Chapter 7, “Family and Diplomatic Reporting: Geneviève Tabouis,” considers the one Frenchwoman who did diplomatic reporting in the interwar dailies. Tabouis illustrates the importance of family contacts, in her case in the diplomatic world. Her anti-fascist and anti-Nazi reporting was known, though not always appreciated, beyond the Francophone world. Part 3, “Gender on Other Beats,” looks at the less prestigious reporting on social conditions and in women’s columns and pages. Chapter 8 compares the reporting of two women and one man about the vexing subject of children in the judicial and penal system, as well as two women’s front-page reporting on work and health in a labour federation newspaper. The final section probes the critiques of racism by one of these women, Denise Moran. The chapter on women’s pages profiles three women writing women’s columns and later writing or editing women’s pages. It also outlines the differences between this section of the daily newspaper, usually located in the middle of an issue, and the “hard news” located on the earlier pages of each issue. The ten women profiled in Gender, Generation, and Journalism may not be pioneers, but they did enter and remain in daily newspapers at a time when they were exceptions in a masculine workplace. They contended with colleagues who were not welcoming and editors

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Introduction 17

and readers who viewed them through gendered lenses that limited their possibilities, but they devised mechanisms to cope with and, in some cases, excel in the press. They persevered in their quest to become reporters, used education to enhance their qualifications, and found ways of supporting one another, despite the lack of a women’s press club. Some of them accepted the masculine rules of the game and covered the same events as their male colleagues, and their reporting differed less from men’s reporting than might be expected. More of them were assigned typically “feminine” beats, covering domestic, social, and educational topics, but they did fine reporting on those topics and a few of them connected these “soft” news topics to the larger economic and political context that was the purview of the “hard” news sections of newspapers. Some sought wider horizons and made new opportunities. Two advanced to section editors, one became a co-editor, but none became an editor-in-chief. Most surprisingly, they did all this while actively engaged in many forms of activism, from feminist agitation to antifascist organizing. They are an interesting lot, deserving of our attention.

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P art o n e Generations, Mentors, and Mothers

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1 Pioneers and Mentors: Séverine and Durand, 1880s–1909

Among a dozen pioneer women employed in French newspapers in the 1880s and 1890s,1 two have drawn scholarly attention: Séverine (pen name of Caroline Rémy de Guebhard, 1855–1929) and Marguerite Durand (1864–1936), owner and director of the world’s first feminist daily, La Fronde (1897–1903). Like George Sand, these two pioneers became models for other women interested in reporting. Unlike Sand, they went beyond modelling to encouraging other women to enter the occupation, and they did so after the extension of secondary education to more girls in the 1880s and as the curriculum began to prepare girls for teaching careers and other employment in the 1890s.2 Young women with teaching degrees, especially from the prestigious L’École normale supérieure de jeunes filles (Sèvres Normal School), acquired a sense of themselves as career women, and not all of them were absorbed into the school system or government offices.3 As the rest of this book shows, some of them combined teaching with journalism or left teaching for reporting. These two pioneers are profiled in two sections in this chapter. Their legacy to the succeeding generations of women journalists is the subject of the other sections. In addition to modelling how to survive in journalism, these two women mentored the next generation. One manifestation of their effect on the next generation was a continuing but not always transparent relationship between feminism and journalism. Another was that their successors followed their pattern of joining mixed-sex unions. This pattern helps answer the perplexing question, why did the succeeding generations of French women in national newspaper not sustain a women’s club, unlike newspaper women in many other countries?

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Contemporary interest in occupational pioneers fostered the belief that Séverine and Durand were “exceptions,” a notion that may have inhibited succeeding cohorts of women and underestimated the real problems faced by the second and third generations of women in an occupation.4 The preoccupation with pioneers has also inhibited scholarly work on the second and third generation of French women in newspapers. Except for the cohort of women working at La Fronde who continued to work in the press, though more often in weeklies and journals,5 members of second and third generation have been curiously overlooked. This chapter makes a modest effort to document their role in newspaper journalism.

T h e F irs t R e p o rt er: S éveri ne Séverine began her career as a secretary and proofreader for a socialist, Jules Vallès (1832–1885), after he took advantage of the 1880 amnesty of the Communards to return from exile. Vallès was one of the “inventors” of reporting in the sense of going to the site of the event, capturing impressions on the move (sur la vif ), and writing in the first-person singular. He encouraged Séverine to report in this manner and she helped him relaunch his political daily Cri du Peuple. For three years after his death in 1885, she stayed at the paper, until a breach with the hard-line Parti ouvrier française (French Workers’ Party) leader, Jules Guesde, prompted her departure.6 Having acquired a reputation as a “brilliant polemicist,” she wrote for several mainstream newspapers, though often under pseudonyms, in the first half of the 1890s. She covered many topics, including women’s right to abortion and her descent, dressed as a miner, into a dangerous mine.7 This piece of stunt journalism so impressed a young Françoise Jacquet de La Verryère, who would become a famous reporter under the nom de plume Andrée Viollis, that she declared that she had “a model, a mentor. I belonged to Séverine.”8 Unhappily, Séverine was not able to place many of her pieces on the Dreyfus Affair, the cause she was most passionate about.9 The affair was unleashed in 1894 by the trumped-up military trial and conviction for treason of a Jewish officer, Captain Alfred Dreyfus. Despite exculpatory evidence, a second trial upheld the original verdict. Émile Zola’s famous protest article “J’accuse” and ensuing trials engulfed France in a major crisis of political and military legitimacy as well as in a wave of anti-Semitism that persisted beyond the end

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Séverine and Durand, 1880s–1909 23

of the legal aspects of the affair in 1906. Séverine joined La Fronde when Durand promised her that she could cover the trial of Major Esterhazy, who had been (unjustly) acquitted of passing military secrets to the Germans. At La Fronde, Séverine reported on the 1898 and 1899 trials in the Dreyfus Affair.10 Despite her ties with feminists, her friendship with Durand, and her conversion to feminism at the 1896 Congrès féministe de Paris (an international feminist congress), she was not attracted by the prospect of writing for a feminist review.11 Rather, she admired Durand’s conception of La Fronde as “a newspaper. But not a feminist review. A real daily, with all the political, cultural and international rubrics. A daily with a feminist tendency such as a paper is on the left or the right.”12 Both women believed in seeking out the facts, not just commenting upon them. In a column, Séverine called it “stand-up” as opposed to “sit-down” journalism, “a journalism of witnessing versus a journalism of writing.”13 From December 1897 through 1899, La Fronde devoted nearly three-quarters of its space to the Dreyfus Affair. Its take on the affair was “the refusal of anti-Semitism, pacifism, and the fight for justice.”14 Séverine’s reporting was scathing about the false postures and antiSemitism of the military, judicial, and government figures implicated.15 As a consequence, she lost any chance for posts at major newspapers but enhanced her reputation as a journalist and a staunch republican.16 In general, La Fronde reporters focused more on the individuals involved, including the wives of defendants and other witnesses, and provided more description of the atmosphere in the courtroom, than male reporters did.17 Many women who followed in their footsteps had a similar approach to courtroom reporting. Séverine remained a journalist until two years before her death in 1929. After leaving La Fronde, she placed articles in eleven newspapers over the next decade, including mainstream dailies ranging from the (then) independent socialist L’Oeuvre, through the left-wing L’Intransigeante, to the conservative Le Figaro. Always a leftist and a pacifist, she was employed by the communist daily L’Humanité between 1919 and 1923. There she explained her feminism, encouraged women to join the party, argued the need to include women in unions and the party, advocated birth control, and reported on trials, war profiteers, and war mongers. When she left the party and newspaper, she published in other left-wing, feminist, and/or pacifist papers such as L’Ère nouvelle and the revived Fronde in the mid-1920s. Then in her sixties, she submitted more opinion pieces on war and peace

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Generations, Mentors, and Mothers

but also reported on crimes such as child and animal abuse.18 She and Durand, who founded a pet cemetery in Paris, were animal lovers. According to Géraldine Muhlman, Séverine was an archetype of the reporter as witness-ambassador, which was what good reporters were supposed to be in France. But Muhlman notes that Séverine held that she excelled because of her “radical sensibility” as a woman. Going beyond the widespread “cult of being present at the scene,” she got involved in the events, was moved by them, and believed she spoke for people reading her accounts.19 Another allegedly feminine trait was her stunt journalism, which bore some resemblance to that practiced by intrepid “girl reporters” like her famous American contemporary Nelly Bly (pseudonym of Elizabeth Cochran, 1864– 1922), who went undercover to infiltrate American institutions and publish exposés.20 In addition to helping reconcile reporting and femininity, Séverine offered guidance to women she believed were capable of reporting. She did not misrepresent the status of the occupation, nor did she encourage literary hopefuls or those whose only interest in journalism was as a conduit to a literary career. In 1922, she insisted that journalists did not have the stature of authors of fiction or nonfiction books, precisely because they dealt with ephemera and left no significant trace in history. The following year, she explained that she discouraged young women who sent her poems and stories, telling them that she had to work as a typist for four years before she was “allowed to timidly propose an adjective, an image, a phrase” as a copyeditor, and all this before becoming a reporter. She cautioned these young women that they must have a vocation, with all “its abnegations, resign themselves to never … writing a word that you don’t believe. And, also, to accept being a passerby, an ephemeral being.” Despite this demanding list of the qualities needed in a journalist, she titled the article “Le plus beau métier du monde” (The best occupation in the world).21

F ami ly, F r ie n d s , a n d A c ces s to Journali s m For young women aspiring to be reporters, family ties helped open the door to the news business. Yvonne Sarcey (pseudonym of Madeleine Brisson, 1869–1950) was the daughter and wife of journalists. Her father, Francisque Sarcey (1827–1899), was a prominent literary critic for Le Figaro and Le Temps, and her husband, Adolphe

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Séverine and Durand, 1880s–1909 25

Brisson (1860–1925), an editor and director of Les Annales politiques et littéraires, a weekly that became a daily with a circulation of 2,000 in 1917. Adolphe was the son of the founder of that paper. Nor was this the end of the family line of journalists. Madeleine and Adolphe’s son, Pierre Brisson (1896–1964), took over Les Annales in 1925 and was director of Figaro from 1947 to 1964. His son, Jean-François Brisson (1918–2010), worked at Figaro from 1950 to 1976.22 Yvonne Sarcey denied being “destined for journalism” and simply explained her vocation as something she took up after a few years of marriage and childrearing, though she acknowledged her husband’s support in her endeavour.23 She wrote the women’s column “Cousin Yvonne’s Chronicle” in Les Annales for decades, as well as co-writing an advice book for girls and many texts for the Université des Annales (Annales University) and its journal, which she founded to offer a more accessible form of higher education through series of conferences.24 Sarcey’s journalism dealt with the appropriately feminine issues of domesticity and education. Other first-generation women thrust themselves into public reporting, sometimes assisted by a male reporter or editor. Francisque Sarcey encouraged Jane Misme (1865–1935) to publish in various reviews between 1895 and 1898. In 1898, on her own initiative, she joined La Fronde, where she became the drama critic and wrote a humourous column. When La Fronde folded in 1906, she and Marguerite Durand cofounded a feminist weekly, La Française, which Misme operated as a cooperative that offered courses, conferences, and even concerts into the 1930s. Unlike La Fronde, the staff of La Française was mixed sex.25 Like Francisque Sarcey and a few other male reporters, Séverine assisted young women who were determined to be reporters. One such woman was Marcelle Capy (1891–1962), who was born Marcelle Marques but took for her nom de plume the patronymic of the grandfather who raised her in the countryside. As a “little reporter,” she was, in her words, “taken up by Séverine,” who worked at the first newspaper to employ Capy. Later in her career, Capy called Séverine “the first woman journalist in France” and claimed that Séverine considered her a “spiritual daughter.”26 Their relationship is explored in the next chapter. For women who aspired to be reporters but did not have the support of experienced journalists or family members in the press, the pattern of entering the field as a copyeditor continued. Madeleine

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Jacob (1896–1985) began her working life as a stenographer-typist at a bank. In 1923, she applied for a secretarial position at Paris Vogue and subsequently became a copyeditor there. When Lucien Vogel, the artistic director of Vogue, established the pictorial news weekly Vu in 1929, he took her with him. Initially appointed as a copyeditor, she was elevated to reporter in 1934. She dedicated her autobiography to Vogel, “without whom I would never have been a journalist.” Gratitude toward a sympathetic (always male) editor/publisher was not unusual among women journalists.27 Her first assignment was an anodyne one on the Viennese aristocracy, but it coincided with Nazi violence in the capital of Austria, which she duly reported.28 That same year she began to write for the daily L’Oeuvre, contributing brief pieces called “Sketches of England” that covered both society events and miners’ strikes. In conformity with other second-generation women reporters, she specialized in French court cases, especially those before the children and juveniles’ court.29 She started with the notorious case of Violette Nozière (1915–1966), a young woman who killed her father and nearly killed her mother by poisoning. Parricide was shocking enough, but when Nozière’s lawyer blamed her crime on incest, public interest intensified. The press leapt on the story, even conducting their own investigations. Nozière’s trial ended in a sentence of death by guillotine, which was soon converted into life in prison at hard labour. Her sentence was reduced and ultimately commuted after the Second World War.30 Later Jacob did more prestigious kinds of reporting. She was a special envoy to the Saar during the plebiscite on annexation to Germany, where she joined “my great Parisian colleagues.” As a Jew and as a reporter, she went to Nazi Germany “clandestinely, with a false passport, claiming to be … a social assistant.” She was a war correspondent in Spain during the Civil War. She covered major strikes and the trial of communist journalists at the beginning of the Second World War. She left Paris when the Germans occupied Paris in June 1940 but soon returned to the capital. She was not associated with L’Oeuvre when Marcel Déat, a former socialist who had moved to the right, took it over and ran it as a collaborationist newspaper. After the war, she resumed her career, once again specializing in court reporting, now covering the prosecution of Pétain, Laval, and other collaborationist leaders, as well as the Nuremburg trials.31

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Séverine and Durand, 1880s–1909 27

T h e F irs t E d ito r: Durand Marguerite Durand brought some notoriety and a lot of contacts to her task of creating an all-woman newspaper. An illegitimate child raised by a prosperous family and educated at a convent school, she had trained as an actress and worked at the Comédie-Française in her late teens and early twenties. During her first marriage, she and her husband frequented a café that newspapermen favoured. After an amicable divorce, the contacts made in this café helped her enter La Presse. Later she worked at the respected Figaro, where the codirector, the father of her illegitimate son, sent her to cover the 1896 Congrès féministe international (International Feminist Congress) that converted her – and Séverine – to feminism.32 Her mixture of a liberated sex life and acting, which was not yet a respectable occupation, incited criticism of her as a courtesan or a prostitute. Critics also used these terms to impugn the press, then in one of its periodic crises due to accusations of corruption, political extortion, and general demoralization. The Fronde’s appearance weeks after Zola’s “J’accuse,” its staunch support of Dreyfus, and its impressive early circulation figures (50,000 copies daily) prompted rumours that her newspaper was financed by Jewish bankers. She must have had financial support, since the paper’s annual operating cost was 500,000 francs, a sum beyond her means, but she did not reveal the financing of the paper and destroyed her financial records.33 The Fronde created employment and a learning opportunity for women. When Durand started the newspaper, she had difficulty finding women experienced in reporting. Early issues featured contributions from renowned women such as the scientist Clément Royer (1830–1902) and the educator Pauline Kergomard (1838–1924) as well as feminist leaders Maria Pognon (1844–1925), president of the Ligue pour le Droit de Femmes (French League for the Rights of Women), and Marie Maugeret (1844–1928), editor of Le Féminisme chrétien.34 Pognan and Maugeret were firmly in the political sphere, which was still defined as a masculine sphere. Most of these women did not aspire to be full-time journalists. However, some of the Fronde women broke down barriers and a few became full-time reporters. For instance, Maria Vérone (1874–1938) won admission into the meetings of the Paris City Council and continued to write for various dailies in the twentieth century. When Mme Avril de Saint-Croix

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reported on the economic situation of women journalists in France to the 1899 International Congress of Women held in London, she argued that the Fronde had improved the situation in France.35 Durand’s reporters covered and learned on the job about many of the “beats” of mainstream papers, including the economy, the military, the Orient, and foreign affairs. In these sections of the newspaper, they provided feminine and feminist perspectives on the topic. Aside from reporting on feminist issues, events, and organizations, they investigated the conditions of French women, children, and education.36 Best remembered for investigations of working women (investigations that complemented Durand’s support of women’s unions and establishment of a women’s placement bureau), the paper presciently covered better-educated women who were entering the rapidly expanding service or pink-collar sector.37 Several of their successors in social investigation are introduced in chapter 8. After La Fronde ceased to be a daily in 1903, Durand and many of her reporters continued to work in the press. Durand, Andrée Téry (soon to be Andrée Viollis, 1870–1950), and four others contributed to the monthly supplement of the anticlerical paper L’Action.38 Together with Jane Misme, Durand cofounded La Française. She also reissued La Fronde for a few weeks at the beginning of the Great War and then again from 1926 to 1928. Her political activities, like running for the Paris City Council in 1926, were probably more important than her journalism after the demise of the first Fronde. Other significant contributions in the 1920s were her speeches and articles about journalism as a feminist occupation.

J o u r n a l is m a n d Femi ni s m In a speech given several times after the demise of the first Fronde, Durand argued that the advent of women in journalism was “one of the conquests of which feminism is justly proud. It has pushed and will always push women toward this career because it is one of those that oblige women to leave their homes, to see, to write, to observe, to comprehend and to judge beyond the restrained circle of their family, relatives, class and customs.”39 Her 1926 article on choosing journalism for a career acknowledged that women had found it difficult to enter the newsroom in the early years of “active” reporting, but reassured young women that they could now find employment and earn a good living. She expanded on Séverine’s advice by telling

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Séverine and Durand, 1880s–1909 29

these young women that they needed “general knowledge, a spirit of observation, perpetual attention, prompt judgment … moral and physical courage, loyalty and health.”40 Two years later, ex-Fronde reporter Jane Misme surveyed twelve journalists – eleven women and one man – about women in journalism. Typically for this period, half of those surveyed were primarily novelists and secondarily journalists.41 Most of the responses expanded upon Durand’s arguments about journalism opening the door to the wider world or to effect feminist change. Few mentioned hard work or other negative features (though not sexual harassment) and those who did insisted that the positive features outnumbered the bad. Respondents who prioritized their fictional writing were more pragmatic about journalism being a way to support themselves or to practise and perfect their literary writing skills. Chapter 3 will examine two women journalists, Colette and Germaine Beaumont, who used their time at Le Matin to support themselves and improve their literary skills. Not coincidentally, literary representations of women journalists written by women journalists had protagonists whose work allows them to escape from a stifling domestic life, or who loved the mobility and other “modern” aspects of being a journalist, or who had to write constantly to support themselves and their families.42 Women who were not part of the Fronde circle also valued the opportunity to work in the wider world. Louise Bodin (1877–1929) got an education degree and taught before becoming the editor of a feministpacifist periodical La Voix des femmes in 1918. As a communist, she also wrote a column for the communist party daily L’Humanité and for a union paper, La Forge. She described journalism as one of “the best trades, because it is … a marvellous way of educating, teaching, proselytizing.”43 In a 1942 speech, Geneviève Tabouis, the diplomatic reporter profiled in chapter 7, called journalism “the most beautiful profession in the world.”44 Autobiographical evidence clarifies that she had wanted to be a diplomat and turned to journalism to be close to diplomatic proceedings, and that she enjoyed being in the thick of these proceedings.45 As late as 1970, Madeleine Jacob claimed in her autobiography, “What I love about my trade is that it opens doors, gives access to knowledge, to diverse disciplines.” She added what she found attractive about court reporting: “Court chronicles reveal all human defects and miseries. It is no doubt why I love my trade.”46 In sum, most of the women who made a commitment to newspaper journalism liked their occupation and encouraged other women to

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enter it. Feminist journalists tried to persuade young women to consider journalism as a career. Minerva, a women’s weekly, ran a series of interviews with famous women reporters, and La Française included occasional pieces on them. Other feminists who had no connection to the newspaper business wrote occupational guides for girls and young women, articles on their occupational opportunities, and held vocational meetings to introduce young women to various occupational options. By the late 1920s, most of these promotional efforts included journalism as an appropriate job for women.47 Even then, however, not all occupational guides or feminist organizations promoted journalism as a career.48

Or g a n iz in g J o u r n a l is ts, 1880s –1930s In the 1880s and 1890s, French journalists began to organize professionally. In 1881, they established the Association syndicale ­professionnelle des journalistes republicains (Union Association of Professional Republican Journalists) and, four years later, the Association des journalists parisiens (Association of Parisian Journalists). By the early 1890s, the number of occupational organizations reached forty.49 These associations insisted that candidates for membership practice journalism as “your habitual and principal profession” or that they must have worked in journalism for a year or more. Including publishers and editors as well as journalists, they were not unions. In the highly competitive decade before and the difficult years of the Great War, few professional organizations formed, but existing ones continued to add members, just not many women.50 The Union Association of Professional Republican Journalists had five women in 1918, and the Association of Parisian Journalists had seven women members in 1921.51 The first real union (later the National Journalists’ Union) formed in 1918 to cope with the recovery of the newspaper business after the war. The Bureau international du travail (International Labour Organization) created by the Treaty of Versailles sent an inquiry into the working conditions of journalists to the National Union. Their responses reveal a great deal about the insecurity of journalism as an occupation. Since there were no legal requirements for individual work contracts, contracts were the exception, not the rule. Some journalists were still paid by the line.52 Even relatively good employers could be demanding. For instance, L’Oeuvre initially offered Germaine

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Decarie (1899–1955) a three-month probationary contract at forty francs per day, without expenses. She was expected to come to the office at 11:30 a.m., do reporting or make inquiries, and stay until 8 p.m. If needed, she was to do night shifts twice a week. In 1934, the paper hired her permanently at 1,500 francs per month, and five years later added a supplement of 50 francs for special duties. During the Second World War, Decarie came under fire for her past association with the Communist Party and lost her job, though the administration indemnified her for the termination.53 Despite concerted efforts to negotiate a collective contract in early 1920s and again in the early 1930s, the National Union failed due to employer resistance.54 Wages were nominally higher than before the war, though inflation limited the purchasing power of the raise. Still, more reporters were eligible for reimbursements for collateral expenses, including travel costs, which could be considerable. Their only legal protection was a recent law requiring one day a week off. In addition to inadequate wages and insecurity, the union complained about the lack of “union spirit” among French journalists. What explains the poor record of occupational organization among journalists? One factor was the challenges newspapers experienced in the first four decades of the twentieth century. In the fifteen years before the Great War, stiff competition between eighty daily newspapers halved the average price per issue and major dailies doubled their length from four to ten pages, added specialty pages and increased their advertising to attract more readers. To limit cutthroat competition, the four major national newspapers (Le Petit Journal, Le Journal, Le Matin, and Le Petit Parisien, each selling at least a million copies daily) signed accords. The number of other dailies fell.55 During the war, many newspapers shrunk to four pages and appeared irregularly; some merged with other papers; several simply closed. Heavily censored and hyper-patriotic war coverage replaced serial novels and “news in brief” items as well as sports and women’s pages. After the war, sixteen opinion journals did not resume publication because they could not afford to modernize or to pay foreign correspondents. Remaining newspapers had to modernize at a time of inflation. Accordingly, concentration of ownership continued and the number of Parisian dailies fell from forty-six to thirty-one. Not until 1928 did national dailies reach the page limit that had been normal in 1914. Surviving dailies tried to increase circulation by reintroducing feuilletons and faits divers and increasing specialty pages and grand

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reporters. Even when the circulation rebounded, the overall figures did not exceed the circulation figures for 1914.56 Other explanations for stagnant circulation include the emergence of the radio and less interest in national politics given the volatility of interwar politics, especially in the scandal-ridden 1930s.57 Through the formative years of the late nineteenth century and the first four decades of the twentieth century, journalists’ organizations had a very poor record of recruiting women. The Union of Professional Republican Journalists, founded in 1881, never had a woman on its council, despite the facts that Marguerite Durand was a member and gave generously to the union. When she died, the vice-president lauded her as “calm and reflective, having nothing of the suffragette.”58 Presumably he meant English-style suffragette, insofar as Durand, who had not particularly promoted women’s suffrage in La Fronde, had since run for the Paris City Council. When the National Journalists’ Union responded to the International Labour Organization’s question about women’s employment, they reported, suspiciously vaguely, that they had “about twenty” women members, most of whom were reporters.59 Despite annual admissions of two or more women, the National Union only added three women to their alleged total of “about twenty” women in a decade.60 The contradiction between annual admission and total membership figures reflects the union’s inflation of the 1925 figures and a 1933 secession that lasted until 1937. At least the National Union had two women on their Administrative Committees. As early as 1923, they elected Andrée Viollis with 244 of a total of 270 votes and they re-elected her until 1935. Claire-Hélène Toux Vallet, who studies these organizations, found that another woman, Claire Dematres, called Claire Gonon, was elected in 1929 and re-elected until 1940.61 Why did the union and other occupational organizations have so few women members? The answer is not simply that few women were journalists, because the 1939 Annuaire de la presse française listed more than 600 feminine names, though only 120 of them held a professional press card needed for reporting.62 The problem was that only 2 percent of reporters were women, since reporters dominated union membership. Why were there so few women reporters? If the departure of many men for the frontlines of war made previously masculine jobs in war industries and nursing available,63 it did not have the same effect on the newspaper business. While all reporters were excluded from

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warfront reporting, men had greater access to the war ministry and war office propaganda.64 Women did report on hospitals treating the wounded and on conditions on the home front. Early in the war, Marc Helys (pseudonym of Marie Léra, 1864–1957) lauded the volunteer nurses trained by nursing courses sponsored by the Union des femmes de France.65 Her reporting reflected the early wartime trend in nurses’ memoirs to celebrate war nurses as “white angels,” a trend that shifted to more realistic representation of that difficult kind of nursing in 1916.66 Having travelled to foreign lands prior to the war, Helys visited the provinces to report on the living conditions there during the war.67 Although the addition of women’s pages presented opportunities for women to enter the business, especially after the war, most of these women used pseudonyms and some of them sent their columns to several papers under different pseudonyms, so they cannot be counted accurately. Moreover, most journalists still did not consider columnists on the women’s page to be reporters. Chapter 3 examines the most successful women’s page columnist; chapter 9 considers three others. More problematically, unions did not actively seek women members. The Association of Parisian Journalists did not admit a woman until 1891; it admitted Séverine the next year and Durand shortly thereafter. Other Fronde reporters followed their example and joined the association over the next decade.68 In the 1920s and 1930s, several former Fronde reporters were members and occasionally sat on committees.69 Although the tiny percentage of women in the National Union hardly threatened the masculine prestige of the occupation, the Journalists’ House, a club house established in 1918, refused women entry. In 1925, Jane Misme and La Française launched a campaign for women to be admitted.70 One year later, Andrée Viollis, Maryse Choisy (1903–1979), and a Mme Brand penetrated the House, but only for lunch. Members of the house had expressed fears that the mere presence of women would mean promiscuity, fears that have often been articulated by men refusing women’s access to their clubs and professions. Anticipating later generations of women who infiltrated masculine spaces, Choisy sarcastically noted that after the luncheon, “Somehow the earth still turns on its axis, the sun continues to rise and [in this case] the franc to fall.” The director promised the three “visitors” that women would be admitted but was worried lest those admitted would not be journalists. He suggested that the three

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women constitute a committee of “respected women journalists” to vet women applicants, which Choisy and the others accepted. They rejected his proposition that the building must first install a powder room for women, assuming it was a delaying tactic – as did later campaigners for women’s admission into men’s clubs.71 The campaign continued without any apparent change in the admission policy.

W h y N o W o m e n ’ s Pres s Club? In France, occupational organizations were undermined by proliferation and subdivision; in the case of journalists, this meant that many associations represented only specialized presses such as judicial or educational journals. This also affected women in journalism. For instance, Maria Vérone, a practicing lawyer, joined Séverine and two other Fronde journalists in the Association confraternelle et mutuelle de la press judiciaire parisenne (Confraternal and Mutual Association of the Parisian Judicial Press) founded in 1885. At least Vérone and Séverine also joined one of the general associations. Other women in specialized associations did not, possibly due to financial constraints. Another challenge was slow and incomplete professionalization. A French journalism school operated as early as 1895; the second school opened in 1924.72 When the latter opened, journalists were skeptical about its necessity.73 One consequence was continuing debates about the roles of professionals and amateurs, meaning occasional journalists. A second consequence was that journalism remained an “unregulated profession” with only 13.5 percent of its practitioners having trained in schools of journalism as late as 1995.74 The lack of professional training probably helped educated women enter the occupation in the early 1920s, but as specialization advanced, it put a lot of pressure on anyone hoping to get positions to bring special experiences and skills to the job. For instance, most sports journalists had been sportsmen, and although two had been sportswomen, there were far fewer sportswomen than sportsmen.75 Another factor limiting the number of sportswomen hired as reporters was that, aside from tennis, the dailies rarely covered the sports women played. After the First World War, Frenchwomen in liberal professions that had admitted some women into their ranks developed feminine associations.76 Not so Frenchwomen in journalism, or rather, not until 1981. Although there had been a Syndicat de la presse feminine et

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féministe (Union of the Women’s and Feminist Press) from 1891 through 1896 (and possibly longer),77 the closest approximation to a women’s press club in the 1920s were the informal groups of journalists that had worked at La Fronde or at La Française and in the 1930s, the Amis de Séverine (Friends of Séverine) constituted after Séverine’s death in 1929 to commemorate her life. The Friends established a prize for writing about peace and met for several years to select the winner and award the Prix Séverine. Why didn’t Frenchwomen sustain a women’s press club? One answer may be that educated women in a masculine occupation preferred not to identify as feminine, a phenomenon still encountered in France and elsewhere.78 This might help explain the apparent dissolution of the Union of the Women’s and Feminist Press, but it flies in the face of a rich tradition of single-sex associations ranging from dinner clubs, through discussion groups to feminist, pacifist, and antifascist organizations.79 Instead, there were two obstacles to forming a women’s press club: the two pioneers and their successors chose to join mixed-sex organizations, and they and their successors were active in other causes, notably women’s suffrage, pacifism, and, in the 1930s, antifascism. Here we consider suffrage and women’s rights activists; in later chapters, we examine pacifism and antifascism. Suffragists and women who campaigned for women’s rights often wrote about suffrage and civil rights activities in the women’s, feminist, and socialist press, but rarely in the mainstream press. Jane Misme founded the Union française pour le suffrage des femmes (U F S F ) (French Union for Women’s Suffrage) in 1909. When La Française became the organ of the Conseil national des femmes françaises (National Council of Women), she became president of the Press, Letters and Arts section of the C N F F and their delegate to the Press, Letters and Arts section of the International Council of Women.80 On top of this, she composed a column called “Cahiers d’une féministe” (A Feminist Notebook) for L’Oeuvre from 1922 to 1930. While Alice la Mazière (1880–1962) was an active member of the French Union for Women’s Suffrage, she conducted social investigations, travelled to foreign countries, and reported her findings in L’Ère nouvelle in the 1920s and La Volonté in the 1930s. She spoke about her travels to various clubs and associations in the 1930s.81 For her part, Vérone wrote about legal issues for four feminist periodicals, two other opinion journals, and two informational papers; she promoted women’s suffrage in occasional articles in a variety of newspapers.82

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Conversely, women who were principally journalists in the mainstream press rarely mentioned suffrage. Editorial decisions about what constituted news meant that they only took up the subject when suffragist efforts came to public attention, notably in 1925 when the Chamber of Deputies adopted a bill in favour of women voting in municipal and cantonal elections, and in 1928, 1929, and 1931, when the Senate refused to vote on a bill for women’s suffrage. Andrée Viollis, the most famous interwar woman reporter, produced two articles on the vote for women when the issue of the municipal vote came up in 1925, but little else in subsequent years.83 Like many of her female colleagues, she drew attention to other countries that extended the suffrage to women and made unflattering comparisons to the French situation, particularly in the newspaper Vendredi that she cofounded and codirected. When the Spanish Republic granted women the vote, she wrote, “What a lesson for us! In all the great countries of the universe … women vote and are eligible to run for office. Frenchwomen … will soon be the only ones not to vote or be eligible for office.” She offered a brief history of the Senate’s obstruction to Chamber of Deputy bills and attributed the Senate’s obstinacy to “purely electoral” considerations, specifying old senators’ claims that women would “hand the country over to the priests.”84 That interpretation is still persuasive.

C o n c l u s i on Séverine and Durand provided more than role models to the generations that succeeded them. Durand employed women and edited their work; she wrote about the advantages of reporting; she entertained and maintained contacts with women journalists; she even financed a retreat for them to research and write. Séverine inspired many young women with her example of reporting, and the next chapter will identify the ways she continued to advise and assist them in the news business. Chapters 2 through 4 will demonstrate how the second and third generations of women in daily newspapers followed the pioneer’s example of fostering one another, in one case in a mother–adoptive daughter relationship and in the second case, in a biological mother– daughter relationship. These four women, and most of the women profiled in this book, also shared the two pioneers’ commitment to their occupation and to an array of causes.

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2 Mother and Daughter 1: Séverine and Capy, 1910–1940

As the first Frenchwoman to be a reporter, Séverine inspired and helped many of the second generation of Frenchwomen in reporting. One of these women, Marcelle Capy, described the relationship between the two generations in terms of mother–daughter ties.1 This language implied that a member of the first generation not only modelled how to access and act as a journalist, but mentored or socialized the next generation in the workplace. This chapter, and the two chapters that follow, analyze three examples of this mother– daughter nexus and how it influenced the careers of second- and third-generation subjects. First, it is essential to recognize that two men influenced Capy’s choice and practice of journalism. In interviews and autobiographical statements, she identified the two men who inspired her. While studying literature and preparing for the École Normale de Sèvres at Université de Toulouse in 1913, Capy heard a pacifist speech by the socialist leader Jean Jaurès. According to her, “That decided the rest of my life … I understood that words were given to us to help those in need. I was mad for justice. Despite paternal disapproval, I abandoned university and went to Paris. I began as a little reporter.” For three years, Capy lived frugally with two other single women in a sixth-floor apartment, working as a little reporter.2 In 1915, Capy read a book by the integral pacifist and author Romain Rolland, who received a Nobel Prize for Literature the same year. The book converted her to integral pacifism, a position that refused all violence and war and that informed her writing for the rest of her career.3 The horrors of the war itself converted more people to pacifism of various kinds.4

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Despite her suspicions about women who really wanted to write fiction, Séverine mentored young women who were determined to be reporters. When she encountered Marcelle Capy during the war, she found her to be “young, robust, filled with love in response to human distress and of revolt against those who exploit them.”5 Capy reported that Séverine “enlightened me, guided me, because until then I mainly had sentimental impulses. How many things she taught me! Even how to do my hair, behave properly, dress well.”6 Learning how to dress and present oneself was part of the process of socialization into any occupation, but especially one that had few women.7 Capy wrote about appearances and clothing more frequently in the war years than she did later in her career.8 Like many provincials coming to the capital, she valued advice on how to dress and behave in Paris.9 Young women aspiring to be reporters must have welcomed guidance on how to combine being a journalist and a respectable woman. The public image of reporters was not conducive to women’s participation or parental acceptance of their participation. One male reporter recalled in his autobiography that a fin-de-siècle reporter had a reputation “as a man who had a young woman on his knees, brandishing in each hand a bottle of champagne and writing with his feet.”10 While clearly a caricature, this account suggests that the newsroom was a masculine space where women might feel uncomfortable, even be sexually harassed. If any of the subjects of this book felt uncomfortable or experienced abuse, however, they left no testimony about it. Possibly the class differences between male and female reporters curtailed sexual harassment. Probably raising the issue would have imperilled these women’s tenuous hold on these positions and hurt their personal reputations. Although Séverine left no testimony about how she helped Capy, it was widely known that Capy was her protégée.11 In the early stage of her journalism career, Capy was hired at two newspapers, La Bataille syndicaliste and L’Ère nouvelle, where Séverine was employed, suggesting that she may have recommended Capy to the editors. As the following sections reveal, Capy’s adult life, like Séverine’s, oscillated between journalism and peace activism. However, Capy was more distracted by pacifism, partly because pacifism was more complex and contested after the Great War. Her course was not determined by her mentor, for she changed during a career spanning two wars, reparations, disarmament, fascism, and Nazism.

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C a py: W o m e n ’ s Work and War As Séverine had reported on men’s work and other feminist reporters had investigated women’s work, so Capy inquired into women’s work, initially in relation to the war and later in relation to the long-term impact of war. Like Séverine and Nelly Bly, Capy engaged in theatrical antics such as posing as a worker “to experience many kinds of jobs, to understand” women’s labour.12 Starting in the 1890s, inquiries into women’s work were published in feminist and union dailies. A collection of articles by Aline Valette and Marcelle Capy, Femmes et travaille au XIXe siècle (Women and work in the nineteenth century), edited by Marie-Hélène ZylberbergHocquard and Évelyne Diebolt, has been mined by historians of women’s work since its publication in 1984. The editors’ introduction to the collection compares the writing styles of the two reporters, characterizing Valette, writing in La Fronde in the 1890s, as “serious and scientific,” and Capy, writing in the syndicalist organ La Bataille syndicaliste, in 1913 and 1914, as “literary and journalistic.” One implication is that Valette’s output is more masculine and objective, Capy’s more feminine and sentimental. A less bipolar interpretation would be that these two women used different approaches to women’s work and other topics. The editors note that both authors were condescending about working women’s passivity and lack of solidarity with other workers. Although Capy acknowledged the precarious nature of many women’s jobs,13 she followed the syndicalist line of blaming women for treating wages as “supplemental income.”14 Present-day feminist researchers appreciate Capy’s qualitative research methods and eye-witness approach, even if they find her style emotional and polemical.15 Contemporary feminist reviews were quite favourable. Reviewing Capy’s self-published collection of articles With French Working Women (1938), Henriette Sauret praises it for not being “stuffed with figures and dates … She did the best kind of reporting, live reporting, and she did it incognito … She slipped into the ranks of working women, threw herself into their lives and times.”16 As a feminist pacifist journalist, Sauret was a fellow traveller, but she was an experienced book reviewer and was not as complimentary about other feminist pacifist books.17 Capy’s wartime exposés about women’s work are wide ranging, perceptive, and well written. She visited at least a dozen industrial

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worksites; she described the actual procedures in many jobs; she reported on work discipline and the sexual division of labour in workplaces. Moreover, she interviewed women workers on and off site and incorporated their stories and voices in her exposés. When she posed as a worker, she wrote vignettes with herself as an active participant observer. Reporting on munitions workers who handled about 2,500 shells weighing seven kilos apiece, in an eleven-hour day, she tried to do the work and did not last three-quarters of an hour. Yet she wrote, “I saw my frail, young, sweet companion in her large black apron continue working. In a year, 900,000 shells had passed through her hands. She had therefore lifted a weight of 7 million kilos.” The math may be questionable, but the point about the magnitude of the work was made. The personalization of women workers, the dramatic techniques, and the inclusion of the author in the text surely helped readers imagine the cramped, stuffy, and sometimes toxic worksites, as well as the repetitive and often heavy work these women did under sometimes-abusive supervision. Readers also got an inside view of their tiny, dimly lit, barely heated, and poorly ventilated lodgings, and a glimpse of the lives that they and their children led. Readers must have realized that these women were not just undifferentiated hands, but individuals whose jobs were hard and lives precarious. This was a revealing and empathetic approach to the paid labour of working-class women. Yet it is overlooked by journalism scholars. When La Bataille syndicaliste censored pacifist copy in 1916, Capy quit the paper but continued to write about women’s work in a more comprehensive and less ideological manner. Her pacifist tract published the same year, Une voix de femme dans la mêlée, surveyed a broader spectrum of working women than her journalism had. In a section on the “feminine proletariat,” she denounced the stereotype of Frenchwomen as “a doll, pretty no doubt, but frivolous and vicious” (though she herself engaged in this type of dig at charitable ladies and their good works). On the contrary, “we have seen the working woman follow the working man to the factory, young women fill the schools, and the female intellectual proletariat take examinations and enter new positions.” Recognizing that there were still barriers to working-class women’s access to good jobs and equal pay, she now attributed their lack of unionization to men treating them as rivals.18 After the war, she and other women reporters would develop her ideas about an emergent segment of educated women

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employed in the growing service sector.19 Capy’s tract also predicted problems after the war, when war widows would get meagre pensions and so would need to work.20 Séverine also tackled this issue at that time, and other newspaper women elaborated on Séverine and Capy’s insights in the postwar years.21 Capy would return to the topic during the Great Depression. For the remainder of 1916, Capy placed pieces on her visits to war industries employing women in radical, feminist, and pacifist papers. On one occasion, she temporarily worked in one of these industries. Her visits and reports were duly tracked by police.22 The summary of a series in Le Journal du peuple accepted new developments in women’s labour without engaging with contemporary predictions of deleterious effects on their health, family life, or maternities. In the summary, she argued that “Woman has taken the worker’s place. There is no question about whether this is good or bad for women … It is useless to discuss the good or the bad of such a situation. It exists and all the discourse and all the writing will not change that. Under the imperious necessity of circumstances, women’s role has ­completely changed and a veritable revolution in ways of life has happened.”23 Capy, who rarely cited statistics, exaggerated the significance of the change in 1916, insofar as the figure of 30,000 women in “private industries producing for the war effort” pales beside data that more than one-third of Frenchwomen worked for wages before the war. But by the end of the war, when there were 430,000 women employed in all defence industries, her interpretation seemed prescient.24 She defended these women against critics of the quality of their work by quoting labour inspectors who reported that women exhibited “satisfactory and sometimes remarkable aptitude” in their new jobs.25 These quotes distinguished her coverage of the home front from that of other women who contended that women capably replaced men in conventionally masculine jobs.26 In 1917, Capy abandoned her dismissive position on working-class women resisting organization. While covering a large strike by seamstresses, she celebrated women’s ability to organize and act together.27 Her positive reporting of that iconic strike was conspicuous in the generally hostile press coverage, one that featured vilification of all women as internal enemies of the war effort.28 She was also one of the few women who reported on the strike, or at least signed her name to articles on the strike, even though the strike was in a feminine industry.29

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Although her interest now extended beyond working-class women, Capy did not abandon a class perspective. She had joined other commentators in the first year of the war in dismissing Red Cross (volunteer) nurses as “ladies who play at being angels.” By 1917, she conceded that the selection process for Red Cross nurses had improved since the beginning of the war.30 No doubt she had been influenced by the shift in war nurse memoirs from celebrations of them as “white angels” to a more realistic representation of nursing that Margaret Darrow traces to 1916.31 But long after the war, Capy could be scornful about “comfortable” bourgeois women who sat around charitable meetings, “their fur coats on the backs of their chairs,” criticizing poor women.32 Other women journalists on the left of the political spectrum were critical but not as caustic about “charitable ladies.”33 After a hiatus while Capy travelled, lectured, and wrote articles on peace, she resumed more regular journalism for L’Oeuvre, which had employed Séverine before the war. Capy revisited the subject of working women, often in relation to the long-term effects of the Great War. Instead of “stunts” like pretending to be a worker, she developed her interviewing skills. In the late 1920s, she explored the impact of the war on artisans and the new “intellectual workers.” One segment of a series on “The French Artisinate” told of a family living and working in a tiny, dark, and stifling apartment, with everyone doing piecework because the father returned from war duty unable to support the family. Another segment included excerpts from an interview with a young woman who had to give up her art studies to earn a living as an artisan because “the war disrupted everything.” In this segment, Capy implicitly calls in question the whole “new woman” idea about the war making better jobs available for women.34 In a series called “Women’s Life” penned for another newspaper, she wrote sympathetically about women “who hide their poverty” because they came from middle-class families squeezed by the economic repercussions of the war. Her examples were “cultivated young women” employed as secretaries for 500 to 900 francs a month. Capy did not mention it, but the lower sum was what she earned at the beginning of her career almost three decades earlier. She did offer an example drawn from her own experience: a talented journalist forced to correct page proofs at home. Taking another poke at bourgeois women, she indicted women who took the jobs of professionals for less pay, specifying the amateur journalist “who writes copy in her automobile … and accepts payment at half the going rate.”35 Her antagonistic language bespeaks

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a resentment of amateurs felt by a woman who had to earn her living in an occupation not yet professionalized. But her recognition that women in other classes engaged in paid labour was a positive step. A standalone article in L’Oeuvre claimed that “the war that ruined so many bourgeois families and brought inflation in its wake, obliged young women to work early.” Capy argued that starting work too early “physically and morally sabotaged young women’s lives.” In a rare reference to race and natality, she contended that “We will see a race in which young women do not develop, wear out and find themselves … condemned in advance to disastrous maternities.” Her proposed solution was an inquiry into the health of young working women.36 Both the pronatalist and race remarks require some explanation. Like Séverine, Capy had previously opposed pronatalist pressure on women to have more babies; unlike Séverine, she did not publicly advocate abortions in the extremely hostile environment for such advocacy under the draconian anti-abortion and anti-female birth-control law of 1920.37 However, two years later, in 1932, she wrote an admiring preface to a French translation of one of Alexandra Kollontai’s books, and while the preface did not emphasize Kollontai’s support for abortion and other forms of birth control, it did not deny it either.38 Nor did Capy seem interested in motherhood beyond the difficulties single mothers encountered providing and caring for their children. Possibly she slipped into the ubiquitous pronatalist lingo or deliberately appealed to the pronatalist political and cultural consensus of the 1930s.39 Her use of the term race, as a lineage, was old-fashioned. Elsewhere she uses the term race to mean like-minded people.40 Neither usage suggests that Capy had imbibed deeply of the more invidious types of racism. In her accounts of travels, notably in Germany after the Great War, she made overtures to Germans and represented them as people just like the French. Her accounts of encounters with Middle Eastern, South Eastern, and Eastern people between the wars and after the Second World War often made a point about the superiority of some of their customs and how Europeans or the French could learn from them.41 As she began to travel more widely in the mid- to late 1930s, she wrote more about accepting and even celebrating diversity – all the while convinced that French civilization (as she defined it) should be exported to the world.42 That mix of acceptance of diversity and pride in French civilization will be apparent in other women studied in this book.

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In response to the mid-1930s Depression, Capy tackled the topic of war widows. A series called “Les femmes dans la crise” (Women in the Crisis) cited the figure of 300,000 war widows who had not remarried since the war. She interviewed Mme Cassou, the president of the Union des veuves de Guerre de la région parisienne (ParisRegion War Widows’ Union), about war widows who were unable to live on the 280 francs state pensions and had to take jobs. Unfortunately, many employers replaced them with younger, cheaper workers when the Depression hit. A second article discussed women who had never had the opportunity to marry due to the war, but had found jobs to sustain themselves until the Depression, when many were dismissed for the same reason as war widows were. Although Capy did not provide statistics on the number of women in these two categories, she did report that “more than a third of French production is in women’s hands.”43 In the articles of the late 1920s and 1930s, Capy expressed a more conservative view of women’s roles than in her earlier journalism, or than Séverine ever did. So too did her first novel, Des hommes passèrent (Men move on), winner of the first Séverine prize for pacifist literature.44 After a flood of French war memoirs and novels in the immediate postwar years, there had been only a trickle between 1922 and 1930. Then, in 1930, ten novels on the war were issued. Unlike the earlier publications, these novels were very negative about the war’s impact, especially on ordinary soldiers or poilu. Nine of them dealt with the desperate situation of men in the trenches. Only Capy’s novel was about the impact of war on women on the home front.45 A revisioning of the war also occured in British literature around that time, including several dramatists who “frequently used the war to explore changes in women’s relationship to the family and to their traditional domestic roles, as in G.B. Stern’s plays The Matriarch (1931) and The Man Who Pays the Piper (1931).”46 Capy’s novel most closely resembled We That Were Young (1932), a novel by British pacifist Irene Rathbone that reimagines war narratives by foregrounding women’s war work. But Capy did not base her novel on a diary, as Rathbone did, and she was less positive about the impact on women.47 Les hommes passèrent expressed conventional views about complementary gender relations before the war: “To her, the household, the inner court, the vegetable garden and the orchard – the particular. To men, initiative, direction of work, sale of crops and animals, payment

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of taxes, politics – the general.”48 This nostalgic picture may reflect Capy’s happy childhood in a rural region to which she returned throughout her life. In the novel, as hospitals filled with wounded men back from the front, their wives and mothers worried about how men would provide for them after the war. Here Capy departed from wartime eulogizing of peasant women as self-sacrificing home-front heroines to probe these women’s feelings, such as their fear that they would remain single, “without love in their youth, without sons to help them in their old age.”49 No doubt many readers remembered such anxieties, although by the 1930s, the more common fictional and media expression of concern about women alone focused on urban working-class women.50 The plot of Les hommes passèrent follows Madeleine, an attractive and educated young wife taking charge of the farm when her husband, Sébastien, goes to war. Having avoided contentious claims that allegedly masculine work defeminized women in wartime, when so many commentators expressed alarm about this,51 Capy now acknowledged the difficulties of heavy outdoor labour. Madeleine is exhausted, her face wrinkled, her skin tanned, her clothing tattered. When Sébastien comes home on leave, he does not find her appealing, which humilitates her. Yet she gives him her savings when he asks for money to purchase perks made available to soldiers who had enough money to pay for them. Instead of being grateful, Sébastien takes up with his “godmother,” the wealthy city woman assigned to write and send him packages as a frontline soldier. The psychological portrait of Madeleine is better developed than that of Sébastien. In many respects, the novel resembles a “he did her wrong” story. The prose is not of the same quality as her best reporting or her second novel. Capy described Les hommes passèrent as “the true story of a French village during the war”; reviewers treated it as a regional and pacifist novel about how enemies could get along in wartime because it depicted peasant women whose fathers and husbands had left for the front or been killed in action, working amicably with the German prisoners of war dispatched to help harvest the crops.52 Another interpretation is that long after the Armistice, Capy delved into the costs of women’s war work that she had elided in wartime. In sum, Capy did empathetic in-person reporting, much like her mentor. However, she deviated from Séverine’s position in her increasingly traditional view of women’s sphere. Her take on pacifism also changed in the interwar decades.

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F e m in is m a n d In t e g ral Paci fi s m Although Capy remained close to socialists after leaving La Bataille syndicaliste, she wrote for and edited the pacifist feminist review La Voix des femmes between 1917 and 1919. She also gave speeches on the New Feminism – in her version, a more pacifist and proletarian feminism.53 She followed other socialist feminists in dismissing suffrage – or as they called it, bourgeois – feminism as “a salon game.”54 Her primary commitment was to integral pacifism, despite mounting police pressure. Even before her departure from La Bataille syndicaliste, one of her pacifist talks had been forbidden by the authorities and she had criticized “informers” who reported her remarks critical of the prime minister.55 In 1916, she published her antiwar tract, Une femme dans la melée (A woman in the battle), with a preface by Romain Rolland, who had just put out a tract titled Au-dessus de la mêlée (1915) (Above the Battle, 1916). In the original preface, he praised her as “a woman who dares to avow her horror of war, her pity for the victims, for all the victims.” The military censor removed that clause,56 leaving the following text: “A woman with compassion who dares to avow it.”57 Two of the essays in Une femme dans la melée were completely suppressed. “At the Threshold of the Cathedral,” an essay on the German bombing of the Reims Cathedral (where the kings of France were crowned) was excised because it exposed the shooting of four wounded German soldiers who tried to escape from the burning cathedral and branded the French state’s failure to indict anyone for that “disgusting” and “cowardly” action.58 This essay was one of the reasons the phrase about “her pity for the victims, for all the victims” was deleted from the preface. Her empathy toward enemy soldiers was unusual and unappreciated in wartime. “The War Got Him,” a poignant tale of wounded and disillusioned soldiers returning from the front, was also eliminated.59 Her realistic descriptions of the situation of French soldiers who had been mutilated, disabled, and discouraged during the war was equally unacceptable to censors. Other essays were cut, some drastically. “Ceux qui se battent” (Those who fight) pilloried journalistic and literary representations of war as glorious and the ordinary foot soldiers known as poilus as heroic. In this essay, she denounced much war reporting: “In the press, some who have given themselves the mission to lead the crowd … have imagined that it was necessary to make the people drunk with

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illusions. They declared the truth indecent.” She quoted a poilu at the front who recalled that they felt forgotten and threw away newspapers that made it to the front. Censors excised most of what she wrote about another poilu. Her essay about the injured returning from the front quoted mothers and wives who welcomed them back but despaired about their condition. One told her that “My man left in good health. Only a medal returned.” Capy’s description of what she observed at a hospital on the front was cut so extensively that the remaining text barely makes sense.60 Insofar as this kind of hospital reporting was allowed later in the war, it may have been so radically altered because the attack in question happened in the first months of the war, after German armies had invaded northern France. Her partner during and after the war, Pierre Brizon, was a minority socialist deputy who opposed the union sacrée in support of the war as early as August 1914. Together, they founded and edited a socialist feminist journal, La Vague, in 1918, which reached a circulation of 12,500.61 Among her contributions to La Vague were predictions about an irreversible wave of pacifist working women, including shop girls, teachers, typists, and war widows. Drawing on maternal feminism, she called them “creators of life who want life, indeed only want life.”62 The stress on life came from Rolland. Capy overestimated the wave of pacifism among working women, though she identified a trend among primary school teachers, many of whom would become ardent pacifists by the late 1920s. Their conversion was due to the proselytizing efforts of Hélène Brion and Madeleine Vernet.63 Brion (1882–1962), a nursery school teacher, teachers’ union activist, and pacifist, was tried and convicted for her opposition to war in 1917. Séverine was a character witness at her trial. Although Brion received a suspended sentence, she lost her licence to teach until 1925. She put the time into union and pacifist organizing and founded a review, La Lutte féministe, which lasted for three years.64 Vernet (Madeleine Cavelier, 1878–1949), another teacher, founder of an orphanage, and founder/editor of the long-lived maternal feminist journal La Mère éducatrice (1917–49), was also charged for defeatist propaganda but was never tried. She too was a reporter; she wrote about children in care, education, poverty, and maternity in a socialist organ between 1924 and 1932. In 1927, she formed the Comité international d’action et de propagande pour la paix et le désarmement (International Action and Propaganda Committee for Peace and Disarmament).65

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Within a year of their civil wedding ceremony, during Brizon’s trial for financial mismanagement at the paper, Capy and Brizon separated. Capy felt betrayed and shamed because he had used her name to raise funds and had evicted her from their apartment, which doubled as their office. Brizon blamed the breakup on her increasingly mystical version of pacifism.66 In 1920, she had produced a brochure titled La défense de la vie (The defence of life) wherein she expanded upon her belief that the war had made “new beings” of men and women, that maternal love, which was love of life, would overcome war. Obviously aware of her critics, she denied that this was either superstitious or sentimental.67 Brizon may also have reacted to her focus on women, as other readers did, for she decided that she had to deny, in print, that her position was anti-male and contend that men and women in the working class had to support one another.68 After Brizon seized the subscription list, Capy resolved to “Recommencons!” (begin again) and established La Vague nouvelle. Without the subscription list, it failed after a few months. In the decade after the Great War, twenty-four pacifist feminist groups emerged in France. They varied in their opposition to war, with integral pacifist feminists, who were opposed to any war or violence, being the most radical.69 Capy formed one of the latter groups, called Les amies de la paix (Friends of Peace), which was affiliated with the militantly pacifist Ligue international de femmes pour la paix et la liberté (Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom).70 Not surprisingly, the police kept her under surveillance and reported, on the basis of the fact that she lived with another woman, that she was a lesbian.71 Studies of lesbian Paris do not mention Capy.72 She subsequently became president of the French branch of the Women’s International League and interacted with other national branches of this organization.73 In the early 1920s, Capy embarked on peace crusades and earned the sobriquet peace “apostle” and “pioneer” of pacifism.74 Despite difficulties getting a passport,75 she travelled extensively in North America, Great Britain, and Germany during the early 1920s. Her speeches emphasizing better understanding between former enemies drew audiences of several hundred to two thousand people.76 She shared her experiences abroad in a series in L’Ère nouvelle, the independent socialist newspaper open to pacifists.77 During the same period, she wrote for a Christian feminist monthly, where she elaborated on her increasingly spiritual version of pacifism.78 The spiritual

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turn deviated from Séverine’s more socioeconomic understanding of pacifism. But Capy remained a feminist. In 1925, she published a pamphlet on the rights and duties of women that laid out an impressive series of political, economic, and social reforms: political equality, equal wages, a minimum wage, paid maternity leaves, crèches in all worksites, vacation colonies, sports for all, ending prostitution, and clearing slums. Her arguments for an expanded sphere included familiar ones about women’s contributions to the economy and more recent ones about women’s commitment to life and health. Aside from the argument about the commitment to life, she did not explicitly promote pacifism in the pamphlet.79 Norman Ingram argues that Capy was closer to the men in the new pacifism of the 1930s than to feminist pacifists. She was an active member of the Ligue international de combattants de la paix (International League of Peace Fighters), a group of largely male militants formed in 1931 to fight war unconditionally through popular propaganda, such as spectacles, as well as more traditional means.80 Capy engaged in the more traditional activities: journalism and public speaking. Between 1931 and 1934, she contributed regularly to La Patrie humaine, which was closely associated with the League, about her many speaking engagements in Germany, reassuring readers that there had only been violence at two such engagements.81 She appealed to German mothers and decried their hardships due to the war and the reparations France forced Germany to pay. The critique of reparations was one of her less popular positions. Once again emulating Séverine, she criticized the arms, oil, coal, and iron industries as well as the banks in Germany and France for their resistance to disarmament and promotion of war.82 In 1932, various strands of pacifism disagreed over support for the Cartel des Gauches (a combination of leftist parties) government’s endeavours to obtain disarmament. The differences between La Patrie humaine and Vernet’s International Action and Propaganda Committee for Peace and Disarmament were fairly easily resolved.83 Both Capy and Vernet turned their attention to combatting fascism. As early as 1929, Capy criticized Italian fascism as it manifested itself in France. Perhaps because she was regularly travelling in Germany, she was less critical about national socialism, though she did declare Hitlerian nationalism “an imposing and serious” movement that “big industry” was using to crush German democracy.84 Vernet was more alert to the Nazi threat. Although she had supported the end of the French

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occupation of the Rhineland in 1930 and shown concern for the economic distress in Germany in 1931,85 by 1932 she was warning about the acceptance of national socialism among the youth. She still reported, hopefully, that their demonstrations were less frequent, imposing, and violent.86 Other French pacifists also held out hope for improvement before Hitler’s ascent to power in 1933. In reaction to the fascist demonstrations against the Republic in February 1934, pacifist feminists split over resistance to fascism. In the face of the rise of fascism and national socialism, they disagreed over remaining committed to no war and especially to no armed forces.87 One rupture was between the International League of Women for Peace and Freedom and the newly formed Comité mondiale de femmes contre la guerre et le fascism (World Committee of Women against War and Fascism), which was associated with the Rassemblement mondial contre la guerre et le fascisme (World Rally against War and Fascism) headquartered in Paris. Several pacifist feminist associations, as well as the Communist Party, cooperated in the World Committee. Internationally, the World Committee drew women such as Ellen Wilkinson and Vera Britain (Great Britain) and Anna Lindhagen (Sweden). In France, the World Committee included four journalists profiled in this book: Fanny Clar, Denise Moran, Simone Téry, and Andrée Viollis.88 During the Spanish Civil War, antifascism gathered support, including that of many feminist pacifists who were against war in principle but accepted armed intervention in Spain. The World Committee’s 1934 Manifesto agreed with the League that “war was made in the interests of a handful of arms manufacturers, bankers and large property owners,” and its demands for women’s equality and social reforms resembled those in Capy’s brochure on women’s rights. However, the Committee put more emphasis on combatting “German Fascism” for its attack on social reforms, reactionary views and propaganda about the family, education, the people and the race, and for “its nationalism, chauvinism and racism that pits people against other people and thrusts them into an imperialist war.”89 Subsequently, an internal struggle within the International League between those influenced by Trotsky and those closer to the Communist Party resulted in nearly two-fifths of an estimated two thousand members leaving the organization.90 In this troubled time, Capy joined an antifascist pacifist review, Solidarité internationale antifasciste, where one of her colleagues was so critical of the “République des camarades” (a pejorative term about

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the Republic) that he was convicted of inciting soldiers to disobedience in 1939. Capy was not implicated. She still believed that Hitler and national socialism would pass, and extended her sympathy to the poor of Germany.91 Under the Vichy Regime, she published in a collaborationist pacifist newspaper, where she presented a delusional idea about making a socialist France in Hitler’s Europe. Although she continued to express sympathy for workers, she voiced little concern for Jews.92 Her most serious critic, Simon Epstein, cites Capy for writing in La Voie de la paix (The path of peace) after the war. This integral pacifist journal was founded by two former members of the International League of Peace Fighters, and published pieces by a Frenchman whom Epstein labels a Holocaust denier or negationist. However, Elhanan Yakira, in Post-Zionism, Post-Holocaust, counters that this negationist did not deny that the Holocaust happened, so much as he argued that it was not out of line with other tyrannies in wartime. Yakira does not mention Capy.93 After the Second World War, she openly aligned herself with a kind of spiritualism far removed from the earlier, Christian spiritualism she had espoused.94 Perhaps her early “sensitivity” and two devastating world wars contributed to this endpoint, so distant from her syndicalist starting point? From 1951 to 1956, she wrote for the monthly La Voix de la paix, now the organ of the Comité national française de resistance à la guerre et à l’oppression (French National Committee of Resistance to War and Oppression) of which she was a founding member. There she complained about “humans today” being “dehumanized [and] unfeeling” and called the explosion of the first hydrogen bomb a “universal suicide.”95 More positively, she was a supporter of Albert Einstein and the movement for children’s peace camps.96

C o n c l u s i on This chapter has documented some of the ways that Séverine mentored Marcelle Capy as an example of the first generation helping the second generation survive in this masculine occupation. Like Séverine, Capy did fine research on workers, though her research focused on women workers and eventually encompassed women in the lower middle class. She transcended her initial ideological blinders about workingclass women and some of her class prejudices about bourgeois women. Journalistic research informed her novels, and literary techniques enlivened her reporting. She might have been called a grand reporter,

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save for the standard definition that grand reporters started in war reporting and wrote for mass circulation daily newspapers. This chapter also traced Séverine’s political influence on Capy. Over time, the protégée deviated from her mentor’s position on pacifism. Capy is one of the many women of the second generation who pursued political goals at some cost to their pursuit of journalism.

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3 Mother and Daughter 2: Colette and Beaumont, 1910–1940

This chapter examines the life and work of two exemplars of the second and third generations of women journalists in the years they were employed at Le Matin. Colette (née Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, 1873–1954) was hired as a literary columnist in 1910, promoted to literary editor in 1912 and left the daily in 1924. (See Figure 3.1.) Germaine Beaumont (née Germaine Battendier, 1890–1983) began as a secretary to Colette in 1918, authored a women’s column from 1920 through 1925 and then edited the women’s and magazine pages until 1940. (See Figure 3.2.) Both Colette and Beaumont were columnists rather than reporters.1 They were also novelists, a combination that was not unusual in France, having persisted there long after it declined elsewhere.2 In Colette’s lifetime, she was more famous than Beaumont, and since her death, many scholars and colloquia have probed her life and oeuvre.3 As well as authoring fifty novels and novellas, Colette was the first woman to be president of the prestigious Académie Goncourt and the recipient of many other honours, including a state funeral. Although ten collections of her journalism have appeared, scholars have only begun to analyze her journalism as a distinct form of expression.4 Beaumont attracted less scholarly interest in her lifetime and most of that came after the Second World War, when she was feted as editor of a series of mystery novels, producer of a radio mystery series, and wrote prefaces to and translated English murder mysteries and Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary.5 The author of twenty novels between 1930 and 1981, she was sufficiently well regarded to be a long-term member of the jury for the Prix Femina, one of France’s top literary prizes, and to be named to the Légion d’honneur (Legion

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Figure 3.1  Colette (1873–1954), writer and journalist at a desk in her flat, 9 rue de Beaujolais, where she lived between 1928 and 1930.

of Honour). Her novels and substantial newspaper columns have been scrutinized by Hélène Fau, who has reissued some of Beaumont’s writings.6 Other than Fau’s work, there has been no scholarship on Beaumont’s literary or journalistic work. Laid out this succinctly, pairing these two authors may seem unfair, but a more detailed examination of their writing lives identifies several instructive commonalities. One was their newspaper work. Like many fiction writers, they supported themselves by writing for daily newspapers for several years. Colette was frank about working for newspapers to earn a steady income.7 Beaumont, a more private person, did not publicly acknowledge any pecuniary motives, but she did not leave Le Matin until she signed a multi-book contract with Plon Éditions. Both considered writing their métier and used the regular exercise of journalistic writing to perfect their craft, particularly when they worked at Le Matin. During their tenure, each of them realized her writing potential. Both wrote for a variety of periodicals, including women’s and fashion magazines and business media.8 Other commonalities derive from their gender. As women in maledominated occupations, they had to cope with a public image of

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Figure 3.2  Germaine Beaumont (1890–1983), writer and journalist, reading a book.

authors and journalists as masculine. This public perception reflected the historical legacy and low number of women in journalism described in the introduction and chapter 1. But there were variations. The first section of this chapter demonstrates that their gender did not prevent them from being hired or from advancing at Le Matin, but it did affect their assignments and signing practices. The section entitled “Mothers and Mentors” details how Colette mentored her younger colleague and Beaumont reciprocated with gratitude. Finally, “Feminine Protagonists and Perspectives” shows how their decisions to write about feminine subjects from a modern woman’s point of view impacted their reception and reputations.

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G e n d e r , F a m il ie s , a nd S i gnatures The gendered nature of newspaper journalism helps explain why Colette, Beaumont, and many women of the second and third generations entered journalism through family connections and why few of them were reporters. Subtler analysis is necessary to understand Colette and Beaumont’s attitudes toward their start in journalism and fiction, their families’ contributions to their writing careers, and their signing practices. Born in 1873, Gabrielle Colette was a generation older than Germaine Beaumont. When Colette was hired by Le Matin at the age of thirty-seven – not an unusual age for women of the second generation to enter national newspapers – she had been writing freelance musical and theatre reviews for monthlies, weeklies, and a handful of daily newspapers for more than a decade. In 1908, she published the first collection of her journalistic pieces, Les vrilles de la vigne (Tendrils of the Vine). After this, she was occasionally called a “woman of letters.” Julia Kristeva’s biography of Colette characterizes Les vrilles de la vigne as a “kaleidoscope of fragments” written in “a sparkling, succinct style” that enriched her fictional output.9 Of course, this brief, fragmentary and lively style also appealed to newspaper readers. This book evoked the earliest public recognition of Colette’s literary status, though it would take more than a decade to consolidate her standing among the literati. Two novels published while she worked at Le Matin, Mitsou (1919) and Chéri (1920), solidified her literary reputation, though her work was still measured against the corpus of “women’s literature,” not simply literature.10 Many of Colette’s fin-de-siècle musical and theatre reviews were co-signed and/or corrected by her first husband, Henry GauthierVillars, an established cultural reviewer.11 Four of her novels, known as the Claudine novels, had been written while confined to a den by her husband, who published her and other ghost writers’ novels under his pen name Willy. Other husbands helped their wives get a position in newspapers; none of the husbands of women profiled in this book were as exploitive of their wife’s talent as Gauthier-Villars. Yet Willy did introduce her to writing, both journalistic and fictional. Like the marriages of other women in this book, her marriage foundered. After four years of separation, she and Willy divorced in 1910, shortly before she joined Le Matin. Subsequently, Colette insisted upon reissuing the Claudines and her other early works under her name alone. Generally, she denied Willy’s role in her coming to writing.

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Marriage to an older and unscrupulous man at barely twenty years of age, exploitation by that man, and humiliation over his blatant serial infidelity account for Colette’s denial of Willy’s contribution to her career. On the other side of the equation, this disastrous marriage gave birth, later in her writing life, to a series of novels and films about young women who were not powerless in relationships with older men. In effect, Colette rewrote the narrative of her early life, giving young female characters agency. Her Claudine novels are integral to the twentieth-century trend to allow girls and young women characters some control over their fates. Beaumont was one of the first to identify this trend in a literary review.12 Some of Beaumont’s novels were part of this trend. Late in 1910, Colette was hired to work on Le Matin’s weekly column, “A Thousand and One Tales.” The column consisted of a distilled short story or vignette, some written by Colette, others by authors who submitted work to the column. The twelve-page limit on the length of the text imposed by this column shaped some of Colette’s fiction. For instance, each installment in La femme cachée (The hidden woman), published just after Colette left the paper, was exactly twelve pages long.13 Colette’s comfort with the limits of journalistic writing distinguishes her from her nineteenth-century predecessor, George Sand, who chafed at journalistic constraints. Colette’s first five contributions to Le Matin were not signed. Clearly, she had difficulties signing her work, but not for the same reason that earlier generations of women had used pen names. In France, the practice of attribution was established by the early twentieth century.14 Her reticence now was due to her scandalous reputation. Since leaving Willy, she had been flamboyantly part of Paris Lesbos (a term for the community of lesbians in the capital), involved in a scandal about a passionate on-stage kiss with one of her lesbian lovers, and toured France with a theatre troupe as a mime wearing revealing costumes. Adding to the publicity, she had published an autobiographical novel, La vagabonde (The Vagabond), about her barely disguised experiences on that tour.15 Patricia Tilburg argues that La vagabonde presented the music hall not only as “a space of social liberation” but as a site of the bourgeois republican values of work and personal hygiene.16 Tilburg persuasively demonstrates Colette’s belief in the values of work and hygiene and her intention to improve the reputation of theatrical performances, but contemporary readers and critics responded more to the message about freedom from conventional marriage and domesticity. Those

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who read the 1913 sequel, L’entrave (The shackle) learned that that the protagonist ultimately renounced vagabondage for a more familiar marital and domestic role. Melanie Collado contends that Colette, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, and Marcelle Tinayre (all novelists engaged in journalism) who featured emancipated heroines continued to be attracted to the domestic feminine ideal.17 These prewar novels reflected the interest in and the anxiety about the “new woman,” specifically about her likelihood to marry and procreate, in the belle époque climate of concerns about depopulation and degeneration.18 They anticipated postwar novelists – male and female – who crafted cautionary tales about the modern, meaning emancipated, women who eventually settled down to marriage and motherhood. This literary fad responded to postwar angst about depopulation due to the large number of single women with little opportunity to marry and fulfill their reproductive role.19 Given the insouciant style of Colette’s contributions to “A Thousand and One Tales,” many readers realized who she was. Soon she signed her work as Colette Willy and by 1913, she dropped Willy. Henceforth the column was signed Colette. In 1912, she married the publisher of Le Matin, Henry de Jouvenel, and after the death of the previous editor of “A Thousand and One Tales,” she took over as editor of the column. After her second marriage ended in a bitter divorce in 1924 – both spouses had cheated, Colette with her own stepson! – she ceased writing for the paper. But she wrote for the press to the end of her life in 1954. In 1919, when Beaumont entered Le Matin, she was twenty-nine years old, younger than most in the second generation but a little older than many of the third generation of women reporters. She was about to be divorced, but she was not as experienced a writer as Colette had been when she was hired. Beaumont had one autobiographical novel on her résumé, a serial in L’Oeuvre, a daily with a respectable circulation of 125,000 in 1917 and 135,000 in 1919.20 L’Oeuvre was founded in 1904 by Gustave Téry, ex-husband of Andrée Téry. He had written for L’Action and other anticlerical journals and been an editor at two of the big national dailies, and he attracted good authors to his paper.21 One such author, Annie de Pène (pseudonym for Désirée Poutrel), was the literary director of L’Oeuvre, his lover, and Beaumont’s mother. Later in her life, Beaumont did not claim her first serial (and was almost as silent about subsequent ones) or tell anyone how much her mother, who had published seven novels

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under the pseudonym Annie de Pène, helped her write her first serial novel. After Beaumont’s mother’s death in 1918, Gustave Téry suggested Germaine might replace her mother in some of her functions at the paper and asked Germaine to submit an essay on a subject of her choosing so that he could assess its suitability for publication in the paper. He rejected her essay and told her she had no talent but hired her to distribute mail and perform other clerical duties. This must have been discouraging, because an article on journalism by Gustave Téry, which she read in her childhood, had set her on the path toward a career in journalism.22 She also missed the opportunity to write for a newspaper that employed other women at that time.23 But the rebuff was a blessing in disguise, insofar as Beaumont was free to seek employment at Le Matin, a more prestigious paper with a more congenial editor. Initially, Germaine was respectful of her mother’s role in her writing life. She signed her first column called “Le petit courrier des femmes” (Women’s correspondence) at Le Matin with the same pseudonym, Rosine, as her mother had used at a moderate feminist weekly, La Femme de France. She also used Rosine for the successor column to “Women’s Correspondence.” Rosine was a common first name for women’s columnists and was also a fashion type in advertising in the 1920s.24 Germaine placed short stories and feuilletons in La Femme de France for years after her mother’s death, but under her own name. When Germaine began editing “Le page magazine” (the magazine page) in 1926, she signed her name to her contributions to the page. She did the same when she took over a long-standing front-page column called “Propos d’un Parisien” in 1940 and changed its title to “Propos d’une Parisienne.” In one interview, Beaumont publicly conceded that it was “important that I belonged to a family that … included a major journalist, a bibliophile, [male relatives] and the charming writer who was my mother.” She further acknowledged that her literary vocation “was born with her [mother].” When the interviewer asked about her mother’s influence on her work, however, she responded tersely that they were interested in similar subjects.25 Presumably she meant women as subjects, since her mother often wrote about women coping with a betrayal of romantic or married love, while Beaumont primarily published mysteries in which romantic love played little role. Her biographer, Hélène Fau, draws the obvious conclusion: Beaumont struggled with her literary parentage. Other female novelists also

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expressed discomfort with maternal influences.26 So did female journalists, although they complained about maternal resistance to their pursuing an occupation that thrust them into the public realm. This was not the reason for Beaumont’s reticence about her mother’s contributions to her work. Germaine’s ambivalence about her mother’s writing career arose from the fact that her mother had left her husband and young children, including eight-year-old Germaine, to pursue her ambitions in Paris without giving her children any explanation. In the divorce, Pène lost custody of her children as well as visiting rights. Only thirteen years later, in an semi-autobiographical novella, L’evadée (The escapee), did she offer a public explanation: “I was no longer a lazy and useless bourgeois lady; I was going to create an intelligent, working life, earning a living.” The protagonist, whose first name was Rosine, finds work in a monthly review and ultimately writes for dailies.27 Despite Germaine’s sympathy with her mother’s aspirations and career choice, she clearly had conflicted feelings about her mother’s decision to leave her as a child. Although she resembled her mother in her pursuit of a career in letters and she married twice, she never had children and rarely wrote about children, as opposed to young women. She maintained good relations with the lesbian circle around Natalie Barney, the American exile living in Paris, and won that circle’s Prix Renée Vivien several times. Beaumont also minimized her mother’s role in her writing career because her oeuvre was not as brilliant as that of Beaumont’s mentor, Colette. Annie de Pène, a long-time friend of Colette, sent her daughter to Colette with a letter, and Colette welcomed her into her home. Shortly after Pène died in the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, Colette hired Beaumont as her secretary. Germaine watched Colette as she modelled good work practices in that office and in the home. Later, Germaine paid tribute to “the regularity of her work hours, the order that reigned in her office, and the care with which she read the stories that it was her job to choose for ‘A Thousand and One Mornings.’” She further observed that Colette’s work as a literary editor did not relieve her from household duties.28 Colette gave Germaine’s career a boost by including some of Germaine’s stories in her popular column.29 More decisively, she introduced Germaine to her (Colette’s) second husband, the publisher of Le Matin, who hired Germaine as Colette’s secretary and soon tasked her with a new column, “Le petit courrier des femmes” (Women’s Correspondence), to run on the second

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page of the daily two times a week. In creating a women’s column, he was in line with many editors seeking to rebuild readership after the difficult war years. As the title of the column suggests, it took the form of advice in response to readers’ questions, which was a familiar type of women’s column. The popularity of her column led to her appointment as editor of the women’s page, and her editorial competence led to editorship of the magazine page. Her advancement from the women’s page to more prestigious duties was unique among the twenty careers examined in this book.

M o t h e rs a n d Mentors Every year Beaumont placed a feuilleton in Le Matin.30 Her first, the story of a young woman in a bad marriage, was so popular that it astonished the newspaper director “that one might keep a reader in suspense without the heroine being tied on the rails with an express train arriving in five minutes.”31 Readers wrote en masse to the editor to ask for another serial novel, which resulted in an order for a second serial, which was equally popular.32 After a serial version in the paper, she published her first successful book, Piège (Trap), in 1930. Two years later, Colette published Ces plaisirs, subsequently republished and translated as The Pure and the Impure.33 Both novels dealt openly with sexual transgressions such as homosexuality and transvestism. Piège won a national literary prize, but The Pure and the Impure, a series of interconnected vignettes, is the text that is still taught. Over a decade after Colette had definitively arrived, during her Le Matin stint, Beaumont attained the status of a literary figure, if not quite a woman of letters, as Colette did during her tenure at Le Matin. In the six years Colette and Beaumont worked together (1918–24), the mentor became the literary mother. Colette began to call Germaine “her chosen daughter.”34 (Colette’s relations with her biological daughter Colette de Jouvenel were distant and tense because Colette the elder rarely saw Colette the younger except in the summer, because neither was able to express affection, and because the daughter disappointed the mother.35) For many years, Germaine joined Colette every summer in her vacation home, where Colette gave her advice about writing such as eliminating the superficial, and imparted life lessons like subordinating pleasure to work. In an apparently innocuous but actually very revealing remark, Germaine told readers that Colette taught her the names of flowers “because she shared with my mother

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a botanical science applied to rustic species that she encountered along roads, on embankments, on stream beds.”36 Colette’s collected writings on flowers and gardens include pieces from Le Matin; flowers also feature in Germaine’s novels and columns.37 In short, the literary mother taught Germaine things her biological mother might have but did not teach her. Beaumont fully and repeatedly recognized Colette’s assistance. When she became a successful novelist, she dedicated two of her novels, La roue d’ìnfortuné and Silsauve, to Colette. To the former dedication, she added, “who placed a star upon my head.” In the second, she wrote, “to whom I owe everything.”38 Other members of her generation of women in the dailies were less fulsome in their praise but they too publicly thanked their mentors, both male and female.

F e m in in e P ro tag o n is t s and Perspecti ves Even though Colette and Beaumont’s subgenres and styles diverged, they both addressed women’s topics in their journalism and chose women as principal characters in their fiction. More unusually, they endowed their characters with agency. Because of this modern feminine focus, they earned less public acclaim in their lifetimes, although Colette did win national popular and critical acclaim in the decade before her death in 1954, largely due to her uplifting writing during the German Occupation. Colette was not hired as reporter, but articles she placed in other newspapers allowed her to report. On several occasions, she used her personal experiences as a springboard for reporting and reflecting on these and other feminine experiences. In a prewar article, she was prompted by an automobile accident involving her and a young woman, both taking driving lessons, to comment on men’s fears about women being bad drivers. She perceived that these fears masked a general apprehension about the expanding arena of women’s activities. Going beyond commentary, she checked the number of the daily accidents involving women drivers and found that there were hardly any. On the contrary, she claimed that women drivers brought to driving “very feminine virtues: mastery of the quick look, calculation of distances,” and so on.39 In 1912, she happened upon a police incident involving a street gang killing. In the belle époque, French readers were fascinated with the violence of street gangs, whose members they called “Apaches.”40 Colette did not have the opportunity to view

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or describe the scene. With “all the brutality of a shopper at a department store on sale days and the fawning politeness of feeble creatures,” she elbowed her way through the crowd gathered at the scene and asked a policeman to let her get closer to the action. When he refused, she complained about gender discrimination, saying that the police let men in but denied “everybody in a skirt.”41 In her early reporting, Colette also addressed some formal political issues in her own ironic manner. She attended a few sessions of the Chambre des députés (Chamber of Deputies) and slammed several prominent orators, including the well-regarded leader of the Socialist Party, Jean Jaurès, whose speaking style she described as “vomiting words.” She was droll about the suffragists she observed at a congress, starting by saying that she admired “their impressive number, their beauty … but I wonder what they are doing here.” When they gathered in an antechamber to wait for the vote count, she described them as “sardines stuffed alive into a can.” When they noisily complained about the count, she wondered why. The article ended with the disingenuous claim that they lacked “a charm that they disdain, yet is very feminine, made up of incompetence, embarrassment, silence.”42 Her court reporting did not conform to the prevailing style of court reporting, classified as melodramatic in France or as the “sob sister” or weepy approach to trials found in American newspapers.43 In 1912, Colette went to Tours for a sensational trial of a married woman and her male lover who were charged with killing the woman’s husband. Other reporters submitted the predictable text; Colette did not. She began by saying it was a trial of a man accused of murder and a woman accused of having been loved. Like the Fronde reporters who attended the Dreyfus Affair trials, Colette described the setting and atmosphere in the courtroom, which she found quite theatrical. Unlike her predecessors, she criticized other court reporters: “These gentlemen of the judicial press, overflowing with joviality, coming out with sardonic prognoses.” But she was impressed with the widow at the heart of the case, calling her “a strong, irritable, intelligent … coquette” who was happy to have inspired love.44 After Colette’s death in 1954, Beaumont paid tribute to her habit of describing court audiences and secondary characters such as witnesses. She lauded “her marvellous ability to notice, in a human being, what escaped other observers. I think that I am correct in saying that the series of articles on trials will remain a model in this difficult genre.”45 Anne Freadman, who has studied Colette’s early journalism,

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agrees that observations of secondary participants, notably women witnesses, without imputing motives or drawing conclusions, distinguish her trial reporting. Freadman extends the argument to Colette’s attentiveness to the crowd at other public events, including sports meets.46 In this, Colette had successors. Some of the women who reported on the trials of wives killing or inveigling lovers to murder husbands – a troubling phenomenon after the massive loss of men during the Great War – adopted Colette’s dispassionate approach, eschewing emotive rhetoric, while male reporters expressed more outrage.47 Because dailies had to reduce the length of their issues during the war and Colette freelanced then, some of her best pieces from those years appeared in other periodicals. Her observations of the injuries to soldiers in the trenches and the collateral damage to family members on the home front were published during and shortly after the war, and many were included in a posthumous publication.48 Instead of speculating about the strategy, tactics or heroism of warfare (and speculation was the only option, given the war ministry’s control over reporting on the front), she focused on the human costs of war. She had direct experience of those costs because she had turned her country house into a hospital for wounded soldiers, which gave her some insight into the suffering associated with trench warfare. Colette’s attentiveness to the suffering as opposed to the successes of wartime (reports of failures were censored) presaged the approach of Andrée Viollis and other women, even the American and British women who finally got to the front during the Second World War.49 Cultural studies scholars who examine Anglo-Saxon journalism have identified the empathetic approach as a distinctly feminine characteristic. Liesbet van Zoonen identified different journalistic styles in male and female reporters, with men emphasizing fact and sensationalism, while women stressed compassion and consequences. Stuart Allan suggests that these distinctions operate to privilege male reporters as more truthful and serious.50 In the material I read for this book, the same gendered approach was present in the French daily press and in their readers’ reactions. Colette covered “feminine” subjects such as fashion in Le Matin, which was unusual for columnists outside the women’s pages. Some of her coverage reflected feminist hygienic criticism of women’s underwear and garments as too constricting and debilitating. A 1913 article titled “Le martyrologie” (martyrology) on “the traits of feminine

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heroism … endurance, sadism, humility,” targeted head-hugging cloche hats that hindered circulation and made the wearer nauseous; high heels that hurt and deformed the feet, and corsets so tightly laced that they inhibited breathing and caused constipation.” But she did not criticize dressmakers, corset makers, or ladies’ wear saleswomen; quite the contrary, she paid tribute to the “feminine dignity” of those women among them who left husbands who beat them – a subject rarely discussed in newspapers at that time!51 After she published Cheri to great acclaim, she was asked to write articles on haute couture and attend the seasonal collections. Although she still criticized cumbersome or excessive styles as “unhealthy” or “frivolous,” she was favourably impressed by the collections; she reported that they were a mix of beautiful clothing and orderly display, which, in her opinion, made them “art, not fantasy.”52 Most of her postwar fashion commentary appeared in society magazines such as Vogue (December 1924–December 1925). She welcomed the lower, looser waistline of the garçonne look, but expressed concern about the “flat, geometric” silhouette, which suppressed the “smooth curves, assertive breasts, and succulent hips” of the female body. As in her earlier coverage of fashion, she did not confine herself to surface appearance and reported on the models’ poor working conditions and pay scales.53 At twenty to thirty lines apiece, Beaumont’s “Women’s Correspondence” was a shorter column than “A Thousand and One Mornings.” The space allotted offered no scope for reporting, short stories, or reflective essays, but allowed Beaumont to take stands on a variety of women’s issues. Announcing the addition of her column to the paper, the editor explained that it was introduced in response to the French Senate rejection of a bill in favour of women’s suffrage – a setback that helped delay the vote for women until 1945. He continued that the Senate “could not take from them the right to have new, practical and interesting ideas on all sorts of things.”54 In the four years of the column, Beaumont covered feminism along with conventional women’s page topics such as fashion. Culling reports from press agencies, she regularly mentioned feminist political successes abroad and commented that France trailed other advanced countries.55 She used her column to advocate feminist changes in the French Civil Code for married women.56 This kind of topical approach resembled that of Andrée Viollis, as described in chapter 1, but Beaumont was a maternal feminist who used her columns to reassure readers that feminism would not mean the end of marriage and maternity.57 Because she

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often moderated radical egalitarian proposals, she did not alienate many readers. This kind of moderation conformed to the reformist trend in interwar feminism, when ongoing campaigns for the vote and other egalitarian measures gained little purchase.58 The “Women’s Correspondence” column was sympathetic toward single and working-class women who were coping with postwar devastation; Beaumont devoted the most ink to the plight of single working women in the difficult postwar housing and job market. When correspondents wrote about their difficulties finding adequate housing, jobs, or opportunities to socialize, Beaumont endorsed proposals to allow women to get mortgages, to establish women’s industries, and to form working women’s clubs.59 She went against the interests of many readers when she responded to correspondents who complained about the dearth of domestics and the high wages they expected after the war by suggesting legal limits on working hours, a minimum wage that included domestics, and amelioration of working conditions.60 These suggestions were definitely not what her correspondents had in mind. Her positive attitude toward peasant and working-class women, and toward women in occupations that were coded masculine, was more fully expressed in the survey of French women that she conducted and published in a magazine format in 1935. Immediately after the Great War, the field of vocational guidance tackled the subject of women’s employment, citing the older concern about the increasing number of women working outside the home but now focusing more on the number of bourgeois women having to find employment, given the impact of the war on their family’s wealth and hence their chances of a dowry. Mary-Louise Roberts has called attention to a contradictory attitude in this career guidance movement: it was open to new occupations for women, but directed most of them to appropriately feminine occupations such as nursing and discouraged them from demanding male occupations like medicine, unless they were single. Another tactic was to divide masculine occupations into those suitable only for men, and those suitable for men and single women. Journalism was either ignored or placed in the category of an occupation suitable for both sexes.61 By the 1930s, there were more positive works on masculine careers open to women, ranging from engineering to journalism.62 As the issue was taken up in the press, many addressed the impact of the 1924 changes in the curriculum of girls’ secondary school to prepare them for the baccalaureate. Specifically, journalists

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worried about the large number of graduates applying for a very small number of positions and the growing number of these graduates unable to find appropriate employment.63 Beaumont’s contribution to the mounting literature on women’s occupational opportunities was surveying actual working conditions for peasant, working-class, and bourgeois women, providing information on wages or salaries and enlivening this approach with stories about individual women in many occupations. Like Séverine and Durand before her, and like other women to be introduced in subsequent chapters, Beaumont actively promoted careers in journalism. She was optimistic about the opportunities for women in journalism, which she labelled a “modern métier.” She reported that journalism “utilized many feminine competencies, whether in the reporting or the administrative services.” More realistically, she admitted that periodicals “destined for women have editorial and administrative services composed almost entirely of women. Publicity has also opened its doors to women with a baccalaureate.”64 Beaumont was more ambivalent about the clothing and lifestyles of the “modern woman” than Colette was. In the introduction to the “Women’s Correspondence” column, the editor promised readers that the column would “treat feminine life” from the point of view of “the woman of today.” The topics to be covered included women’s sports (considered modern) but not women’s paid employment (too modern?) as opposed to their volunteer work (less traditional than in AngloSaxon countries). This qualified modernism meshed with the advertising images of women in Le Matin and several other newspapers, an image of women with modern appliances to assist her in her traditional domestic role, now to be accomplished without domestic servants.65 Beaumont handled the mixed mandate by expressing limited support for the modern. She approved of the shocking new phenomenon of single women wearing makeup, if it was discreet, and the equally disturbing trend of women participating in sports, if the sports were ladylike individual ones, such as tennis, not contact or team sports.66 She wrote little about gymnastics, one of the newly acceptable physical pursuits for women that Colette practised enthusiastically. Beaumont made fun of the short hair, or bobs, that incited so much cultural outcry about women looking like men and, at least in the opinion of some male critics, virtually becoming men in the early 1920s. Colette had shorn her famously long braids as early as 1902. Beaumont initially criticized the equally contentious garçonne style,

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including features that Colette praised.67 Although Beaumont was ultimately reconciled to the straight silhouette, she remained skeptical about radical changes in women’s clothing and any extreme or impractical features of new styles. Her initial skepticism followed by acceptance resembled the approach taken by many women’s columnists, especially in the dailies. Likely because of her moderate feminism, Beaumont’s column promoted more circumspect clothing and lifestyles than Colette’s columns did. This circumspection surely reflected the preferences of her editors and readers, but also mirrored her personal lifestyle. Unlike Colette, she did not engage in public displays of affection or semi-nudity; nor did she share her romantic affairs with readers. Beaumont wrote for and edited Le Matin’s women’s and magazines pages until 1940. When she placed stories and essays in the daily, they were assigned to “A Thousand and One Mornings” or the magazine page (where the literary column and Germaine had relocated).68 After a two-year stint as a fashion columnist on the weekly Les Nouvelles littéraires, she wrote longer essays for a column called “Disques” from 1925 through 1935. Selections of these essays were published in collections, first in the 1930s and again in 2005. The first edition won another national literary award. These essays are more substantial than her columns, and many resemble essays in Colette’s “A Thousand and One Mornings.” One of them compared the representation of single women in literature to the treatment of “the good negro” in literature. The same essay complained that a woman without a man was suspected of having designs on men or of being prey to gigolos. But, she continued, literature failed to notice that a single woman could dress for her own pleasure, go where she chose, and read in bed all day without having to account for her activities or idleness to a husband. Recognizing that literature needed a victim type, she cheekily proposed that fiction writers depict married women as victims.69 The observations on the single life represent her personal satisfaction with single life after her second marriage ended; the proposal about married women echoes her and her mother’s experience of marriage. Beaumont’s early life affected her fiction more obviously than her journalism. Ten of her twenty novels involved mothers who failed or deserted their daughters; in the words of her biographer, she was “infinitely reconstituting the original abandonment scene.”70 In an interview for a series of articles on women writers, she answered the question, “What brought you to writing?” with this poignant

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statement: “The sentiment of being alone in life. Literature, for me, is life.”71 Many of her protagonists are single women; others are wives without spousal or family support. They are not “modern women” in the 1920s sense of the term, which is to say, urban, employed, and mobile. Nor are her novels’ geographical settings and protagonists typical of French crime fiction, though her interest in past injustices does conform to a larger pattern.72 She set most of her stories in relatively isolated rural homes or provincial towns and wrote about timeless situations involving petty bourgeois women who did not have opportunities for employment or independence from husband and family. But these female protagonists are not passive; they cope with situations that seem ominous. Several novels hint of crimes or malfeasance in the past that foretell danger in the present. These plots follow the protagonists as they untangle what happened in the past and learn that they are more capable than they had thought. Usually the heroine escapes the prison of the past and is better able to handle the present. Except for the gender of the protagonists, this kind of novel fits the classic puzzle or enigma mystery plotline popularized in France by translations of Edgar Allen Poe. In a review of Beaumont’s novels, Colette described them as “police procedurals without cops, mysterious and literary.” Another reviewer contended that Beaumont had invented a genre “tied to the psychological novel.”73 Explorations of isolation and vulnerability in the heroine’s psyche bore little resemblance to the newly popular romans noirs, with contemporary private eyes who dealt with urban crimes in a violent or at least action-packed way.74 Well into the 1990s, private eyes in French crime literature were men, and the only response to feminist criticism of the genre was to introduce female assistants to male detectives.75 Both these authors used their pen to probe and understand women’s lives, including their own lives. Feminine preoccupations such as cosmetics, fashion, and corsets, which many commentators dismissed as frivolous, and desire and agency in female characters, which many critics deemed improper or imaginary, help explain the late recognition of Colette and Beaumont. Beaumont faced other hurdles. During her lifetime, the genre of mystery novels was not considered literary enough for scholarly attention. When scholars did study the genre after her death, they focused on romans noirs, whose hard-nosed detectives and gritty urban settings differed radically from Beaumont’s petty bourgeois women in villages and towns unravelling a personal or family enigma.76

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C o n c l u s ion Despite Colette’s unique literary genius, this chapter has demonstrated that comparing her journalism and literature to those of another woman with a similar, if not as brilliant, career yields some useful observations about families of origin, mentorship by other women, and the reception given authors and journalists who wrote about feminine subjects from a modern point of view. Colette, a member of the second generation of women in the masculine world of newspaper journalism, helped the career of Germaine Beaumont, a member of the third generation of women. Other successful members of the second generation helped younger colleagues, mainly by creating positions for them on the women’s pages and encouraging them to cover more “serious,” meaning general political and economic, topics there.77 Like Beaumont, these third-generation journalists publicly acknowledged their female mentors’ assistance. Finally, in posing the old question of how a “feminine” subject matter and a feminine standpoint hinder literary and journalistic recognition, this chapter suggests that exceptional feminine writers and journalists such as Colette could transcend the condescension of the literary and journalistic cognoscenti with little concession to mainstream criticism. It also suggests that less transcendent writers, such as Beaumont, can be sidelined in their lifetime, especially if they choose to write about women in resolutely macho genres. Hopefully, these writers will get posthumous recognition as more scholars recognize their literary contributions.

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4 Family Business: Andrée, Gustave, and Simone Téry, 1890s–1940

This chapter profiles two other exemplars of second- and third-­ generation Frenchwomen in reporting. It unravels the complicated relations in a family of journalists to understand whether the adoptive mother–daughter mentoring of Colette and Beaumont existed between a biological mother and daughter and, in this case, between a biological father and daughter. After introducing the Téry family, the second and third sections examine how family ties, specifically their parents’ occupations, class, and educational standards, helped both mother Andrée and daughter Simone access and succeed in journalism. The fourth and fifth sections compare the two women’s entry into journalism, their literary output, and how it was reflected in their reporting. Foreign reporting and political activism are the subjects of the final two sections. All these sections show a pattern of independence and mutual support that resembles feminist co-mentoring, in which mother and daughter interact and change in relation to one another and to events.1 These sections also reveal how busy these women and their colleagues were, suggesting that they prioritized political activism over forming a women’s press club.

T h r e e J o u rnali s ts Three members of the Téry family were journalists and authors in the first half of the twentieth century, with the mother becoming the most famous and the father an editor. How did this family background affect their daughter Simone’s choice of a career and in the practice of journalism? Andrée Téry (1870–1950), who became Andrée Viollis, was the best-known member of the second generation of women reporting.

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Figure 4.1  Andrée (Téry) Viollis (1870–1950), journalist and writer, at her desk.

(See Figure 4.1.) As such, she has been the subject of two fine biographies that have informed this chapter.2 She was one of only six Frenchwomen participating in the golden age of investigative journalism, which was also known as grand reporting.3 During this period, writers of the stature of André Gide and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry tried their hand at a vocation combining travel, adventure, and political engagement. Most of the grand reporters also published several books about their investigations.

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Figure 4.2  Simone Téry (1897–1957), journalist and writer, ca. 1930.

Of the six Frenchwomen recognized as grand reporters, Viollis travelled the most, conducting inquiries in Russia, Afghanistan, India, Indochina, China, Japan, and Tunisia in the 1920s and 1930s. She also had the largest readership, because her byline ran for more than a decade on the front pages of Le Petit Parisien, with a circulation of around 1.5 million between 1924 and 1934.4 She published nine edited collections of her overseas investigations between 1924 and 1938 and a tenth one in 1948. In 1933, she won a political reporting prize for her exposé of Japanese militarism and for the entire body of her work, awarded by L’Europe nouvelle, the weekly review of foreign policy founded and edited by Louise Weiss (1893– 1983), one of the other Frenchwoman doing international reporting.5 After that, male and female colleagues recognized Andrée as a leading foreign affairs reporter and hailed her as the successor to Séverine.6

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Andrée was married to two journalists, who, like many journalists, had other occupations. In 1895, she wed Gustave Téry (1870–1928), a teacher who became a journalist. After this marriage ended in divorce in 1901, Gustave added poetry, playwriting, and editing a newspaper to his accomplishments. From 1904 until his death in 1928, Gustave ran L’Oeuvre, an independent socialist monthly that he converted first into a weekly and in 1915 into a daily. In the next four years, the circulation rose from 55,000 to 135,000.7 Late in 1904, Andrée wed Henri d’Ardenne de Tizac (1877–1932), a sinologue and curator of the Musée Cernuschi as well as a novelist with the nom de plume Jean Viollis. Thereafter, she signed her written work Viollis. The second marriage lasted until his death in 1932. She had two daughters in each marriage; the first two were born in 1896 and 1897; the other two in 1909 and 1911. Her second daughter, Simone Téry (1897–1957), became an investigative reporter. (See Figure 4.2.) It must have been daunting to follow in her parents’ footsteps and be in their shadow. She did not have a byline at a major informational daily like her mother; nor did she become an editor like her father. She initially wrote for a variety of smaller, left-wing dailies, notably L’Oeuvre, whose circulation had grown to 230,000 in 1936.8 From 1936 to 1939, she was employed at Communist Party organs L’Humanité and its newer and more popular partner Ce Soir, which ran shorter articles and more photos. These two dailies had the fourth- and sixth-largest daily circulation at that time.9 Simone published four edited collections of her foreign inquiries, a number that pales only beside the collected works of her mother and a handful of other grand reporters. She never won a prize for her journalism but was awarded the third Prix Séverine for one of her plays the same year as her mother won the sixth Europe nouvelle prize.10

P a r e n ta l In f l uence? In a short autobiographical piece, Simone answered the question of how she became a journalist: “I was born … in printers’ ink.”11 Others spoke of her being “born under the sign of journalism.”12 Clearly, her socialization into journalism began young, in her parents’ home and her father’s newsroom. This kind of socialization was unusual for women entering journalism, though many male journalists followed in their fathers’ footsteps.13 But neither parent nor the daughter left

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much testimony about how Gustave’s editorial duties or Andrée’s brilliant career affected the daughter’s not-so-brilliant career. Even with friendly interlocuters, they were reserved about their family life,14 possibly because of the parents’ divorce and custody arrangements. In print, mother and daughter’s references to the other’s reporting were rare but positive. After Simone had conducted two overseas investigations, Andrée included her daughter in a list of “up and coming” women in foreign reporting.15 In 1938, Simone mentioned that her mother had preceded her to Spain and been honoured there.16 In Une française en Union Soviétique (A Frenchwoman in the Soviet Union), published after her mother’s death in 1951, Simone applauded Seule en Russie, de la Baltique à la Caspienne (translated and published as A Girl in Soviet Russia) published in 1927 by “my mother Andrée Viollis,” as “the first time a non-communist journalist spoke of the Soviet Union without hatred, with an evident care to be objective.”17 The praise was merited,18 though Simone herself was partisan. Beginning her book with the statement that “the Soviet Union saved the world from Hitler’s fascism” – an exaggeration, though not altogether wrong – she proceeded to extol the Soviet Union’s rapid recovery after the devastation of the Second World War. Aware of accusations that the Communist Party masterminded foreign visitors’ travel, she insisted that party officials did not arrange her itinerary.19 But she expressed no concern that the writers’ union officials who accompanied her might have steered her toward model factories, housing, and social services. She was less naive about the Soviet Union than the feminist, pacifist, and communist Madeleine Marx (aka Paz) (1889– 1973), who visited the new state in the early 1920s and whose book never mentioned how she obtained her information. Conversely, Simone was less honest about how she determined where and what to investigate than Hélène Gosset (1869–1963), a feminist socialist sympathetic to the Soviet Union who scrupulously recorded her sources in her book published in the late 1920s.20 Simone’s disregard for the possibilities of manipulation deviated from her mother’s policy of assessing the value of a source that had been suggested by someone with an interest in the subject at hand. In her prize-winning book on Japan, Andrée discussed a reporter’s duty to question her sources. “In the journalism trade, one must not be a dupe. This interview made me wonder. Had it been due to chance? I recalled how the magistrate had ‘confided’ me to the care of his young friend … I could not stop doubting.”21 Andrée could also be

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more critical of people she respected than Simone. In an interview with Gandhi, the person she most admired, Viollis asked him uncomfortable questions about the treatment of untouchables and women in his movement and recorded his evasive answers.22 Although Simone kept her patronymic and reported in her father’s paper, she rarely invoked his name. One exception was during a struggle for liberty of the press in 1939, when she reminded her audience that her father had been a leader in war-time struggles over freedom of the press.23 This reference came more than a decade after Gustave’s death. In the 1950s, she explained that she did not publicly recognize her father because he represented the bourgeois lifestyle that she rejected, specifying characteristics such as “arrivisme, avidity, vanity, frivolity, and corruption.”24 This explanation was more dogmatic than personal. She neglected to mention his irascible character and quarrels with former friends and other reporters. Before the Great War, Gustave had engaged in polemics with former allies on the left, aligned himself with notorious anti-Semites like L’Action française, and criticized the popular judicial ruling that exonerated Mme Caillaux for murdering a journalist.25 During the war, when L’Oeuvre led courageous campaigns against abuses of military justice and resisted government censorship of the press, the masthead of every issue carried a provocative slogan: “L’Oeuvre tells everything the others [presumably newspapers] do not.”26 After the war, Téry abandoned anti-Semitism, directed his vituperation at L’Action française and mounted a campaign against the leading press distribution service, Hachette. His confrontational style continued until his death.27 Although Simone would also have altercations with authorities, she had better rapport with reporters than her father did. In the absence of any account of the parents’ counselling their daughter about a career, let us turn to Andrée’s advice to women who wanted to become reporters, as told to interviewers in feminist media. Her tough and sensible advice suggests that she had thought about the subject and might have conveyed her ideas directly to her daughter. When an interviewer asked whether she had to work harder, as a woman, to succeed in reporting, Andrée replied in a similarly realistic but gentler fashion than Séverine had to the same question a decade earlier. She insisted that it mainly required “patience and tenacity. The first years were hard but when you begin to prove yourself, the obstacles fade away and your colleagues recognize you as one of them.” Note the reference to colleagues to whom she had to prove herself,

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without any explanation of what she meant. One can assume that she thought that her readers knew about the atmosphere in the newsroom. Another interviewer asked whether grand reporting was accessible to women. She answered, “Yes, when they are able to forget that they are women, do their work exactly like men, passing up all the grades and not wanting to reach the summit in one big step. But that requires method and discipline, lots of reflection, a profound knowledge of politics, a lucid and observing spirit.”28 With the numerical dominance of men and the emphasis on eye-witness reporting, this advice seems pragmatic. Her answer shows that she did not query the rules of the game, however masculine in inspiration. This attitude was not unusual for early women reporters, at least those who survived. Given her acceptance of the rules, it is hardly a surprise that male colleagues, “often hostile to women of letters,” eventually treated her as “a real colleague.”29 If Andrée shared her experience and advice with her daughter, her daughter did not agree with all of it. In an interview, Simone claimed that mainstream newspapers first opened their doors to women on the women’s page, a claim that ignored her mother’s entry into mainstream newspapers. Simone contended that newspapers soon welcomed women in other parts of the paper. Since the evidence does not support this assertion, we might posit that she was trying to be encouraging. Whereas Andrée never publicly acknowledged gender differences in reporting, Simone explained that men were unable to express sentiments such as pity, indignation about injustices, and hatred of war, whereas women had more empathy.30 Simone’s statement seems to be one of the more accurate formulations of gender differences in reporting. Even Andrée showed more empathy toward the wounded soldiers she encountered in various war zones than her male peers did. When Simone repeated some of her mother’s advice, she did so in a more demanding way. She agreed that journalism was suitable for women, but added that a “real journalist” remains one all her life, which hardly made allowance for childbearing and rearing, including her mother’s four childbirths, at least one still birth and related maternal responsibilities. What was needed, Simone said, was curiosity and analysis.31 Sympathetic interviewers argued that “curiosity was her characteristic trait.”32 Her reporting was also quite analytical. These qualities make for good journalism. Both women enjoyed reporting, albeit different aspects of it. For Andrée, it was the travelling; for Simone, it was the camaraderie.

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Characterizing Andrée, an interviewer wrote, “Everything about her speaks of an impatience to leave, the taste for new horizons, the appetite for adventure.” Andrée told the interviewer that she only became a journalist “out of a need” to travel.33 Simone engaged in “reporting about reporting” that indicates that she had more social contact with male reporters in the field than her mother had, until Andrée reached the top of her profession.34 Simone’s best collection of articles, Front de la liberté, 1937–1938 (Freedom’s front), told of reporters from “newspapers around the world” gathering in Madrid for the meeting of the Cortes, reporters having a favourite restaurant, meeting “comrades” the likes of Ernest Hemingway, English and French reporters waiting hours to telephone London or Paris, walking in the dark with flashlights due to blackouts, being bombarded in Barcelona, feeling ashamed when soldiers told reporters to stay out of danger.35 Her mother did not publicize, or perhaps experience, this kind of comradeship or shame. In sum, her parents’ occupations assisted Simone’s entry into and informed her practice of journalism, but she was selectively appreciative of them as models. Acknowledged or not, their impact was considerable, but over the course of her career she carved out a different path.

C l as s a n d S o c ial Capi tal Despite the dearth of personal testimony, it is possible to draw some inferences about the similarities and differences between mother and daughter from comparisons of their family background and education. Although the circumstances of their births differed, both women benefitted from their family of origin and their education. Born Françoise Caroline Claudius Jacquet de La Verryère, Andrée came from a provincial family. Her father had an administrative career; his second wife was an aristocrat.36 Although her father introduced her to politics at a time when most young women were not exposed to politics, the only parent to whom she dedicated any of her works was “dear Mother.”37 Unlike most Frenchwomen in journalism, Andrée never identified a journalist in her family that inspired her to consider a career in the media. When asked about her start in journalism, she mentioned a love of travel since childhood, her early reporting experiences, and the two men who had hired her to report during the Great War: the English publisher Lord Northcliffe; and

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the editor of Le Petit Parisien, Élie-Joseph Bois (1878–1941).38 She did not mention being inspired by Séverine or hired by Marguerite Durand, possibly because the interviewer was interested in grand reporting in major newspapers. The Jaquet de la Verryère family was staunchly republican and progressive enough to ensure that Andrée got a baccalaureate five years after her father died. Next she worked as a governess in England and used her salary to pay for studies at Oxford. Only then did she come to Paris and enroll at the Sorbonne. As a mother of two, she earned an arts degree (licence ès lettres) in living languages.39 Like most grand reporters, who preferred to present themselves as everymen, she did not mention her education in interviews. Yet her knowledge of England and English enabled her to be a special envoy in London and Ireland between 1900 and 1902, in 1918 and 1922, and again in 1929.40 Her 1934 book on Japanese life follows the grand reporting convention of claiming that it had “no pretentions to an inquiry in depth, but is simply the initial reactions, entirely spontaneous, of a reporter.”41 Yet she consulted experts on Japan, and the book reads like a well-written ethnographic study. Little is known of Simone’s childhood, other than that her mother did not get custody in the divorce and her father introduced her to famous journalists and inculcated his anticlerical beliefs.42 There was contact between mother and daughter, and she was fond of her stepfather, whom she called Uncle Jean. Like her mother and several women of the third generation, Simone got a degree in living languages from the École Normale de Sèvres. She did not study in England, but spoke English. Both women used their education to write scholarly books. Simone published a literary study, L’île des bards. Notes sur la littérature irlandaise contemporaine (The isle of poets: Notes on contemporary Irish literature), which analyzed the work of six contemporary Irish writers. It appeared in Flammarion’s Collection Bleue, a series that included works by established writers such as Colette and Victor Margueritte.43 The book was cited in literary debates for at least a decade.44 In 1926, Andrée published a scholarly study of the first historical novelist in France, Mme de Lafayette (1634–1693), based on previously ignored letters. It was part of the series “Les Cahiers féminins” (Women’s notebooks), which also included a novel by the writer Marie Leneru (1875–1918) and an edited version of the famous journal of Marie Bashkirtseff (1858–1884). Although Andrée

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acknowledged criticisms of Mme de Lafayette for borrowing elements of older literary genres like the fabliaux (medieval verse tales), she defended Lafayette from these charges, noting that there were no models for a novel in the seventeenth century. She praised Lafyette’s elegant and simple writing style, economical way of revealing emotions and subtle way of conveying social nuances.45 Possibly coincidentally, Andrée’s reporting was praised for her attention to personal reactions and social situations.

B e c o m in g R e p orters Mother and daughter’s entry into journalism varied more than their education. Andrée and five other women grand reporters came to their vocations between their late twenties through to their early forties.46 Simone and four members of the third generation began in their mid-twenties. One reason for the difference in their ages at entry is that the third generation had more opportunities to pursue a postsecondary education and hence completed their studies earlier than their predecessors. Simone had already taught before she was a journalist, whereas her mother had only applied to teach before her initiation into journalism at La Fronde. Andrée considered taking up journalism when she was unable to get a teaching post near her first husband’s teaching post in the late 1890s. At the age of twenty-nine, she began sending articles to La Fronde. After seven months of being paid by the line, she asked Marguerite Durand for a contract and a monthly salary. Citing the salary of 399 francs earned by some colleagues at La Fronde, she asked for the same amount, and when informed that she would be expected to produce copy every day, raised her request to 500 francs. She asked Durand to use her contacts to find her husband employment in journalism or education, explaining that while she came from a wealthy family and would inherit money, she and her husband were then dependent on their earnings. Durand met her salary demand but was unable to assist Gustave Téry in his search for a position, primarily because Gustave had unrealistic expectations and his prickly reputation preceded him to Paris.47 Embarrassed about being “the husband of the debutante,” Gustave used his own political contacts to get a post at the socialist journal La Petite République, then directed by Jean Jaurès.48 This position led to posts at national newspapers and ultimately to his own

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newspaper, L’Oeuvre. He remained in touch with Durand, offering to distribute feminist brochures and organize feminist demonstrations.49 He also employed more women reporters than most national dailies. After the Great War, the contributors included outspoken feminists such as Jane Misme and Marie Vérone.50 Working at L’Oeuvre was another recurring point of contact between women journalists on the left and centre of the political spectrum. Even after Gustave died, the daily regularly employed three of the women cited in this book – namely, Decarie, Gosset, and Tabouis. Simone had less difficulty starting her career than her mother had. Beginning at L’Oeuvre, she soon travelled abroad to conduct an inquiry. At the age of twenty-five – five years younger than her mother had been when she first reported from England for La Fronde – she went to Ireland to cover the Irish War of Independence. The course of their careers also varied. Initially, Andrée signed a column in La Fronde that was prominently positioned below Séverine’s column. In 1900, she reported from the Congrès international des oeuvres et institutions féminines (International Congress of Feminine Organizations and Institutions) held in Paris, which she attended “as a journalist” and dutifully listed the orators and conveyed their speeches “as faithfully as possible.” Nevertheless, she felt free to condemn some of the decisions of the congress, such as retaining the ban on research into the paternity of children of single mothers, which deprived them of legally mandated paternal support.51 This issue had been debated in feminist circles since 1878 and would be a feminist demand until the paternity law of 1912.52 She took on anti-suffrage journalists and politicians who queried women’s “absolute” right to vote or who tried to sow dissension in feminist ranks.53 Among the issues she addressed were child prostitution, slavery, and inequality in education or employment, revealing herself to be a liberal feminist with some maternal feminist tendencies.54 In England, she sat in a London courtroom for the trial of a young French teacher, Louise Masset, who was convicted of murdering her infant child. Andrée consulted with the defence lawyer, went to the scene of the crime, re-enacted the crime, pleaded with officials to hear witnesses who had been excluded from the trial, and delivered a petition signed by 1,500 French teachers compiled by La Fronde. After her inquiry, she concluded that Masset was innocent.55 She was equally sympathetic to the patients at the Saltpêtrière Hospital when she entered the hospital as a student nurse to investigate nursing by nuns

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for the anti-clerical journal La Raison. Likening this kind of reporting to the theatrical styles of Nelly Bly and Séverine, Thérenty labels it “the journalism of immersion” and “the journalism of identification” with the victim.56 While in London, Andrée interviewed bureaucrats, and when political leaders refused to see her, she interviewed their daughters. In all cases, she asked questions critical of the Boer War.57 Other women reporters would follow in her footsteps whenever politicians and officials refused to meet with them.58 She also took up her pen against European interventions in China, especially the “fanatical missionaries” who, in her estimation, tried to impose their beliefs on the Chinese and thereby caused the Boxer Rebellion. Indeed, she excoriated “our vain ignorance in taking on the densest and most industrious population in the world.”59 In effect, she was doing grand reporting, but it was not recognized as such, since she was writing for a small opinion not a major informational paper. After La Fronde went out of business in 1906, Andrée did little reporting for a decade, because she was distracted by two pregnancies, two births, and a bout of tuberculosis. However, she and Jean cowrote a weekly chronicle for La France de Bordeaux et du Sud Ouest, one of the regional newspapers that published the work of many important writers. Jean introduced her to Le Petit Parisien, which took short stories by each of them from 1909 through 1913.60 When the war began, she trained as a volunteer nurse and sent in reports from a hospital on the front,61 as Marc Helys had done. Whereas Hely’s reporting reflected the early wartime trend in nurses’ memoirs to celebrate war nurses as “white angels,” Viollis’s approach prefigured the more realistic representation of that difficult kind of nursing that emerged in 1916.62 Because of the number of women reporting on the human and material costs of war, this kind of journalism was called “feminine.” War-front nursing also made Viollis a pacifist, albeit not an integral pacifist, or opponent of all war.63 Her article on the British women’s air corps in Le Petit Parisien caught the eye of Lord Northcliffe, who hired her at the Daily Mail in 1918.64 Her byline appeared in this London paper until 1922.65 After the war, Le Petit Parisien assigned Viollis to general reporting (a mix of local, regional, and sports journalism), which in her case meant trial and sports reporting.66 Her postwar coverage of court cases was lively and dramatic, combining perceptive portraits of

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defendants, attorneys, and judges, and apparently verbatim giveand-take of lively courtroom exchanges between prosecutors and defence lawyers. Her sports articles described athletes and audiences, enlivened by a sprinkling of revealing quotes from her subjects and illustrative anecdotes to grab the reader’s attention.67 In short, she had learned how to write for the daily press, whose readers wanted information that they could assimilate without too much intellectual effort.68 Like other women, she covered trials of women charged with killing or arranging the murder of their husbands, especially when the husband had recently returned from the front to find that their wives were accustomed to greater independence, causing some spousal conflict and more social anxiety about potential marital breakdowns. Like Séverine, Andrée did not particularly empathize with the accused.69 Perhaps because her second husband was a wounded veteran, she did not relate to wives who did not treat veterans well. As a liberal feminist, she also balked at legal arguments based on claims of women’s moral weakness or physical incapacity. None of her general reporting was edited for publication as a book. Simone worked more consistently in her early career, although she did not have steady employment at any dailies other than L’Oeuvre until she joined L’Humanité in 1935. She did general reporting in the 1920s, even, on occasion, submitting short items on social gatherings.70 Simone did little court and no sports reporting, but did more domestic political and social investigation than her mother did. Politically, she focused on working-class municipalities.71 What explains the difference in the beginning and course of the mother and daughter’s careers? The obvious explanation for Simone’s early entry is that she began at her father’s paper; she also benefitted from an easier path to higher education and the existence of a travel grant program that supported twenty-seven women travellers and paid her way to Asia early in her career.72 The salient explanation for the continuity of the first half of her career, compared to the interruptions in her mother’s early career, is that Simone had no children or serious illness. The significant interruption in Simone’s career was the Occupation, when she left France for the Dominican Republic and then Cuba with her new husband, the Spanish writer and leftwing militant Juan Chabàs (1910–1954). After the war, separated from her husband, she resumed her career at L’Humanité.

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L it e r a ry Input Both mother and daughter resembled other French reporters in writing fiction, and their literary endeavours influenced their reportorial styles. However, their literature did not define their reputations, as they defined Colette and Beaumont’s reputations. Andrée was a journalist first and foremost. When literary reviews debated the thorny issue of the relationship between journalism and literature in the mid-1920s, Andrée presented a defence of journalism as art: “To grasp men and things in the moment, note and draw out their essential traits, fixing them in a clear, precise, sharp image that evokes joy, anger, irony, pity – all that in an instant – is that not art? A nimble art, without pretension, since it is not intended to be for eternity.” She listed some very impressive qualities of a reporter: “Aside from literary qualities, those of a man of action. Whoever wants to be a reporter must have, serially or simultaneously, the tact of a diplomat, the flair of a detective, the courage of a soldier, the patient tenacity of a savant, the manners of a noble man.”73 She never wrote fiction about journalists, while her daughter wrote a play about them.74 Andrée’s first novel, Criquet, appeared as a serial and a book in 1913. It was the story of an adolescent tomboy who preferred boy’s clothing but finally accepted that she had to don feminine apparel and adopt feminine behaviour.75 Criquet was avant-garde in its topic of cross-dressing, but unlike Colette’s Claudine novels at the turn of the century or Victor Margueritte’s 1922 novel La garçonne, Criquet did not hint about girls’ sexuality or lesbianism.76 Instead of provoking controversy, it won a prize as an exploration of an adolescent girl’s feelings at a time when adolescence was first being defined and studied.77 It was reissued in 1934, at which time, Andrée admitted that it was partly autobiographical.78 In the late 1930s, Andrée penned Le secret de la Reine Christine, an “imagined” life of Queen Christina of Sweden, another cross-dresser. Christina was often considered a lesbian, but her sexual preferences were ambiguous enough for Viollis to interpret her avoiding marriage as a reaction to disillusionment about one beau and the intentions of the suitors who pursued her hand in marriage only to rule her realm.79 The book was welcomed by a feminist reviewer.80 Andrée was clearly intrigued by transvestism but not by lesbianism. Although British biographies and films had discussed the Swedish queen’s sexual orientation since the 1890s, there had only been two French biographies and a biopic in the 1930s,

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and only one of them hinted at her sexual preference.81 Written in 1938, Le secret was first released as a feuilleton under a masculine pseudonym in 1943 and came out as a book with Viollis’s name on the cover the following year. The delays were due to her antifascist activism in the late 1930s and her involvement in the Resistance under the Occupation. Andrée’s second novel, La perdrix dorée (The golden partridge, 1925) was co-written with her second husband. It was criticized as a sequence of vignettes of village life peopled with familiar village types. Most of Jean Viollis’s novels got better reviews; Monsieur le principal won the prestigious Prix Goncourt.82 Perhaps discouraged by the reviews of La perdrix dorée, Andrée did not publish novels after 1925. However, her literary efforts had honed her skills at revealing character through succinct physical description with special attention to facial features, which she subsequently used to great effect in her reporting. Andrée devoted the next fifteen years to investigative reporting and the second half of the 1930s to political activism. She did engage in literary polemics such as critiquing Henri de Montherlant for his hostility toward women, very much as Kate Millet would do four decades later. Viollis’s essay on Montherlant appeared on the same women’s page of Les Nouvelles littéraires as an essay on Séverine by Simone Téry.83 Colette, Germaine Beaumont, and other women cited in this study also contributed to Les Nouvelles littéraires women’s page in the late 1920s and early 1930s. This weekly was another point of contact between women in journalism, despite the lack of a women’s press club. Simone Téry resembled Colette and Beaumont in favouring “modern” women as protagonists in her two interwar novels. None of her characters were transvestites, though they did have autobiographical elements. Both of Simone’s interwar novels treated love without conforming to the popular romance genre targeting the growing audience of women readers in the interwar period. Nor did they follow the revised romance script of Sapphic writers active in the 1920s and 1930s.84 Her first novel was modernist and the second was influenced by socialist realism. Neither were popular enough to be reissued. Simone’s first novel, Passagère (1930) (The passenger), came out in a series called Romans de la vie nouvel (Novels of the new life), a few of which dealt with “modern women” or “exotic” places.85 About a Frenchwoman travelling alone to the Orient to escape her artificial life in Europe, Passagère cast a female character in a role and plot

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usually reserved for male characters in modernist literature and in “an entire tradition of Western writing which makes the experience of the non-Western world into an inner journey, and in so doing renders that world as insubstantial.”86 On a trip that paralleled one Simone had taken for research, the first-person narrator muses about a love affair that she decides to end in the course of the novel. The descriptions of distant places are more engaging than the reflections on the love affair. Simone’s second novel, Le coeur volé (The stolen heart, 1937), followed the official literary policy of socialist realism as laid down by the Communist International in 1934. Steeped as she was in French literature, she used the same title as an Arthur Rimbaud poem. Unlike the poem or a film with the same title that premiered in 1934, the novel is about a bourgeois women who falls abjectly in love with a married Communist Party militant who briefly returns her affection but then repeatedly rejects her, causing her to fall into a depression and kill herself.87 Simone did not admit autobiographical inspiration, but did leave epistolary testimony that she wrote the novel in “a fury,” and knowledgeable readers considered it an account of her troubled liaison with the (then) communist philosopher and novelist Paul Nizan.88 This reader found the protagonist’s obsession with the elusive militant more of a polemic about bourgeois women’s individualism and unfulfilled lives than a story line. Sometimes her journalism had the same tone. Angela Kershaw, who studies Téry’s novels in the context of women’s political writing in the 1930s, argues that after 1934, she produced “dogmatic, party literature.”89 At least her postwar novels were more optimistic about the possibility of combining political commitment and romantic love.90 Two of them were reissued, one several times.

F or e ig n R e p o rt in g : Ir eland and S pai n, 1 9 2 1 – 1 9 39 Mother and daughter became famous for foreign reporting. Both wavered in their level of partisanship, but Simone was always more partisan. Both were analytical, but Andrée was more likely to illustrate with interesting anecdotes.91 Both visited Ireland, China, Spain, and Russia. Because their series on Ireland and Spain appeared about the same time, they are most comparable.

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In Ireland, mother and daughter interacted with the rebels, interviewed participants, and submitted eyewitness reports. They supported different factions. Simone, who reported on the War for Independence and the Civil War, excoriated the English for “bloody repression, murders, famines, emigration and poverty.” She did not condemn the Republican Government’s execution of Erskine Childers (an Englishman who had supplied arms to the rebels) and tried to justify an “ignoble war” as necessary to the birth of a new nation.92 Andrée did not send copy until the Civil War and criticized the English less harshly. As a supporter of Erskine Childers, she lobbied to stop his execution by the Irish Free State. At this point, Élie-Joseph Bois, her editor, who had sent her off saying, “Go then, listen, observe, and try to understand. Be careful not to get too involved and especially, especially, remain objective,” pointedly reminded her of “the reporter’s modest role.”93 For a decade after that, her reporting was less engagé. Most French reporters covering the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) were openly partisan in their coverage. An outline of the war, from a French perspective, helps explain the nearly universal partisanship. The outline is based on the relatively neutral (though pro-republican) interpretation of the first year of the Republic by feminist journalist Alice la Mazière and Julián Casanova’s A Short History of the Civil War (2013). La Mazière toured Spain in 1932, one year after municipal elections won by Spanish Republicans ushered in the fall of the monarchy and a government led by conservative republicans but encompassing socialists. She noted that forty-five of the fifty major cities elected republicans, while rural areas upheld conservatives. One short-term consequence was ongoing strikes and subsequently, republican repression. Union members, socialists, and anarchists grew disillusioned and many renounced electoral politics. A second problem plaguing the new state was the divide between the urban, industrializing north and the rural south, a division aggravated by the republic’s failure to implement agrarian reform. A third problem was the resistance of elements of the army and civil guard, even after many royalist or conservative officers were removed from duty.94 Casanova notes other destabilizing events: a failed military uprising in 1932, a conservative coalition that won the elections of November 1933, and anarchist and syndicalist uprisings the following year.95

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That year Simone went to the Spanish Republic for L’Oeuvre. In October 1934, she was arrested by the military authorities and incarcerated for an article on internal divisions in the army. Reports of her arrest circulated in the French press; the Foreign Press Association asked the minister of foreign affairs to intervene; the Association syndicale des journalistes professionnels (Syndical Association of Professional Journalists), and the feminist-pacifist Comité mondial des femmes contre la guerre et fascism (World Committee of Women against War and Fascism) sent a delegation to Spain. Simone was released and escorted to the French border.96 Andrée and Simone were members of the two professional associations and the World Committee.97 Returning to Casanova’s account: conservatives controlled the Spanish government until the elections of February 1936, when a Popular Front government that included communists assumed power. Five months later, a military uprising fomented by Franco and three other generals wreaked havoc on the army and security forces. Fierce resistance from loyalist officers and troops foiled the uprising but initiated a civil war. Franco appealed to Germany and Italy for military assistance and received aircraft, tanks and troops, as well as loans.98 Once fighting broke out, Andrée flew to Barcelona. Being one of only two Paris newspapers that tried to present both sides of the conflict, Le Petit Parisien later sent Louis Roubaud, André Salmon, and other less partisan reporters to Spain.99 The increasingly conservative administration of the daily either edited or did not print some of Andrée’s dispatches, so she sent them to the regional newspaper most interested in the conflict. She was forced to resign from Le Petit Parisien.100 What did Le Petit Parisien print? Upon landing in Barcelona in July 1936, Andrée heard gunfire and encountered young men with rifles, which reminded her of an earlier landing in Afghanistan. Over the next month, she trekked with loyalist troops to many battle fronts, recalling her time near the front in the Great War.101 The reflections no doubt underscored the seriousness of the conflict. Returning in October 1936, she went to Madrid and described how the city, which was under bombardment by Fascist forces, was organizing for resistance and how life continued in a city under siege. Some of these passages display her talent for using individual stories to evoke the aftereffects of battle. She told a moving story of a bereft man desperately seeking his wife and children, who had been in a school when it was bombed but had been transported to different hospitals, with no record of who went where.102 Her sympathy was

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not laced with anger or recrimination. She let the story evoke those reactions. She did not criticize the French government for its policy of neutrality because she was a supporter of the Popular Front government in France. Although Andrée did not publish a book on the Spanish Civil War, she did publish a reflective essay on Spain in Vendredi, a weekly she cofounded and codirected with Jean Guéhenno (1898–1978) and André Chamson (1900–1983). All three belonged to the Comité de vigilance des intellectuels antifascists (Antifascist Intellectuals’ Vigilance Committee) founded after the crisis of 6 February 1934, when right-wing, anti-parliamentary demonstrations and riots seemed to threaten a fascist coup d’état.103 They created Vendredi out of “disgust and indignation” with the centre-right government in France, the Stavisky financial scandal and its cover-up, and the violent demonstrations by proto-fascist leagues that brought down the government in February 1934.104 In defence, Socialists and Communists inched toward cooperation, a process that culminated in formation of the Popular Front government composed of communist, socialist, radicalsocialist, and radical party deputies in 1936. Vendredi became the de facto organ of the Popular Front government. The Spanish prime minister asked the French prime minister, Léon Blum, for armaments, and Blum arranged to comply until the rightwing paper L’Echo de Paris broke the news and fostered discontent among conservatives fearful of communist revolutions. The French press was mostly preoccupied with the decision by the Popular Front government – squeezed by the conservative Senate – not to send military supplies.105 Soon, France, Great Britain, and other liberal democracies adopted policies of non-intervention, in line with their appeasement of fascist countries. Only the Soviet Union sent supplies and loans to the beleaguered republic. Although the Blum government turned a blind eye on French arms shipments to Spain, the conservative government that replaced the Popular Front closed the border in 1938. With liberal democracies out of the action, thousands of progressive individuals, most of them organized by the Communist International, flocked to Spain. The largest number of volunteers came from France. Hundreds of reporters from around the world descended on Madrid. In 1939, the Republic fell to Franco’s superior forces, and liberal democracies recognized Franco as head of state. In the winter of 1937–38, Simone spent several months in Spain for L’Humanité.106 Six months later, she published a slightly edited

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version of her series as Front de la liberté.107 She proclaimed that this was a partisan book – which it certainly was! – but also that “It is only an eye-witness report. I will only tell you what I have seen, heard, felt.” Like many grand reporters, she seemed unaware that these two comments might be incompatible. Simone’s writing crackled with indignation about Fascists bombing cities or Italian fighter planes strafing refugees escaping from besieged Malagra, but also about the new conservative French government, which sent fifty thousand women and children who had fled to France back to Spain and refused to arm the Republicans, aka Loyalists.108 Unlike her mother, she openly expressed rage against the perpetrators of the violence. However, she deployed her mother’s technique of presenting detailed descriptions of the results of violence. When she visited the morgue the day after an airial bombardment of Barcelona, she described bodies piled on the floor. She explained, “For all crimes, there must be witnesses. We are here to bear witness.”109 Some of her most disturbing descriptions of death and destruction in Barcelona also appeared in other pro-Soviet journals.110 From different positions on the left, mother and daughter had begun to converge journalistically and politically. First Simone, then Andrèe moved closer to the communists and contributed to L’Humanité. Both joined the antifascist campaign. For a while, the daughter seemed to be leading the mother.

An t ifas c is t A c t iv is m : Spai n, 1935–1939 In 1935, Viollis broke with moderate republicans. Now she helped organize support for Spanish Loyalists, primarily women and children. She spoke about Spain to meetings that drew hundreds of Parisians. She met with André Malraux and other members of the newly formed Association international des écrivains pour la défense de la culture (International Association of Writers for the Defence of Culture) to proclaim that the Spanish Civil War was destroying culture, liberty, and independence.111 Together with Jean Renoir, Jean Gabin, and other leading directors, actors, academics, and authors, she signed an appeal to respect the elected will of the Spanish people. She penned a pamphlet on the deteriorating situation of women and children in Spain that was published by the International Aid to Spanish Republican Women and Children; she joined a committee that collected food and clothing and sent over four million kilograms

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of goods to Spain in 1938. That same year, she, Simone, and Mme Cécile Brunschvicg (1877–1946) demonstrated their solidarity with Republican Spain. Brunschvicg was head of the Union française pour le suffrage des femmes (French Union for Women’s Suffrage), an editor of La Française, and one of three women who had been appointed as under-secretaries of state by Léon Blum. The following year, Andrée was the treasurer for an international committee to aid Republican Spain that raised funds for a mobile medical dispensary for Spain.112 Simone was equally involved in spreading the news about Spain and fundraising for the Spanish Republic. While in Spain, she broadcast weekly reports for Radio Madrid and a French radio station. When she returned to Paris, she gave many speeches on the situation in Spain. In March 1937, she launched an appeal to “Save the Spanish Patriots Destined for Massacre” in Ce Soir, and for a year, publicized the appeal. Simone was also a speaker at several Popular Front and Communist gatherings to support the Spanish republicans.113 She worked with the L’Union des jeunes filles de France (Union of young French girls) campaign to provide milk for the children of Spain.114 The Communist Party had created the union in 1936 to attract young women by such means as fashion shows, sewing classes, and the like. Its leader, Danielle Casanova, would become famous as a communist martyr of the Resistance.115 The union played a role in the fact that more younger women were drawn to antifascist campaigns than to feminism in the late 1930s.116 As Andrée turned her attention to events in Germany and Central Europe (to be discussed in chapter 7), she inched toward the Communist Party and joined Simone at many Communist demonstrations, until Simone left with her new husband for Latin America. Not long after, Andrée moved from Paris to a small village in the unoccupied Free Zone of France, where she participated in the Resistance. Even after their politics converged, they lived quite separate lives.

C o n c l u s i on Chapter 4 illuminated several characteristics of the careers of secondand third-generation Frenchwomen who reported. It demonstrated the importance of family and education in two women’s entry into and achievements as reporters. The socioeconomic status of Andrée Viollis’s parents and the higher education that they permitted and paid for (and subsequently she pursued on her own) helped her find

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a job as a grand reporter and contributed to her spectacular success in that highly masculine career. Andrée’s time at La Fronde, with its roster of women reporters, provided otherwise unavailable experience. In turn, Andrée modelled a career in reporting for her daughter Simone Téry, while her first husband, Gustave Téry, let Simone observe the newsroom as a girl and hired her at his paper as a young woman. Given Simone’s fondness for her stepfather, Jean Viollis, it is likely that he too encouraged her interest in reporting. While these two women had more family ties in the business than others in our cohort, many others relied on family connections to meet publishers and editors and to get interviews for positions in newspapers. Half of them got teaching degrees and even worked as teachers before or ­during their reporting work. Details about Andrée and Simone’s work life also illustrate challenges faced by women reporters and their responses to these ­challenges. Andrée’s comment in an interview about how women could become reporters, to the effect that they must prove themselves, indicates that women were not automatically or easily accepted by editors, colleagues, and possibly also readers. Andrée’s follow-up advice to women wanting to become reporters – “do their work exactly like men” and be disciplined – suggests that she accepted the existing masculine code of behaviour but believed women had to work harder than their male colleagues. Other members of the second generation had a similar view of their occupation. It is likely that this attitude was not conducive to forming a women’s press club. While Andrée showed empathy toward her subjects, she did not treat all female subjects, for instance, women on trial, particularly sympathetically. Several other members of her generation who specialized in trials were similarly disposed. As a member of the third generation of French newspaperwomen, Simone was more positive about the prospect of working in the newsroom and more convinced of the special qualities, like sympathy, that women brought to the job. One explanation of this difference is that members of the third generation found adapting to the newsroom less demanding, and at least partly for this reason, felt comfortable claiming a feminine approach to reporting. Even when this mother and daughter agreed, they had distinctive opinions. While both liked their jobs, Andrée loved the travel involved, Simone liked the camaraderie. Others in this cohort took pleasure in other facets of the job. In short, women reporters, like their male colleagues, varied in their attitudes toward aspects of their work.

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Two final observations arise from this analysis of Andrée and Simone’s careers. The first is that women reporters had many points of contact with one another, through their work in many of the same newspapers, writing for the same literary reviews, and through social and political circles ranging from supper clubs through intellectual discussion groups, to political activism. Their sociability and activism is part of the explanation for their failure to form a women’s press clubs. Second, reporters in general, including women reporters, became increasingly polemical in the 1930s. The decisive moments in the transition to political activism were the proto-fascist attacks on the Third Republic in 1934 and the Spanish Civil War, 1936–39. This and the preceding two chapters have demonstrated that Frenchwomen in journalism supported one another generationally, that the relationships were often conceived of in mother–daughter terms, and that both generations were supportive yet independent of one another. Part 2 will now examine how gender influenced their colonial and foreign reporting. Generational factors will be less central to the analysis, and other intersectional factors will play a more significant role.

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P art t wo Gender and Front-Page Reporting

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5 Gender and Grand Reporting: Andrée Viollis and Albert Londres on Asia, 1930s Studies of the gender implications of newspaper reporting began with biographies of “girl reporters” famous for “stunt journalism” or theatrical elements such as dressing in a costume to gain access to sites closed to reporters.1 More recent Anglo-American scholarship contends that many early women journalists gained purchase in the massmarket press because of plucky personalities and sentimental styles, but they do not present these qualities as essential feminine traits. Rather, these women performed what was expected of them, which was to build readership by catering to a new market of less sophisticated readers.2 Another American work, Out on Assignment, notes that both newspaper men and women wrote with emotion, whether their work appeared on the front page or on their highly gendered beats on the sports and women’s pages.3 French scholars Géraldine Muhlman and Marc Martin demonstrate that both men and women who were grand reporters used personal and sensational styles.4 By comparing the reporting of a siege by the leading male and female grand reporters in interwar France, this chapter confirms some of the familiar gender distinctions and complicates others. Focusing on two specific grand reporters and their coverage of the same event takes into consideration how grand reporting reflected the personalities, politics, and styles of individual authors as well as the time, place, and circumstances that they were covering. The approach is based on a method developed by Charles Forsdick, comparing male and female authors of travel chronicles with the same itinerary undertaken at approximately the same time. Drawing upon Sara Borella’s comparison of the British writer Ian Fleming and the French-Swiss writer Elsa Maillart’s chronicles of their journey through

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China in the 1930s, Forsdick finds that Fleming was ethnocentric while Maillart was critical of an ethnocentric approach, that Maillart showed more empathy toward the people they met, that she discussed foot binding, which Fleming barely noticed, and that her account lacked Fleming’s authoritative expert “tone.”5 Forsdick compares other male and female travel writers and finds a great deal of diversity among men and women travel writers. This chapter concentrates on two investigations of the Japanese siege of Shanghai in 1931–32. The thirty-three days of fighting there ended in a capitulation and is sometimes considered the first volley of a fifteen-year Sino-Japanese War.6 The investigators were the leading male and female grand reporters, Albert Londres (1884–1932) and Andrée Viollis, whose series and books on the siege are works of mature and experienced journalists. The following chapter will take a similar approach to reporting on Indochina after the Yen Bay mutiny of 1930 and to reporting on colonialism more generally. After a brief history of grand reporting, the second section of this chapter examines the relationship between stunts and “pluck” on the one hand, and gender on the other hand. The third section considers intersectional influences on the two grand reporters’ careers, and analyzes the content of their reporting on Shanghai, noting their different political orientations. The final section applies to their reportorial styles the literary technique of deixis, specifically scoring how often the authors use the first person to develop a sense of empathy in their readers or emotive phrases or grammar to evoke feelings about the subject.7 This analysis identifies intersectional differences in coverage, content, empathy, and style.

G r a n d R e p orti ng Grand reporting implied “special envoys” actively seeking information by travelling, often in perilous conditions, to the site of a major event or an unfamiliar place to write eye-witness accounts and interview participants. The results were published as series of articles called inquiries, appearing once or twice a week over the course of a month or more. Major series began on the left front page above the fold, where most readers start looking at the paper. At a time when many French editors preferred unsigned articles, special envoys had bylines and hence could be identified and followed by readers impressed with their reporting.

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Grand reporters emerged in the 1890s, when a few reporters began to conduct interviews and carry out inquiries, first into traditional literary subjects but soon into social conditions. Several travelled to countries of interest to the French government, such as Russia during the Franco-Russian Alliance (1891–1912), or to French colonies, often after colonial unrest. They cabled reports back to Paris.8 Those who were invited to accompany President Sadi Carnot (1887–94) on foreign trips had their travel and lodging paid by the government, a practice that fed into popular opinion of “the abominable venality” of the French press.9 In actuality, many reporters remained independent of the government and some critiqued government actions like the armed repression of strikes. None of these reporters were women. Grand reporters’ breakthrough came with wars or disasters. For many of the fourteen years of fierce competition between dailies preceding the Great War, Gaston Leroux (1868–1927) wrote for Le Matin, where he introduced the system of writing articles as a series of dramatic episodes. He frequently covered shocking trials and included personal details about the accused. Although some of his trial journalism resembles the sensational trial journalism of American “sob sisters,” his reporting was not dismissed as sentimental or overwrought, because he was a man and because he wrote well. Leroux quit journalism to devote himself to detective fiction and to pen The Phantom of the Opera upon which the musical and film are based.10 The link between grand reporting and detective novels would recur in the careers of individual journalists such as Albert Londres and Louis Roubaud (1884–1941), both of whom contributed to Detective magazine, which specialized in true crime. Roubaud also published mystery novels in the 1930s and 1940s, following the trend away from atmospheric and mysterious stories toward “noir” novels.11 Both mystery writing and grand reporting, Myriam Boucharenc contends, thrived in “the spirit of inquiry characteristic of urban and democratic modernity.”12 Given their accounts of distant and (in contemporary French opinion) exotic places, grand reporting also borrowed from the genre of travel writing. Many of the men in grand reporting represented themselves as adventurers as well as detectives, emulating fin-de-siècle travel writing as well as the new detective fiction, which itself had a dual narrative structure of crime story and investigation story. Both types of para-literature had expanded in the nineteenth century alongside new means of communication like the periodical press and the

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feuilleton. Both reached new heights of popularity in the interwar decades.13 So too did grand reporting, although by the mid-1930s, its pre-eminence in the media was challenged by radio broadcasting, news reels at cinemas, telephotography, and (as Viollis predicted) “soon by television.”14 As far back as the seventeenth century, Frenchwomen had written about their travels abroad.15 Their travels to exotic or dangerous places and written accounts of these travels were transgressive of their expected gender role. Their numbers expanded with the emergence of the “new woman” in the 1920s, and included several journalists, notably the “most professional journalist,” Andrée Viollis.16 Alice la Mazière reported on Morocco and Czechoslovakia as well as on Spain;17 Elsa Maillart (1903–1997), a Swiss francophone, wrote about Afghanistan, Russia, and China; and Titayna, the pseudonym of Elisabeth Sauvy (1897–1966), reported from many distant parts of the world. Some of these women wrote a more “feminine” kind of travel chronicle, avoiding the narratives and language of masters, conquest, and colonialism, but most share discursive characteristics with their male colleagues. For instance, la Maziere’s Le Maroc secret (1932) penetrated the interior rooms, including the harems closed to masculine visitors, and revealed the living conditions, legal constraints, and lesbian liaisons in the harem.18 In doing so, she also extended the colonial gaze.19 While La Mazière would be considered a grand reporter, but for the absence of war reporting, Maillart and Titayna were not primarily journalists. Maillart’s travel writing veered toward self-discovery through encounters with other cultures,20 while Titayna was feted as one of only ten French aviatrices (women pilots) in 1926 and one of forty in 1932.21 Titayna’s scandalous lifestyle, including dressing in men’s clothing, flamboyant affairs, and a taste for spectacular gestures, made grand reporters reluctant to include her in their circle and editors wary about hiring her.22 Both these women wrote to finance their travels and contracted with newspaper for particular inquiries. For example, Titayna proposed a series to the editor of L’Oeuvre that would be “a picturesque and anecdotal account written in the manner of an adventure novel.” She also demanded that another proposed series identify her as a “special envoy” and that the first few installments be on the front page. She asked 10,000 francs to cover her travel expenses.23 Although the editor met her conditions, he found the submissions “too subjective and distant from reality”

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and published only a few short pieces in the less prestigious column called “Choses vues” (Things seen). For years, her written work hovered between factual reporting and fiction and appeared in the illustrated bimonthly magazine Lecture pour tous (Reading for all). She took up photography but continued to call herself an “intrepid reporter” and eventually found a place at the new popular daily, Paris Soir, which ran shorter articles and more photos than other dailies. During the Occupation, she wrote for an anti-Semitic collaborationist journal.24 After the Great War, many French people distrusted journalists, especially from press agencies, because many of them had supported the war effort by passing on war propaganda with false information.25 Hiring special envoys helped the remaining dailies increase circulation, because inquiries involved eye-witness, not second-hand, accounts, and because they enticed readers to purchase subsequent issues to learn more about their subjects, much as serial novels induced readers to buy many issues. Many special envoys also employed literary techniques such as vivid characterizations and vignettes used by serial novelists.26 In the 1920s, a leading publisher, Albin Michel, put out a series of books called Grand Reporting that were revised versions of newspaper inquiries. The series was so successful that other publishers followed suit. Over time, publishers created specialized collections on social investigations, inquiries in troubled countries or colonies, and voyages. There were even more specialized lists, such as ones on travel by ocean liner or by airplane. In turn, books bolstered the association between grand reporting and serial fiction, the best of which was published in book form. Books included more illustrative and amusing anecdotes and permitted authors to express a more personal and polemical point of view than newspaper reporting. Often grand reporting books were more censorious about the situation described and more prescriptive about how to resolve the problems identified than the series upon which they were based. The collections elevated the popularity of the grand reporters to real fame.27 Witness the Tintin phenomenon: the famous cartoon character in comic books by Hergé (Georges Rémi, 1907–1983) was a grand reporter.28 Albert Londres inaugurated the first Grand Reporting collection with his 1923 book, Au bagne (In the penal colony), a critical investigation of the French penal colonies in Guyana. This book revitalized a campaign to correct the worst abuses in the penal colonies, which slowly brought some improvements, though penal colonies existed

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until 1937.29 Next, Londres turned his reforming zeal to insane asylums, which did not produce as much public protest or any significant changes.30 One of his biographers has noted the paradox of his being the “roving reporter par excellence,” yet one of his favourite subjects was confined spaces. The success of these engagé books gave rise to the neologism Londreisme and encouraged other reporters to travel to penal colonies, insane asylums, and other places of confinement.31 In the next decade, Londres published fourteen books based on his reporting. Three pursued his interest in penal colonies and prisoners. Others treated unfamiliar places such as the Soviet Union, the Balkans, and China.32 In all these works, he is less interested in explaining the unfamiliar than detailing the differences from French readers. A third type of reporting involved searing indictments of colonial administrations and working conditions in the African colonies, with especially disturbing information on forced labour to build roads and railways.33 The problem of forced labour had been taken up by the International Labour Organization from its inception in 1919, yet the phenomenon had expanded with the huge infrastructure projects initiated by Colonial Minister Albert Saurraut in the early 1920s.34 Together with indictments by André Gide and other French intellectuals, Londres’s condemnation of forced labour ultimately led to interpellations in the legislature and modest changes.35 The system was not completely abolished until 1946.36 None of Londres’s books were “objective” in the sense of presenting various points of view or a balanced argument. This was particularly apparent in his book on Soviet Russia, where his inveterate anticommunism shone through, and in his first book on China, where his penchant for striking metaphors captures the readers’ attention. In this case, the metaphor was that China, in the throes of internecine battles for control of the country, had gone mad. Londres revised all but his final book on Shanghai from previously published series in several newspapers.37 Three of them had been series in Le Petit Parisien, which employed several grand reporters in the late 1920s and early 1930s.38 Many of his books received favourable reviews; those that denounced forced labour in colonies provoked special interests and elicited hostile reviews; both positive and negative reviews increased sales.39 Some of his books have gone into more than a dozen editions in up to six languages. Many were reissued in recent decades.

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After Londres’s death, his daughter and colleagues established the Prix Albert Londres to recognize the best of grand reporting. By then, a colleague at Le Temps reported that there were “twenty, no fifty French journalists travelling the world” doing grand reporting.40 A panel of reporters and statesmen awarded the annual prize from 1933 to 1939 and 1946 on (with a division into print and audiovisual categories since 1985). Two of the early panelists for the Londres Prize were Andrée Viollis and Louis Roubaud. Neither ever won the prize. No women won in the print category until the 1990s.41 Despite Viollis’s prewar inquiry into a hospital for the insane and her wartime service in a frontline hospital, she did not repeat this kind of inquiry after Londres popularized penal and asylum investigations (though she did exhibit a secondary interest in hospitals in many of the places she visited). Between 1926 and 1930, she published four inquiries into conditions in postwar Alsace-Lorraine, warlord-ravaged Afghanistan, newly established Soviet Russia, and India during Gandhi’s campaign for independence.42 Between 1931 and 1938, she published seven more books based upon special investigations in the Far East and in the French colonies of Indochina and Tunisia.43 Only her studies of Japanese militarism and Indochina generated as big a reaction as Londres had provoked with his studies of penal colonies and forced labour. Several of her works went into multiple editions in French. Most of them were translated into English, and three were translated into other languages as well. Her books on Afghanistan and Indochina are still on the open-access reference shelves at the Bibliothèque National de France. When Londres perished on a ship that sunk returning from China in 1932, a colleague lightly edited his second series of articles on China into a book, Mourir pour Shanghai (To die for Shanghai).44 The following year, Viollis published Changhai et le destin de la Chine (Shanghai and the destiny of China), based on a series in Le Petit Parisien. She and Londres overlapped in Shanghai, where Londres, a former colleague, visited her in the hospital while she recovered from cholera.45 These series and volumes are analyzed in detail below.

S t u n t s , P l u c k , W ar, and Travel Although a quick inspection of Viollis’s and Londres’s reporting might suggest that her gender correlated with theatrical stunts, a deconstruction of theatricality in journalism suggests otherwise. On the surface,

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only Viollis engaged in a stunt. During the uproar about the proposed separation between church and state before the 1905 separation, Andrée entered Saltpêtrière Hospital dressed as an apprentice nurse to expose the inadequacies of the nursing sisters that the state was going to replace with lay nurses. Thereafter, she eschewed costumes and dressed in a ladylike manner. Commentators often described her as fragile and feminine and yet, as if it were surprising, courageous.46 We will see that other women reporters elicited the same kind of reaction. However, the third generation of women reporters were not accused of stunts, mainly because their reporting techniques were not subject to so much scrutiny since women were no longer so rare and so new to the occupation. Conversely, Londres did not don costumes but did pose as an ignorant observer of penal colonies and insane asylums, a form of performance that was not perceived or criticized as theatrical. Commentators rarely mentioned his physical appearance but often cited his courage. Clearly, gender expectations informed the reception of their performances in journalism. Like many grand reporters, Londres and Viollis began with war reporting and travelled frequently and far to conduct inquiries. In this sense, most grand reporters seem quite “plucky,” which means brave, courageous, and gutsy, but they were not described as plucky, no doubt because most of them were men. Here too gender expectations inflected the reception of their reporting. During the Great War, French military authorities did not allow reporters at the front. In September 1914, Londres, who had been declared unfit for military service in 1906, learned in Paris about the bombing of Reims in the Ardennes, 129 kilometres north and east of the capital. He rushed to Reims by train but had to cycle the last nine and a half miles. Once there, he set the scene by vividly describing the magnificent cathedral with towers soaring into the sky just before shells fell from the sky and debris from the cathedral. He told of French women and children fleeing the city but did not dwell on the suffering of the injured, notably the one hundred wounded German soldiers sheltered in the cathedral or the five who were shot escaping the cathedral. Another grand reporter, Edouard Helsey, remembered Londres’s article as “a tale of tragic instants, written with such a virile pen, such poignant yet sober accents that [it] made his reputation in a single coup.” Tom Quinn, who contributed an essay on this article to a book on war reporting, lauds his courage, resourcefulness, emotion, and “almost ‘heroic’ positioning of himself as the observer.”47

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Part of the impact of this article reflected the timing and seriousness of the attack on Reims, early in the war and close to the capital. Part of the response reflected what he did not describe. Remember the ­quite different reception of Capy’s essay on the same event. Londres’s biographers, who also study his war reporting in the Dardanelles and Italy, note that he tried but rarely got close to the fighting, which meant that his wartime reporting was about the aftermath of battles, mainly the destruction of buildings and the countryside. In this sense, it resembled some of the reporting done by Colette and other women reporters during the war. Although he was less likely to discuss human losses than women reporters, the details about material losses he provided and the indignation he expressed ultimately resulted in dismissal from Le Matin due to military pressure on the publishers. Although many French reporters won the military award known as the Croix de guerre, Londres did not.48 Viollis first appeared on the front page of Le Petit Parisien in March 1916 with an article entitled “Ambulence!” and subtitled “Comme ils savent souffrir” (How they suffer). Beginning with the sounds of bombing and glass shattering nearby, then the rumbling of ambulances approaching the camp hospital, she detailed the process of triage, talked with wounded soldiers, described their bloody bandages, recorded nurses and doctors treating patients, and concluded with the words of patients she interviewed.49 With its auditory, visual, professional, and interpersonal details, the article certainly evoked the victims of battle, but it has not attracted the same attention as Londres’s article on Reims Cathedral has. No one called her reporting virile or brave. Yet surely this kind of reporting showed personal fortitude? Timing affected the article’s reception, since it appeared after two years of war and after other reports from nurses on the front. Her subsequent wartime reporting was more about the British women’s army corps and England, which may explain why French scholars do not regard her as a war reporter.50 Londres’s and Viollis’s eye-witness approach to Shanghai, which involved walking around dangerous sites and talking to potentially hostile informants, was not equally plucky, because as Europeans they were hors de combat. Still, both ventured into battle zones and conversed with combatants among the Japanese and Chinese forces during interludes in the fighting. When the rickshaw driver conducting Viollis to the fighting in the outskirts of Shanghai refused to take her any closer to the engagement, she walked the rest of the way to the site.

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While circulating around Nanking in another rickshaw, she was hit by a hurled stone, which ended her wandering around the besieged city.51 By this point in their careers, both reporters understated their daring and Londres mocked his. Although he was stopped twice on his way to the place where the Japanese infantry were gathering outside the city, when he reached them, “they parted and let me through, without asking where I came from or who I was.” In an aside, he commented that “A war correspondent’s job is not difficult in the Far East.”52 Not as difficult as getting close to the action in the Great War, perhaps, but hardly easy! These seasoned reporters queried the bold reputation of grand reporters. Londres often ridiculed his and other men’s bravado, and Viollis admitted personal failures but never criticized her peers. In a collection of essays by grand reporters, he selected one about an expedition to kill a tiger in the Indochinese jungle that he called off when he realized that this manly exercise meant luring a tiger into the open by displaying the corpse of a water buffalo. Viollis – the only woman included in the collection – recounted her pursuit of Irish authorities and Erskine Childers during the Irish Civil War. She did not find the authorities, who had fled their posts, or Childers, who had been executed. No other contributor to this collection mocked himself or chose a story where he failed to fulfill his objectives.53 In the manner of the authors of adventure and exploration accounts, most grand reporters described the length of time and obstacles they encountered travelling to foreign assignments: taking up to six weeks to get to distant sites, using uncomfortable means of transportation, passing through rough terrain and regions in civil war. In contrast, most offered few details about their more commodious means of travel, for instance, on ocean liners. Initially, Viollis gave detailed accounts of the arduous aspects of her travels and referred to her gender directly or indirectly. In Seule en Russie (A Girl in Soviet Russia, 1927), her account of travelling “alone and freely” in trains resemble the gutsy girl-reporter trope popular in the 1920s. Train rides tapped into the modern fascination with mobility; an anecdote about smoking in the corridor of one coach evoked the insouciant modern girl.54 Yet she was a married woman and mother in her mid-fifties! Shortly after a 1929 revolt in Kabul, Viollis spent five days on a train to Russia and then persuaded Soviet authorities to fly her to Kabul. The flight, her first, took two

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days and passed through contested territory. When an official at the Afghan consulate discouraged her from going to Afghanistan because of the civil war, she replied, “Bah! I have seen other wars, other revolutions!”55 The consular official responded, “But not the same kind. There are savages among us. We detest strangers, especially women strangers.” She persisted. Arriving in Kabul after the citadel there fell to insurgents, she hid for several days with the remaining embassy staff in the outbuildings of the French legation (the main building was too damaged by artillery fire for human habitation). Having aroused readers’ interest, she described rare interviews with leaders of the insurgents and provided a time line of the succession of coups and counter-coups preceding the seige of Kabul. After a difficult flight back to Russia, the pilot informed her that the trip would have been challenging for experienced aviators, “And you were calm all the time – I watched you … Not many men would be as calm as you!” She concluded, “Even in my youth, no compliment made me blush so deliciously.”56 References to her gender and blatant self-promotion disappeared in her subsequent reporting. By comparison, Londres was more inclined to tell tales of the disgusting hygienic conditions in steerage on the ships he sailed to penal colonies and the seedy bars where he drank on stopovers on the way to Rio de Janiero.57 He depicted some informants, like prisoners in the penal colonies or criminals in the white slave trade, as suspicious and threatening. He gained their trust by taking an interest in them.58 No doubt because of her gender and class, Viollis did not focus on sleazy sites or represent herself chatting with prisoners about tattoos or white slave traffickers about prostitutes. Editors publicized their grand reporters’ heroics, calling Londres’s and Viollis’s assignments adventurous, audacious, and astonishing.59 When Viollis was hospitalized with cholera on the second leg of her tour of the Far East, her editor shared with readers that she had refused repatriation, even though other European correspondents were fleeing Shanghai to avoid the cholera.60 Viollis confined herself to a terse but telling remark in the chapter on the cleanup after the battle in her book: “World journalists have dispersed to the four quarters of the world.”61 Along the same lines, her front-page obituary for Londres lauded his refusal to leave the sinking ship bringing him home from Shanghai, trying to save his “notes and documents, journalists’ most precious possessions.”62 Clearly both were committed to their work.

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In t e rs e c t io n a l it y and Careers Many of the differences between these two grand reporters’ careers were due to intersections of gender with class, education, and literary genre. Like several other men in grand reporting, Londres was from a modest background. Born in 1884 into a Lyonnais artisanal family, he received a “sketchy education.”63 Like all the women in grand reporting, Andrée Viollis came from a higher social class, received a better education than Londres, and used her superior qualifications to advance in her occupation.64 While she never had the kind of camaraderie with other grand reporters that Londres enjoyed, once again due to her gender and class, she did use the social capital acquired in her upbringing to gain access to important sources as a reporter. Geneviève Tabouis, the subject of chapter 7, did the same. Literary genres also affected the two journalists’ written works. While employed as a bookkeeper, Londres published four books of poetry between 1904 and 1910. Lyricism, imagery, irony, and other poetic elements enhanced his reporting. So, too, did his use of the Voltairean tactic of representing himself as a stranger without special knowledge but with unique sensitivity to his surroundings.65 His sensitivity to his surroundings accounts for commentators calling his writing feminine.66 However, this sensitivity did not trump his use of irony, notably in his material on China. Reviewers and readers of his first book on China were amused by passages like, “China has lost its head. In compensation, it has two brains: Peking to the North; Canton to the South.”67 He showed little respect for the individuals in insane asylums or of a different race in the colonies; instead, he exaggerated their strangeness and resorted to obvious stereotypes. Boucharenc contrasts his reporting on psychiatric asylums to Nelly Bly’s reporting from an asylum, which was intended to reduce strangeness and induce indignation.68 A similar contrast would be to Viollis’s sympathetic presentation of patients in hospitals. Viollis described individuals and settings as a novelist might. Her perceptive portraits of individuals and depiction of social settings may be connected with her “feminine style,” as has been argued about Colette’s journalism, but the impact of these women’s portraits and settings also derived from their literary skills.69 Although Viollis – and many other reporters in this period – succumbed to Orientalist stereotypes when discussing large groups of Asian people, she

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described Chinese, Japanese, Indochinese, and African individuals much as she did French or other Caucasian individuals. After apprenticing on several newspapers and being advised to pursue reporting by fellow-Lyonnais Élie-Joseph Bois, Londres was hired at the age of twenty-six as a political reporter for Le Matin. This was the first of many moments in his career where a male colleague or colleagues helped his career.70 Other men in grand reporting got the same kind of boost from male colleagues.71 At the beginning of the Great War, Le Matin appointed Londres a war correspondent and he acquired a byline. During the war, he formed bonds with many male reporters that would help him in future reporting. Despite being married and the father of a beloved daughter, he travelled incessantly while writing for various newspapers. Gender, in the form of marriage and maternity, both helped and hindered Viollis’s career. Her second marriage to a journalist helped her enter grand reporting, albeit at a later age than most of her male colleagues. Five maternities (one was a stillbirth) and tuberculosis slowed her progress, while male colleagues who started late had tried out various occupations before taking up journalism.72 Under her second husband’s nom de plume, she reached the major dailies in her forties. She placed her first signed articles in Le Petit Parisien at the age of forty-six – twenty years older than Londres had been when his byline first ran in Le Matin.73 Not until her mid-fifties and early sixties, when her children were independent, was she able to travel to Russia, Afghanistan, Indochina, China, and Japan. Although Londres was usually a salaried reporter, he behaved as if he was a freelancer, which meant frequent and sometimes bitter breaks with editors, culminating with him resigning or being fired.74 Just before he went to China in 1932, he left Le Petit Parisien because he would not tell Bois, long-time editor of this daily, what he intended to investigate. There has been credible speculation that he was interested in exploring the drug trade. Typically, and in this case accurately, Londres told his readers that it was only by hazard he was “the witness of a historic minute” in Shanghai.75 The respect he commanded and his stature in the world of journalism were recognized in frontpage obituaries announcing his death in a shipwreck during his return from Shanghai. One of these was by Bois, who paid tribute to Londres’s courage. Another by Andre Viollis, in Les Nouvelles littéraires, called him a “Prince of Reporters.” She would later be called the “Princess of Reporters.”76

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Viollis stayed at Le Petit Parisien for a decade and a half, and maintained good relations with Bois almost to the end. Initially, the paper paid her and Londres the same salary but soon he earned more. In February 1923 (the first date for records of monthly salaries at the daily), both had a monthly salary of 2,000 francs; in 1926, she earned 2,300 francs while Londres earned 4,000 francs; and by February 1929 (the last date for which there are comparable pay rates), Londres remained at 4,000 francs, but Viollis only took home 3,000.77 This difference was not solely due to her gender, since she received more than Roubaud at 2,500 francs and other (male) grand reporters at Le Petit Parisien. Londres’s fame after publishing several popular books in the 1920s best explains the difference. All the grand reporters at Le Petit Parisien were paid more than a regular reporter at that paper.78 They were paid much more than reporters for secondary dailies. For instance, in 1930 Yvonne Dusser (1889–1967), a Frenchwoman resident in and correspondent from Brussels, had a contract for 1,000 francs a month at L’Oeuvre.79

C o n t e n t a n d In t erpretati on Londres and Viollis had conducted earlier inquiries in Russia. Their series and books on visits to Russia differed dramatically in content and interpretation, largely due to their timing, gender and political positions. Three years after the Russian Revolution, Londres followed four other French reporters to the Soviet Union. The four pioneer reporters had either been very positive or very negative about the new Soviet regime. Greeted by two soldiers on his arrival, Londres construed their presence as “already” having the state’s “hand on my neck.” His focus was on the communist political system, which he called “a dictatorship in the name of the proletariat, over the proletariat as over the rest, by non-proletarians.” He also detected a resemblance to German imperialism, a harsh indictment in the postwar period. Although he interviewed and quoted a variety of Bolsheviks, he disparaged their policies and dismissed Bolshevism as “a monastic order rather than a party.”80 Viollis went to Russia seven years later and was more even-handed and comprehensive. The explanation for her tolerance was only partly the passage of time. The preface to her book reported that she observed “an enormous mass of one hundred and forty million people …

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following the directions of the seven hundred thousand dictators of the communist party.” She concluded that “Russian-style bolshevism would not make inroads in Europe and particularly in France,” because it severely limited freedom of expression and overregulated everyday life.81 But she did not concentrate on formal political institutions and spent time considering housing and other social policies and conditions. She applauded Alexandra Kollontai’s radical reforms in marriage and divorce laws, maternity and child care, but expressed reservations about easy access to abortion, perhaps in obeisance to the anti-abortion climate in France after the passage of the anti-femalebirth-control and abortion law of 1920.82 The following passage hints that her reservations did not fully express her position. She chronicled communist reactions to her discomfort about abortion, mentioning that the Soviets viewed abortion differently than hypocritical countries [like France] that criminalized abortions without reducing the number of abortions. Instead of focusing on raising the birth rate [as the French state manifestly did], the official insisted that the Soviet Union emphasized the fight against infant mortality.83 (Bracketed material not in the original.) This juxtaposition of her discomfort about the subject and the more accepting Soviet view of the subject cleverly let her feminist sensibilities speak to those in her audience who were responsive to her message. In one respect, their interpretation of Shanghai in 1931–32 resembled their interpretation of the Soviet Union. Londres blamed propaganda from Moscow for the situation and Viollis remained silent about that possibility.84 Even though Louis Roubaud was a colleague at Le Petit Parisien, neither referenced his 1928 investigation of China, when the communist forces had been overcome in Hangkeou.85 They were equally silent about Simone Téry’s book, Fièvre jaune (La Chine convulsée) (Yellow fever: China convulsed), even though this was her least partisan book. Arriving in China was “like landing on the moon,” a place where words like nationalism and communism “don’t mean what we mean by them.” She denounced a warlord in Beijing for “imposing a reign of terror” but reserved her most anguished language for peasants who were “dying of hunger” and her most severe criticism for the cover up of the famine.86 Londres’s and Viollis’s comments on Chinese women differed. Viollis wrote more about women in Changhai et le destin de la Chine (references on twenty-five pages) than Londres did in Mourir pour Shanghai (references on nineteen pages) and significantly more than Roubaud

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or Téry had in 1928. As in her accounts of other foreign travel, she was most interested in women’s physical work and childcare practices. Londres’s observations of Chinese women were most often of them fleeing the fighting. He was less interested in women’s clothing than he had been in La Chine en folie, where he commented several times about elite women’s tiny shoes and feet. Viollis did not mention Chinese women’s feet or shoes. This was the reverse of the level of attention paid to women’s bound feet in the writing of Ian Fleming and Elsa Maillart, who travelled together through China in the late 1930s.87 Londres’s interest was less in the treatment of women, qua Maillart, than one more aspect of his fascination with Chinese “exoticism” or differences from European practices. His perspective is a reminder that differences that may seem to be determined by gender may in fact reflect individual differences. The editor of the reprint of Londres’s two books on China, originally published ten years apart, discerns a change of tone from sarcasm in the first book to horror in the second.88 In 1922, Londres had spent seven and a half months travelling in the Far East. His newspaper series and book on Japan was less judgmental than his series and books on China. Par for the course, he devoted an entire article to geishas, which, he cautioned, were “not what we think,” but rather dancers, singers, and hostesses.89 He was more critical and sardonic about China. Learning that military and civilian leaders he interviewed seemed to be planning an escape from the city or region they administered, he condemned their hypocrisy. He castigated Shanghai for its business culture, piracy, drugs, and gambling.90 Reviews of La Chine en folie admired his “comic genius” in evoking “a real Oriental farce” represented as “scenes of an irresistible burlesque.”91 In contrast, Mourir pour Shanghai was filled with horror, though Londres could not forebear pointing out absurdities such as a Japanese soldier, with his rifle, being taken to the battle in a rickshaw pulled by a Chinese man. Although Londres repeated the madness metaphor from La Chine en folie, he now labelled it Asian rather than Chinese. Describing Chinese and Japanese brutality in treating enemy corpses, he ended the disturbing passage with a trademark curt and relativist statement: “It is customary in the Far East. To each, his moral standards.”92 However, there were more harrowing passages, also written in short, staccato sentences. One passage about overcrowding, poor supplies, and disarray in Chinese hospitals ended with the discover of “a child wounded in the war. They carried him here, his stomach

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gaping from a bomb. He died. He was four years old.”93 Harrowing details, briefly recounted, akin to passages in Changhai et le destin de la Chine. What had happened in the ten years between the publication of his two books on China? One thing was the defeat of the communist forces in 1928, a second was another Japanese attack and serious fighting in Shanghai. In 1931–32, Le Petit Parisien sent Viollis to China and Japan. The introduction to her book on Shanghai claimed that readers familiar with her previous voyages looked forward to what she would “see and say” because they knew that her “genius … comes from the fact that she is exceptional … in being humane and disinterested.”94 Changhai et le destin de la Chine was not as sarcastic or as horrified about atrocities as Mourir pour Shanghai. When Viollis arrived in China in December 1931, she expressed the same opinion of China – “this inexhaustible reservoir of men” – as she had thirty years earlier when reporting on the Boxer Rebellion. By 1931, she shared the contemporary European view (and present-day opinion) that this population, under repeated Japanese attacks, was becoming nationalist.95 In Nanking on her way to Shanghai, the Japanese attacked, and she wrote about failing to find the city officials in a passage reminiscent of her fruitless search for civil authorities in the Irish Civil War a decade earlier. When she got to Shanghai, the Japanese assault of that city began. With the municipal officials divided on a response, residents began an exodus, which called forth an anti-war remark she would repeat in Spain four years later: “the eternal spectacle of the miseries of war.”96 She interviewed officials and people on the street until she was hospitalized with cholera. During her fortnight-long hospital stay, she met many injured Chinese, which intensified her critique of Japanese brutality. After she recovered, she toured the city again, then continued her journey to Japan. Only in Le Japon et son empire (Japan and its empire) did she append to her brief reference to the “famous incident” of the thirty-three-day assault and fall of Shanghai, that it “killed 15,000 men and left another fifteen thousand dead from epidemics.” Her estimates are lower than those of historians, who have the advantage of consulting many more sources.97 Viollis came to Japan with some stock ideas, for she characterized it as a country of surprises that had transformed rapidly into “a great modern power” with well-trained and equipped soldiers. She was especially surprised that the populace was divided on the siege of Shanghai but intransigent about the invasion of Manchuria. In an

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interview with the minister of war, she asked about Japan’s intentions in Manchuria and rumours that it would leave the League of Nations over the League’s opposition to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. She got a clear and aggressive answer to the first question and an evasive but threatening answer to the second.98 Most of her series and books on Japan concentrated on the rise of nationalism, particularly fascist and reactionary elements in the nationalist movement, and the importance of the military and the economy. She interviewed socialists and fascists, ministers and industrialists, military officers and soldiers. Her description of a military parade, with row after row of soldiers robotically paying obeisance to the Emperor, was ominous.99 After one of her books on Japan won a foreign reporting prize, Viollis became something of an expert on Japan. She republished the disturbing article about the military parade in Vendredi.100 As Japanese invasions of China resumed in 1937, she joined others speaking to large meetings about the need for aid to “China under attack.”101 The prestigious Cercle Descartes published and distributed her speech on the subject.102

S t y l e a n d Gender Newspaper editors lavished praise on their grand reporters’ writing. In the introduction to the final leg of Viollis’s journey to Asia, ÉlieJoseph Bois complimented her “clarity of expression, probity … and sincerity that … earns Mme Andrée Viollis first place among grand journalists of our times.”103 Editors and book reviewers regularly praised Londres’s sincerity, along with his eye for picturesque details and amusing phrases.104 Evidently, sincerity was a gender-neutral quality in these reporters, but sexual probity was important to Viollis’s reputation and – with the exception of Titayna – to the reputations of other women whose reporting challenged gender role expectations. Conversely, Viollis’s reporting was not as picturesque or amusing as Londres’s. In these two reporters’ journalism, there were stylistic similarities as well as dissimilarities. Writing in the first person was a feature of the eye-witness style of French grand reporters. They considered themselves “witness-ambassadors,” invoking what Géraldine Muhlman calls a “tacit contract” between the “I” and the readers “who recognize themselves in that ‘I.’”105 In their early reporting, both reporters

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occasionally referenced that contract when they addressed readers and intruded in the text. In Londres’s reporting on China (and several other publications), his self-representations and references to readers were not necessarily flattering. In La Chine en folie (1925), he told “A Story that could serve as a preface” about a grand reporter named Aigues-Morte (possible translation Near Death?) who is sent everywhere by his editor until he is addicted to travel, just as drug addicts are addicted to drugs.106 He also describes a romantic interlude that culminates, after eighty-five pages, in him spending a night in the hotel room of a Russian woman.107 The affair is described with little reference to the political and cultural context that was supposedly the subject of the book. One chapter tells of waking up mid-afternoon asking himself, “why am I in China? It is, I say, while lacing my shoes, to wait for the war between M. Tang-Tso-Lin and M. Wou-Pé-Fou.” Smiling, he asks himself “if the readers of your newspaper await every morning, hearts beating, for news of MM. Wou-Pé Fou and Tsang-Tso-Lin? … [D]on’t you know that 5,000 cadavers don’t have the same value if they perished 500 or 20,000 kilometers from Paris?”108 Here he disparaged his readers. Viollis’s self-representation and references to readers differed significantly, largely on lines of gender. As a married woman, Viollis did not mention or – so far as can be ascertained – engage in affairs during her assignments. She assumed her readers would be interested in her reporting, or, if she was unsure, tried to entice them with her content and style. After her 1930 book on Afghanistan, which began, “An extraordinary adventure, where progress and barbarity, the Orient and the West, medieval fanaticism and the modern spirit are in a violent conflict with tragic and comic, bloody and burlesque overtones,” she avoided rhetorical excess.109 As their careers unfolded, both journalists’ personal idiosyncrasies intruded less in their reporting and books, but Londres’s persona was always more present. He represented himself as an ignorant observer, simply recording unfamiliar, sometimes horrible but sometimes humorous events, or as a “good old boy” hanging around with criminals selling women into prostitution. Both the ignorant persona and the good old boy persona were disingenuous, for penetrating closed institutions and criminal organizations required assiduous pursuit of the gatekeepers. His claims to leave judgments up to his readers were equally insincere. His introduction to the book on virtual slave labour

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used to build roads in African colonies mentioned the vitriolic criticisms of his newspaper series and added to his indictment of the system in the series.110 In his introduction to Indochine S.O.S., André Malraux distinguished between Londres’s personal style and Viollis’s “new journalism,” which he defined as writing focused on the events being reported.111 Clearly, he meant the “new journalism” of the 1930s, not the subjective journalism of the 1960s in the United States.112 Viollis described her methods of investigation, admitted doing research before visiting sites, and appended reading lists to two of her books.113 For the Shanghai book she drew on and detailed her research en route to China, although, in line with her policy of not revealing details about her family, she did not mention her husband’s expertise as a sinologue.114 Before 1935, she did not include manifestos in her work. The next chapter deals with her more polemical writing after that date. By the 1930s, neither author was as intrusive in the text. In Changhai et le destin de la Chine, Viollis uses personal pronouns slightly more than once a page (281 uses in 241 pages), enough to make her presence in the landscape of China apparent. Instead of omnipotent observations, such as noting that “there is a group of soldiers,” she writes, “I can see a group of soldiers.” In Mourir pour Shanghai, Londres refers to himself 394 times in 246 pages, over a hundred times more often than Viollis does in her book. Although both reporters most often used I or we with verbs of perception, movement, or navigation around Shanghai, the pattern and purpose of this usage varied. If graphed, Londres’s self-references are wavelike, with fewer in the early chapters, considerably more in the midsection, then tapering off in the final chapters. In the early chapters, he contextualizes his surroundings for readers without locating himself in the landscape, as an omnipotent observer. The midsection tells about his movements and heroic efforts to get the news. Finally, he discusses the macro-implications of what he has seen in the field. This pattern can also be found in at least two of his other grand reporting books.115 The wave of personal references can be connected to his Voltairean persona, which can make it seem as if he is writing less about what is happening around him and more about himself. Muhlman sees similarities between this characteristic of his writing and Nelly Bly’s feminine style. But Muhlman distinguishes between Bly’s attempts to make her subjects familiar to her readers

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and Londres’s stress on the incomprehensibility of many of his subjects.116 She might have contrasted his representation of subjects to those of Viollis. Viollis refers to herself more in the early parts of her book and series on Shanghai than she does in later chapters or articles. She uses her perception of the environment to introduce it to her readers and to establish a rapport with her readers. In this, her style resembles the first great Frenchwoman reporter, Séverine, and other women journalists, in that they used their bodily and sensory experiences to establish trust. Muhlman suggests that this was possible because women’s bodies, and hence their personal perceptions, were considered more empathetic and receptive.117 Here it is important to repeat that Viollis herself made no claims about feminine sensitivity. Viollis then disappears for several chapters, where she discusses general conditions, including politics and the condition of women. This pattern of selfreference is also found in her previous grand reporting series, though her later books, such as Notre Tunisie, began more authoritatively, as if written by an omniscient observer. Perhaps her self-confidence in her observations had increased. The two reporters deployed the pronouns we and you differently. Viollis uses we to refer to herself and her audience, establishing a kind of intimacy, while Londres more often uses you to describe differences he observes between daily lives in China versus what his reader would be familiar with in France. This put him in a liminal space between the place he is writing about and his readers in France, further implying that his experience is unlike anything readers and possibly other reporters might experience. Viollis more often includes herself in the second person plural. Like most French reporters, public figures, and intellectuals of the interwar period, both journalists referred to their readers as us and Chinese people as them, distancing the two populations. Both deployed Orientalist stereotypes about inscrutable and uncontrollable crowds. Both used the terms coolies and boys, which were common then but are offensive to us today. In other books, Londres devoted full passages to his local servant in situ. In Terre d’ébène, the servant, called “Mon Boy,” was represented as unintelligent and rather feminized due to his interest in clothing.118 Little credit was accorded to this person’s knowledge of the place or situation, even though he might have been a useful source. Insofar as Viollis did not describe any servants she had on her travels, the best comparison is with Roubaud,

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who paid a lot of attention to his translator. Viollis and Londres also differed in their attitudes toward Chinese men. Londres repeatedly remarked on how small Asian troops were and how strange Chinese men’s attire and appearance were, implicitly by comparison to French readers, whereas Viollis described a variety of Asian foot soldiers, including sturdy types, and a range of men’s clothing, from silk robes to Western-style suits. Only once, describing a young man, did she invoke the stereotype of Asian men as slighter and by implication more feminine than European men.119 In short, her portraits of nonCaucasian individuals were less racist than Londres’s. Here her relative sensitivity seems as much a consequence of her reading and accepting communist critiques of colonialism and racism, as it does of her “feminine” compassion. Neither of these grand reporters could be characterized as sentimental, though they were capable of emotive writing. Both included some wrenching description of war dead in their work on Shanghai. Viollis is more detailed and empathetic. She writes of encountering a cart, apparently full of tangled bedding and clothing, but looking closer, she notices a bent neck, a bloody hand peeking out, a face partially covered by a cap, and so on. She ends the passage with her personal reaction: “My God, these are corpses!”120 As a former nurse at a war-front hospital, her reaction was not simple ignorance about corpses. Londres combines some detail with an averted eye, but does not emphasize his own horror so much as local custom. He begins by telling readers that he noticed two cadavers of Chinese snipers, one of which was partially undressed and had a bayonet wound in its chest. “But, he continues, I cannot say more; this is enough. Death among these Asiatics … takes a sibylline aspect.” Presumably he meant a mysterious or possibly a prophetic aspect. He continued with a cool report of his own reaction: “On the other side of the road, another corpse under several blue cloths. Feet protrude. I did not lift any more cloths.”121 By today’s standards, Londres was more politically correct in applying different cultural standards, but Viollis was more empathetic. One way both Londres and Viollis communicated dramatically through their writing was through their sometimes excessive deployment of exclamation marks, which have little grammatical point other than prompting or amplifying feelings such as shock. Londres frequently used this kind of punctuation to indicate speed, while Viollis was apt to insert exclamation marks to highlight her own reactions,

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notably in relation to war horrors. In her books, Viollis often had one tone that underscores the whole narrative, and in the book on China, the tone was one of misery. She then used exclamation marks to provide variation in moments that deviated or required extra attention. Both journalists also used question marks in their writing as a literary device to ask readers rhetorical questions. Like exclamation marks, question marks featured prominently on occasion. In one of her final articles in the series on China, Viollis punctuates with no fewer than twenty-three question marks.122 She tended to finish her series by asking herself and readers a lot of questions about the difficult terrain she has just navigated, while Londres uses question marks predominantly towards the beginning of his reports as part of his ignoramus persona, who later needs to ask fewer questions as he becomes an authority. In Mary Louise Pratt’s terms, he ends with the “monarch of all I survey” rhetorical ploy.123

C o n c l u s i on Chapter 5 introduced grand reporting, the acme of newspaper reporting, linked it to travel and adventure writing as well as to detective fiction, two other kinds of para-literature popular in the interwar decades, and explained that publishers and editors promoted this kind of reporting because it countered readers’ suspicions about the veracity of wartime news reporting and because grand reporting series invited readers to keep buying issues. The chapter also identifies and compares the most prominent male and female grand reporter, Albert Londres and Andrée Viollis, to draw some conclusions about the impact of gender on their careers and reputations, their reportorial techniques and styles. In doing so, it demonstrated that grand reporting reflected not only the time, place, and situation being covered, but also the gender expectations of its practitioners. Systematic comparison of their careers identified the most significant gender difference was the time Viollis took out for maternities and illness, which in turn meant that she entered the field of grand reporter later in her life. As for their reportorial techniques, both engaged in theatrical efforts to get news, with Viollis donning a nurse’s uniform early in her career, and Londres regularly misrepresenting himself as a kind of ignoramus bumbling into a story. Only Viollis’s effort was called a stunt, though it is hard to determine if this was because of her gender or the adoption of a costume to play a nurse. Examining the

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reception of their reporting of similar events shows that both were praised for their sincerity and courage, though in case of Viollis (and other roving women reporters to be discussed in later chapters), commentators seemed surprised at such courage in a woman. Presumably they had not read the dozens of lady travellers’ books published in France. Despite reporting from similarly disturbing scenes of war, Londres rose to fame on his war reporting, while Viollis (and other women reporting from hospitals on the front) was and is not feted as a war reporter. Equally detailed comparisons of the content and tone of their reporting discovered some variations due to gender alone: Viollis evinced more interest in women, children, and hospitals than Londres did, and she showed more empathy toward her subjects than Londres. One consequence was a less racist portrayal of Chinese people, both men and women. Londres represented himself as a rogue, while she avoided self-denigration, especially any allusion to sexual impropriety. Similarly, Londres was more inclined to visit and describe unsavory spots and consort with criminals, gangsters, and the like. Deixis also identified differences almost certainly connected to gender: Londres often adopted the omnipotent observer position, separating him from readers, while she more often wrote in the first or second person, encouraging more reader identification with herself and likely her subjects. Conversely, variations in their willingness to acknowledge doing research for their investigations and in their interpretation of communism were as closely associated with their level of education and their respective political positions.

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6 Gender, Politics, and Racism in Colonial Reporting, 1930s

In the early 1920s, only three national dailies had regular columns on the colonies.1 As the far-flung and barely secured empire was periodically challenged by revolts put down by military interventions and the repression that followed aroused anticolonial sentiment in Communist Party circles and newspapers in the following years,2 other editors paid more attention to the colonies. Starting with the Rif War in Morocco (1921–25), they sent grand reporters to sites of colonial conflict. By 1930, when the Yen Bay mutiny occurred in Indochina, colonial reporting had become a regular feature in the Parisian press. Some of the broadsheets published weekly colonial editions; tabloids sent special envoys to Indochina. Unlike earlier colonial coverage, these investigations were often critical of colonial administrations and settlers. Popular interest declined after extensive coverage of the Yen Bay mutiny, but some reporters continued to send dispatches from the colonies through the 1930s. When Andrée Viollis cofounded the Popular Bloc newspaper Vendredi in 1935, she insisted on a colonial page because “few problems facing our époque are as serious, pressing, or sad as that of colonization.” Their colonial page would “differ from others in that it would not celebrate colonials, but rather indicate the defects and injustices … and seek in each colony the causes and remedies for malaise.”3 The spread of fascism in Europe cut this initiative even shorter than the leftist weekly, which closed in 1936. The failure to implement the Popular Bloc’s colonial policies, which resulted in protests in the colonies, caused little stir in France. Henceforth most foreign affairs reporting concentrated on the menace of fascism in Europe.4

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The reporters discussed in this chapter were not dedicated colonial reporters. Louis Roubaud and Viollis had been abroad but had little colonial experience before Yen Bay. Jean Dorsenne (pseudonym of Jean Troufleau, 1892–1944 or 1945) had lived in and written fiction about Oceania, Polynesia, and Tahiti.5 Postcolonial historians have condemned reporters who covered the colonies as pro-imperial and Viollis for advocating a patriarchal feminist variation of colonialism. This chapter refutes these blanket charges, with the help of critiques of postcolonial approaches for their failure to attend to the material conditions of colonialism and anticolonialism,6 and of feminist transnational and neocolonial scholars who link labour conditions in the “First World” to those in the “Third World.”7 Historical subjects should be assessed by the standards of behaviour in their time, not just by latter-day standards. Certainly, these reporters did not advocate the end of colonialism, but two of them documented serious abuses in colonial administrations, companies, and plantations, and recommended collaboration with indigenous peoples to ameliorate the abuse and respond to demands for consultation and representation. While all expressed some racialism, or belief in the existence of race, and racism, or belief in racial hierarchies, they were not grossly racist. Both Roubaud and Viollis had flirted with the ubiquitous notion of a racial hierarchy; both of them were changing their minds about this invidious idea in the early 1930s, just as the concept took on new meaning in France.8 After introducing the reporters examined here, this chapter provides essential background information about the colonial and Indochinese situation and French attitudes toward the colonies in general and toward Indochina in particular. The third section contrasts the three reporters’ investigations of Indochina, and links differences in content and interpretation to gender and political beliefs. The fourth section analyzes some passages from Viollis on Indochina that may have informed the critiques of her as an imperialist (critics do not quote extensively) and offers a defence of Viollis’s intentions.

R o u bau d , V io l l is , a nd Dors enne Le Petit Parisien, which had adopted the policy of presenting different perspectives on important news stories, sent three reporters to Indochina in the aftermath of the Yen Bay mutiny.

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Louis Roubaud was one of the grand reporters who emulated Londres’s focus on penal colonies and insane asylums, beginning with a 1925 series and subsequent book on children in the judicial system placed in private workhouses and continuing in a 1933 series and volume on insane asylums.9 While he did not make his mark writing about war or travel, his eclectic choice of subjects resembled Londres’s heterogeneous subjects. Between the 1925 book and the outbreak of the Second World War, Roubaud put out eleven grand reporting books on topics varying from judicial affairs, the stock exchange, the music hall, prostitution, the Baltic and Adriatic regions, and China. From 1929 on, his inquiries appeared in Le Petit Parisien, where he overlapped with Viollis and Londres. In the spring and summer of 1930, his inquiry on Indochina appeared in that tabloid and the following year was published as a volume on Vietnam.10 This series resulted in interpellations in the Chamber of Deputies.11 His volume provided at least one Vietnamese rebel otherwise-unavailable information on the geographic scope of the rebellion, information that encouraged the rebel to commit to the communist and nationalist cause.12 Subsequently hailed as a specialist on the colonies, Roubaud coauthored two books on the colonies, a monograph on the Maghreb, and a prize-winning biography of a renowned colonial administrator.13 Five of his works went into multiple editions; the Vietnamese material was republished in 2010.14 Four of his grand reporting books have been translated into other languages, including Vietnamese. His novella Christiane de Saigon was also translated. By the time Viollis came to Indochina a year later, she had acquired some colonial credentials. In 1930, she went to India to cover Gandhi and his disciples’ campaign of non-violent protest. As a prominent French Orientalist wrote in the preface to her book L’Inde contre les Anglais (India against the English), she eschewed the “literary exercises that India had inspired for centuries: the India of rajas.” Instead, she conducted close-up investigations of “suffering and militant India.”15 Her observations included instances of economic exploitation, notably in the textile trade, which she ­compared to the working conditions of British textile workers.16 Whereas she had paid obeisance to the notion of a French civilizing mission in her earlier series on Afghanistan,17 L’Inde questioned the viability of colonialism. She warned that if Indians revolted against Britain, the whole of Asia would revolt against Europe, and

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that if Britain was vulnerable to the disintegration of its empire, all colonial powers were vulnerable.18 In October and November 1931, at the request of Minister of Colonies Paul Reynaud, a centre-right (Alliance démocratique) member of the government, she visited Indochina. Reynaud’s invitation was predicated on Le Petit Parisien’s support of the coalition government.19 This first visit by a minister to Indochina was ostensibly to investigate the Yen Bay mutiny of 1930 but really to assert French control of the colony.20 Viollis went on this official visit with some reluctance. As one of four journalists from centre- to far right-wing dailies on the trip, this was the first time she fraternized with other reporters on assignment.21 Her anodyne series describing the ministerial tour appeared just after the Exposition coloniale international (International Colonial Exhibition) of 1931 was held in Paris, during a flood of publications celebrating colonial riches and French development of those riches.22 The flood was followed by a smaller stream of works that criticized French policy in Indochina.23 Included in this stream of publications was her 1935 book on Indochina. Viollis did not intervene in the discourse again until December of 1933, when she placed an article in the left-leaning Catholic journal L’Esprit that was so critical of the colonial regime in Indochina that it reads like the antithesis of her series.24 One month after the article appeared, the editor of L’Esprit printed a tear-out petition demanding an investigation of the brutal repression, amnesty for rebels, assurances of free speech, and preparation for independence.25 Two years later, Viollis published Indochine S.O.S., a combination of passages from the original series, excerpts from her travel diary, the Esprit article, and a more fully documented critique of colonial abuses than appeared in that article.26 The 1933 article and the 1935 book disclosed prison torture, an indifferent official response to mass starvation after extensive flooding and crop failures, and near intolerable working conditions on French plantations and in mines and factories. Indochina S.O.S. was also the most personal of her books, with 479 uses of the first or second person in 228 pages. Even before she reported on the Spanish Civil War, her exposure to Indochina converted her to a more partisan and polemical style. In the mid-1930s, scholars considered Viollis’s book on Indochina a “bleak picture of the seamy side of colonization” and many cited it as authoritative.27 Postcolonial scholars such as Nicola Cooper agree that her book revealed colonial abuses and sympathized with the

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demands of indigenous peoples but dismiss her position as immured in colonial ideology and rhetoric, including a kind of patriarchal feminism. Cooper subsequently revised her assessment to argue that she was a humanitarian colonialist.28 Another Petit Parisien reporter, Jean Dorsenne, submitted two reflective articles on Indochina in the winter of 1931 and conducted an inquiry there in the spring of 1932. Later that year, he published a brochure with the provocative title Faudra-t-il évacuer l’Indochine (Should we evacuate Indochina?).29 This brochure is held in many American libraries with holdings on foreign policy and war, no doubt because of its relevance to the American war in Vietnam. Neither of the Indochina volumes by the other Petit Parisien journalists are present in these depositories, though they are available in university libraries worldwide. Dorsenne had published twelve novels between 1925 and 1931, most of them set on South Pacific islands or in South Asian countries. Several of them had erotic titles and content. The novels were popular to the point that one of the erotic ones went into thirty editions in the 1930s alone.30 Dorsenne had also written travel guides and histories focused on Oceania and Polynesia, as well as a biography of the admiral who explored that region, Louis de Bougainville (1729– 1811). Dorsenne’s fiction and nonfiction fall into the tropical subcategory of colonial exoticism, with the focus on garden paradises on “enchanted isles” and the myth of the noble savage, which misrepresents the real lives of the indigenous inhabitants.31 He had occasionally contributed to Le Petit Parisien since 1909 and was a reporter for Paris-Midi during the war.

C o l o n ia l Context After the consolidation of the Third Republic in the early 1880s, a colonial lobby composed of politicians, businessmen, adventurers, and scholars pursued colonial expansion. Two-time prime minister Jules Ferry proposed a civilizing mission as the rationale for this expansion to motivate a never-enthusiastic nation to invest in overseas possessions. The metropolitan press popularized exploration by Frenchmen. The press and school texts emphasized the humanitarian motives of violent incursions and de-emphasized economic motivations for these and more pacific ventures.32 Initially, the Ministry of the Colonies followed a policy of assimilation, which included conquests

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and acquisitions, but by 1917, the ministry adopted the doctrine of association, with more conciliatory language about incorporation and inclusion in metropolitan France. Simultaneously, France was more often represented as the motherland, with connotations of protection and nurturing of the colonies, though the colonial administrators and settlers were still represented – hierarchically – as masculine and authoritative.33 In reality, association was simply a less expensive system that relied more on local elites to govern the colonies and exploit their economic resources. Following the creation of the League of Nations after the First World War, colonial rationales depended more on claims of economic development (mise en valeur). Albert Sarraut (1872–1962), minister of the colonies between 1920 and 1924 and twice prime minister in the 1930s, lobbied for a policy of colonial development to rebuild the French economy and to contain communism.34 In the moderate and radical republican-dominated legislature, he won cross-party support in key parliamentary committees.35 As the overseas empire reached its greatest extent between the two world wars, most French people remained indifferent. Even the contributions of 222,793 indigenous colonials serving in infantry regiments, labour service battalions, munitions factories, and farms during and after the Great War did not leave much of an impression, because most of these men were not integrated with the French populace during their stay in the country and were sent back to the colonies after the postwar reconstruction work concluded.36 Although the colonial lobby and leagues revived after the war, they did not flourish.37 But political and economic leaders recognized the economic potential of the colonies and invested heavily in several of them. By 1928, the colonial empire was France’s major trading partner, and by 1933, when the Great Depression hit France, large industrial producers pursued colonial trade as a solution to their loss of export markets elsewhere.38 Private companies created or exploited existing colonial stereotypes in their advertising. Even the idealized images of Senegalese soldiers used to advertise the drink Banania were racist in their representation of indigenous colonial subjects.39 Governments tried to build awareness of the empire by naming streets, squares, and metro stations after imperial explorers and governors, and by subsidizing colonial exhibitions in 1922 and 1931.40 They used the exhibitions to encourage trade with the colonies and to publicize the extent, value, and potential of the empire.41 According

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to Marshal Hubert Lyautey (1854–1934), the first resident-general of Morocco and organizer of the 1931 exhibition in Paris, the exhibition was supposed to represent the colonies without recourse to the suspect images of Orientalism. The ubiquity of Oriental and exotic images undermined this goal. The exhibit contrasted “the colonies as the Orient – the site of rampant sensuality, irrationality, and decadence – and as the laboratory of Western rationality.” The exhibition grounds physically separated the European and colonial displays, and the distance between the two sectors and the more elaborate buildings in the European sector reinforced the hierarchy of the empire.42 Between eight and nine million people visited the exposition over its six months.43 A rich stockpile of colonial literature supplied the French imaginary. Although adventure narratives were less prevalent than they had been in the fin de siècle, some of these narratives were reissued and a new generation published popular adventure novels set in the colonies. The Orientalist novels of Pierre Loti (pseudonym of Louis MarieJulien Viaud, 1850–1923) were reprinted 33 to 109 times in the first three decades of the twentieth century. His simple prose, escapism, and sexual themes appealed to a wide readership.44 More realistic accounts of North Africa and the Middle East did not replace his exotic view of the colonies, nor did Marc Helys (Marie Léra) diminish his popularity when she revealed how unreliable some of his sources were.45 One of the consequences was that many travelogues and newspaper inquiries used the trope of asking readers to set aside Orientalist ideas about the Middle East and North Africa. In 1950, Marcelle Capy began a study of Egypt with an anecdote about a woman travelling to Egypt who imagined her destination as “a kind of ideal world … a kind of country of the thousand and one nights.” Capy advised the woman and by extension the reader to “forget the old clichés and vague desires.”46 After the Great War, literature turned away from adventure and exotica, which were more about the personal exploits of European men in the colonies than they were about the colonies, toward a more self-effacing kind of writing, more focused on the colonies, sometimes exposing serious conditions there. Unlike most of the earlier colonial writers, the authors had lived for considerable time in the settings they described. Novelists such as Robert Randau (1873–1950) believed that colonial novels should advance the cause of colonialism.47 The government tried to encourage a vogue for these novels by setting up

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a Grand prix de littérature coloniale (grand prize for colonial literature) in 1921. The prize helped the careers of the winners, but the ministry of education did not include the new colonial literature in the school curriculum, which might have had a more lasting effect.48 Among the authors of the less fantastic travelogues and novels were several women. The most famous was Isabelle Eberhardt (1877–1904), a Swiss francophone who lived in Algeria, wrote favourably about the desert, nomads, and Islam, and adopted the behaviour and dress of male Bedouins. She used her journalistic credentials as a smokescreen to gather information for Marshal Lyautey when he secured Morocco as a French protectorate. Her masculine behaviour and clothing hurt her reputation in France. After her death in 1904, Séverine promoted her to the point that she became radical icon in the interwar period. Her works were reissued in the 1920s. Another woman, Magali-Boisnard (1882–1945), wrote historical novels about the Arab and Berber past. Her nine novels and translation of a major study of the Sahara won many prizes.49 Most of the colonial women writers published fictionalized travelogues “which either proselytized the colonial project for metropolitan women or expressed disapproval of the colonial lifestyle.”50 Some countered the exoticism of male novelists, and in the case of Lucie Cousturier (1870–1925), came close to reversing exoticism, notably in her stories about her life with the Senegalese tirailleurs, the soldiers depicted on Banania packaging and advertising. Marthe Oulié (1901–1941) won several prizes, including two from colonial governments. Patricia Lorcin characterizes these two women’s writing as colonial – not imperial – nostalgia, in the sense of anticipation of a loss of the status quo more than mourning a loss of traditional cultures.51

I n d o c h in a a n d t h e F r ench I magi nary For nearly two centuries, French penetration of Cochin-China, Cambodia, and Vietnam had been the work of Catholic missionaries. As a majority in the Chamber of Deputies rallied to the idea of a civilizing mission in the 1880s, a treaty between France and the new and diverse colony of Indochina was ratified in 1885. During Albert Sarraut’s governorships (1912–14 and 1917–19), mines, rice production, rubber plantations, cotton, tobacco, and sugar production were intensified. However, war reduced the size of the colonial service, which was faced with periodic anti-colonial violence organized by

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secret societies. Colonial governments ruled by decree, with, at best, a consultative assembly dominated by European settlers.52 Economic exploitation was widely resented. In a few decades, there were huge concessions of land to colonial settlers (872,000 hectares of a total of less than 4 million hectares of land under cultivation). Some of this land had belonged to Vietnamese villages but had never been registered, which meant dispossession. Rubber, coffee, and tea plantations owned and managed by Frenchmen were scattered throughout the colony. The workforce was indentured servants “recruited” primarily from the poorer provinces of northern and central Vietnam. Given harsh treatment on these plantations and frequent escapes, recruitment was an ongoing effort, which sometimes led to violent resistance. As elsewhere in the colonies, the French built road and canal networks that required manual labour and therefore impressment of locals, further augmenting discontent. Moreover, the transportation networks did not respect the boundaries of rice paddies or ancient burial grounds, alienating many local people. State monopolies on essentials like salt and “distractions” like alcohol were circumvented, which brought intrusive customs officers and more discontent. The monopoly on opium, which was a significant source of the administration’s revenues, primarily affected the trade with China.53 By 1929, peasant rebels who had been mobilized by scholar-rebels in preceding generations were being organized by communists, some of them educated in France. However, the most significant Frencheducated communist, Nguyen (H)Ai Quoc, best known by his last pseudonym, Ho Chi Minh, was in Canton, where he organized secret societies. In France from 1917 through 1923, Nguyen (H)Ai Quoc had mingled in union and left-wing circles. At the pivotal Congress of Tours, where communists and socialists split, he had sided with the communists due to their position on imperialism. More Vietnamese encountered communism in Canton, which became a kind of an antiimperialist Mecca in the 1920s.54 By 1930, the prisons were full of communists, nationalists, and anti-imperialists. Communist inmates proselytized among other prisoners and coordinated resistance efforts outside the prisons.55 In 1929, the assassination of a detested labour recruiter, strikes, and the discovery of bomb caches alerted the colonial administration to rising antagonism. The initial reaction was to cover up the appalling labour conditions that occasioned the assassination and to repress

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any rebellion. Then, in February 1930, about fifty Vietnamese soldiers at the Yen Bay garrison turned their rifles on officers, and were joined by sixty nationalist/communist civilians who invaded the camp. Most of the Vietnamese soldiers in the garrison did not participate, the mutiny failed, and the repression was swift and severe. Among the eighty-seven men found guilty, thirty-nine were sentenced to death and thirty-three to life at forced labour.56 The severity of the sentences incited the French Communist Party and many of the Vietnamese students in Paris to demonstrate. The Ministry of Colonies ordered that no executions be carried out while the cases were reviewed, and after the review, a presidential pardon cut the number of prisoners to be guillotined down to thirteen. When editors in Paris learned of these events, they sent grand reporters to Indochina. Not mentioning the editorial directive, Roubaud claimed that he “decided to open an inquiry” to understand the movement, its goals, and “especially the popular feelings it expressed.” He explained that nothing had prepared the French public for the mutiny, which the government tried to dismiss as a local matter. Yet he noted that when the new Indochina House opened at the Cité Universitaire (University City) in Paris, very few students registered, one of many manifestations of student and communist protest about the repression of the mutiny.57 Surprise about the mutiny and student protests reflected public interest in Indochina since the mid-nineteenth-century discovery of the magnificent Angkor Wat temple complex in Cambodia. Once the French government had taken nominal control over Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in 1885, journalists kept public interest alive. In 1885, Paul Bonnetain (1858–1899) of Le Figaro edited his articles into a book, Au Tonkin, that was reprinted several times between 1885 and 1927. Popular novelists, including several Frenchwomen, exploited the area into the 1930s. Common features of this literature were exotic and picturesque elements, notably descriptions of the ruins of the Angor Wat temple. In the mid-1920s, a colonial court found André and Clara Malraux guilty of stealing artifacts from Angkor Wat and gave André a stiff sentence. After protests by prominent French intellectuals, the court reduced the sentence. On his return, Malraux signed a contract for three books with Grasset. One of these books, The Royal Way, published in 1930, fictionalized his experiences in Indochina as a tale of adventure and exoticism.58 It found a large audience. Most of these accounts presented indigenous people as inscrutable and their “boys” (male servants) as treacherous and

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greedy, all qualities in the French stereotype of the Indochinese (often called Annamites).59 Several women wrote novels about the relationship between colonists and natives, often focusing on and criticizing couples composed of Caucasian men and indigenous concubines called congaies. One of these novels, Petites épouses (Little wives) by Myriam Harry (1869– 1958), was reissued three times in the interwar period.60

R e p o rt in g a f ter Yen Bay Other than picturesque descriptions of places, surprisingly little of this literary imagery showed up in these three investigations of Indochina, no doubt because their series followed the incident at Yen Bay. However, the three authors did bring racial prejudices, political proclivities, and gender sensibilities to the subject. Viollis had engaged in both negative and positive ethnic labelling in her book on Afghanistan (1930), where she wrote of “savage tribes” and “pure Mongols, descendants of Genghis Khan, and magnificent Tadjiks of the Iranian race whose … almond-shaped eyes, beards and hair ringlets evoke the majesty of the Magi in the Scriptures.” 61 Though her book on Indochina discusses indigenous people more often than the other two books under consideration, it does not engage in this egregious kind of labelling. As in her other reporting from Asia, she often remarks on people of both sexes being petite, but she does not dwell on the men being small, wearing silk robes, or on any other (European) markers of femininity. Her two colleagues make more comments about men’s size and clothing, not so subtly querying Asian men’s masculinity (though neither made as many slurs as Londres in his volumes on China). Roubaud was the most likely to indicate the skin colour of his subjects – both white and yellow – and the shape of the indigenous subjects’ eyes. Viollis, who did not pay as much attention to women as usual, still devoted more ink to their work than her colleagues did. She said little about their appearance compared to her male colleagues. In short, the two men used more racist and sexist language than Viollis. Although Roubaud used the first person singular or plural 381 times in 288 pages, he took a relatively distanced approach to Yen Bay. Even when he described some of the brutality he witnessed in Vietnam, he did not use emotive language. Instead, he provided a chronology of clashes between colonials and indigenous peoples and listed

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ongoing revolts around the colony. He identified the leaders as ­communists whom he called the Viet Nam Cong (sic) and linked to the Third International and Indochinese nationalists, duly noting the apparent contradiction between internationalism and nationalism. He interviewed and provided a short biography of Nguyen (H)Ai Quoc (aka Ho Chi Minh). Although he interviewed colonial officials and businessmen, he seemed as interested in conversations with his young Indochinese translator/typist who was persona non grata with colonial officials.62 Similarly, he acknowledged harsh exploitation of workers on plantations but was more intrigued by his discovery that bourgeois Vietnamese were funding, and their French-educated sons were joining, the Viet Cong. Dorsenne and other journalists would follow up on this discovery. Finally, Roubaud represented many of the colonial settlers as opposed to any cooperation with indigenous people and yet separatist in the sense of rejecting French efforts to reform the colony. Late in the series, he dropped his (never entirely convincing) objective observer stance and expressed his own belief that there must be more consultation and collaboration between the metropole and the colony.63 During the outpouring of popular publications on colonies after the 1931 Colonial Exhibition, Roubaud and Gaston Pelletier (1876– 19??), a former colonial administrator and author of a book on Madagascar, published an illustrated guide to Indochina. Here, some of the picturesque and exotic imagery of the literary corpus appeared. Five years later, in the middle of the Abyssinia Crisis, they penned a more substantial and critical study entitled Empire ou colonies? (Empire or colonies?), which proclaimed that “the era of colonial expeditions and conquests is over.” Because all parts of the world were interdependent, “international cooperation must resolve the colonial problem.” The two authors castigated “the most specious” rationale for conquest, “the idea of a racial superiority,” citing German racial theorists and Italian claims for Ethiopia during the Abyssinia Crisis, but including all European nations in their indictment. Racism, they stated, “simply rehabilitates the cult of violence.” Applied to colonization, the myth of racial hierarchy gave those on top “the right, without limit or control, to dominate weaker peoples … for the greater benefit of Humanity.” However, their proposed solution was to find a better rationale for colonization, “a more disinterested ideal … a rehabilitated idea of the civilizing virtue.”64 Liberating colonized people would not serve the needs of the collectivity in the metropolis

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or in the colonies. Europeans, who could not thrive on their own “overcrowded” continent, should continue to bring the benefits of their medical knowledge, science, and economic system to other parts of the world. The point was “to define and delimit colonization,” not to end it. At least they recognized that economic imperialism would not suffice, that people needed ideals and hopes.65 It was, in effect, a reformulation of the civilizing mission theory of colonization. Roubaud’s other book on colonies, Mograb (Maghreb), published in 1934, was prompted by protests in the North African colonies that were barely reported in the metropole. This book had a more positive attitude toward North Africans than most French people, even members of the Communist Party, in the previous decade.66 After visiting Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, Roubaud explained their differences to a public that made few distinctions between these regions.67 Much of the text reported inflated claims of colonial supporters, followed by deflationary criticism. After describing Casablanca as a “miraculous port” (referring to the French expansion of the port) and a “marvelous metropolis” (referring to the metropole’s modernization of the city), he critiqued the financing of these enormous work projects and the division of the city into a model urban area inhabited by Europeans and overcrowded shantytowns housing the indigenous population.68 Having spoken to leading economic actors, he reported serious economic problems in Morocco and Tunisia due to French tariffs that had encouraged wheat and wine production, only to restrict colonial imports of these products when the Depression hit France, at enormous cost to colonial settlers and indigenous people.69 On the basis of interviews with several Muslim religious leaders, he identified Muslim dissatisfaction with restrictive policies and described how dissatisfaction spread from mosque to mosque. As for Algeria, he considered the local populace “Algero-Europeans” who had been Occidentalized yet had few civic rights.70 Here too, he urged “preparing” the indigenous “to collaborate with Europeans in the administration of their country.” As examples, he cited India, Egypt, and Turkey. Belatedly acknowledging that he was “departing from his objective role,” he concluded that there was a common element in the three colonies, which was that a new elite wanted recognition.71 His position on colonialism remained the same as it had been in Viet-Nam. Viollis’s articles and volume on Indochina avoid adventure-style narratives, on the one hand, and the issue of cohabitation, on the other hand. Her sponsorship by the government and her age (sixty-one)

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account for avoiding adventure tropes, in which she had indulged in earlier volumes on Russia and Afghanistan. Incidental remarks about congaies and cohabitation reflect her decision to focus on political and economic analysis in her works on colonial and foreign affairs after 1930.72 In the Indochina book, she informed readers that she had been influenced by two earlier publications denouncing the colonial administration and French colonists: Viet-Nam by Louis Roubaud, and Les Jauniers by Paul Monet. The latter was a sharp condemnation of French rubber plantations’ exploitation of thousands of Vietnamese dispossessed by massive flooding to recruit and retain “coolies” – a system that resembled the widespread Asian practice of trading and sometimes kidnapping and enslaving women and children.73 She also appended trial transcripts about the mutiny and added a bibliography of works to consult that included two works by colonial rebels, one the 1925 version of Ho Chi Minh, Le procès de la colonization française (The trial of French colonization).74 Viollis’s indictments were so serious that she did not incorporate them in her submissions to Le Petit Parisien and she hesitated about sending the censorious article to L’Esprit for two years. Although one scholar has questioned her courage about exposing her opinions about colonialism,75 her motives for delaying publication were not to curry favour with the government, fear of colonial displeasure, or to keep her position at Le Petit Parisien. She had asked government officials penetrating questions about the minister’s purely political solution – better representation of indigenous people on local and national councils – during the minister’s visit. She advocated pardons for all rebels condemned to death immediately after the minister departed.76 She stayed on in Indochina. Not surprisingly, “The atmosphere became unbearable. Those who had welcomed me amicably turned their backs on me. No doubt their attitude was the result of superior orders.”77 But the two-year lapse before sending her critical pieces to the press was not due to a hostile reaction in the colony, which she left a few weeks after the minister of the colonies returned to France. Finally, she was unlikely to worry about how Élie-Joseph Bois would react to such a stinging indictment of colonial policies. Despite the article in L’Esprit, her Indochina book and continuing activism in pursuit of amnesty for the Vietnamese prisoners,78 she continued to send pieces to Le Petit Parisien until 1937, by which time she was regularly contributing to communist newspapers like L’Humanité and Ce Soir.

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Ironically, she had been savaged by L’Humanité in 1931 for travelling to Indochina in “the baggage of Minister Paul Reynaud.”79 Instead, Viollis had personal, professional, and political reasons to postpone publishing the attack. The 1932 death of her second husband, Jean Viollis, delayed publication of the article and book.80 While grieving the loss of her husband and adjusting to widowhood, she found time to edit three of the newspaper series on her Asian travels into books. One of her two books on Japan won L’Europe nouvelle prize for foreign reporting the next year. Politically, Viollis was inhibited by her own republicanism. Born and married into republican families, when republicans were on the left of the political spectrum, she had not yet moved further left in 1931. The next few years changed the nature of the republic and her political orientation. France began to feel the full effects of the Great Depression; the elections of May 1932 broke the hold of centre-right republicans on governments and initiated a period of ministerial instability. The cover-up of the Stavisky financial scandal unleashed proto-fascist leagues into violent demonstrations that brought down the government in February 1934. In defence, Socialists and Communists inched toward cooperation, a process that culminated in formation of the Popular Front government in 1936. In the same troubled period, Hitler became chancellor of Germany and introduced a series of anti-democratic, anti-Semitic, and militaristic policies. From 1933 to 1938, Viollis focused more on fascism in Europe than on the colonies. Her opposition to fascism drew her to the most outspoken opponents of fascism, the communists. Both new confidence in herself after winning the L’Europe nouvelle prize and new confidants on the left encouraged Viollis to be bolder in her mid-1930s publications on Indochina. Before and during Viollis’s trip to Indochina, Jean Dorsenne sent two articles on the colony to Le Petit Parisien, which identified him as a special envoy on the first one and as “one of our correspondents” on the second.81 His message was sycophantic and cautionary. Although the colony was feeling the effects of the worldwide depression, he contended it was better off than other colonies due to economic measures taken by the governor general. Thanks to the security measures initiated by the same official, the communists had been routed, or so he claimed. Nevertheless, Dorsenne cautioned that the communists could regroup.82 The next spring, he wrote about

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the future of Indochina in four front-page articles. This time he delved into relations between the better-educated urban members of the indigenous population and the French settlers, and found that indigenous people had less regard for the settlers and administrators since the Great War, when so many had fought for France and been disillusioned. Like Roubaud, Dorsenne blamed young Vietnamese intellectuals for spreading ideas of nationalism and communism, but unlike Roubaud, he traced their ideas to the French education that they received. The critique of their French education would be taken for granted by many subsequent French reporters. He repeated a familiar response to critics of settlers’ treatments of indigenous people: “there are brutes everywhere, not just here.”83 Dorsenne did not mention suffering labourers in any of his accounts. His brochure the same year with the provocative title about evacuating Indochina warned the French of the dangers of ignorance and complacency about the colony.

In D e f e n c e o f Vi olli s With this background, let us consider Nicola Cooper’s critique of Viollis’s book about Indochina, which raises serious questions about her journalism and as such, offers an opportunity to assess this part of her life work. First, Cooper dismisses Viollis’s advocacy of equality between colonizers and colonized as merely equality between people of the same social class. Cooper’s evidence is Viollis’s disgust at the way Vietnamese political prisoners who were educated in France, and who were therefore of the same social strata as Viollis, are treated by “ignorant settlers.”84 Viollis’s Esprit article and the first chapter of her Indochina book describe a tour of a political prison, a history of prison riots in the colony, and the incarceration of recently arrested rebels. Even though she was escorted by a prison official, she encountered young political prisoners who complained about their treatment. These prisoners spoke French, though that did not necessarily mean they had been educated in France, since francophone schools had proliferated in Indochina. One of the prisoners declared that he was a communist, which no longer implied education in France. Instead of passing judgment on her reliance on French-speaking indigenous people, try to imagine what other language would assure direct communication with Indochinese prisoners. In preparation for a three-month stay,

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Viollis could barely have learned one of the Indochinese languages, not to mention several of them, well enough to converse in their languages with rebels or labourers and to understand and represent their conversations accurately. Often, like other reporters, she relied upon a translator. Following reportorial protocol, she recorded both the prisoners’ complaints and the prison officials’ response. Like most reporters, she expressed more sympathy toward prisoners. Soon after the prison interviews, Viollis received letters from three indigenous rebels, two of them educated in France, who expressed admiration of her earlier critique of British imperialism and favourable interpretation of Gandhi and Indian nationalism in L’Inde. The rebels asked her to meet them clandestinely and escorted her to an obscure location, where they told her of official maltreatment upon their return to Indochina. They decried the lack of basic liberties, like freedom of the press and freedom of assembly, which they and Viollis associated with the French revolutionary tradition. If an education in the secular schools of Third Republic France (including public schools in the colonies) meant that they had political and civil values in common with Viollis, these political and civic values do not add up to similar class positions, as Cooper posits. Viollis came from a privileged background. As a sixtyone-year-old Frenchwoman, she differed from the young rebels she interviewed in age, ethnicity, and gender. It is a tribute to her capacity to empathize that she represented the young communist rebels positively even before she aligned with the Communist Party in reaction to the proto-fascist demonstrations mentioned above.85 In addition to providing information about overcrowding, infestation of vermin, limited access to infirmaries, and restrictions on reading material and visitors, the rebels disclosed the systematic practice of torture. In Viollis’s revealing words, “I did not want to, I could not believe this. But my hosts gave me such precise and complete information that I was slowly convinced.” Clearly, her preconceptions had been smashed. Her initial resistance may seem naive today, but it resembles the first reactions of many Americans to the Abu Ghraib photographs and, a generation earlier, of many French people to torture scenes in the 1960 film titled The Battle of Algiers. Of course, Viollis could not visually shock her readers, because she and the photographer who travelled with her were not admitted to the prison’s torture chamber. After further inquiries, she compiled a list of types of torture and coolly broke them down into archaic techniques and

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modern electric devices. The shift from emotive to scientific language functions to intensify the reader’s horror. As an admiring colleague said of her writing, it has “duality. She gives us … charm with figures. To the technical knowledge of her métier, she joins the gift of life, enthusiasm, and ardent curiosity.”86 In this case, she brought empathy and shock to the data. Critics are correct in saying that Viollis related better to French- and English-speaking than to other colonial subjects and often used francophones and anglophones as informants. Because she spoke French and English, she relied heavily on resident francophones or anglophones in trips to distant lands. She admitted that she often felt ill at ease when surrounded by people whose language she did not know.87 Perhaps this is one reason she responded so well to anglophone nationalists in India. But another important reason was Indian nationalists’ appeal to basic democratic principles. She admired Gandhi’s deployment of civil disobedience,88 because she had been a pacifist since her service in a frontline hospital during the First World War. But she was not an integral pacifist, since she sympathized with the communist rebels in Indochina, and, after struggling with the tension between pacifism and antifascism, supported the republicans during the Spanish Civil War. She also joined the Resistance during the Second World War.89 Finally, she found it easier to indict a colonial power other than France, for she was a nationalist, especially in the wake of the First World War.90 Her nationalism also affected later work on the colonies. Although her final book on the colonies, Notre Tunisie (Our Tunisia) (1938) sympathetically recorded the demands of Tunisian nationalists, she was preoccupied with an Italian threat to French colonies after the Ethiopian War. I hardly need to note the significance of her use of the adjective “Our” in the title. Her nationalism and antifascism made her less critical of French than of Italian colonial methods.91 Second, Cooper charges that Viollis, like Roubaud, painted a debased picture of the colonizers and, unlike Roubaud, she called for a kind of patriarchal feminism, in which Frenchwomen would be moral tutors to uncivilized natives and colonizers. It is accurate to say that Viollis reported offensive deeds and words of French planters and officials in Indochina. After visiting, inquiring, and describing the long working hours, low wages, and terrible working and living conditions of plantation and textile workers, she attended a dinner in Tonkin. She asked a planter seated beside her

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whether he did not feel an obligation to bring the benefits of European civilization to the colony, since she had seen their poor conditions and been told of many cruel practices. The planter replied with the familiar bromide that there are brutes here, as elsewhere, and that she should not generalize.92 Note that she was not referring to the vaunted benefits of European civilization but rather to labour standards that would meliorate the impact of metropolitan capital investment in the colony. She makes no direct judgment at this point in the book, but the specific details about working and living conditions in the preceding passage ensure that most readers would be persuaded of their truth and disgusted by the planter’ response. Once again, she contrasts her observations backed by statistical information to prejudices on the part of colonists. She was blunter in a subsequent passage. After stopping at several officials’ residences in Laos, she writes, “I was stupefied by the table conversation of certain administrators, their egoism, and their puerility. There is no question of paying indemnities, returning to France, of regret. Is this possible? Are these men blind? Have they no concern about their duty, or of the languishing problems here? Don’t they see the writing on the wall?”93 This passage is reminiscent of her anguished reaction to details of torture. The personal reactions of investigative journalists were part of the story. Evidence for Cooper’s charge of patriarchal feminism or an expectation that European women would civilize colonials is sorely lacking. There are familiar diatribes about the complacency of colonial women but no specific complaints about their failure to improve sexual morality in the colonies. Viollis was primarily a liberal and egalitarian feminist, not a maternal feminist. She had no more illusions about women’s moral superiority than she had believed, ten years earlier, in the moral frailty of women charged with murder. She certainly had no interest in the colonial lobby’s Société française d’émigration des femmes (French Society for Female Emigration), which tried to increase the number of Frenchwomen emigrating to the colonies, hopefully to marry colonial officials, form French families and end the practice of cohabitation with indigenous concubines.94 If anything, her Indochinese material pays less attention to women than her other books. Her gender alone did not determine her subject matter; nor did her feminism, which was, in any case, neither patriarchal nor maternal. Third, Cooper makes a familiar postcolonial accusation: that Viollis portrays the indigenous people drawn into the new capitalistic

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economic system as morally and physically degraded, as “animal-like others.”95 She implies that Viollis’s approach falls in the category of a typical journalistic rhetoric of empire, which consists not so much of establishing a radical opposition between colonizer and colonized, and hence of confrontation with an independent Other, but rather of domination by inclusion and domestication of the colonized.96 It is indisputable that Viollis portrayed the plight of starving peasants as dehumanizing. Consider the most disturbing passage. Having stopped at a “huge hangar” filled with starving peasants, she recorded, What I saw then, I will never be able to forget. In an immense enclosure, surrounded by wooden barriers, 3 to 4,000 human beings, dressed in dirty rags, were so crowded together that they formed a mass … On each of them, all the signs of sickness and degeneration: swollen or sunken faces, missing teeth, dull or runny eyes, ulcerated sores. Were they men, women, or children? I do not know. No more of age or sex, nothing but a mortal poverty that cried out like an animal.97 The comparison to animals is demeaning, but this passage also has pathos and purpose: to expose the indifference of the colonial regime. She noted that the wife of the local colonial agent, surprised by the reporter’s shock, told her that “this often happens here.” As she frequently did, she lets the narrative and descriptive material carry the moral message. Subsequently, she remarks upon the insensitivity of colonial reactions to many abuses with some understanding of why they might have blocked out empathy. After detailing the exhausting labour of plantation workers, she observed that she was not as upset about working conditions as she would have been before she came to Indochina. “A month ago, I would have been indignant to see them at their work. Today, after so many horrifying spectacles, I no longer react so much. Have I arrived at the point where I understand the ironic and weary attitude of the best of the officials? Ah, the colonial virus!”98 The shaming of the colonial regime continues. Her travelling companion, an official, explains that these peasants have experienced three bad harvests in a row. “We are feeding about 80,000 … every five days … It is partly their fault … they are so improvident. And anyway, they left their villages, became communists. So much the worse for them!”99 When the minister arrives, he is advised not to

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stop, because his presence will cause a riot. The official party went on to a lunch of “fish, fowl, foie gras, champagne … They took away plates still full. I could not eat a bite. The minister seemed preoccupied.”100 Once again the contrast, in this case between starvation and lavish satiation, packs a punch. The Esprit article and the first chapter of Indochina S.O.S. include an explanation that she would not discuss “the principle of colonization.” But, in another of her signature juxtapositions that undermines the previous statements, Viollis tags on a declaration that she has lost her belief that France used more humane colonial methods than England did.101 The initial assumption about a more humane French approach to colonies reflected the interwar lobbying effort conducted by Albert Sarraut to convince an indifferent French public that France was developing and/or civilizing their colonies. Viollis’s declaration breaks with any assumption about the necessary benefits of colonialism. Unlike her colleague Roubaud, who continued to advocate moral reform of colonialism, she was on a trajectory that culminated in her support of Vietnamese independence in 1946.102 No, she was not postcolonial, nor was she a reflexive scholar. As André Malraux, a journalist and critic of the colonial regime in Indochina, said of her book on Indochina, she was a practitioner of a new kind of journalism, investigative reporting for the popular press.103 Her perspective was always that of a European open to other cultures. Long after it can have been a genuine representation of her attitude, she repeats the useful heuristic device of expecting a stereotype, like a savage or a barbarian, but finding, instead, sensible and civilized people. This kind of writing should be read for what it was: an appeal to a mass readership. More importantly, her reporting revealed details about the economic backbone of French colonialism, the exploitation of colonial workers, and the corruption of the colonial regime. In these respects, her reporting challenged orthodox colonial ideologies of association and assimilation alike.

C o n c l u si on Evaluating these three reporters in the context of contemporaneous colonial and political realities, as opposed to contrasting their ideas to present-day expectations, provides a more balanced assessment. Given widespread promotion of the colonies in the decades before Yen Bay, it is hardly surprising that Viollis, Roubaud, and Dorsenne

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(and most dedicated colonial reporters) did not advocate the end of colonialism or the independence of Indochina. From a historical point of view, what stands out in Viollis’s and Roubaud’s reporting and books on Indochina is how little they borrowed from the rich inventory of exotic images at their command. With the exception of Roubaud’s coauthored guidebook, their work on Indochina resembles the interwar trend of more realistic and critical literature on the colonies. After several outbreaks of armed resistance in the colonies and mounting criticism of the abuses committed by colonial administrators and enterprises in the mother land, one might expect exposés of colonial abuses like those offered by Roubaud and Viollis, as well as vindications of colonial administrators and policies like those offered by Dorsenne. All three reporters suggested possible solutions, though Roubaud and Viollis went further than Dorsenne in recommending collaboration with indigenous peoples to ameliorate abuses and encouraging ongoing consultation with local inhabitants. Focused on the problems revealed by the mutiny, none of them proselyzed for the migration of women to the colonies to instill proper morality, which is to say, to end mixed marriages with indigenous women. Taking the prevalence of racialist thinking in the first half of the twentieth century into consideration, their use of racial stereotypes and prejudices seems predictable, if disturbing to present-day readers. Compared to many of their colleagues in the press, Viollis and Roubaud had at least rejected beliefs in racial hierarchies if not entirely in European superiority. Compared to Roubaud and Dorsenne, Viollis was less inclined to resort to racist (or sexist) descriptions of men and women. Some of the differences between the three journalists derive from their gender. Although Viollis had deliberately chosen to focus less on women and more on political and economic issues, she devoted more ink to women’s work than either of her colleagues did, whereas she was not as interested in the appearance and clothing of the women – or men – as they were. More of their differences arose from their political proclivities. While Roubaud and Dorsenne remained solidly republican, Roubaud was more closely aligned with left-wing republicans and Dorsenne with right-wing republicans. Viollis was beginning to question republican values and reading communist critiques of colonialism, a path that would lead her to support the independence of Vietnam in the 1940s.

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7 Family and Diplomatic Reporting: Geneviève Tabouis, 1930s

Between 1933 and 1967, Geneviève Tabouis (née Geneviève de Quesne, 1892–1985) was one of two Frenchwomen journalists with “a considerable notoriety.” (The other one was Titayna, for very different reasons.) This chapter has benefitted from Tabouis’s autobiography and biography, as well as typescripts of two autobiographical talks she gave. Thanks to her diplomatic scoops in L’Oeuvre, she was called Cassandra and Geneviève la Pythonesse, Pythonesse referring to a mythical woman with a gift for prophecy. Thanks to her fierce anti-Nazi stands, she was the subject of unkind caricatures.1 Other than Louise Weiss, the founder and publisher of the weekly L’Europe Nouvelle, she was the only Frenchwoman to be a diplomatic reporter in the 1930s, at a time when there was only one woman in the 598-member diplomatic corps: Suzanne Borel, first appointed in 1930.2 Although a member of the third generation of French women in the national dailies, her singularity as a diplomatic reporter and her notoriety meant that she could not support women journalists until after the Second World War, when she was able to help other women enter the field of diplomatic reporting. Before the war, she did interact with some of the subjects of this book in antifascist activism. The first section of this chapter explains what kind of reporter Tabouis was; the following sections explore how gender, family, and influential friends helped her access and succeed in her career, and how they and her social skills shaped her work and style. The remaining sections chronicle her foreign reporting and unrelenting and courageous struggle against national socialism in the 1930s.

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W h at K in d o f Reporter? Tabouis has been characterized as a grand reporter, because she travelled widely and signed her articles, because many of her contributions appeared on the front pages of L’Oeuvre, and because she published nine books on current events and historical subjects, most of them translated into English and half into other languages as well.3 Her frequent resort to interviews and propensity to include herself in her stories resembles grand reporting. But Tabouis primarily travelled to international conferences and she did not normally carry out inquiries published as series of articles to be collected and edited into books, as grand reporters did. Her only newspaper series was “L’Oeuvre en URSS. Moscou 1933” (L’Oeuvre in the USSR, Moscow 1933). Unlike most grand reporters, who had qualms about government subsidies, she accompanied Prime Minister Édouard Herriot and a delegation to Moscow. The delegation sought a Soviet–French alliance against Germany, which she made the focus of her reporting until the rest of the delegation left. She included some familiar French newspaper criticisms of the Soviets, calling Stalin “the Pope of this communist religion” or complaining about “rigorous étatisme.” However, she did little investigation, did not identify all her sources, and did not mention, or seemingly question, who arranged for her tour of the Ukraine after the French delegation left. Accordingly, she misrepresented serious problems, notably when she reported that rumours of famine in the Ukraine earlier in the year were not apparent when she briefly toured the region. Nor did she hint that the Stalinist regime caused the dreadful famine known as the Holodomor (genocide through hunger) by policies of undermining propertied peasants, imposing collective farms, and other measures to halt Ukrainian resistance to the Soviet Union. Her discussion of the condition of women in the Soviet Union was ludicrously skewed. For instance, having only met elite women, she reported that most Soviet women had two or three domestics, were tanned from their state-paid vacations, and other absurdities.4 After this, she did no further series on other countries for L’Oeuvre. Her biographer, Denis Maréchal, found evidence that she took subsidies from the Soviet Union between the wars. She did not publicly abandon her positive attitude toward the Soviet Union until 1958, by which time she was influenced by the Cold War and the Hungarian Revolution.5 In the interests of fairness, it should be noted that

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venality was not unusual in the French press in the 1930s.6 Her subsidy and relatively uncritical opinion of the Soviet Union led to her proselytizing for a Franco–Russian alliance in the late 1930s and kept her from seeing the import of the Nazi/Soviet accord (aka German– Soviet Non-Aggression Pact) in 1939. She did recognize that the Non-Aggression Pact would not last.7 Tabouis did not do “on the scene” reporting. During the Spanish Civil War, she did not go to Spain but expanded her diplomatic coverage to include Spain. Like most French journalists, she was very concerned about Italian and German interventions into the conflict. She peppered her reporting on international discussions about the war with fervent denunciations of Italian and German aggression. For the first time, she accepted speaking engagements to air her concerns and educate a wider audience.8 As a supporter of the Popular Front government, she queried but did not rail against the policy of neutrality adopted by France.9 But when German planes bombed Guernica, she was incensed and called the invaders “assassins.”10 She was a major fundraiser for a refuge for a thousand Spanish women and orphans, which was named after her in recognition of her fundraising.11 Although her speaking and fundraising were independent of Viollis’s and Téry’s efforts for Spanish women and children, there must have been some coordination, for the two endeavours complemented one another. Tabouis was a diplomatic reporter. From 1933 to 1940, Tabouis submitted regular, short items to the “Dernières Nouvelles” (Latest News) columns on page three and occasional, longer articles to the front page of L’Oeuvre. After two trips to the United States and Britain in 1933, she focused on Western and Central Europe. Three particularly well-informed scoops secured her reputation: one was on the rejection of a proposed eastern pact between Germany and Poland in September 1934, the second forewarned about the remilitarization of the Rhine in the winter of 1934–35, and the third revealed a copy of the Hoare–Laval Plan (a British/French agreement accepting the division of Ethiopia/Abyssinia between Italy and Abyssinia) in December 1935. The third scoop, which was shared with Pertinax (pseudonym of journalist André Géraud, 1882–1974) of the rightwing L’Echo de Paris, figured in the subsequent rejection of the plan. Italian troops and aircraft entered Ethiopia shortly thereafter and Anglo–French relations were strained.12 By 1938, she was reaching out to the French and British public in newspapers and magazines, on radio, and in two books on foreign

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policy, both translated into English.13 This media blitz was an attempt to spread a message advocating closer French ties with America and Britain and informing readers and listeners about the territorial ambitions of Germany and the anti-democratic intentions of Hitler. She critiqued French and other nations’ politicians and diplomats who accommodated or recommended accommodating Hitler. Her forthright and forcefully expressed opinions gained her international name recognition and generated positive and negative reactions domestically and externally. In the long term, many of her prognostications were accurate, though there were occasions when she presumed and published without adequate verification. For instance, a suggestion in April 1934 that Premier Gaston Doumergue might be threatened triggered a police investigation. Under questioning by the police, she acknowledged that the suggestion was just an opinion, without factual basis.14 She may have jumped to conclusions or she may have been protecting a source. Whatever her motivation, Doumergue was not attacked. Another troubling aspect of her reporting was implying that she was conveying the speeches of people verbatim. She was criticized for using quotation marks in accounts of speeches she had not attended, though she may have had typescripts of some these speeches.

G e n d e r , S ig n at u r e s, and Fri ends in H ig h P l aces Gender limited Tabouis’s education and opportunities, but family, well-placed friends, and political allies neutralized most of these limitations. For this third-generation woman in the dailies, the help of family and their diplomatic and political contacts was more important than mentorship by women reporters, for there was only one female forerunner in diplomatic reporting, and she turned her attention to feminist advocacy around the time Tabouis came to national attention. Tabouis was one of only three women in this study who did not attribute her interest in journalism to a relative who was a journalist. She did acknowledge a debt to her uncle Jules Cambon (1845–1935) and his brother Paul Cambon (1843–1924), prominent ambassadors in the Third Republic. Indeed, she wrote a hagiographic biography of Jules, which was promptly translated into English.15 Early in her career, Jules helped her place her first published article in a Quebec newspaper, Soleil de Québec.16 When she expressed a desire to have

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a diplomatic career in her twenties, Jules suggested that she observe the League of Nations sessions in Geneva. There she learned that there was little opportunity for women in the diplomatic corps: only three Frenchwomen – two prominent feminists and Marie Curie – had posts at the League of Nations in the mid-1920s. She did identify two major regional newspapers that did not have correspondents at the League: Le Petit Marseilles and La Petite Gironde, which had a combined circulation of six hundred thousand. To get positions at these papers, she had to accept conditions set by the two editors: in one case that she not sign her name but only initial her articles and in the other case that she use her first initial and last name, “since self-respecting newspapers did not have women as diplomatic correspondents.”17 Although the general trend in newspaper reporting was to move from anonymity to attribution, some regional and national newspapers still barred women from signing serious reporting in the 1920s. Despite these conditions, Tabouis remained with these provincial papers until 1937, writing a column titled “Impressions de Genève” (Impressions of Geneva) for La Petite Gironde and variously titled but regular articles for Le Petit Marseilles. She finally got a byline in these dailies in the early 1930s.18 At the age of forty-one, she moved to the national press. She joined L’Oeuvre as the diplomatic correspondent and special envoy for international conferences and signed her full name from the beginning. Like most of the women who became grand reporters, Tabouis came from a family that provided her with cultural and social capital that largely compensated for the handicaps of her gender. This included a higher education, though her upbringing was more conventional than other women profiled in this book. As a girl, she went to a fashionable Parisian convent school run by the Sisters of the Assumption, where she received what she later called a “deplorable” education emphasizing rote learning, religious observance, and etiquette. “Happily,” as she phrased it in her autobiography, the separation of state and church “allowed” her to attend courses at a secular lycée (high school) and university. She went on to post-secondary studies in antiquity and archeology, specializing in Egyptology. During these years, she “never went out alone, even to attend classes at university. I was always accompanied by a woman teacher.” She worked for several years at the archeology school at the Louvre.19 Unfortunately, she fell ill and was confined to bed rest for “two or three years.” She

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made use of the time to write two books on Egypt and one on King Soloman of Israel, without leaving Paris. Lacking original research, the books were serious popularizations based largely on the Tut Ank Amen findings of Howard Carter in 1922 and secondary works in English, German, and French.20 They were well reviewed in the French press and immediately translated into English and later Arabic.21 For several years thereafter, she kept her hand in archeology, writing an article and giving a speech (to diplomats!) about feminism in Ancient Egypt, while practising as a journalist.22 In the 1950s, she returned to university to get a doctorate and published another book about archeology. However, her dissertation and this book were about Europe, not the Middle East.23 In 1916, at the age of twenty-two, Geneviève married a man who was supportive of her career. Robert Tabouis (1889–1973), who became director of a radio company, accepted long separations while she was in Geneva and for most of the Second World War, when she lived in the United States and he remained in France (joining an industrial resistance group in 1942). After she returned from the United States to find a changed media situation, he arranged for her to host a regular radio show, Tomorrow’s Latest News, which was her most popular forum from 1947 to 1967. Like Viollis, she virtually never mentions her children in her reporting or autobiographical works. The major exception, and it is a telling one, was when she had to leave her children for the duration of the war, when she mentioned that she was sad but emphasized her pride that her son was reporting for military duty. Whenever she was in Paris, she assiduously cultivated her contacts. She invited artists, intellectuals, influential politicians, and diplomats to the luncheons she hosted twice a week in her luxurious home on the Place Malesherbes.24 One of her closest acquaintance was threetime Radical premier and ministrable (frequent cabinet member) Édouard Herriot, with whom she was so familiar that aspiring cabinet members asked her to recommend them to him when he formed the first Cartel des Gauches (a coalition of left-wing parties other than the communist party) government in 1924.25 She was also an intimate of Joseph Paul-Boncour (1873–1972), France’s permanent representative to the League of Nations from 1932 to 1936, three times foreign minister between 1932 and 1938, and another premier in the constantly changing coalition governments of the mid-1930s. Boncour was one of the minority of parliamentarians who refused to grant

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Petain constitutional powers in 1940 and voted to continue the war from Algiers.26 Tabouis’s many enemies who were hostile toward her for her opposition to appeasement referred to her as “the most celebrated of the ‘Précieuses de Gèneve’” and a “professional agitator for war.”27 She considered opponents of her hardline stance on Germany to be enemies.28 Supporters who applauded her clairvoyance about Mussolini and Hitler were laudatory. One called her “a courageous woman … who has many masculine qualities.” Then, like the editor who praised Viollis’s courage, the male journalist in question promptly assured readers that she was “fragile and thin” and by implication, sufficiently feminine.29 Her relationship with the Cambon brothers and influential politicians gave her the advantage of personal contacts with many international diplomats. When Paul Cambon was ambassador to England before the war, she met the prominent British politician Joseph Chamberlain at the French Embassy in London. Then when she met his son, British secretary of state for foreign affairs (1924–29) Sir Austen Chamberlain, at a luncheon hosted by French Minister of Foreign Affairs Aristide Briand, she capitalized on this family connection. 30 Briand and Chamberlain had just been awarded Nobel Peace prizes for their work on the 1925 Locarno Treaties to secure the 1919 peace treaty and assure future peace. She admired Austen Chamberlain as “a friend of France” and opponent of appeasement, but labelled his brother Sir Neville Chamberlain, the prime minister of Great Britain, an appeaser, after he signed the Munich Agreement conceding the German-speaking region of Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia to Germany in 1938.31 Tabouis was not part of the feminist circles that emanated from La Fronde, nor is there any evidence of camaraderie with her three longterm female colleagues during her tenure at L’Oeuvre. One reason may be that Madeleine Jacob, who was introduced in chapter 1, and Germaine Décarie and Hélène Gosset, who were introduced in chapter 2, specialized in domestic political and social affairs, often involving women and children. When they did cover foreign affairs, they did “on the scene,” not diplomatic, reporting.32 However, Tabouis was a friend of Louise Weiss, who introduced her to suffrage feminists, radical socialists, and socialists in her salon in Geneva.33 Although Geneviève supported suffrage, she was not an activist like Louise, who devoted herself to women’s suffrage from 1934 to the Second

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World War.34 The only time that Tabouis publicly interacted with French feminists in the interwar decades was at the Annual Conference of the National Union for Women’s Suffrage in 1933.35 However, she was intellectually interested in feminism and aware of gender discrimination. Thus she wrote about feminism in Ancient Egypt on the women’s page of Les Nouvelles littéraires in 1929.36 She was outspoken about gender discrimination in the workplace. After getting her first job at the École d’Archéologie, she noted “that the world-wide reputation of Frenchmen’s gallantry is seriously overrated, when women, by their work, became their rivals.” She also believed that “the unfavourable prejudice against women” restricted her field of endeavour until she entered L’Oeuvre.37 Like other diplomatic reporters, Tabouis depended on access to and good relations with League delegates and diplomats and with other diplomatic reporters.38 Jealousy about her privileged access to key players and alienation due to her antagonism toward Nazi Germany and appeasers, on top of isolation as almost the only woman in her field, limited her participation in the diplomatic reporting network prior to the Second World War. She joined the French Diplomatic Press Association that formed in 1929. However, she did not play a significant role until the association, which was dissolved in 1940, reconstituted itself in 1945. After the war, she was more involved, because colleagues no longer blamed her for her predictions about Nazi oppression and accusations about appeasement and because she wrote for La France libre (1945–49), L’Information (1949–56), and Paris-Jour (1959–). By the late 1960s, she was one of two vice-­presidents of the association. As one of nine women among ninety members, she had supported all these women’s candidacies for membership.39 By then, as a doyenne of the diplomatic press corps, she was being honoured in other ways, such as admission to the Society of Men of Letters.40

S t y l e , S c o o p s , a n d Censorshi p Like Viollis, Tabouis made no claims about feminine style or sensitivity. However, her biographer Maréchal rightly observes that her tone was “singularly different than the texts of her colleagues.” Some elements of her style, such as her penchant for digressions, he attributes to her archeological training, perhaps meaning her academic training. Other distinctive features, like her interest in the ambiance of an event and the attitudes of the protagonists, he notes but does not explain.41

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Since Maréchal’s biography of Tabouis came out in 2003, new scholarship on how gender influences journalism and the present study of gender inflections in journalistic writing suggest that she had a “feminine” interest in the atmosphere and participants in events. Tabouis relied heavily on her contacts with diplomats and prominent politicians to scoop other reporters. The desire to scoop others sometimes overcame whatever inhibitions she had – she claimed she started with none – about reporting the full truth. Not long after the signing of the Locarno Treaties (1925) whereby Germany agreed to abide by the boundaries set by the Versailles Treaty (1919), she interviewed the German minister of foreign affairs von Schubert, “whom I had known well at the home of my uncle M. Cambon.” Schubert made imprudent comments about Germany reclaiming Alsace and Lorraine in the future. She included these comments, seemingly verbatim, in an article that, in her words, “caused a hubbub.” The revelation reflected real problems with the treaty, which at best ushered in a détente, since the lessening of tensions only lasted until Germany remilitarized the Rhineland in March 1936. But in the euphoria about this apparently promising assurance of peace, there was no political taste for exploring German or French reservations. Instead, Aristide Briand (who was foreign minister from 1925 to his death in 1932) summoned her to the Quai d’Orsay to reprimand her. He asked, “Are you not from a family of diplomats? And therefore, don’t you know that you never tell the truth?” She did not tell this story until twenty years later, long after Briand died. She admired Briand and liked his earlier advice “to the ladies and gentlemen of the press, that your pens are forged of the same steel as cannons.” She turned the summons into an interview with Briand that, when published, was so well received that she soon negotiated her first position as diplomatic reporter.42 Tabouis learned to self-censor copy about what diplomats, politicians, and officials said to her or to submit problematic copy to cabinet ministers or other officials before submitting it to an editor. In the early 1930s, as German and French delegates argued about reparations, the League of Nations restricted reporters’ access to the sessions. In the course of these sessions, German General Franz von Papen invited her to dine at his hotel, which she interpreted to mean that he had “something to convey in the French press.” He told her about divisions among German generals, industrialists, and politicians over whether Germany should seek closer ties with the Soviet Union or

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with France, information that she shared with Édouard Herriot, who insisted that she cut it to twenty innocuous lines. Despite her excitement about having “a sensational story for the first time,” she acquiesced. She later explained that “political interest obliged me to sacrifice my journalistic vanity on this occasion.”43 This kind of experience taught her not to identify informants and to employ the circumlocutions that diplomatic reporters used to pass on sensitive information: vague phrases like “according to information received” or “the dominant sentiment in informed spheres.” The first-person singular did not disappear from her columns, however. She let readers know that she had many contacts, without naming them. Her articles revealed that she had visited with groups of anonymous officials or delegates and brought back “impressions of the tenor of the conversations.”44 For two years, there were no significant objections to her coverage of disarmament talks. Although she redoubled her efforts to protect sources, she became blunter and harsher when Hitler came to power. One month after he was appointed chancellor in February 1933, she condemned “German bad faith” at Geneva. After the Reichstag fire and the suspension of most civil liberties in Germany, she denounced “Hitlerian terror” and predicted a coup more than a week before the Enabling Act allowed Hitler to rule by decree.45 Nazis did not respond to her attacks until she intensified her criticism of Nazi plans for Austria and Czechoslovakia. Even then, the discrete way of passing on disturbing information helped her avoid penalties. In February 1939, the Havas Press Agency picked up and distributed one of her articles about a German military mobilization to other newspapers, and these papers referred to “details about a sensational plan, based on the last conversation between the French Ambassador in Berlin and M. von Ribbentrop.” This alarming news was followed by a categorical denial by “authorized persons.” Over the next few days, L’Oeuvre responded that Tabouis had merely reported that there was talk about the conversation in question and that Nazi officials let hints about it circulate among foreign observers. The editor of L’Oeuvre blamed Havas for misrepresenting the story; Tabouis wrote a postscript correcting Havas’s version and repeating her original observations. The Conseil administrative du Syndicat national des journalistes (Administrative Council of the National Union of Journalists) “expressed its regret” about the allegations against Tabouis. She took advantage of the quarrel to argue for recognition of the “professional dignity” of journalists.46

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O n F r a n c e , E n g l a n d, and Ameri ca While working for the two provincial papers from 1923 to 1933, Tabouis covered the regular meetings of the Council of the League of Nations and several rounds of the preliminary disarmament talks. By 1933, she had an impressive reputation and wanted “a larger field of action,” meaning a post at a Parisian paper. She pursued L’Oeuvre because she believed it was a paper “on the left, of intellectuals, militant syndicalists, artists, anarchists and teachers.” Accordingly, she approached the editor Henri Raud, who had replaced Gustave Téry, with a proposal that she said would make the tabloid the greatest in France. She recommended that the paper “promise to print the whole truth, regardless of who the truth might displease.” When she told this anecdote later in her life, she did not mention that the promise resembled L’Oeuvre’s motto during the Great War, as described in chapter 4. Raud hired her as a foreign affairs correspondent “reporting the news as I saw it,” and promised to support her if there was trouble so long as circulation rose in the next three months. It did rise in three months, then soared to 230,000 in 1936 and 550,000 early in 1940.47 As this initially socialist and pacifist paper became the organ of the more conservative Radical Socialist Party, she encountered problems maintaining what she called “a left-wing foreign policy,” given opposition from the increasingly “right-wing shareholders” who constantly demanded “the departure of Tabouis.”48 Her new position at L’Oeuvre involved attending the Chamber of Deputies. Since the Treaty of Versailles, at the request of her uncle Jules Cambon, she had a card admitting her to the presidential loge at the Chamber, where the mistresses (petites amies) of deputies, senators, and directors of newspapers gathered.49 When the Chamber discussed a matter of international importance, she went every evening to the Chamber. During a long debate over a Herriot government proposal to pay war debts to America, she stayed there almost fortyeight hours, and when the government fell over the proposal, retreated to Herriot’s apartment. She called this episode “a kind of bankruptcy of French traditions beginning the greater disintegration of the institutions and parliamentary regime of my country.”50 Tabouis’s first major assignment at L’Oeuvre was to accompany Herriot to Washington for talks about the devaluation of the American dollar and the British pound. Her access to Herriot was apparent in her reporting, though it was equally evident that she had little contact

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with American officials. She approved of Franklin Delano Roosevelt because he was willing to engage with “the world” (meaning Europe and its colonies). Nevertheless, she recognized that isolationism was rampant in Congress and among the populace.51 Although the mission did not result in an agreement, Herriot and Tabouis put a good spin on the talks, representing them overly optimistically as an “affirmation of the American will to collaborate.”52 During this trip, she interviewed Eleanor Roosevelt and praised both her redecoration of the White House and her activism in the wider world.53 This is one of the rare occasions when she interviewed women and wrote about interior decoration other than in international conference venues. During the war, she met with Eleanor Roosevelt and women journalists at least twice. Although she found Mrs Roosevelt well-informed, she was frustrated about journalists’ ignorance about the causes of the war. In the second visit, late in the war, Mrs Roosevelt assembled an impressive group of women who agreed upon demanding a women’s charter be appended to the general treaty to be signed by all countries. The charter was to mandate respect for “the rights and interests of women,” including the right to participate in international conferences and to be consulted before enacting any social legislation, as well as their access to all public employment and equal pay “in all occupations, for workers as well as managers.”54 Signing this charter was Tabouis’s most public commitment to feminist aspirations to that point. Her American experience seems to have made her more openly feminist. One manifestation of this was a 1965 book on women in history.55 Tabouis’s second major assignment for L’Oeuvre was the world monetary conference held in London in July of 1933. Her articles critiqued the American and British participants for refusing to consider an immediate monetary stabilization or the French proposal of a gold standard. She scoffed at British efforts to mediate between the “dollar/ sterling bloc” and the western European “currency bloc.” Well before the conference concluded, she declared it moribund. Recognizing that failure to reach an agreement was a major blow to economic internationalism, she declared the situation “infinitely more serious for our country.”56 In general, she shared the Cambon brothers’ Anglophilia, though she and Jules worried that the divergence between the two countries’ understanding of the Treaty of Versailles and League of Nations (with France expecting guarantees against the recovery of a powerful

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Germany and Britain seeking compromises to avoid continental commitments) had resulted in treaty revisions in response to German blackmail or threats about war.57 She expressed her disapproval when the British government did not support French initiatives on disarmament in 1934 and when Prime Minister Chamberlain seemed indifferent to the fate of Czechoslovakia in 1938. Both times she accused the British of being isolationist. From 1934 until the beginning of the war, she consistently criticized British isolationism, and in 1938 she fiercely opposed appeasement during and after the Munich meeting. The title of the English translation of one of the three books she published in 1938, Perfidious Albion-entente cordiale, paired a French phrase expressing suspicion of British deceit in foreign relations with the 1904 entente that ended much of the colonial conflict between the two countries and ensured that they would be allies in the First World War. Following a script written, more concisely and diplomatically, by Jules Cambon in 1930,58 she identified different cultural and political traditions in the two countries and traced them back to the Hundred Years’ War and the insular nature of Great Britain. She urged a new entente cordiale since Europe was on the “brink of the abyss.”59 French reviewers gave mixed reviews. British reviewers critiqued her factual errors about British history and her “frequent and hasty generalizations,” especially about national “temperaments,” notably that Britain was materialistic, France idealistic! Her shorter volume on foreign policy, Blackmail or War, was better received, partly because it was in the Penguin Specials series that assured a wider readership and partly because it focused on the interwar period. Packed with statistics and facts, it was not easy to read, which limited its influence.60 Tabouis remained cautiously optimistic about American intervention in Europe. After the Munich Agreement of September 1938, she predicted that the United States would stand with the European democracies. In February 1939, she declared President Roosevelt the only obstacle to the “plans of the dictatorships” (Germany and Italy), citing a declaration by the American president and new polls indicating more Americans were willing to go to war.61 As the war approached, Tabouis tried to reassure Americans that recent threats to French democracy, both internal and external, had been exaggerated. Less than two weeks before the outbreak of the war, she placed an article in The New Republic. “Hitler’s Danzig Plans” drew a parallel between the date when Hitler began naval operations to cut Poland off from the sea and the date of the assassination in Sarajevo that ignited the

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First World War. She argued that Hitler had acted quickly, to keep the democracies from mobilizing to support their ally, Poland.62

An t i- F as c is t a n d A n t i-Nazi Reporti ng Most daily national newspapers aligned with the left were antifascist in the first two years of Hitler’s ascension to power. This included communist papers, which did not change their tune until the Nazi– Soviet pact in 1939. Conversely, major segments of the right-wing and even the moderately right press were positive about the authoritarian and anti-communist elements of national socialism. Most of them did object to its racial policies, however. Domestic politics informed their antagonism or sympathy toward Nazism. While residual distrust of Hitler’s militarism and expansionist goals informed almost all the press, different papers took objection to German repression of specific groups, whether Catholics, Jews, Social Democrats, etc.63 One of the voices on the left was L’Oeuvre, and increasingly, this meant Tabouis. As Tabouis focused more on fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, she started to engage in antifascist activism, where she interacted with women such as Viollis, Téry, Fanny Clar, Denise Moran, and other subjects of this book who were antifascists. Tabouis was not as outspoken about fascist Italy or Spain as about Nazi Germany. In May of 1934, she used circuitous language to inform readers of a report on Mussolini by M. Berenger, the president of the Franco-Italian Committee, but more direct if still cautious language to query the practicality and inflexibility of the Duce’s position on disarmament.64 Her distrust was warranted, as the next few years would show. During the 1935 negotiations for the Franco-Italian accord that ceded much of Abyssinia to Italy in return for securing France’s position in Tunisia, she expressed some optimism about the accord.65 After that, her coverage is negative. As both sides prepared for war, she seemed to have inside information on the Ethiopian position, and during the war, she criticized Italy, notably for its use of nerve gas, which was and is forbidden by international law.66 Tabouis’s articles in L’Oeuvre were always suspicious of Nazi Germany. In September 1933, she critiqued Goebbels’s anti-Semitism as expressed in a speech to the League of Nations, citing press disgust and a French critic’s argument that it was illogical. The next month, she warned about Nazi expansionist intentions in a series on the

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current round of disarmament talks and dismissed the German withdrawal from the League of Nations and the disarmament talks as “Hitler’s theatrical coup.”67 She covered trouble spots such as the German-speaking Saar territory that had been administered by the League of Nations since the Treaty of Versailles, with its all-important coal mines under the control of France. Although distracted by Nazi designs on Austria over the next year, she reported Nazi restrictions on the press in the Saar and measures to keep Jews and peasants from voting in a plebiscite about returning the territory to Germany.68 Ninety percent of the populace voted for the Saar’s reintegration into Germany in January 1935. She was similarly vigilant about reporting Nazi insults and local National Socialist attacks on the high commissioner overseeing the Polish city of Danzig for the League of Nations in 1936. Danzig was incorporated into the Reich two years later, when the Nazis invaded Poland without a declaration of war.69 The festering problem she monitored most diligently was Austria, an ethnically German country targeted for German annexation. In 1933, Austria had overthrown a democratic constitution and replaced it with a form of fascist dictatorship under Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss. She called his evictions of Social Democrats from politics “odious” and queried his proclamations about wanting to remain independent of Germany. After the assassination of Dollfuss in February 1934, she turned her attention to his successor, Chancellor Schuschnigg.70 In the lead-up to the Anschluss (German annexation of Austria) in March 1938, she not only resorted to press attacks but also gave public speeches accusing Hitler and Austrian Nazis of pressuring Schuschnigg into a union.71 She became so concerned that she started a school for adults where she lectured and discussed the news three or often four times a week.72 The Nazi press retaliated with diatribes against L’Oeuvre, singling out “the poisoner,” their epithet for Tabouis. During Nazi moves on the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia later that spring and again during the occupation of the Sudetenland in the fall of 1938, the police monitored her public speeches because of the provocative nature of her criticism of Germany and because of mounting and sometimes threatening criticism of her within France. After a German newspaper ran one of her more inflammatory articles in May 1939, Hitler indicted her by name in speeches – to which she replied that his “acerbic attacks” on “this modest journalist” always came when some action was being planned. Another reason for his attention, she explained,

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was that she published information about internal divisions in his own entourage, including among German generals. A Nazi “court investigation” into her origins, declared her to be “the preferred advocate of international Jewry.” Undaunted, she gave her first speech to the International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism in February 1939.73 Other women journalists were also critiquing Nazi Germany. In 1934, pacifist feminist Denise Moran (1885–1946), whose social investigations are analyzed in the next chapter, produced three series on Nazi Germany: one on the trial of the alleged arsonists in the Reichstag fire, another on the concentration camps, and a third on the Third Reich. Several pieces focused on the imprisonment and torture of German socialist, communist, and Jewish women.74 Other women warned about Nazi expansionism. In January 1935, Viollis reported on the Saar plebiscite in Le Petit Parisien; in December 1935, in Vendredi, she reported on an international conference decrying the Nuremburg laws that deprived 450,000 German Jews of their rights.75 Three years later, now writing for Ce Soir, Viollis toured Czechoslovakia when the Sudetenland was under threat of annexation. Without Tabouis’s formidable contacts, on the strength of her reputation, she interviewed Presidents Masyaryk and Benes, both of whom expressed concern about annexation. She recognized that many Sudetans of German stock wanted annexation, but also registered a “terror campaign” of threats and boycotts against those who opposed it. Like Tabouis, she condemned Sir Neville Chamberlain, but went beyond calling him an appeaser and charged him with working in the interests of big business.76 By 1939, Tabouis was regularly musing about the possibility of war as well as publishing and speaking about various efforts to stave it off. 77 One month before German troops crossed over the Czechoslovakian border, she predicted a new diplomatic crisis around that time would precipitate a new offensive.78 Her articles still ran in L’Oeuvre after the formal declaration of war in September 1939, but during the “false war” of the fall and winter, they were censored, sometimes heavily.79 She placed pieces in other media predicting further German invasions but also announced flagging enthusiasm for national socialism and for the war in Germany; she insisted on the existence of internal opposition to Hitler and National Socialism. Furthermore, she gave speeches about Hitler’s plans for world hegemony.80 Even before the German occupation of Paris in June 1940,

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some of the articles she penned were published elsewhere or did not appear at the time,81 because most newspapers closed or left Paris and the distribution network was no longer operative. When German troops occupied Paris, Tabouis had to leave France in a hurry. She received a phone call from the secretary of an unidentified minister (likely foreign affairs) informing her that she would be arrested in forty-eight hours and should go to England. Told to destroy her archives, she burned four “enormous valises” of her papers. She left husband and adult children behind. Her ship to London included other anti-Nazi journalists like Pertinax of the right-wing L’Echo de Paris and Élie-Joseph Bois of the centrist Le Petit Parisien.82 Once in England, she was asked by several newspapers to be their correspondent in the United States. She went to the States and remained for the duration of the war. Overhearing apparently wellinformed Americans talking about the imminent defeat of England, she set herself the task of convincing opinion-makers to engage in the war. She found limited acceptance of her notion of the role of Hitler’s fifth columnists as a cause of the war. At meetings with cabinet members and politicians and in lectures to the National Press Club, the Women’s Press Club, and other groups, she urged America to enter the war.83 She was interviewed by and contributed to the Washington Post, New York Times, and other American periodicals, even after America entered the war in December 1941.84 She also had a regular radio program, France in the News. In January 1942, with financing from friends, she founded a newspaper, Pour la Victoire (For victory).85 The Nazi press continued to monitor and critique her articles.86 Later that year she published her autobiography in French – part of a list of 120 volumes in French published by the Éditions de la Maison Française in New York during the Second World War. The translation into English came out simultaneously.87

C o n c l u s i on As the only female diplomatic reporter in interwar France, Tabouis was a pioneer in the subgenre of diplomatic reporting in the daily press. Like her predecessor Séverine until she joined La Fronde, Tabouis worked in an exclusively male-dominated field of endeavour. Even when she entered L’Oeuvre, where several other feminists worked, she seems not to have socialized with them, perhaps because her travel and socializing with important people left her little time to

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do so. While she publicly disapproved of gender barriers, she did not report much on suffragette or suffragist activism until she went to America, met influential feminists, and signed a feminist petition. Her priority in the period up to 1933 was disarmament, with an intensely nationalist fixation on stopping German opposition to the Versailles Treaty. She had little contract with pacifists, most of whom agreed with disarmament, but few of them hobnobbed with the delegates and diplomats in Geneva, as Tabouis did. From 1933 to 1944, Tabouis was outspoken and notorious. If she had “feminine” touches in her style of conducting and reporting on diplomacy – think of her luncheons and her interest in interior decoration – she was a tougher patriot and harbinger of war than most of her (male) colleagues in diplomatic reporting. After the war, she helped pave the way for other women to enter this subgenre.

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P art t hr e e Gender on Other Beats

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8 Gender and Social Reporting: La Mazière, Clar, and Moran, 1922–1939

In Third Republic France, social reporting meant tracking the social movement, defined as covering union meetings and federal congresses, labour legislation, strikes, poverty, social insurance, and welfare. Most of the reporting dealt with men in the labour movement, but there was some coverage of women and children in investigations of their work as well as of poverty and welfare. Most reporters were men, but women addressed issues such as women’s work, poverty, and welfare. The issue of race did not regularly feature in this rubric, though critiques of racism occasionally found a place there. Two features of this kind of journalism indicate lower status in national dailies. Except for papers affiliated with a labour federation or left-wing party, articles were usually located on the inside pages, and even in the labour federation or socialist papers, articles were rarely found above the fold on the front page, where grand reporting series were found. Second, many articles on social issues were not signed, which did not allow a reporter to build a reputation or expect his or her byline to attract readers. Sandrine Lévèque, who analyzed the columns and special pages in April issues of seven Parisian dailies between 1905 and 1935, found that all had regular sections entitled “Latest News,” “Daily Bulletin,” or variations on these titles, as well as sections on provincial news, faits divers, and sports. Five of the seven dailies – L’Humanité, L’Intransigéant, Le Petit Parisien, Le Populaire, and Le Temps – had a regular social reporting section. Figaro and Le Matin, the more conservative papers examined, had no rubric for social issues.1 Labour federation, socialist, and communist newspapers had social columns or pages.

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With very few exceptions in the dailies surveyed for this book, male reporters covered men’s work and unemployment, strikes, union and labour federation meetings, and pension provisions. Very occasionally a union daily allowed a woman like Séverine to write about work accidents or, like Capy, about a strike by women.2 A dozen or so women in the national union, socialist and communist daily press investigated poor children’s, working women’s and working-class living conditions as well as their health and housing. In brief, newspapers’ assignment of social subjects respected the gender divide that consigned children, women, health, and home life to the domestic sphere. Little research has been done on social investigative reporting for feminist, communist, socialist, or union reviews in the interwar period. This neglect was not because these reviews were part of the opinion media, since the border between objective and opinion press was blurred by the 1930s, when so-called informational newspapers were subsidized by political parties.3 Given the gender hierarchy in journalism and in much of journalism history, one reason for scholarly silence on this kind of investigative reporting may be that women did this kind of reporting in smaller left-wing and women’s media. This chapter starts to fill the scholarly void on social reporting by women in the national dailies. The first section examines two women’s and one man’s inquiries into children in the judicial system and finds that gender influenced the assignment and reception of this kind of reporting. The next two sections double down on two women’s coverage of work, poverty, and social policies in one labour federation newspaper and a socialist party paper to underscore the variety of women’s styles and messages. The fourth section discloses some women reporters’ remarks on race and probes one of these women’s analysis of race in the context of the sparse critical examination of race in the daily press. First, note two major omissions in this chapter. One is the wave of strikes and factory occupations involving over a million workers in the wake of the election of the Popular Front government in May 1936. This topic is omitted because very few women reporters, even in the labour and socialist papers read for this chapter, covered important strikes. Stephen Dell, who has surveyed the press coverage, argues that Le Peuple and other union papers represented the strikers as united and determined to expropriate the means of production, while newspapers that were more supportive of the Popular Front government than of the strikers, including L’Oeuvre, emphasized the festive

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and celebratory aspects – and by implication the more limited goals – of the demonstrations. Dell cites one woman, Simone Weill, who was not writing for a daily. He also mentions an anonymous newspaper journalist, who, I conjecture, might have been a woman.4 Conversely, social reporters took up the appropriately “feminine” subjects of education, natality, and maternity, but their contributions on education are too voluminous to cover in one chapter, and most of  their reporting on natality and maternity appeared in other media or on the women’s pages. Two observations about their approach to education must suffice. First, many of the journalists profiled in this book, notably those with education degrees, preferred the “école unique,”5 a more democratic system of education proposed by socialists in the 1890s and promoted by a group of teachers after the Great War.6 Second, when national dailies broached the subject of education, they did so because it was newsworthy and their approach was reactive, rarely investigative. Socialist organs such as Le Peuple and the independent socialist organ L’Oeuvre engaged in some advocacy for l’école unique, but very little investigation.7 Most women journalists commented on natality and maternity in women’s and feminist reviews and, until the mid-1930s, in the communist women’s organ, L’Ouvrière (The woman worker).8 Another site for this kind of coverage was the women’s pages; some of this coverage is analyzed in the next chapter.

Chi l d r e n in t h e J u d ic ial S ys tem: Roubaud, L a M a z iè r e , a n d T éry, 1924–1936 One kind of social investigation engaged several journalists studied in this book. Louis Roubaud and Alice la Mazière addressed the subject of children in the judicial system in the mid-1920s and Simone Téry entered the ongoing discourse about these children in the mid-1930s. Yet Manevy, who studies the press in the interwar decades, only identifies five male reporters who studied this subject in the interwar decades.9 Why are the two women (and possibly other women and men) elided from this and other histories of the press between the wars? A comparison of the two inquiries in the 1920s, using the same methodology devised to compare grand reporting, provides some answers to that question. Examining the later inquiry will offer some insight into the ephemerality of newspaper reporting. In 1924, Louis Roubaud conducted an investigation into children in the judicial system placed in private or public workhouses for the

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daily Le Quotidien. Aside from being inspired by Albert Londres’s just-completed series and book on penal colonies for adults, Roubaud was drawn to the topic because he had been in a children’s correctional facility as a youth. His series summarized the 1912 and 1921 laws setting up special courts to hear cases involving children and adolescents, laws that empowered these courts to confine children who were convicted of sometimes banal offences to workhouses or agricultural colonies. As a grand reporter, Roubaud inspected five workhouses for boys throughout France and concluded that these workhouses were correctional colonies or bagnes. The following year, an edited version of Roubaud’s series was published as Les enfants du Caïn (Cain’s children). This book was reissued twenty-two times over the next decade and a half, more than six times as often as Londres’s Au Bagne was reprinted in the same period. In 1926, Roubaud returned to the subject in L’Intransigéant, this time interviewing seventeen minors who appeared before the judges in the special courts for adolescents. He related heart-rending tales of adolescent girls and boys convicted of escaping from abusive correctional colonies, or whose parents accused them of running away from home or stealing, or who tried to marry too young or inappropriately in the opinion of their parents and the courts. Parents and judges were opposed to young offenders marrying because the judges assumed the young women would be prostitutes who would support the young men, but also of young women aging out of the system marrying considerably older men who, the judges feared, could not support the young women financially – and by implication, would live off the young women’s earnings as prostitutes.10 Roubaud mounted a campaign to reform or abolish these bagnes, but it took a revolt at one of the juvenile penal institutions in 1934 – and ample reporting and protesting about the revolt – to usher in a crackdown on abuses that lasted several years. As recently as 2006, extracts of Roubaud’s book were republished on the Department of Justice website and in a journal devoted to children and adolescents.11 Alice la Mazière followed Roubaud with a six-part series on “L’enfance malheureuse” (Unfortunate children) in L’Ère nouvelle, April through August 1925. Even before the inquiry, la Mazière had shown that the patronages for orphans or children in trouble with the law overworked the children and deprived them of their pay.12 The series presented further documentation about the exploitation of children and urged that these patronages be shut down.13 Like

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Roubaud, she petitioned to attend court sessions but a judge refused her request, telling her that court cases would “soil a feminine sensibility,” reasoning that she characterized as ridiculous.14 She withheld the information about her rejection until the final article, perhaps because it might have prejudiced readers but probably because women reporters (other than Colette) did not admit in print to difficulties accessing the scenes of crime or sources of information, presumably because it might undermine their credibility. The series explained the 1912 law as clearly as Roubaud had and was more informative about the inadequacies and vagueness of the 1921 law. She also added to the discourse the claim that “provincial magistrates” were particularly ignorant about the two laws, condemning children as young as six to remain in a patronage until the age of majority (fifteen for girls and eighteen for boys) for simple thefts.15 Like Roubaud, she sought out victims of the system after the series had concluded and published one interview in another newspaper, La Volonté.16 Her series was not issued as a book and was rarely cited in the decade-long campaign for reform of the correctional colonies. Why did Roubaud’s investigation have far more impact than la Mazière’s? One answer is that Roubaud was the first to investigate and publicize the problem. Another answer is the breadth of his inquiry. The third reason is the relative importance of Le Quotidien, which had a respectable circulation of 260,000.17 But the fourth reason is surely gender, which is directly linked to the more limited scope of la Mazière’s inquiry and to the subsequent reputations of the two reporters. Roubaud’s career as a grand reporter has been discussed above. La Mazière’s travels and reporting abroad have also been referenced, as well as the fact that she should have been recognized as a grand reporter. Now consider her career and interests prior to her series on correctional colonies. She was one of the two subjects of this book who began her career in journalism during the Great War. One article on the work women did sorting and repurposing discarded or damaged goods returned from the front first appeared in Revue de Paris and was reprinted as a pamphlet.18 As an active member of the Section française de l’internationale ouvrier (SFIO) (Socialist Party), she ran as a socialist candidate in the municipal elections of 1919, even though, as a woman, she was not eligible to do so.19 After campaigning for only a week, she managed to attract 390 votes.20 She did not, indeed could not, win. That same year, she reported to the Congress of

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L’Union française pour le suffrage des femmes (French Union for Women’s Suffrage) on how votes for women would save babies. Here she developed the idea of degeneration, with a hint of eugenic concerns. She argued that the high level of infantile mortality was due to “congenital debility, hereditary syphilis, … artificial feeding, poor hygiene due to unhealthy and cramped lodgings and women’s ignorance of the most elementary principles of infant care.” Her remedy was, “do not separate babies from their mothers and prepare future mothers for their métier as mothers.” To accomplish these goals, she recommended the creation of departmental offices to combat infantile mortality, a refuge for pregnant women, and a convalescent home for postpartum women, as well as a clinic for pregnant women and nursing babies in every city and town. Only by having the vote could women effect these changes.21 Few of her proposed reforms were enacted before women got the vote in 1945. La Mazière’s extensive, expensive, and feminist remedies decreased the impact of her series. By replacing a feminist perspective with a communist one, the same interpretation can be applied to Simone Téry’s fine twenty-one-part series on “Disadvantaged Children,” published in L’Humanité in the mid-1930s. The length, breadth, and qualitative methodology of the series are impressive. She visited and described the homes and lives of children brought before the Tribunal pour enfants et adolescents (Court for Children and Adolescents), attended and critiqued many legal proceedings at the court, elicited written testimony from children incarcerated in patronages, and liberally quoted the children themselves.22 This approach did more to contextualize her series in systemic poverty than earlier press inquiries into children in the court system. It was more than the equal of Roubaud’s series and book. Although Téry referred to a long history of problems and complaints about the system, she did not cite Roubaud’s book, despite having been employed at Le Quotidien when Roubaud’s series appeared in it and having many opportunities to purchase the book in the succeeding years. Nor did she cite la Mazière’s series, though the latter was a friend of her mother, Andrée Viollis. These omissions did not distinguish her from others reporting on penal facilities for children in the 1930s.23 One is reminded of the transitory and ephemeral nature of much of what appears in daily newspapers. Because Simone’s series was never edited into a separate volume, it was not as widely or recently cited as Roubaud’s book. Timing may explain the decision not to issue the series as a book, for the series

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came out between Téry’s arrest in Spain and her return to Spain in the middle of the Civil War. Thereafter, she was more devoted to reporting about and activism to support Spanish republicans, succor Spanish refugees in France, and participate in the antifascist campaigns of the mid- and late 1930s. The pressing nature of the international situations may have discouraged her and potential publishers from putting out a book. However, it is quite possible that her employment at communist dailies and her own communist sensibilities discouraged many publishers.

Le Peuple   a n d Le Populaire : Fanny Clar on W o r k , C u lt u r e , a n d Soci al Hygi ene Socialist and labour federation dailies were exceptions to the rule that men reported on the social movement. The SFIO organ Le Populaire began in 1916 and became a daily in 1918. By 1936, it had a print run of 250,000.24 Le Peuple, a daily from its inception in 1921, was subsidized by the Conféderation général du travail (General Labour Confederation) because it never attained a circulation that would sustain it.25 Although Le Populaire’s “Economic and Social Life Page” and Le Peuple’s “Social Page” were filled with articles on male workers’ issues written by male labour leaders,26 they employed women to cover the condition of women and children and on women’s role in the party and (some) unions. Le Populaire ran a column called “Tribune des femmes socialistes,” and later added a “La femme et le foyer” (Women and home) page. The first covered party issues of interest to women; the second covered women’s working and living situations alongside the usual food, fabric, and fashion topics.27 In The Republic of Men, Geoff Read argues that the women and home page and its successors endorsed the women as mother, as a way of attracting readers and reinforcing gender roles.28 Yet in the labour and socialist dailies, even that page discussed paid labour and working conditions. Le Peuple employed three women who shared a column titled the “Tribune des femmes” (Woman’s tribune). Two of these columnists produced more copy about women’s political and social issues than they did on the usual fare in women’s columns.29 Two of them, Fanny Clar (1875–1944) and Denise Moran (1885–1946), were social investigators for Le Peuple between 1921 and 1939. Both also worked for Le Populaire for shorter periods in the interwar decades. Even so, these two journalists differed in their emphases, methods, and style.

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Fanny Clar was a feminist, pacifist, and socialist journalist. Proud of the fact that her grandfather was a Communard, she wrote for La Bataille Syndicaliste and the satirical and pacifist weekly-then-daily Le Bonnet Rouge during the war. In both, she described women’s labour in the war industries and regretted that they had to work in the service of war.30 In 1922, she joined Le Peuple, where she remained, with a two-year hiatus, until 1939. She also contributed to Le Populaire from 1918 through 1925 and L’Ère nouvelle from 1925 through 1939. At Le Peuple, Le Populaire, and L’Ère nouvelle, she had contact with Alice la Mazière, Henriette Sauret, Séverine, Madeleine Vernet, and other women journalists and pacifists cited in this book. Having acquired an education degree, as so many members of the third generation did, she published illustrated antiwar stories for children during the war.31 In the early 1920s, two of her novels first saw print in Le Peuple and Le Quotidien (1922–24), and short stories about working people appeared in L’Ère nouvelle.32 She was welcomed into the Société des Hommes de Lettres (Society of Men of Letters) in 1924. By 1938, she had authored dozens more illustrated stories for children as well adult fiction.33 When she died in 1941, she was lauded as a successor of Séverine.34 At Le Populaire for five years after the Great War, Clar wrote a column titled “Feuilles au vent” (Leaves in the wind). The column touched on many subjects, engaged in exchanges with readers, and explored various issues from a feminist, pacifist, and hygienic point of view. As a supporter of women’s suffrage, she tried to convince working women and many socialist feminists that the vote was not an end but a means to improve their life.35 When she addressed ­alcoholism in her column, she offered the unusual remedy of ending war, which she contended – probably correctly, given the rations of ­alcohol distributed to soldiers before going into battle – increased alcoholism.36 Occasionally, she did a front-page article. One of these articles critiqued the postwar demobilization of women workers and challenged the revived rationales about women being less productive than men, following up on (though not citing) Capy’s articles about women’s competence during the war. The same article drew attention to the plight of war widows and orphans who suffered from the loss of income of the husband and father, a subject Capy raised long after the war.37 Clar did not contribute to the “Tribune des femmes socialistes” that appeared on “La femme et le foyer” page. And when she wrote a column on “La ménagère” (Housewife) for Le Peuple in

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1937–38, it did not focus on the subjects typical of women’s columns. Instead, it criticized the status of housewifery, advanced an early version of wages for housework, and advocated a code for housewifery.38 Clar was one of the few journalists who covered men and women’s work. Her column “Cahiers des gens du travail” (Working People’s Notebook) ran in the Le Peuple from 1922 through 1934. Here she delved deeper in working-class life. Several of her Notebook items considered masculine workplaces and male workers engaged in heavy labour like mining and road work, which were rural occupations that received less attention than urban jobs, except in the colonies (Londres and other grand reporters wrote series and books on these colonial labourers). Clar also coauthored a book on work and working men, which included urban labour.39 Unlike Capy and other peers who discussed working women, Clar paid little attention to pinkcollar workers. In general, she was interested in more traditional feminine jobs, including domestics, and called for regulations for these kinds of jobs.40 Clar’s columns frequently dealt with the health of workers beyond workplace injuries or illnesses. Shortly after the launch of the first national sale of anti-tuberculosis stamps to fund campaigns to educate people about tuberculosis, especially among children,41 she investigated the causes of tuberculosis among young people.42 She indicted insalubrious workplaces as well as the impact of factory pollution on working-class communities but also, in line with contemporary hygienic thinking, censured overcrowded and unventilated lodgings, malnutrition and poor sanitation.43 Her columns on the deleterious effects of inadequate rest and recreational opportunities covered workers of both sexes, with special attention to young people.44 These columns reveal that Clar was influenced by the social hygiene movement, which had begun before the war as dozens of private charities to deal with health problems such as tuberculosis, alcoholism, infant mortality, and childhood morbidity, and which had formed a central organization, the Alliance d’hygiène sociale. After the war, many of these charities handed over their facilities to the state, which set up various offices and finally a ministry to deal with health and hygiene between 1924 and 1940, but the Alliance and many of its associated charities continued to provide health care and hygienic education.45 Local and departmental branches of the Alliance included some prominent women in leadership positions, like feminist Cécile Brunschvicg, as well as women doctors, nurses, and teachers.46

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Although these organizations published several journals and some of them had female contributors, most of the authors of both sexes were doctors or nurses.47 One of these journals, L’Hygiène par exemple, had many women teachers and school inspectrices on the board of editors and regularly ran articles by teachers and inspectrices. Despite her educational training and interest in children, Clar did not write for any of these journals.48 Social hygiene has been associated with the eugenics movement in France, which also developed in the fin de siècle and shared many of the same health concerns, notably infant mortality. It is important to realize that French eugenists were divided into two branches: one focused on innate or biological causes of degeneration, which many of them blamed on syphilis; the other concentrated on environmental and social causes of degeneration such as poverty, overwork, deficient housing, and bad hygiene. In the early 1930, the first branch advocated negative measures such as premarital examinations and restrictions on immigration. The second branch continued to promote positive and preventive measures, like better pre- and postnatal care.49 Clar and the Alliance were more open to the latter.50 However, Clar paid relatively little attention to infant mortality, except to criticize the system of sending infants to wet nurses in the countryside. Her solution was to improve the working conditions and pay of wet nurses.51 She never used the term eugenics. This elision was hardly unusual. A study of the use of the term eugenics in the French publications digitalized by Google between 1900 and 1960 found sparse use of the term.52 Nor did Clar’s failure to use the term distinguish her from other women journalists who treated infant and child mortality and morbidity. Consider Madeleine Vernet, the editor of La Mère éducatrice and founder of an orphanage, who published an eight-part front-page series on “Le martyrologie des enfants assistes” (The martyrdom of children in care) in Le Peuple in late 1924. This inquiry explored the system that entrusted abandoned Parisian babies to rural wet nurses in the Seine-Inférieure department abutting Paris and left them with the same women to raise to the age of thirteen. She informed readers that she had been able to “observe, study and verify [the subject] for twenty-five years” and that she and her family had a long history of working with and for abandoned children. She also consulted the few official documents on the system of placing babies abandoned in Paris in rural homes that she was able to access (far more are available now).53 She added her voice to a long list of critics of a system that

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relied upon women who had no training or certification of their ability to care for their charges and that rarely inspected the homes and circumstances of these wet nurses. Other articles in the series exposed inspectors’ failure to research or report on the safety or sanitation of the housing and the vague questions doctors and officials asked wet nurses when they visited.54 Another article critiqued the antiquated organization of public assistance, its bureaucratic delays and unresponsiveness. She warned that many babies and children were malnourished, ill-clad, unclean, and unhealthy and that these conditions led to degeneration, a potent scare tactic in the aftermath of the massive loss of life in the war and the resurgance of pronatalism.55 The argument hinted of positive eugenic solutions like interventions to ensure healthy babies and children. In 1934, Clar acted in a highly regarded film L’Atalante, directed by Jean Vigo, whom she knew from Le Bonnet Rouge.56 She had already written articles on film’s potential to be educational without being boring.57 Throughout her career, she insisted on all people’s need for education and cultural enrichment.58 After a break in 1935– 36, Clar returned to Le Peuple and addressed new issues about work and health. After the Popular Front legislation on the forty-hour work week and paid vacations, she wrote about weekly rest and paid yearly vacations.59 Later that year, she dug deeper into the subject of poor nutrition, describing the daily meals of many workers and the scarcity of fresh and nutritious food in shops and markets in workingclass neighbourhoods.60 Instead of condemning the recreational options available, as she had earlier, she promoted popular outdoor fetes on hygienic grounds of the need for fresh air and exercises.61 She always treated her subjects as people with lives beyond their jobs. Although Clar penned an early childhood education text, the column rarely mentioned education, though a stand-alone article proposed women’s education as a solution to female alcoholism and other problems.62 Perhaps because other women writing for Le Peuple addressed single motherhood and education,63 she was nearly silent about these topics.

Le Peuple : D e n is e M o r a n on Women’s Work a n d P ov erty Although Denise Moran lacked a family background in journalism, she followed much the same career path as Simone Téry and Andrée

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Viollis. Like Téry, she taught in the early 1920s and worked for several left-leaning dailies and weeklies from 1923 into the 1930s. As a suffrage feminist, she joined other feminists at these papers.64 Like Viollis, whose second husband helped her find employment at Le Petit Parisien, Moran’s career was partly shaped by her second husband, Edmond Jean Savineau (1893–193?), another teacher and journalist. When he became a colonial administrator in Chad, she accompanied him, where she founded two schools for indigenous children and was among the first women in the colonial administration, as an education official. She wrote articles about the subject for Le Peuple. Four years in Chad interrupted her journalism but also provided the material for articles that she edited and released as a book on Chad, Tchad (1934). It appeared in the same series as André Gide’s widely known Voyage au Congo (1927) and Le retour du Tchad (1928), which were translated and published together as Travels in the Congo.65 Compared to Gide and Albert Londres, she spent more time in and saw more of French West Africa.66 Later, Moran produced a major report on education in Chad.67 Before she went to Chad, Moran reported for many newspapers, covering topics ranging from the treatment of the mutilés de guerre (war wounded), the mutiplication of charities, and women’s work. In the last instance, she studied and sympathized with women gathering broken glass in wineries (to be sold back to glassmakers), artists’ models, piano teachers, etc.68 She was divided about the campaigns to get women to have more children, since she recognized that this was hard on working women but also that it was good for children to have siblings.69 Her years in Chad and a stint in Spain during the civil war radicalized her.70 On her return to France, she signed two articles in favour of the legalization of abortion in La Lumière, a daily with a print run of seventy thousand. Here she presented a counter-­ intuitive though logical argument that legalization would increase the birthrate by reducing the number of women made sterile by illegal abortions.71 She was clearly trying to appeal to the pronatalist sentiment so prevalent in the mid-1930s. Joining Le Peuple, she signed a series of articles profiling and extolling “Revolutionary Women” from Utopian Socialist Flora Tristan, through Communard Louise Michel to Séverine.72 In 1934 alone, she conducted three social investigations for Le Peuple. Although the subject matter of her investigations overlapped with Capy’s and Clar’s, the methods and style differed. The first and

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longest inquiry was into women’s work during the Depression. 73 Compared to Capy and Clar, Moran took a more sociological and statistical approach. Yet her perceptions about working women’s real options produced interesting insights and overturned some assumptions. Instead of a broad general study, which would have too expensive for the newspaper, she took a case-study approach, selecting her examples from a representative range of urban jobs held by women. She dealt with the clothing industries, which employed many women at low to modest wages. Insofar as the garment industry had been investigated several times since the mid-nineteenth century, she had models to follow or revise to fit the circumstances. She also dealt with the new and expanding occupation, stenographers-typists, who were, on average, better-paid than seamstresses. Because pink-collar work was considered more respectable/bourgeois, their public image was more positive than seamstresses’ image. Occupational guides for girls and women and private training colleges advertised that office work offered unlimited job opportunities. Moran was not misled by their reputation or the vocational sources. In the clothing industry, she identified the hierarchy of positions and pay scales, differentiating between different unions’ rates and between unionized and non-unionized rates, distinctions that were more significant than before the Great War. She calculated average budgets for each type of position, using criteria beyond food and lodgings. Having asked seamstresses to list their major expenses, she learned that most of them included the costs of washing, mending, and replacing clothing because they had to wear clean and proper clothing when they handled materials to make bourgeois clients’ dresses and underwear and/or to help fit the clientele. Previous investigators had not grasped that this was an occupational expense. After talking to stenographer-typists and visiting placement bureaus, Moran corrected the public image of satisfied and secure steno-typists by documenting how many failed to find appropriate jobs, endured long periods of unemployment, and ended up working in factories and other less “respectable” workplaces.74 Moran’s second inquiry for Le Peuple was on poverty in working-­ class quarters.75 She examined poverty itself, not, qua Clar, as a result of other problems. Like Clar, she visited workers’ homes but, unlike Clar, she informed readers that she did so with the help of social assistants.76 Probing deeper than Clar, she asked how poverty affected morale and family relationships. One of her more moving and effective

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anecdotes was about a mother who was depressed because she could not afford to take time off work to care for her sick child. Typically, Moran independently checked and reported on the cost of medications and other treatments.77 She was as compassionate as other women reporters but, unlike Capy and Clar, she verified the details of the stories she heard from her sources and provided objective data on the problems and solutions she identified. Moran’s shortest series on a social issue was about poverty among people on low pensions. Here she did less sociological investigation and more analysis of the proposed reductions in real pensions, through increased taxation of pensions, in what she called the “‘stupefying incoherence’ of the 1934 decree laws.”78 Moran’s radicalism and political activism intensified after a trip to the Soviet Union in 1935. However, her affiliation was not to the Communist Party, but to the League for the Rights of Man and the League Against Imperialism (although the latter had ties to the Comintern).79 According to a 1936 police report, Moran collaborated on several weekly newspapers “of secondary importance,” including Vendredi, the weekly cofounded by Viollis, and L’École Libératrice, a weekly issued by the National Union of Teachers in France and the Colonies. She joined Viollis and Téry on the World Committee of Women against War and Fascism and Viollis in the Vigilance Committee of Antifascist Intellectuals. She gave speeches on Nazism and fascism to groups interested in documenting Hitler’s atrocities and assisting the victims of fascism.80 In 1938, Moran participated in inspections of the French and Algerian refugee camps for Spanish soldiers and civilians at the request of the International Conference for the Defence of Humans that met in Paris in 1938. The following year, the reports on these inspections roundly condemned the overcrowding, inadequate provisioning, and treatment of refugees.81 In 1936, she was in Senegal as a technical educational advisor and volunteered to be part of an inquiry into the social conditions in the French West African colonies launched by the first Socialist Minister of the Colonies Marius Moutet (in the Popular Front government). Her assignment was to research the condition of women and the family. She produced a summary report and seventeen more focused reports, which together filled about a thousand pages.82 Her reporting on this colony, and the associated critique of racism in this reporting, also distinguished Moran from most of the journalists in this book.

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A n t ir aci sm With four exceptions, the journalists profiled in this book did not publicly query the meaningfulness of race as a category, and two of them only questioned intra-European racism. The other two, Clar and Moran, addressed the intercontinental and colonial version of racism. Intra-European racism implied intra-European racial differentiation and hierarchies, bolstered by theories of biological differences between people of different nations or regions. When articulated in the nineteenth century, most of these theories were associated with differences in skull size or cranial configuration, but by the 1930s, anthropologists and other scholars had definitively discredited these biological markers.83 However, intra-European racism acquired a new biological rationale by René Martial (1873– 1955), a medical doctor and hygienist who founded an institute to study blood types. Concerned about immigration, Martial published books linking race to blood types. Fear about immigration, especially acute during the Great Depression, made his book on La race française (The French race) (1934) acceptable in medical reviews and libraries. Under Vichy, he was promoted to director of a Vichy government agency, for which he prepared racist and anti-Semitic reports commissioned by the Vichy government. Although his blood-type theories were repudiated after the Second World War, he continued to publish on race until his death in 1955.84 Journalists began to query this kind of racism in response to the Nazi ideology of a racial hierarchy with Aryans or Nordic types at the apex and other “races” below them, especially when Hitler used the ideology to target and terrorize Jews and other people in Germany. A brochure on racism by Dr Louise-Marie Ferré summed up the situation: “We talk endlessly of racism, even in the humblest provincial papers, assuming the reader knows what it is … But we have noticed, even in cultivated circles, a nearly total ignorance in this regard … Racism, for the average Frenchman, is more or less identical with Hitler’s Germany.” In the brochure and speeches Ferré gave at this time, she insisted that there were races and divisions between indigenous Europeans (her term), but these races were not the ones proposed by Nazis.85 She provided no evidence for this claim. Anne Darbois (1900–??), a militant socialist, teacher, teachers’ union activist, and a journalist for socialist newspapers, queried this kind

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of racism. In 1938, she proclaimed that “the old myths” (of fatherland, race, etc.) operated to sustain capitalism. Her militancy caused friction in the Socialist Party and her four years at the daily paper Le Nouvel Age were fractious. She resigned from the party and the paper the same year as she made the statement about race, though her position on race was not the reason she resigned. Differences about the direction of the Socialist Party and about the management of the daily caused the rift.86 In reaction to Nazi racism during the Occupation, Viollis produced a powerful pamphlet in 1943. The preface by the “National Movement Against Racism” began with a critique of how French newspapers were “a source of deception and disgust since 1940” and “journalists had abdicated all human conscience.” Like others, Viollis listed the horrors associated with Nazi racism, now including the internment of Jews, Gypsies, and other prisoners in Drancy before being deported to concentration camps. She joined earlier critics in calling Hitler’s racism “a crime against reason,” since it had “no scientific basis and real scholars consider it absurd. By what right,” she asked, “do ‘blond Aryans’ proclaim themselves a superior race, above the Latin, Slavic, and Indo-European races, if it is not to impose the so-called superiority by force of arms?” German scholars knew that racism was “nothing but a scientific error, nonsense. But they have found a useful pretext, a mask behind which they hide the avid and prideful fact of maxiimperialism with its will to hegemony over all the nations of Europe.”87 As early as 1925, Fanny Clar critiqued the broader conception of racial hierarchy. In an article called “Civilization and the So-Called Inferior Races” in the “Free Opinions” column of Le Peuple, she probed the self-reinforcing but poorly reasoned ideas of a racial hierarchy and the benefits of the civilizing mission. “By our original superiority, we have been taught, the white must spread the benefits of their civilization to the so-called inferior races … But unhappily, in as much as they are not contaminated by the viruses of the civilized, the inferior peoples rarely seem to be convinced that they should be grateful for the advantages we have brought them. Whether they wanted them or not.”88 In 1933, Denise Moran made a fuller critique in a series on “Chad’s Distress” that was edited into a book and published the next year. In the manner of grand reporters, Moran was critical of the colonial administration, but she parted ways with them by focusing on racism and its linkage to the economic exploitation of French West Africa.

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Beginning with a brief description of her various postings and their locations in French West Africa, she warned her readers not to “commit the error of believing that there are ‘negroes’ in general, all alike, or a black Africa in general.” This acknowledgment of differences distinguished her approach from that of most other grand reporters.89 Moran then surveyed the history of the French subjugation of the colony, contrasting French promises of “peace, liberty, justice” to the heavy taxation imposed by the military and their ruthless collections of these taxes. She condemned the subsequent civilian administration for employing ex-military men and using the same military tactics; she denounced colonial officials’ “distrust of the indigenous people, faith in the superiority of the white race and its right to ownership of the black race, [and] devotion first and foremost to European interests.” Following the example of Gide and Londres, she exposed the system of forced labour used to build the railway from the Congo to the ocean. She compared Londres’s statistics on death rates of 60 to 80 percent of the line workers to more recent, significantly lower figures and interpreted the improvement as an outcome of Londres’s investigations and publicity about them. After consulting contracts and other archival material, she proved that other concessionary companies were also corrupt and used forced labour. In the concluding article on the toll of thirty years of colonization, she summed up, “What the conquerors of Chad and their successors call the ‘colony’s prosperity’ is not the well-being of the indigenous people, it is not even combining the interests of the blacks and the whites, it is the profit of the whites no matter what it costs the blacks.”90 Like grand reporting books, Tchad described difficult journeys and the author promised to report “only what I perceive,” but, unlike other such books, she wanted to investigate the conditions of “blacks.” In line with the “modern woman” type of grand reporting, she told of defying colonial authorities who thought her proposed journey was unsuitable for women and she denigrated the puerility of colonial women. Although her use of the terms blacks and whites essentializes both categories, she distinguished herself from overt racists by criticizing European travellers (not just colonials) for using demeaning epithets like “savages.” She concluded that “we flee Europe and its war between the classes, the races, the sexes; we find the battle over colours. And most hateful of all, women and Jews, often treated with contempt, are complicit. The mullatto suppresses the Martiniquan who suppresses the African.”91

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More significantly, Moran observed and interviewed many groups of black Africans and reported differences in cultural and economic practices among the groups. She traced these differences to climate and geography, explanations favoured by French thinkers since Montesquieu. In each ethnic group, she sought out women, described them and pronounced many of them beautiful. But she was not a relativist, for she decried practices like tattooing and scarification as disfiguring and found pendulous breasts ugly. Even her praise for black African women’s physical agility and suppleness, which she believed were the source of classical – meaning Greek – ideals of beauty, was couched in terms of these women remaining primitive, not perverted by civilization.92 Evidently, she was writing for French people and making less than flattering comparisons to European women. Despite her critique of colonial policies, practices, and rationales, she continued to support French colonialism, if it benefitted the indigenous people of the empire. Concerned about the threat of colonial rivals like Britain and Belgium, who held territories on either side of Chad, she warned that French policies of protectionism against their colonies (imposed during the Great Depression) must be modified.93 In this, she seems closer to colonial reporting in Viollis’s 1938 book on Tunisia and in Roubaud’s colonial books. Moran subsequently published a long essay entitled Noirs et blancs (Blacks and whites) that she initially sent to a weekly illustrated paper for youth. Here, too, she challenged popular images of black Africans and insisted that “they” were “the same as us, with their cultures and their industries.” Still she went on to argue that “they” needed to learn how to take better care of themselves, and whites “should instruct them.” She did recognize that contact with Europeans was “often terrible for blacks.”94 In the section on the condition of women that was part of her comissioned report on education submitted in 1939, Moran fully explored the horrors of “pawning” women and girls and porterage (women carrying heavy loads along the expanding road system). Long before anyone else, she discovered and admired the large number of women entrepreneurs and long-distance traders as well as the variety and importance of women’s crafts and manufacturing.95 Western economists and feminists would rediscover these West African women in the 1990s and document how they played a central economic role, without getting much credit for it in European or American studies.96 While Moran hardly meets contemporary criteria for non-racist or

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neocolonialism, she went further in those directions than others discussed in this book, and should get credit for that.

C o n c l u s i on Unlike most dailies, union, socialist, and communist dailies published social investigations on the front page. Although most union and strike reporting was done by men, even in the left-wing dailies, a handful of women investigated children’s, women’s, and living conditions as well as working-class health and housing in left and labour papers. In this way, left-wing dailies respected the gender divide that considered major strikes and labour organizations part of the public sphere, and consigned women and children’s health and housing to the domestic sphere. Historians have paid more attention to the reporting on major labour organizations and strikes than to investigations of living and working conditions, especially of women and children. As the comparison of Roubaud’s and La Mazière’s almost-contemporaneous investigations of the legal treatment of criminalized children revealed, the male reporter got much more recognition, partly due to his being granted access to the children’s courts and colonies, while a judge refused La Mazière’s request to visit the court, for an openly stated sexist reason. No doubt other women reporters encountered the same resistance. Téry, who did attend court sessions, produced as thorough an investigation as Roubaud, but her series came a decade later, after many inquiries, and was never published in book form, which renders the comparison less useful. It does, however, reinforce Sèverine’s observations about the ephemerality of newspaper reporting. This chapter’s assessment of social reporting on women’s work by Clar and Moran identified some similarities to Capy’s reporting, which is hardly surprising since they all were left-wing pacifists, but also noted differences between all three in their methods and styles. Notable in this regard was Moran’s more quantitative approach to the subject. The major variation between Capy and Clar is the latter’s greater interest in working and living conditions and her social hygienic approach to these subjects. Moran stands apart, from them and most French reporters, in her critique of racism. Whereas Viollis and other reporters criticized intra-European kinds of racism associated with Hitler, Moran censured the intra-continental and colonial racism so prevalent at that time. There may be more women – and men – whose social reporting deserves similar consideration.

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9 Women’s Pages: Rosine, Magda, and Chandet, 1918–1940

In North America, women’s pages began in the 1880s and 1890s, as American and Canadian newspapers sought more advertising and a more diversified readership. One inspiration was women’s magazines, which focused on the private sphere, not on the public sphere usually covered in daily newspapers. Because of a cultural consensus that the private sphere was women’s realm and because these magazines hired women to write about domestic life and fashion, newspaper publishers hired women to cover the “four Fs”: family, food, furniture, and fashion. Some of the content took the form of advice dispensed in the form of correspondence between friends or between readers and the journalist. The women’s column and women’s pages created employment for women in newspapers but also segregated them, because newspapers considered their content to be soft news, whereas the rest of the newspaper (barring advertisements) was hard news.1 France followed this path a decade later. However, the division between hard and soft news and public and private affairs was blurred: trial reporting, “Choses vues” (Things seen) columns, and stories or tales crossed the border between hard and soft news to probe private lives and events, while women’s page columnists made forays into hard news on some social, political, and feminist issues. Moreover, women’s pages themselves redefined women’s and the domestic sphere. Despite these qualifications, the division into hard and soft news both reflected and reinforced the prevailing separate spheres ideology, making it difficult for women who entered the dailies on the women’s page to cross over to the news pages, which employed more people and were more prestigious.

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No one has specifically studied women’s pages in France. According to Sandrine Lévèque’s analysis of the April issues of seven national dailies from 1905 to 1935, only three of them had a women’s page: Figaro, Intransigéant, and Le Matin.2 My reading of annual runs of the seven newspapers over two decades indicates that at least one other newspaper she surveyed, Le Petit Parisien, had a women’s page by the mid-1920s, as did second-tier national dailies like L’Oeuvre, L’Ère nouvelle, and Le Peuple. At least one right-wing newspaper, Le Flambeau, introduced a women’s page in 1934.3 Thanks to Viollis, Vendredi had one from its initiation in 1935. This was also true for L’Epoque, a Catholic daily founded in 1937. No doubt there are other examples. This chapter first explains why French women’s pages came later than their predecessors in North America and why they were more oriented to fashion. The second section identifies four ways that French – and possibly other countries’ – women’s pages differed from the rest of the newspaper. The last three sections compare three long-time women’s columnists working at three newspapers over the two decades of the interwar period, noting that they were not uniform in their perspective on fashion and related matters and that their prescriptions for women and the domestic sphere expanded between the early 1920s and late 1930s.

O r ig in s a n d Vari ati ons According to Manevy’s study of daily papers in the interwar decades, sports pages were the precursor of other specialized pages. As early as 1920, dailies consecrated an entire page, on Mondays, to accounts of the Sunday sports matches. The success of these pages encouraged directors and administrators to run sports columns on other days of the week, sometimes every day. Daily coverage gave them an advantage over the new and successful sports magazines. Manevy attributes the subsequent appearance of speciality columns on fashion, theatre, and cinema to the popularity of the sports pages.4 Although he does not pursue the subsequent history of fashion columns or mention women’s columns, they also increased in number and size in the following decades, because they too were popular additions to newspapers and attracted new readers and advertising. French women’s magazines guided newspaper directors and editors in the staffing and composition of fashion columns and subsequently

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pages. Beginning in the belle époque and continuing through 1940, women’s magazines were constructing a new version of womanhood, the new woman, who was primarily a “consuming woman,” though the new woman was also a more physically and socially active and even an employed woman.5 As might be expected, given the international pre-eminence of Parisian fashion and the economic and social importance of the industry in France, all these women’s magazines followed haute couture. The Annuaire de la presse française had three categories of women’s magazines: Mondaines, Mode, and Féminine (society, fashion, and women’s).6 At the apex, in terms of price and prestige, were a handful of society magazines that reported on the couture collections, high society events, socialites, and (by the late 1920s) celebrities. They ran articles that, to present-day readers, read suspiciously like advertorials for haut de gamme furniture, decorative items, cars, and travel. Couture, cars, and other luxury goods cross-advertised in these magazines. By the late 1920s, there were two hundred second-tier magazines known as fashion magazines. They covered the collections and high society, but included counsel on sewing, altering, and caring for clothes, and occasionally on housekeeping and cooking for less-affluent readers. These magazines had fewer ads for luxury goods and more ads for dress shops, fabric stores, and household goods such as vacuums and sewing machines. The third tier consisted of a dozen women’s magazines with considerably more practical advice and advertising about clothing, housewifery, and child care. Most of their advertising was for dress and fabric outlets, and cooking and cleaning products.7 All three types of magazines flourished in the 1920s, even as dailies struggled to recover their prewar readership. After a dip in circulation during the Depression, magazine circulation resumed growth in the mid-1930s, at a slower pace than in the 1920s but faster than newspaper subscriptions grew in the mid-1930s.8 These magazines’ rapid rise, deceleration, and recovery mirrored developments in haute couture, which had lost some of its international standing during the Great War but rebounded to its greatest success in the late 1920s, followed by declining prices and production in the early 1930s and partial recuperation in the late 1930s. Couturiers preferred to advertise in the illustrated semi-glossy society and fashion magazines, but they admitted fashion columnists of major newspaper into their seasonal shows and released photographs of new creations to newspapers. One or two of these photos were

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routinely placed, very advantageously, on the front pages of dailies.9 Since newspaper columns could not compete with the number or quality of drawings and photos in magazines, publicity experts advised newspaper publishers to accept illustrations in their advertisements, stop putting ads on the last four pages of each issue and move them close to articles pertinent to the products being advertised. The experts argued that more graphics and less text appealed to potential consumers and were especially effective at persuading women readers, who, they claimed, were more “emotive” consumers.10 Whether newspaper owners or editors consulted the experts is unclear; however, they did increase the number of illustrations and photographs as well as disperse ads throughout each issue. Beginning in the mid-1920s, they placed ads for fashion accessories, beauty products, over-the-counter medicines, and household cleansers near the fashion columns in what became known as the women’s page, although it was usually a quarter or half a page.11 In addition to columns two or three times a week and a women’s page once a week, a few major dailies introduced seasonal women’s and/or fashion supplements in the late 1920s. These supplements were in a magazine format with more illustrations, photos, and ads than daily issues. Nos Loisirs, which was associated with Le Petit Parisien, exceeded the circulation of that daily, which had the largest circulation of a French daily.12 In high-end newspapers, the fashion columns continued the centuryold tradition of fashion and society chronicles in society magazines like Vogue and Femina, which cost six francs per issue in the mid1920s. Their “ideal reader” was wealthy and sought guidance from “counsellors” who promised to tell readers how to acquire chic and distinction.13 In addition to reporting on the couture collections, they described what society ladies wore to balls, tea dances, operas, theatres, and the races, as well as to stroll in the Bois de Boulogne and engage in other leisure activities. Early in the 1920s, the counsellors turned their attention to sportswear for golf and skiing and to casual dress (included in the category of sportswear) for attending sports, going on vacation, spending time in one’s country home. Commentary about children and child care was virtually nonexistent. This was hardly the traditional wife/mother/domestic version of women’s sphere. The practical columns in fashion and women’s magazines such as Chiffons (Clothes) and La Mode pratique (Practical Fashion) were the model for second- and third-tier newspapers. An issue of a fashion

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or women’s magazines cost about one-quarter what society magazines cost; their target audience was middle-class women. These magazines were less fixated on the collections, society events, and sports. They dispensed how-to advice about sewing your own and your children’s clothes, altering garments to follow fashion, and washing, mending, and refreshing clothes. Fashion magazines occasionally considered issues of early education and child sports in addition to their interest in children’s clothing. Their articles on clothing for “special occasions” were more often for family affairs like dinners or weddings than commercial entertainments. Women’s magazines included articles on child and house care, and sometimes on cooking. They alone ran pieces on housedresses. Conversely, they devoted more space to garments for family or religious celebrations. This version of womanliness bore more resemblance to the ideology of two spheres. Newspapers mimicked the kind of magazine that served a similar clientele. Figaro, which cost eighty-four francs for an annual subscription and twenty centimes per issue in 1925, copied society and fashion chronicles in society magazines. L’Oeuvre ran a fashion and society column by a (real or pretend) countess who authored books about couture and style, as well as “La Mode” (Fashion) by Fanchette and “L’Élegance pratique” (Practical Elegance) by Pamela.14 “Practical Elegance” gave instructions on how to find or make garments that looked like haute couture models and how to dress smartly on a budget; it was useful to the humbler readership of second-tier dailies. Modest newspapers introduced columns that solicited and responded to readers’ letters to the columnist. Sometimes the columnist was accused of manufacturing correspondence that raised issues that she or the newspaper wanted to discuss. Their magazine counterparts forged bonds between long-term columnists and readers through synthetic personalization, by calling themselves auntie or cousin, directly addressing “chères lectrices” (dear readers) and using the personal pronouns I and you.15 This technique did not work as well in the dailies, for those who tried it soon reverted to more direct expository texts. Synthetic personalization was ineffective because many columnists in the dailies did not use their full or real name or stay in their positions for years, as magazine columnists did. Whether in essay or correspondence format, these newspaper columns discussed fashion other than haute couture and linked the garments to family dinners and weddings more than to balls, operas, and the like.

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There were outliers, like Le Matin, which had an eclectic readership. According to their own advertising, 35 percent were businessmen and industrialists, 35 percent employees and skilled workers, 15 percent professionals, bureaucrats, and rentiers, and 10 percent agriculteurs (farmers).16 As chapter 3 demonstrated, their women’s columnist for more than twenty years, Germaine Beaumont, had a broader mandate, a longer tenure, and progressed further up the ranks than her peers. While most women’s-page journalists, even those who were feminists, avoided the subject of women’s suffrage, Germaine Beaumont’s column “Women’s Correspondence” began in response to the French Senate rejection of a bill in favour of women’s suffrage that helped delay the vote for women until 1945. Along with conventional women’s page topics, “Women’s Correspondence” endorsed women’s suffrage and other civil rights and lauded feminist political successes abroad. However, Beaumont invariably reassured her more conservative readers that feminist victories would not mean the end of marriage and maternity. Unlike most women’s columnists in the dailies, she penned variations on the correspondence column for twenty years and unlike any other women’s columnists identified in the research for this book, she advanced to editing the women’s page and the magazine section, as well as signing a front-page column in the last year of her twenty-two-year tenure at Le Matin.17 Other outliers were the communist, socialist, and labour organization newspapers. Immediately after the war, few of them ran fashion columns, as opposed to women’s “tribunes” where various left-wing and feminist journalists held forth on social and political matters, including suffrage. Many of their items were on subjects defined as feminine or feminist, such as single mothers and their children.18 By 1924, Le Peuple put their feisty tribune on a new page with the banner “La Page de la Femme et de l’Enfant” (Women’s and Children’s Page) and placed it beside a column called “Parmi la mode” (In Fashion) signed by Celyne and “Carnet de la Ménagere” (Homemaker’s Notebook), which was left anonymous. The banner and space allocated to child and house care revealed that Le Peuple still thought that women’s appropriate role was maternal and domestic, not independent and in the workforce. Geoff Read’s study of newspapers of the left, centre, and right of the political spectrum has shown that all of them believed women were primarily maternal and domestic, and even communist ones were more outspoken about that belief in the

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1930s.19 However, it would be wrong to see this fixation on maternity and domesticity as static. Detailed analyses of several years of three women’s column/women’s page content demonstrates that their conception of women’s proper role, as well as of maternity and domesticity, altered over the years. The final three sections of this chapter provide such an analysis and argument. Whatever form the columns took, they were gradually surrounded by more domestic items like advice on cooking and housewifery as well as ads for packaged food, family medicines, and cooking and cleaning products. A lot of the counsel on child care was about formal education, though there were also appeals to mothers to teach children proper hygiene and behaviour. Some newspapers hired doctors to write medical advice columns. In the mid-1920s, this cluster of items began to be called the woman’s page, even though most “pages” were only a quarter or half of a page. The women’s page appeared once a week, with one, two, or occasionally three columns in other issues over the week. Only one ran daily women’s columns, like sports columns. For a while, there was a common women’s page for major dailies like Le Petit Parisien, Le Matin, Le Quotidien, and L’Echo de Paris.20 Clearly, French women’s pages were derivative of women’s magazines and differed in content from the rest of the newspaper, but they did have three models of magazine coverage to imitate, and their columns expressed a range of opinions on their common subject matter. Even on these pages, there were variations and changes over time.

D if f e r e n c e s f ro m News Pages In addition to staff and content, women’s pages diverged from the rest of the newspaper in four ways. First, they had their own conception and construction of time. Whereas news, sports, and entertainment sections of dailies conceived of and represented time as series of single events organized daily and sequentially, the women’s page saw and wrote about time as seasonal and annual. The seasonal rhythm was determined by the seasonal change of wardrobe and the four seasonal collections of couture, which signifies that it was controlled by climate and commercial interests, not a so-called feminine sense of time. Another determinant of the seasonal rhythm was regular household duties like spring cleaning or fall canning, which reflected gender role expectations, not any essential feminine trait. The annual

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cycle was determined by recurring society events like the opening of the opera or the races and by religious, educational, and commercial timetables. Columnists on the women’s page spilled more ink on Christmas ceremonies and the rentrée (return to school in the fall) than on any kind of political coverage, except of the home front during the war. A large part of their counsel in the early fall and before Christmas was about shopping for school children’s clothing and gifts. Domesticity and family life played a part, but commercial interests also shaped the notion of time on women’s pages. The second way women’s pages differed from most of the rest of the newspaper stemmed from fashion columnists’ almost incestuous relationship with couturiers. Columnists had to curry favour with couturiers to have access to their collections, since seasonal shows were by invitation only. Many columnists openly promoted certain couturiers or shops, leaving a distinct impression of favouritism or even corruption, at least to media-savvy readers today. Some of this dynamic played out in the cultural and political sections, just not so obviously. The third and fourth discrepancies were in tone and style. Compared to the relatively sober language, regularly interrupted by dramatic and even melodramatic writing about crimes and crises, found in the news sections of the daily newspaper, the language on the women’s page was often enthusiastic and even effusive, especially about new dress designs, interrupted by moralistic criticism about such matters as designers promoting or women wearing skimpy dresses. (And their conception of skimpy clothing was much more exacting than today’s more liberal standards. For instance, some colunists criticized short sleeves for displaying too much bare arm.) One indicator of these two tones was the frequent use of positive adjectives such as elegant or smart in the promotional passages and of verbs of obligation, as in ought to or should, in the moralistic exhortations. To be sure, the promotional passages engaged in persuasion, just in a less didactic and likely more effective way, in their repeated use of phrases like “Madam will be wearing” or “Everyone will be wearing” certain items of clothing. Descriptions and illustrations of the items of clothing no doubt aroused desire to purchase or make a fashionable garment, and asserting that everyone will be wearing it evoked anxiety about not being in style. Evoking desire to and anxiety about looking appropriate is a potent form of suasion,21 particularly in a period of rapidly changing expectations and styles.

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Having described the general characteristics of the women’s page, let us turn to the variety of formats and alterations in their messages over the two interwar decades. On the women’s page, as on other pages, journalists were individuals who had their own perspectives and who reflected their times. Women’s pages were not undifferentiated, nor were they static.

An ot h e r R o s in e , C o n s e rvati ve Columni st, 1 9 1 8 – 1 934 Le Figaro advertised that it was “the organ of all the elites. It is … the elegant and worldly newspaper.” During the Great War, it ran a weekly column titled “Paroles féminins” (Women’s words), initially written by a women’s magazine colunist known as Camille Duguet (Mme de Latour).22 From 1918 through 1934, this column alternated with “La femme pratique” (The practical woman) or was accompanied by a shorter column called “Entre Nous” (Between us).23 These three columns were usually signed by Rosine. Analysis of the content, style, and tone indicates that this Rosine was not Germaine Beaumont, who also used the pen name Rosine on her columns in Le Matin. Familiar feminine names and reassuring titles such as “Ange Benign” (Good angel) were common among women’s columnists, in the case of countesses or women from socially or politically prominent families to avoid revealing that they worked as a journalist or, in other cases, to allow the journalists to write for other newspapers or periodicals.24 In 1920, “Women’s Words” briefly adopted a letter format, but Rosine did not assume a familial tag like Aunt or Cousin; nor did she correspond with provincials needing help following Paris fashion, as many of her peers in women’s magazines did. Instead, she composed letters between sophisticates, which supplied information that would help readers keep up with the so-called élégantes or Parisian style leaders. In parallel columns “Between Us” and “Practical Woman,” she recommended particular couturiers or shops. Ten years later, she tried an imagined correspondence between herself and a young man, to whom she explained fashion trends, style, and etiquette. Another temporary format was “day in the life” stories about an alleged friend who was very chic, stories that resembled Colette’s tales about her fashionable friend Valentine, without Colette’s wit. Rosine’s columns

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recommended certain couturiers, specific dress models, and upmarket dress shops. When she reverted to a more direct expository style identifying trends, fabrics, and details on new dresses, she still promoted certain designers and shops. Although Rosine rarely mentioned it, information about fabrics and details could be taken to a “little dressmaker” to make copies of original models, a common practice then. When she noted in 1928 that dresses were getting more complicated, she revealed this underlying assumption by noting that the era of “straight, easy-to-make dresses is over.”25 As haute couture prospered in the mid-1920s, Rosine paid more attention to the couture collections four times a year. Her coverage of haute couture resembled that of her colleagues at Vogue or Femina, save for being briefer and more cautious about anything modern. Compared to them, she was slow to accept the so-called masculine straight line, with no waistline or a very low one, and she chided rather than lauded Parisiennes who abandoned the corset in the early 1920s.26 In 1929, she got on the bandwagon by plugging a brand of girdles as more comfortable. Far sooner than society magazine journalists, Rosine welcomed the reappearance of longer hemlines and natural waistlines that she, like most commentators at the time, characterized as a return to the feminine.27 Figaro was a conservative newspaper, so it is hardly surprising that their fashion columnist would be conservative. Rosine, like Beaumont and other fashion/ women’s columnists in the dailies, was ambivalent about modern women being represented as active, mobile, and young. Along with other columnists, Rosine accepted sports clothes, which had been considered masculine, but were being worn by modern women. Like so many of her peers, she approved of ladylike sports, meaning individual, not team, and non-contact sports. In short, she accepted skating, tennis, and golf. She publicized two designers specializing in sportswear of this type in the early and mid-1920s.28 Between 1925 and 1928, she repeatedly endorsed the couturière Jenny, whose simple casual wear she liked. After 1928, Rosine did not endorse Jenny as often or as fulsomely, but continued to recommend her.29 As she changed her mind about the new styles, she adapted her descriptors. In the early and mid-1920s, she favoured the more traditional adjectives – elegant, chic, and distinguished – to describe garments and the women wearing them. By the 1930s, she caught up with avantgarde society magazines and favoured more au courant adjectives

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such as youthful, fresh, and modern for garments and women alike. The adjectives reflected developments in the representation and very conception of bourgeois womanhood. Among society fashion journalists, Rosine was unusual in promoting knitting and blatently touting the BzF brand of yarn in the early 1930s. To the extent that she explains this two-year-long obsession, she mentions knitting items for children and friends, which was a common rationale for bourgeois women sewing. Presumably, sewing or knitting one’s own clothing was déclassé. Yet the timing of Rosine’s digression coincides with the Depression and a BzF campaign promoting knitting as a fashionable leisure activity for ladies. The campaign had some effect. Her successors did not show much interest in knitting until 1939–40, when they printed knitting instructions for socks and scarves for soldiers on the front. Rarely did any of the knitting advice include patterns for women themselves. “Women’s Words” differed from another Figaro column for women, “Le monde et la mode” (The world and fashion). “Women’s Words” was attributed to the same pen name for fourteen years; “The World and Fashion” was signed by at least four women, using patronymics as well as first names and, in three cases, signing their real names. The content also diverged. “Women’s Words” focused more on women’s dress than on society events, which were more extensively covered in “The World and Fashion.” However, Rosine was not above namedropping in her column about noblewomen, albeit not identifying them, or about celebrities, whom she did identify.30 Nor was she alone in name-dropping, which must have appealed to readers, given them ideas for their own clothing and possibly made them feel more posh or glamorous when they wore these copies. In 1934, “Women’s Words” was replaced with “Elégances” signed first by Nicole, then by the Countess de S. The latter may have been a countess but it is more likely that the title was a fabrication to make her seem more socially prominent. The assumption of a noble pseudonym by columnists was as common as noblewomen assuming more common names. Along with “Elégances” came “La Mode,” signed intermittently by Geneviève Clarence or Magdeleine Chaumont, but often left anonymous. The assembled columns filled a woman’s (half) page. A new feature of “Elégances” was regular advice on makeup, hygiene, exercise, and interior decoration. French women’s magazines and women’s pages had discussed makeup, hygiene, and fitness from the mid-1920s. It would be another decade before décor entered the

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women’s pages in Figaro and most other French dailies, much later than it became a staple of American women’s pages. The delay is curious because the society magazines had been promoting décor along with fashion since 1901 and because there had been many interactions between French couture and décor leading up to and during the L’Exposition international des Arts decoratifs (International Exhibition of the Decorative Arts) in 1925. Figaro’s delay is particularly curious, given that their models for a women’s column/page had been society magazines like Femina that had been promoting décor since its inception in 1901 and Vogue Paris that had done so since its inception in 1920.31 The near absence of advertising for furniture and décor in Le Figaro may account for the delay in coverage. At most, dailies ran ads for furniture in department stores. Even in Le Figaro’s women’s columns, there were alterations in format, style, and content, along with more space allotted to them in the newspaper and a more dynamic and less domestic representation of bourgeois women. Other dailies were more experimental with their format and content, but they too expanded in size, scope, and their depiction of woman’s proper sphere.

Mag da , M o d e r at e C o l u mni s t, 1918–1929 Magdeleine Chaumont (d. 1938) wrote fashion advice columns in four newspapers in the interwar decades. This section concentrates on two of her columns that ran twice weekly in L’Intransigéant from 1918 through 1929. At forty-five francs annually, or fifteen centimes per issue in 1925, L’Intransigéant was a second-tier daily. By 1930, it cost eighty francs annually, the same price as Le Petit Parisien in that year.32 Her first column, called “Conseils de Magda” (Magda’s advice), was only a few lines long and was located on page two of two-page issues. Over the next decade, it remained the same length but gradually moved to the third or fourth page of issues that expanded to eight pages. In 1920, a longer version of the column, with three illustrations attached, appeared on the weekend. “Magda’s Advice” was often paired with an unsigned or initialed column, “La Vie Pratique” (The practical life), that dealt with household budgeting and cooking. Together, these two items covered less than quarter of a page and were not placed under the rubric woman’s page. By 1925, the director had Magda pen a longer column, with illustrations, called “Pour Vous,

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Madame” (For you, madame). Sometimes this column was surrounded by shorter, usually unsigned items on accessories and beauty secrets. The assembled items took up a quarter of a page, which were eventually placed under the banner “Women’s Page.” In 1928, a short story – not unlike the Colette’s and Beaumont’s tales in Le Matin – often shared the same page. By 1929, L’Intransigéant had a weekly women’s page, and in the next decade, it expanded from a half to almost a full page. By then, Chaumont was no longer signing the fashion items or anything on this page. Chaumont’s fashion advice in L’Intransigéant borrowed eclectically from society, fashion, and women’s magazines. Like society magazine columnists, she reported on the preparation and reception of the seasonal collections, then selected and spotlighted the models she thought would be adopted by Parisiennes (with the understanding that many Frenchwomen beyond the capital would copy Parisian looks). She accepted the multiplication of specialized clothing types beyond the basic morning, afternoon, and evening garments to encompass tea and cocktail gowns, and she was positive about the new category of sports and casual garb.33 Unlike her colleagues in society magazines and upscale newspapers, but like colleagues in women’s magazines, she did not flaunt her relations with couturiers and “les élégantes.” She joined columnists from all types of magazine and newspapers in critiquing designer innovations such as longer or more voluminous skirts after the Great War. Along the lines of Colette’s criticism, she dismissed them as cumbersome and impractical, and she added that they were unfashionable.34 In this instance, the journalists reflected a general distaste for this short-lived innovation rather than shaping readers’ tastes. Like Rosine, Magda was tentative about the straight lines and short hair of the early and mid-1920s and welcomed the return of the waist line in the late 1920s.35 Unlike Rosine, she applauded modern woman’s mobility, notably their involvement in sports and travel, and she offered a lot of advice on sportswear and travel wardrobes.36 Compared to the columns of her competitors surveyed for this book, Magda’s columns were distinctive in providing more information on women’s economic realities and lifestyles. For instance, her columns just after the Armistice praised the reserved mode of dressing during the war but encouraged women to adopt “a little more elegance.” Over the next two years, she wavered about how luxurious women’s attire should be, given the high prices of clothing in the postwar inflation.37 She was more open about how the price point

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for ready-made garments and dress materials affected purchases and how women “made do” with less elaborate wardrobes.38 Likewise, she acknowledged that her readers looked for cheaper styles and/or copies in less expensive material, or home-sewed fashionable items.39 She wrote about the appropriate clothing for a wide range of activities, including shopping and attending the cinema. Like several other women’s page columnists, Magda paid some attention to the economic bases of couture. All these columnists upheld the notion of the superiority of French taste and chic and explained that they did so to sustain demand for Parisian couture. Some of them, including Magda, disparaged couturiers’ tendency to design for the overseas market, which they believed demanded more flamboyant designs.40 Here they were speaking for French consumers. Conversely, Magda and most of her competitors did not discuss politics. She was even reticent about expressing her own feminist beliefs, with the occasional exception, such as supporting paternal support of their illegitimate children.41 Her silence was curious, because Chaumont was a moderate feminist and her feminism informed two of her sentimental novels. One of these novels was published in 1925, while she worked for L’Intransigéant, and the other appeared shortly after she left that paper. Both novels revolved around marital infidelities and divorces; their female protagonists disagreed with natalist pressure on women to have more babies, the dependence of wives in marriage, and the difficulties of divorce.42 It is possible that her editors imposed silence about these subjects because her columns ran on the women’s page. The editors certainly did not censure other moderate feminists they employed: popular novelist and journalist Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, and the Soroptimist (member of an international association of women’s clubs) and author of a history of French suffragists Suzanne Grinberg (1889–1972). Perhaps Chaumont herself assumed that a fashion column was not the place to proselytize. After she left L’Intransigéant, Chaumont became an activist. In 1932, she founded a circle of prominent people such as the Countess de Polignac, Mme Avril de Saint-Croix (1855–1930) of the Conseil national des femmes françaises (National Council of French Women) and other feminists, several women doctors and lawyers, two women journalists not discussed in this book, and six men, including the director of L’Intransigéant. The circle known as Forces féminines françaises (French Women’s Forces) was committed to and advocated the vote for women, changing laws on the age of majority for young

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women, permitting married women to manage their own money, and more adequate child allowances. Their principal method was lobbying influential politicians.43 As the first editor of their monthly review (1932–39), Chaumont penned articles about married women’s right to manage their own money and published articles by lawyers on young women’s age of majority and other legal issues for women.44 After Chaumont died in a car crash in 1938, the review continued to advocate the vote but did not pursue their other objectives as forcefully. Instead, they publicized the women painters’ salon and international feminist groups. The review even had a conventional fashion column for a while.45 In sum, economics and feminism were not absent from women’s columns, but the references to economics only related to the couture industry, while references to feminism were muted and moderate.

He n r ie t t e C h a n d e t, a C atholi c Femi ni s t C o l u m n is t, 1 9 37–1939 Another moderate feminist wrote a women’s column in the later 1930s. Henriette Chandet was a director of a Catholic feminist group, National Union for the Vote for Women. Founded in 1920, the National Union reached an impressive membership of one hundred thousand in the 1930s.46 Chandet edited their monthly review, which appeared between 1927 and 1940 (and again after 1945).47 From 1937 through 1939, she penned an almost daily women’s column for a new Catholic daily, L’Epoque, which reached a circulation of eighty thousand.48 The title of her column was “Le femme de 1937” (The Woman of 1937), with the year changing over the three years the column ran. Like Germaine Beaumont and a few other women’s columnists, she went on to write many books, mostly historical biographies and novels, including a mystery. One of her biographies won a prize from the Académie française.49 It seems feasible that she, like Beaumont, used her experience writing a column to polish her writing style for her later literary endeavours. Chandet’s columns were updated versions of earlier women’s columns. She discussed ladies’ wear but extended the commentary to men’s wear on a few occasions.50 Like her predecessors, she promoted certain couturiers, but she went a step further and added inserts with the dates and locations of sales to her column.51 She was quite political: she defended French fashion against the prohibitively

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high tariffs on French couture imposed by Great Britain, the United States, and almost all the countries that purchased large quantities of couture. She railed against the “Buy American” campaign and its British equivalent, as well as fascist and Nazi campaigns to bolster their national garment industries. She suggested that French women engage in “un certain snobisme,” by which she meant buying exclusively Parisian and French clothing and other products.52 In all this, she was more explicitly polemical than Magda Chaumont had been just a few years earlier. Many of her columns assumed her readers had the resources to dress well and used to have a maid. Thus, she wrote short stories about a “friend” who travelled abroad, which included details about arranging and dressing for travelling by car, train, and ship and for different destinations, something earlier daily paper women columnists did not do.53 One of her few forays into housework told of a certain “Colette, whose maid had left her,” so she had to do her own housework. In this, she observed that “difficult times” required a lady to be a good housekeeper and “graciously elegant.”54 But if “The Woman of …” was not uncomfortable about a more modern, mobile, and active woman, it was also more inclusive and encouraging of motherhood and domestic duties than earlier columns. A maternal feminist, Chandet lectured her readers about the maternal instinct, declaring (rather inconsistently) that mothers had to be encouraged to teach little girls “the rudiments of infant care.”55 She wrote eloquently about making jam, soup, and other dishes, sometimes providing step-by-step recipes.56 Later she co-wrote two cookbooks, one of which was reissued many times.57 “The Woman of …” also reported on the 1939 Housewife’s Congress, which opposed birth control advocates, upheld the draconian law forbidding abortion, and advocated “substantial allocations for mothers who stayed home” as well as insurance that would allow mothers who stayed home to raise their children.58 At the same time, Chandet actively proselytized for women to access and achieve in the public realm, both in the paid workforce and in politics. She labelled a subset of her columns “Feminine Careers” and used them to inform readers about professional and occupational opportunities for women that went beyond the more conventional feminine professions and occupations like nursing to still-masculine professions like veterinarians and, yes, journalism.59 Columns described women’s groups such as the Union of Frenchwomen Decorated by the Legion of Honour and the Feminine Union of Liberal

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and Commercial Careers.60 Moreover, she reported on respectable feminist demonstrations, like the presentation of petitions to the Senate for recognition of the civic capacity of married women and speeches in favour of married women’s right to control their own money given by the Duchess Edmée de la Rochefoucauld.61 Although Chandet identified as a pacifist in the 1920s,62 she was a supporter of the French empire, especially during the Colonial exhibition of 1937, and expressed discomfort about the mounting independence of women in Indochina.63 She was also a nationalist, particularly in the years leading up to and during the Second World War. Before the outbreak of the war she endorsed campaigns to rally French people for the war.64 Once the war began, she publicized the locations of war cantines and the activities of Red Cross nurses.65 She also encouraged her readers to knit for and write to soldiers at the front.66 If Chandet presented a more modern and expansive vision of women’s role and of domesticity, she also expressed a simultaneously traditional insistence on the primacy of maternity and a new, more demanding conception of motherhood. Even in Catholic dailies, gender expectations and prescriptions were changing.

C o n c l u s ion Women’s pages were additions to daily newspapers in the interwar decades, but they were not trivial additions, since they appealed to women and thereby increased circulation. With more women readers, dailies also attracted new and frequent advertisements. If this partial survey of women’s columns and pages in French dailies is any indication, women’s pages differed in content, style, concept of time, and relationship to their subjects from the rest of the newspaper, but very little of this difference derived from a fundamental feminine character, as opposed to commercial imperatives and religious, school, and household schedules. Moreover, women’s columns and pages changed over the decades, expanding their content within the domestic sphere but also reacting to major economic and political events and addressing feminist and national political issues. The four women’s page columnists studied in this book often went on to other kinds of writing, but, with the notable exception of Beaumont, did not become editors and, without exception, did not become reporters. As more women entered the newspaper business, the internal segregation of women continued.

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Conclusion

After the Germans entered Paris in June of 1940 and during the fouryear-long Occupation, many of the newspapers mentioned in Gender, Generation, and Journalism were closed by the military authorities or shut down in anticipation of closure or, as the war dragged on, in response to the lack of paper, which was rationed by the Germans. The remaining newspapers shrunk back to Great War page limits of two or four pages per issue. Three of the nine dailies emphasized in the book kept publishing under the Occupation regime and were favoured by the Germans: Le Matin, L’Oeuvre, and Le Petit Parisien. All had moved farther right than their positions in the 1920s or early 1930s. The Nazi authorities regularly told the remaining Parisian journalists (120 in February 1943) what to report or not report about the war and occasionally “instructed” them about approved propaganda themes. Some of their copy was “corrected” by the authorities. More often, the press self-censored to avoid retaliations like a drastic cut in the supply of paper.1 Shortly before or soon after the Germans moved into Paris, most of the women profiled in this book either left their current newspaper and home, as Andrée Viollis and Germaine Beaumont did, left the newspaper business altogether, as Denise Moran did, or retreated to another country, as Simone Téry and Geneviève Tabouis did. Viollis and Beaumont went to the unoccupied zone, where Viollis did what she could for the Resistance and Beaumont wrote novels. Some, such as Madeleine Jacob, returned to Paris but did not work at any newspaper until the Liberation. Colette wrote occasional pieces for various reviews. Only one of the main subjects, Marcelle Capy, worked at a collaborationist newspaper. After the war, most of the survivors

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resumed newspaper work, albeit rarely at their previous papers, insofar as few of these papers survived. Andrée Viollis died in 1951, but her daughter worked at L’Humanité for more than a decade after she returned to France. Two of the women profiled, Germaine Beaumont and Geneviève Tabouis, found a bigger audience in radio work, which they did into the 1960s. It was a new era, with new media challenges to be faced. Radio and television offered more competition; a new generation of women in the newsrooms raised the issue of the masculine climate and ultimately sexual harassment in the newsroom. The ten women profiled in this volume pursued careers in daily newspapers while they were a tiny minority of the employees of these papers. They coped with barriers to acceptance and promotions in an occupation dominated by men and stereotyped as masculine, but they did not receive the accolades accorded the pioneer women in reporting. Hopefully, this book has given them the credit they deserve for persevering and in some cases excelling in a difficult work situation. The first and second generation of women journalists began their careers when women were supposed to be unfit for the “rough and tumble” life of interviewing strangers, attending political rallies, and travelling to war zones or “uncivilized” regions. The third generation contended with the ambiguities of the “new woman” phenomenon, which was not as much about celebrating career women as it was about reifying consuming women. If these journalists seemed the very picture of the active, mobile modern woman, most were not hailed as such, save in feminist circles and publications. Even those in the third generation who benefitted from the creation of new posts in the daily papers bumped into the limitations of these opportunities on the women’s pages. Their management of this anomalous situation involved considerable skill and tact, skills they transmitted to their successors in a specialized kind of occupational socialization. To counteract the masculinist image of reporting and the ambiguous new feminine ideal, these ten women used resources that they shared with the men in news, notably the help of family members in the newspaper business or family members with contacts in the business or in specialities to which they were assigned. A few of the women who remained at a daily newspaper for five or more years worked their way up from lesser positions like petit reporting for the inner pages to prestigious posts as grand reporters with bylines on the front page. Many of them – and of the ten other women mentioned briefly in this study – carved out different paths to employment in

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the newspaper business than men did. Andrée Viollis, Simone Téry, Fanny Clar, Denise Moran, and Geneviève Tabouis took advantage of the new educational possibilities for girls and women. The second generation – starting their journalism careers in the 1890s – got a secondary education that, for the first time, tried to prepare girls for employment; the third generation – entering the press in the 1920s – took post-secondary degrees in the normal schools established to ensure women teachers for girls’ schools, and once they could study the subjects required for the baccalaureate in 1924, enrolled in university. In this way, they acquired more educational capital than most of their male colleagues, capital that they could deploy to improve their chances of attaining positions that required literacy, writing skills, and a lucid and interesting style. However, flaunting their higher level of education was not a wise tactic with their male colleagues and did not fit with the public persona of reporters, so they did not leave a lot of testimony about it for historians. Teasing out the meaning of their education required a certain amount of inference drawn from the requirements of an occupation that required literacy and the flexibility to deal with different kinds of people and situations. When men and women covered the same topics, some differences emerge, though fewer than might have been expected. Many women reporters included more material on women and three of our subjects – Viollis, her daughter Simone Téry, and Alice la Mazière – did not concentrate as much as their male colleagues did on women who were victims. Women reporters also gave more details about décor and settings. But they did not avoid dangerous sites. They waded into battle grounds. They interviewed political and economic leaders in France and elsewhere, and they met and interviewed prisoners and rebels in the colonies and distant lands. The assignments women were given explain most of the gender differences in content. Three of the ten main subjects – and other women who are not mentioned in Gender, Generation, and Journalism – never left the women’s page. Of course, one of these three and no doubt others were quite satisfied with remaining there. Another three of the subjects spent most of their working lives as social reporters for socialist and labour federation dailies. In two cases, this may have cohered with these women’s ambitions; in the case of Denise Moran, she clearly sought and found wider horizons. Conversely, only one woman, Geneviève Tabouis, reported on diplomatic relations at a time of intense diplomatic efforts to prevent the recurrence of war by

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negotiating and renegotiating treaties, alliances, and other means of disarmament and peacekeeping. In this case, she sought and was passionately committed to the assignment. Several of the ten subjects advanced in their careers. Germaine Beaumont began with a women’s column but became editor of the magazine section of Le Matin. However, no woman was editor of a hard news section, let alone editor-in-chief at a national daily. Marcelle Capy and two other women mentioned in passing coedited pacifistfeminist weeklies and monthlies, all of which were ephemeral. Conversely, three other subjects started in general reporting, without bylines and on the inside pages, but ended signing their names to articles on the front page above the fold. Andrée Viollis became one of three directors of the weekly newspaper she cofounded, Vendredi. Political reporting, diplomatic, and grand reporting put reporters right in the political arena, despite restrictions on their entry into the Chamber of Deputies or the Senate. Together, these women employed a variety of methods and styles. As authors of serials in newspapers, novels, and other kinds of literature, many of them used their literary skills at characterization, description of settings, and anecdotes that engaged readers. Most used a literary and qualitative approach, replete with interesting character sketches and vignettes of the people in their stories, but a significant minority adopted a more sociological and quantitative approach. There was no single feminine style. Moreover, these women addressed topics ranging from fashion to war, literature to social investigation, and municipal politics to international affairs. Despite popular and scholarly interest in their allegedly feminine “stunts” and apparently astonishing “spunk,” their reporting techniques did not vary significantly from male colleagues’. Both men and women engaged in theatrical methods to get a story and both sexes went to distant and dangerous sites where they showed great courage. Men and women in grand reporting inserted themselves and emotion into their newspaper series and books, precisely because they were – and were supposed to be – eyewitnesses of dramatic events. These similarities should not be surprising because women who wanted to be reporters wanted to do the work that the men had done. They were also aware that general editors, all of them male, made crucial decisions about their assignments and eligibility for advancement at the paper. An editor such as Élie-Joseph Bois, who hired many women, advised conformity to standards such as

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objectivity and reined in male and female journalists alike who failed to conform, but even he accepted a level of personal involvement and sentiment. The French press, in general, accepted that pure objectivity was impossible. Although many of the women profiled here were feminists who belonged to single-sex social and political groups, most of them chose to join mixed-sex occupational associations. The one single-sex occupational association represented the “feminine and feminist” press, not the dailies. In any event, it did not last long or leave much of an impression. Still these women supported one another and helped the next generation of women enter and excel in their occupation both as individuals and in a myriad of single-sex associations, some of them social, some of them ideological, some of them political. This did not restrict them from activities in mixed-sex associations and agitation. They were busy women. Of course, there were differences between these ten women – and, counting the other women briefly mentioned in this book, these twenty women – and their male colleagues. Two of the women in this study began in copyediting, which was not a career path for any of their male colleagues who left biographical details. A far higher percentage of the women who made a career in journalism had a degree than their male colleagues. Their degrees were disproportionately those that allowed them to teach, and many of them taught before, during, and/or after their time at daily newspapers. Editors limited the opportunities of women to a far greater degree than they did their male employees; witness their near absence in sports and diplomatic beats and their concentration on the women’s page and, to a lesser degree, on the social pages or in the magazine sections. Despite the oft-­ proclaimed idea that society, fashion, and women’s columns were springboards to more respected kinds of journalism, only one, Madeline Jacob, progressed into hard news reporting – by taking things into her own hands. And Germaine Beaumont, who advanced from women’s columns to magazine editor, still dealt with what was considered soft news. Conversely, some women preferred to concentrate on what they considered maternal subjects such as children, education, and social problems, subjects that maternal feminists and many pacifist and socialist feminists thought were suitable for women. Finally, there were a few gender differences in their attitudes toward subjects: the women were more empathetic and paid more attention to secondary characters in their stories.

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To conclude, I recommend some of the organizing concepts and interdisciplinary methods employed in this book to other scholars in the field. The concept of generations helped me understand the situation of groups of women in an occupation, not just extraordinary individuals. Similarly, the concept of socialization into occupational mores and behaviours drew my attention to patterns of socialization beyond the obvious things like a pioneer inspiring, hiring, or directly advising younger colleagues. Mentoring involved recommending protégés as well as modelling good work habits. In combination, a generational and socialization approach may be useful to study of other “newcomers” to an occupation. Gender comparisons of career paths and writing styles are not so unusual, though they are not often as systematic and detailed as my approach. One must not lose sight of the amount of overlap between the sexes and the variety of experiences among the women and among the men. Intersectional analysis that includes the influence of family background and education as cultural capital was essential, and would be useful in studying other occupations. Insofar as French men and women who were journalists wrote fiction and other kinds of nonfiction, the methods and insights of literary scholars were brought into play. In addition to the familiar method of content analysis, focusing on accounts of the same event and applying deixis are very productive methods. Last, five topics call out for more research. Some of the secondary subjects in this book, notably Alice la Mazière, should receive more attention, though this will require seeking personal papers and visiting local archival or library sources. Second, the Annuaire de la presse française indicates that women formed a higher proportion of journalists in the regional than in the national press; these women must be studied in the future. Another area for further research is group biographies and analyses of the work of women journalists on the right of the political spectrum. Some of the more tentative conclusions in this book could be confirmed or corrected by biographies and comparative analyses of the work of a wider range of journalists, men as well as women. Sorely lacking are biographies or a prosopography of editors, not only to learn about their own contributions to press history but also to assess how their decisions about hiring staff and placing and assigning stories shaped journalists’ careers. Finally, although my sources hinted of a less than ideal work environment for women on assignment, they were silent about the climate in the newsroom, a topic of some interest today in many workplaces.

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Notes

I nt roduct i o n   1 An eleventh newspaper woman whose women’s column is analyzed in chapter 8 used the pen name Rosine and could not be identified enough to profile.   2 Levy, “The Daily Press in France,” 297. On the national press and its impact on regional papers, see Throgmorton, The National Daily Press of France, 91.   3 Rennes, Le Mérite et la nature.   4 Bellanger et al., Histoire générale de la presse française, vol. 3, De 1871 à 1940, 296.   5 See, for example, Kershaw and Kimyongür, Women in Europe between the Wars, and Chadwick and Latimer, The Modern Woman Revisited.   6 Martin, Medias et journalistes de la République, 197.   7 Kershaw, “Women’s Writing,” 65.   8 On women in the metal trades, nursing, and government service, see Downs, Manufacturing Inequality; on nursing, Schultheiss, Bodies and Souls, 157–8.   9 Delporte, “Journalistes et correspondants de guerre,” 717–30. 10 Margadent, The New Biography. 11 The most useful were Boucharenc, L’écrivain-reporter au coeur des années trente and Muhlmann, A Political History of Journalism. 12 The two newspaper women without birth and/or death information are Magdeleine Chaumont (d. 1938) and Henriette Chandet (publishing 1945–75), who are discussed in chapter 9. 13 Adalgisa and Waters, “Introduction,” 4–5. 14 Lapeyre, Les professions face, 41.

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Notes to pages 7–13

15 Cragin, “The Failings of Popular News Censorship,” 69. 16 Cambron and Lüsebrink, “Presse, litérature et espace public,” 127–45. 17 Mancini, “Is There a European Model of Journalism?” 84–5. 18 Reid, Des femmes en littérature, 146. 19 Kleinert, Le “Journal des Dames et des modes.” 20 Reid, Des femmes en littérature, 25; Thérenty, “La chronique et le ­reportage,” 117–18. 21 Reid, Des femmes en littérature, 87–9. 22 Kalifa et al., “Genèse du quotidian modern (1800–1835),” 270; Planté and Thérenty, “‘Séparatisme’ mediatiques 2,” 1457. 23 Thérenty, George Sand journaliste, 8. 24 Thérenty, “Songez que je n’ai aucune,” 207–38. 25 Bara and Planté, “Preface,” 13–15; Bordas, “Rhétorique de la defense,” 39–50. 26 Grossir, “George Sand journaliste,” 85–96. 27 Walker, Outrage and Insight. 28 Chalaby, “Scandal and the Rise of Investigative Reporting,” 1194–1207. 29 Giroud, Profession journaliste. 30 Chambers, Steiner, and Fleming, “Introduction,” 6, 12, 19–20. 31 Martin, “Journalists et gens de lettres (1820–1890),” 1117. 32 Cairns, Front-Page Women Journalists, 4, 20, 31; Marzolf, Up from the Footnote, 21. 33 Avenel, “Liste des pseudonyms” (appendix), in La presse française au vingtième siècle. 34 Viollis, “La vie généreuse de Séverine,” 7. 35 Tiersten, Marianne in the Market, 186–9. 36 Mollier, La lecture et ses publics à l’époque contemporaine, 160, 165; Walker, “Writing between Faits Divers and Procès-Verbal,” 237–42. 37 Thiesse, Le roman du quotidien. For a contemporary opinion, see Vauglin, “Quels journaux choisir pour toucher une clientèle déterminée?” 38 Diebolt, “Les femmes-feuilletonistes,” 24–6. 39 Margadent, Women Educators in the Third Republic; Clark, The Rise of Professional Women in France. 40 Martin, Les grands reporters. 41 Maingueneau, Initiation aux mèthodes de l’analyse du discours. 42 Hall et al., Culture, Media, Language; Carter, Branston, and Allan, News, Gender and Power. 43 Borroff, Language and the Poet.

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Notes to pages 13–24

207

44 Forsdick, Basu, and Shilton, New Approaches to Twentieth-Century Travel Literature. 45 Paligot, La république raciale, 1–147, 270–315.

C ha p t e r o n e   1 Offen, “Kaethe Schirmacher,” 200.  2 Mayer, L’education des filles en France, 167–8.  3 Margadent, Women Educators in the Third Republic; Clark, The Rise of Professional Women in France.  4 Rennes, Le mérite et la nature.   5 These women have been ably studied by Delord, “Une femme sujet d’histoire”; Thérenty, “De La Fronde à la Guerre (1897–1918)”; Thérenty, “Séverine (1855–1929)”; and Thérenty, “Les ‘Vagabonds du Télégraphe.’”  6 Demeulenaere-Douyere, Séverine et Vallès.  7 Séverine, Choix de papiers, 15–189.   8 Viollis, “La vie généreuse de Séverine,” 7.  9 Séverine, Choix de papiers, 12–14. 10 Crosnier, “Les ‘reporteresses’ de la Fronde,” 73–82. 11 On her conversion, see “L’effort,” L’Éclair, 9 October 1899, boîte 4, ­dossier Séverine, BM D. 12 Cited in Coquart, La frondeuse, 97. 13 Thérenty, “De La Fronde à la Guerre (1897–1918),” 143. 14 Cross, “Représentations de l’affaire Dreyfus,” 85, 87. 15 Her reports on the second trial appear in La Fronde, 6 August to 15 September 1899. 16 Roberts, Disruptive Acts, 146–7. 17 Thérenty, “Séverine,” 1289; Cross, “Représentations de l’affaire Dreyfus,” 86. 18 Couturiau, Séverine, l’insurgée lists most of the newspapers and reviews. For papers and articles that Couturiau does not list, see Fonds Bouglé, Articles de Presse, Auteurs, boîte 3, dossier Séverine, B HV P. I also found articles in L’Oeuvre. 19 Muhlman, A Political History of Journalism, 34–49. 20 Kroeger, Nellie Bly; Randall, The Great Reporters. 21 “Libres opinions: A travers des apothéoses,” L’Ère nouvelle, 23 June 1923; and “Le plus beau métier du monde,” L’Internationale, 7 October 1922, Fonds Bouglé, Articles de Presse, Auteurs, boîte 3, dossier Séverine, B MD.

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Notes to pages 25–9

22 Les Annales politiques et littéraires, Fonds Famille Brisson, IMEC , http:// www.imec-archives.com/fonds/les-annales-politiques-et-litteraires. 23 “Une tasse de thé avec Yvonne Sarcey,” in the column “Chez les femmes journalistes,” Minerva, 17 February 1935. 24 Sarcey, La route du bonheur. 25 Delord, “Une femme sujet d’histoire,” 25–42. 26 Capy, “La leçon de la solitude,” La République, 18 October 1934, and “Souvenirs sur Séverine,” La Voix de la paix, 1 and 4 December 1955. 27 Viollis, Lord Northcliffe. 28 Jacob, Quarante ans de journalisme, 13–37. 29 “Croquis de la vie anglais,” series in L’Oeuvre, 9–17 September 1934, and court coverage, 19 September 1934 and 27 July 1936. 30 L’Oeuvre, October 1934; Jacob, Quarante ans de journalisme, 43–50. On the Nozière case and press coverage, see Maza, Violette Nozière. 31 Jacob, Quarante ans de journalisme, 63–228. 32 Coquart, La frondeuse, 23–93. 33 Roberts, Disruptive Acts, 77–88, 120–4. 34 La Fronde, 23, 27, and 30 November 1897. 35 The report was published as Mlle de Ste Croix, “La situation économique de la femme dans le journalisme,” in Women in Professions, 67–70. 36 For examples of feminist and feminine reporting, see series on “Féminisme international,” 3 January–12 June 1902, and series on children and education, La Fronde, 3 January, 17 February, 24 March, 22 April, and 2 May 1902. 37 For examples of coverage on pink-collar workers, see Pognon, “Les employées du banque,” and Bauer, “La femme dans les grands magasins,” 8 December 1897; Rambaud, “La femme dans le Service des Postes,” 16, 20, and 27 May and 17 June 1902. 38 Coquart, La frondeuse, 190–202. 39 Durand, “Conférence: Les femmes dans le journalisme,” Marguerite Durand, manuscrits 3, BM D. 40 Durand, “Quel métier choisir? Femmes journalistes,” Fonds Bouglé, Articles de Presse, Auteurs, boîte 1. The article is attributed to L’Intransigeant on an unspecified date in 1926, but a search for the article in the 1926 issues did not find any trace of it. 41 Ensemble de lettres addressées à Jane Misme, 091.1, B MD. The respondents were Rachilde, Maria Vérone, Andrée Viollis, Huguette Garnier, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, Yvonne Foussarigues, Blanche Vogt, Yvonne Netter, Jane Misme, Marcelle Tinayre, Colette Yver, Countess

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de Bretailles, and Gustave Téry. Bretailles wrote for women’s magazines but echoed the encomiums of others surveyed. We will return to seven of these respondents in subsequent chapters. 42 Pène, L’évadée; Chaumont, Un mari modern, and Téry, “Dernière édition spéciale,” comédie en 3 actes, typescript at B NF Richelieu, Arts et Spectacles. 43 Cosnier, La bolchévique aux bijoux, 70. 44 Tabouis, “Twenty Years of Journalism,” typescript, Tabouis Conferences, 27A R /92, AN . 45 Tabouis, Ils l’ont appelée Cassandre. 46 Jacob, Quarante ans de journalisme, 42, 286. 47 Yver, Femmes d’aujourd’hui; Ostroga, Les indépendantes, 165; Sauvage, “Les femmes et le travail: L’orientation professionnelle,” Le Sud Montpellier, 25 March 1933; Beaumont, “La femme française.” 48 Decaen, “L’avenir de nos filles,” L’Essor féminine, 21 December 1934, Fonds Bouglé, Coupeurs de presse, Articles, Themes, dossier enseignement, boîte 5, BHVP. 49 Martin, “Journalistes et gens de lettres,” 120; Martin, “‘La grande famille,’” 130–3. 50 Delporte, Les journalistes en France 1880–1950, 85; Ferenczi, L’invention du journalisme en France, 248. 51 Annuaire de la presse française, 1918 and 1921. 52 Syndicat des journalistes, Les conditions d’existence des journalistes. 13–20. 53 Fonds de l’Oeuvre, dossiers des journalists, dossier Decarie, 3A R /1, A N. 54 Bulletin du Syndicat des journalistes, no. 21 (1924) and no. 35 (June 1935). 55 Avenel, La presse française, 30 and 46, lists eighty-one “political dailies” and sixty-five specialized (judicial, commercial, etc.) dailies in 1901; see also Bellanger et al., Histoire générale de la presse française, vol. 3, De 1871 à 1940, 407. 56 Manevy, Histoire de la presse, 1914 à 1939, 114–16; Bellanger et al., Histoire générale de la presse française, 3:423–9, 3:447–9. 57 Albert, “Remarques sur la stagnation,” 543–6. 58 Association syndicale professionnelle des journalistes républicains francais, Annuaire de 1937, 37. 59 Syndicat des journalistes, Les conditions d’existence des journalistes, 12. 60 Bulletin du Syndicat des Journalistes, no. 22 (March 1923); no. 28 (February/March 1928); supplement to no. 9 (April 1929); Annuaire de la presse française, 1935, 185.

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Notes to pages 32–5

61 Toux Vallet, “Les femmes journalistes syndiquées.” 62 Annuaire de la presse française, 1939. 63 Downs, Manufacturing Inequality; Schultheiss, Bodies and Souls, 157–8. 64 Delporte, “Journalistes et correspondants de guerre,” 717–30. 65 Helys, Cantinière de la Croix-Rouge 1914–1916. 66 Darrow, French Women and the First World War, 153, 197. 67 Helys, Les provinces françaises pendant la guerre. 68 Avenel, La presse française, 66–9, 221–9, 439. 69 Annuaire de la presse française, 1921 and 1925. Other women members were Mme Jeanne Bremontier, Marguerite Hellé, Alice la Mazière, and Avril de Saint-Croix. 70 Delord, “Une femme sujet d’histoire”, 156–7. 71 Billy and Piot, Le monde des journaux, 176–7; Choisy, “Des femmes à la Maison des Journalistes,” Minerva, 25 April 1926. Maryse Choisy was another highly educated journalist and author, who shortly thereafter published La femme emancipée: Les cahiers contemporains. She wrote in a fascist journal during the Second World War and founded Psyché: Revue internationale de psychanalyse et des sciences de l’homme in 1946. 72 Ferenczi, L’Invention du journalisme en France, 257. 73 See, for example, Sarti, “Paris, École du journalism” 150–1. 74 Ferenczi, L’invention du journalisme en France, 251; Danner and Galode, Analyse des processus de fermeture, 17, 18; Charon, Le journalisme, 8. 75 Chandet, “La femme de 1938: Sport et journalisme,” L’Époque, 22 February 1938, Fonds Bouglé, Thème, dossier on femmes, boîte 6, BHVP. 76 Rennes, Le mérite et la nature, 77–9. 77 Valette, “Extrait de La Petite Republique,” 403–6. 78 Fortino, “De la ségrégation sexuelle,” 363–84. 79 One social group was the Amis de Lucie Delarue-Mardrus gastronomic club, which included Andrée Viollis, Hélène Gosset, and Blanche Vogt, and a more intellectual gathering was Les compagnons de l’intelligence discussion group, with influential feminists such as Mme Avril de Saint-Croix and Mme Brunschvicg, and writers and journalists such as Alice la Mazière, Marcelle Tinayre, and Andrée Viollis. See Blanche Vogt, “Un club de gourmandes,” Lectures pour tous, June 1930, and “Bref…,” Les Nouvelles littéraires, 13 December 1924, 2. 80 Delord, “Une femme sujet d’histoire,” 38–45. 81 Clippings from La Volonté and “L’Enquête de L’Ère nouvelle, L’Enfance malheureuse,” L’Ère nouvelle, beginning 10 June 1925, 091 LA M, B MD; invitations to her speeches, dossier Maz, BMD. See also La Mazière,

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Neuvième congrès de l’Alliance internationale pour le suffrage des femmes. 82 Kimble, “Popular Legal Journalism,” 224–6. 83 Viollis, “Candidates féministes aux elections municipals,” Le Petit Parisien, 1 May 1925; Viollis, “Les femmes, doivent-elle vote?” Le Petit Parisien, 23 May 1925. 84 Viollis, “Les femmes ont la liberté,” Vendredi, 28 February 1936.

C h a p t e r t wo   1 Much of the material covered in this chapter appeared in Stewart, “Marcelle Capy’s Journalism and Fiction on War, Peace and Women’s Work, 1916–1936,” Proceedings of the Western Society for French History 39 (2011): 212–23.   2 Téry, “Marcelle Capy. Prix Séverine,” Les Nouvelles littéraires, 21 February 1931.   3 Remond, “Le pacifisme en France au 20e siècle,” 10.   4 Mueller, “Changing Attitudes towards War,” 1–3.   5 Séverine quoted in Valette and Capy, Femmes et travail au XIXe siècle, 12.   6 Capy, “La leçon de la solitude,” La République, 18 October 1934, and “Souvenirs sur Séverine,” La Voix de la paix, December 1955.  7 Lapayre, Les professions face aux enjeux de la feminisation, 53.   8 Shearer, “Dressing Up for War,” 66–76.   9 On seeking advice on how to dress and behave like a Parisian, see Stewart, Dressing Modern Frenchwomen, 59, 61, 159. 10 Gabriel-Reinet, Une vie de journaliste, 13. 11 “Le Prix Séverine est attribué à Mlle Marcelle Capy,” La Française, 6 November 1930; Fernand Corcos, “Le Prix Séverine a été attribué hier pour la première fois,” L’Oeuvre, 30 November 1930. 12 Capy, Avec les travailleuses de France, 55–6. 13 Capy, “La vie tragique d’une fille-mère,” La Bataille syndicaliste, 13 September 1913. 14 Valette and Capy, Femmes et travaille au XIXe siècle, 25, 29, 32, and 84. 15 Thébaud, Les femmes aux temps de la guerre de 14, 24, 45, 52–3, 158, 170, 242, 247–50, 255, 336, 345, 346–7, 371, 395, 402. 16 Sauret, “Les travailleuses de France prises ‘sur la vie,’” La Voix des femmes, 25 March 1938, Fonds Bouglé, Actualités, 80, dossier Sauret, BHVP. 17 Sahuqué, “Henriette Sauret, la munificent,” La Voix des Femmes, 25 March–10 April 1938, and for thirty-five of Sauret’s articles published

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Notes to pages 40–3

between 1927 and 1939, Fonds Bouglé, Articles de presse, Auteurs, boîte 4, dossier Sauret. In this dossier, see “Réponse de Mme Suzanne Normand à Mme Henriette Sauret,” La Française, 18 June 1930. 18 Capy, Une voix de femme dans la mêlée, 36–7, and on charitable ladies, 83–5, 134–5. 19 See articles by Ida R. Sée, Paule Ferrat, Jeanne Galzy, and Alice Decaen in various newspapers, 1924–34, Fonds Bouglé, Coupeurs de presse, Thèmes, Enseignement, boîte 5, BHVP. 20 Capy, Une voix de femme dans la mêlée, 144–5. 21 In “Petite courrier des femmes,” Le Matin, 21 March, 1 April, 5 and 12 May 1920, Germaine Beaumont expressed concerns about war widows, as did Alice Jouenne (1873–1974) on the women’s page in Le Peuple, in “Situation sociale,” 17 July 1924. See section on Clar in chapter 8. 22 Extract of Chamois report, 3 July 1916, BA 2270, Capy dossier, A PP. 23 Capy, “La femme au travail,” Le Journal de peuple, December 1916. 24 Hardhack, “Industrial Mobilisation in 1914–1918,” 61–2. 25 Capy, “La femme au travail,” Le Journal du peuple, n.d., Fonds Bouglé, Articles de presse, Auteurs, Capy, BHVP. 26 La Mazière, “Les “épaves du front,” extract from Revue de Paris, 1 December 1917; Thérenty, “De la Fronde à la Guerre,” 153–6. 27 Capy, “Eux et elles,” Le Peuple, 23 May 1917. 28 Darrow, French Women and First World War, 194–202. 29 Reports on the seamstresses’ strike in L’Humanité (9 January, 16 and 18 May 1917) and Le Petit Parisien (10 January and 17–22 May 1917) were not signed. 30 Capy, Une voix de femme, 84–7, 134. 31 Darrow, French Women and First World War, 143, 153. 32 Capy, “La fin d’un monde,” La Vague, 13 February 1919; Capy, “Femmes d’aujourd’hui, Mater dolorosa,” La Rumer, 2 December 1927. 33 Clar, “Chronique d’une villageoise, Requête à Mme X. Visiteuse de l’A.P.” (Assistance Publique), Le Peuple, 7 July 1926; Darbois, “Quand on joue aux œuvres sociales,” Le Nouvel age, 18 July 1936. 34 Capy, “Des tous de taupes aux ruches ensoleillées” L’Oeuvre, 1 March 1929; Capy, “Une femme modern,” L’Oeuvre, 13 May 1929. 35 Capy, “La vie féminine: Les demi-chomeuses,” Le Monde, 7 December 1929. 36 Capy, “Comment vivent les jeunes travailleuses,” L’Oeuvre, 20 March 1930. 37 Pedersen, “Regulating Abortion and Birth Control,” 689–92. 38 Capy, “La suppression du travail au domicile: Les fleurs de muguet,” La Bataille syndicaliste, 29 October 1913; Capy, “Opinion de nos lecteurs, les prêcheurs de l’arrière-garde,” La Bataille syndicaliste, 13 March 1915;

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Capy, Preface to La femme nouvelle et la classe ouvrière, by Alexandra Kollontai. 39 Read, The Republic of Men, 115–41; Koos, “The Good, the Bad, and the Childless,” 5–6. 40 Capy, De l’amour du clocher à l’amour du monde. 41 See, for example, Capy, “Le tour du monde à Paris, Une salade orientale,” L’Oeuvre, 1 December 1928, and L’Egypte au Coeur du monde, 179. 42 L’Egypte au Coeur du monde, 23, 96 and 105. 43 Capy, “Les femmes dans la crise,” La République, 17 and 18 October 1934. 44 Capy, Des hommes passèrent, “Le Prix Séverine est attribué à Mlle Marcelle Capy,” La Française, 6 November 1930; Fernand Corcos, “Le Prix Séverine a été attribué hier pour la première fois,” L’Oeuvre, 30 November 1930. 45 Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 86–7. 46 Buck, “British Women’s Writing of the Great War,” 95–9. 47 Brassard, “From Private Story to Public History,” 43–63. 48 Capy, Des hommes passèrent, 23–4. 49 Capy, Des hommes passèrent, 76–7. 50 Neulander, “The Perils of Being Single,” 31–41. 51 Kedward, La vie en bleu, 72–3. 52 Téry, “Marcelle Capy. Prix Séverine,” Les Nouvelles littéraires, 21 February 1931. 53 Police reports dated 7 June 1914, 15 December 1915, and 13 September 1916, B A 2270, dossiers de journalists, Marques/Capy, A PP. 54 Capy, “Une voix de femme. Le droit de jambage,” Le Cri de Jour, November 1928. 55 Capy, “Une interdiction,” Les Hommes du Jour, December 1915; Intercepted letters to and from Capy, BA 2270, dossiers de journalistes, dossier Marques/Capy, APP. 56 Rolland, The Forerunners, 34. 57 Capy, Une voix de femme dans la mêlée, i. 58 Capy, “At the Threshold of the Cathedral,” 118–19. 59 Capy, “The War Got Him,” 175–7. 60 Capy, Une voix de femme dans la mêlée, 1–17. 61 La Vague, féminist, socialist, no. 1, 5 January 1918; Chamois reports, 16 February 1919 (circulation figure), BA 2270, dossier on Capy, A PP. 62 Capy, “La vague féminine,” La Vague, 5 January 1918, 4 (back page). 63 Siegel, “‘To the Unknown Mother of the Unknown Soldier,’” 427–51. 64 Grayzel, Women’s Identities at War.

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Notes to pages 47–9

65 “Le martyrologie des enfants assistés” series in Le Peuple, 18 October– 26 December 1924; articles in Le Peuple dated 1927 through 1931, Fonds Bouglé, Articles de presse, Auteurs, boîte 3, Vernet, B HV P. 66 Roy, Pierre Brizon, 259–60. 67 Capy, La défense de la vie. 68 “Le couple,” La Vague, 7 March 1918, back page. 69 Bard, Les filles de Marianne, 463–5. 70 Capy, “La Verité,” and “Recommencons!” La Vague nouvelle, 10 May 1923; Capy, “Les Amies de la Paix,” La Vague nouvelle, 20 May 1923. 71 “Une interdiction,” Les Hommes du Jour, December 1915, Fonds Bouglé, Articles de presse, Auteurs, boîte 1; and intercepted letters and Chamois report, 24 June 1918 and 2 July 1928 (speculation about “lesbian practices”), B A 2270, APP. 72 Latimer, Women Together, Women Apart. 73 Letter from Prefecture de Police to the Directeur, Sûreté générale, 31 January 1924, in APP BA 2270; group photograph at the 7th Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom International Congress in Grenoble, 1932, in the Swarthmore College Peace Collection. 74 “Un apôtre de la paix: Marcelle Capy,” La République, 11 January 1931; Claude Pierrey, “Marcelle Capy, pionniere du pacifisme,” L’Oeuvre, 14 March 1932. 75 Document on passport troubles, 18 February 1924, B A 2270, Capy ­dossier, A PP. 76 “Un apôtre de la paix: Marcelle Capy,” La République, 11 January 1931. 77 See, for example, “Jaunes et blancs,” L’Ère nouvelle, 6 June 1925, and “Les exiles,” L’Ère nouvelle, 26 June 1925, both in series “Sur les routes internationals.” 78 Letter from Préfecture de Police, 31 January 1924, B A 2270, A PP. 79 Capy, Le droit et le devoir des femmes. 80 Offenstadt, “Le pacifisme extrême à la conquête des masses,” 35–6. 81 Capy, “Notre crusade,” La Patrie humaine, November 1931; Capy, “Retour d’Allemagne,” La Patrie humaine, 6 March 1932. 82 Capy, “Aux femmes allemandes,” La Patrie humaine, 4 December 1931; Capy, “Guerre à la guerre,” La Patrie humaine, January–February 1932; Capy, “A bas les armes,” La Patrie humaine, February 1932; Capy, “Tout se paie,” La Patrie humaine, 16 March 1932. 83 Comité International d’Action et de Propagande pour la Paix et le Désarment par la Volonté des Individus et des Peuples, “Lettre à notre camarade et ami, Madeleine Vernet,” La Patrie humaine, 22 December

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1931; Madeleine Vernet, “La paix sans frontiers,” La Patrie humaine, January–February 1932. 84 Capy, “Le tour du monde à Paris, en Italie,” L’Oeuvre, 2 January 1929; Capy, “Retour d’Allemagne,” La Patrie humaine, 4 March 1932. 85 Vernet, “Libres opinions: L’évacuation de la Rhenanie” and “La détresse de l’Allemagne,” Fonds Bouglé, Articles de presse, Auteurs, boîte 3, Vernet dossier, BHVP. In this dossier, these articles are wrongly attributed to Le Peuple, 14 and 29 July 1930. 86 Vernet, “Lettre de Hambourg, Observations et reflexions sur la situation allemande,” Fonds Bouglé, Articles de presse, Auteurs, boîte 3, Vernet dossier, B H V P. This article is also misattributed to Le Peuple, October 1932. 87 Cooper, “Pacifism, Feminism, and Fascism,” 110–13. 88 Les femmes dans l’action mondiale, Prospectus, in the October and November 1934 issues and articles by Moran in the Octoer 1934 and by Clar in the November 1934 issue. 89 Manifeste voté au Congrès mondial des Femmes Contre la Guerre et le Fascisme, 1934; Charte des Droits de la Femme votée au Congrès mondial des Femmes contre la Guerre et le Fascisme, 4–7 August 1934, Fonds Bouglé, Articles de presse, Thèmes, boîte 2, Conférences, B HV P. 90 Offenstadt, “Le pacifisme extrême à la conquête des masses,” 35–6. 91 Martin, “Collaboration ‘chaude’ ou collaboration ‘froide’?” 91–106. 92 Epstein, Un paradoxe français, 118–19. On the newspapers, see Evleth, The Authorized Press in Vichy and German-Occupied France, 131. 93 Yakira, Post-Zionism, Post-Holocaust, 5–24. 94 Capy, Preface to Le spiritualisme expérimental. 95 Capy, “D’abord, l’hommes,” La Vox de la Paix, March 1951; Capy, “Avertissement,” La Voix de la Paix, April 1954. 96 Capy, “L’heroisme qui sauve,” La Voix de la Paix, May 1951; Capy, “Village des enfants du monde,” La Voix de la Paix, June–July 1952; Capy, “La tristesse d’Einstein,” La Voix de la Paix, June 1955.

C h a p t e r t h re e   1 Much of material in this chapter appeared as Stewart, “Gender, Genesis and Generation: Colette and Germaine Beaumont’s Journalism at Le Matin, 1910–1924,” French Cultural Studies 25, no. 2 (April 2014): 165–79.   2 Martin, “Journalistes et gens de lettres,” 107–20; Boucharenc, L’écrivain-reporter.

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  3 For their status in literary studies, see their entries in Demougin, Dictionnaire des littéraires françaises et étrangères. For Beaumont’s erasure from French literature, see Didier, Dictionnaire universel des littératures, A–F.  4 Colette, Colette Journaliste; Freadman, “Being There.”   5 For example, Doyle, Une étude en rouge suivi de Le Signe des quatre. See also Woolf, Journal d’un écrivain.   6 Fau, “Germaine Beaumont: Un siècle au service du mystère”; Fau, Preface to Des maisons; Fau, “Entre heritage et rupture,” 17–31.  7 Dugast-Portes, Colette, 105, 107; Dubbelboer, “‘Nothing Ruins Writers Like Journalism,’” 34.   8 See, for example, Preface by Colette to 28 compositions de Michel Dubost pour des tissus de soie réalisés par les Soieires F. Ducharne, and Beaumont, “Les modes aériennes,” 19–20.  9 Kristeva, Colette, 74. 10 Poskin, “Colette et ‘L’Argus de la presse,’” 116–23. 11 Galliari, Colette au concert, 8–11. 12 Gale, A World Apart, 128–47. In “Le centenaire de Zénaïde Fleuriot,” in Si je devais, Beaumont praised Colette as the only author who did not punish her young characters, even by representing them as little angels (21–3). 13 Kristeva, Colette, 104; Colette, La femme cachée. 14 Reich and Boudana “The Fickle Forerunner,” 411–14; Gray, introduction to Women in Journalism at the Fin de Siècle, 8. 15 Colette, La vagabonde. 16 Tilburg, Colette’s Republic, 14. 17 Collado, Colette. 18 Roberts, Disruptive Acts, 26–7. 19 Roberts, Civilization without Sexes. 20 Notes on L’Oeuvre in the inventaire for the A N Series A R /9, Fonds d’Archives de presse located in the Salle des Inventaires in the Archives Nationales. 21 Bellanger et al., Histoire générale de la presse française, 3:393, 3:427–9, 3:438. 22 Beaumont, “Mes premières armes dans la presse,” 243–6. 23 Faure-Favier articles in L’Oeuvre, 17 January, 14 and 25 February, and 29 March 1919. 24 Rosine was the pseudonym used to sign the “Propos féminins” column in Le Figaro from 1918 to 1934; it was also the name of one of the types of women used in advertisements in Vogue Paris in 1922. 25 Lefèvre, “Une heure avec Germaine Beaumont, romancière,” Les Nouvelles littéraires, July 1936.

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26 Marrone, Female Journeys. 27 Pène, L’evadée, 6. 28 Colette par elle-meme, 7–8, 25, further details on 59–60. 29 For example, Beaumont, “Renoncement,” Le Matin, 12 August 1917, and “Mrs. Maundy” in “Les Mille et un matins,” Le Matin, 18 January 1923. 30 Beaumont, “La biche aux Abois,” Le Matin, 1926–27; “Le prisonnier de Riom,” Le Matin, 1935; and “Le froide de l’Aube,” Le Matin, 1938. 31 Beaumont, “Mes premières armes dans la presse,” 183. 32 Ibid., 182–3. 33 Beaumont, Piège; Colette, Ces plaisirs, republished in 1941 as Le Pur et l’impur. 34 Colette, Colette. Lettres à Annie de Pène et Germaine Beaumont, 247. 35 Thurman, Secrets of the Flesh, 251–2, 272–80. 36 Colette par elle-meme, 12–13. 37 Phelps, Colette, Flowers and Fruit; Beaumont, La longue nuit. 38 Dedications to La roue d’infortuné and Silsauve. 39 “Accidents de printemps,” in Colette, Aventures quotidiennes, 21–4. 40 Kalifa, L’encre et le sang, 138–64. 41 Colette, “Dans la Foule: Après l’affaire de la rue Ordener,” 2 May 1912, in Colette, Dans la foule, 53–4. Original in Le Matin, 2 May 1912. 42 Colette, “A la chambre des députés,” 9 March 1914 and “Les femmes au Congrès,” 19 January 1913, in Dans la foule, 2–9 and 21–8. 43 On France, see Maza, Violette Nozière, 176–7. On sob sisters, see Mills, A Place in the News, 27. 44 Colette, “A Tours,” 27 June 1912, in Dans la foule, 41–8. 45 Beaumont, “Colette journaliste.” 46 Freadman, “Being There,” 5–16. 47 Compare the article by Blanche Vogt, “Le cadavre dans une malle,” no newspaper indicated, 16 June 1922, Fonds Bouglé, Actualités 80, dossier Bessarabo, BHVP to accounts in L’Affaire Bessarabo, Recueil factice d’articles de presse sur Hera Mirtel, BN F. 48 For example, Colette, “Les Troglodytes,” from Le Matin 1914, reproduced in Cahiers Colette, vol. 18, Écumes. 49 Fillion, No Job for a Woman. 50 Allan, “(En)Gendering the Truth Politics of News Discourse,” 124–6; Van Zoonen, “One of the Girls?” 33–46. 51 Colette, “Contes des mille et un matins, le journal de Colette,” subtitled “Le martyrologie,” Le Matin, 5 March 1914; Colette, “Sévices,” Le Matin, 2 July 1914. 52 Ferrier-Caverivière, Preface to Colette et la mode, 23.

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Notes to pages 65–70

53 Colette, “Printemps de demain,” Vogue, 1 February 1925; “Mannequins, Vogue, 1 April 1925. See also Freadman, “Breasts Are Back!” 335–46. 54 Introduction, “Echoes et Propos. Le Petit Courrier des femmes,” Le Matin, 8 March 1920, 2. 55 Rosine, “Le Petit Courrier des femmes,” Le Matin, 8 April 1920, 13 September 1921, and 30 June 1922. 56 Rosine, “Le Petit Courrier des femmes,” Le Matin, 29 May 1921. 57 Rosine, “Le Petit Courrier des femmes,” Le Matin, 17, 22, 24 March, 1 and 23 April 1920 and 30 November 1922. 58 Bard, Les filles de Marianne, 235–9. 59 Rosine, “Le Petit Courrier des femmes,” Le Matin, 10–30 March 1920. 60 Rosine, “Le Petit Courrier des femmes,” Le Matin, 13 and 31 May 1920. 61 Roberts, Civilization without Sexes, 188–97. 62 Ostroga, Les indépendantes. 63 Ferrat, “Les jeunes filles à la faculté,” Le Quotidien, 19 June 1926; Galzy, “Le cas angoissant des jeunes filles qui suivent les cours de l’enseignement supérieur,” Excelsior, 15 October 1933, Fonds Bouglé, Coupeurs, Articles, boîte 5, Themes, dossier enseignement, BH V P. 64 Beaumont, “La femme française,” Le document 3 (April 1935): 56, 70. 65 Stanley, “Hearth, Home, and Steering Wheel,” 233–53. 66 Rosine, “Le Petit Courrier des femmes,” Le Matin, 10 March 1920 and 27 October 1921. 67 Rosine, “Le Petit Courrier des femmes,” Le Matin, 3 May 1921, 7 September 1921, and 24 June 1922. 68 Magazine, and “Mille et un matins,” Le Matin, 20 March 1930 and 7 January 1940. 69 Beaumont, Si je devais, 25–7. 70 Ibid., i. 71 Bouissounous, “Femmes écrivains, Leurs débuts, Germaine Beaumont,” Les Nouvelles littéraires, 14 December 1935. 72 Goulet, Legacies of the Rue Morgue, 15–16. 73 Review by Tatiana de Rosnay in Psychologies Magazine and by Astrid de Larminat in Le Figaro, reproduced in La Botti, a publicity brochure found in the Beaumont dossier in the BLP. 74 Pouy, Une brève histoire du roman noir, 12–14. 75 Charest, “Littérature policière et rapports sociaux de sexe,” 303. 76 Gorrara, “French Crime Fiction”; Rzepka and Horsely, A Companion to Crime Fiction. 77 One example is Andrée Viollis, who insisted on a woman’s page that included economic and political commentary in Vendredi, the daily she cofounded in 1935.

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C ha p t e r f o u r   1 Maguire and Reger, “Feminist Co-Mentoring,” 54–72.  2 Renoult, Andrée Viollis; Jeandel, Andrée Viollis.  3 Martin, Les Grands reporters, lists five women. One of them, Louise Weiss, is not a major subject in this book because she left daily newspaper reporting after a brief stint. See Kershaw, “Women’s Writing and the Creation of Political Subjectivities,” 55–72. Boucharenc, L’écrivainreporter au coeur des années trente, mentions one more woman, Maryse Choisy, who spent little time reporting and, accordingly, is treated briefly in this book.  4 Amaury, Histoire du Petit Parisien, vol. 1, La Société du Petit Parisien, 398, 400.   5 Maurice Bourdet, “Le Prix de l’Europe nouvelle a été attributé à Mme Andrée Viollis, notre distinguée collaboratrice,” Le Petit Parisien, 28 October 1933; “Mme Andrée Viollis recoit le prix de L’Europe Nouvelle,” Le Journal, 28 October 1933, Fonds Bouglé, Actualités, dossier Viollis, B HVP.   6 Roubaud, “Andrée Viollis, princesse du journalisme. Elle succède à Séverine, ” Le Petit Parisien, 13 May 1934; “Andrée Viollis, princesse du journalisme,” Minerva, 6 May 1934.   7 Notes on L’Oeuvre in the inventaire for the A N Series A R /9, Fonds d’Archives de presse located in the Salle des Inventaires in the Archives Nationales, 3AR, Fonds L’Oeuvre.   8 Notes on L’Oeuvre in the inventaire for the A N Serie A R /9, Fonds d’Archives de presse, located in the Salle des Inventaires in the Archives Nationale, 3AR, Fonds L’Oeuvre.  9 B NF , Des sources pour l’histoire de la presse, 62. 10 Normand, “Simone Téry. Prix Séverine,” La Femme de France, 29 January 1933, dossier TER, BM D. The prize-winning play was Comme les autres, produced in 1932. Suzanne Normand (1895–1981) was a journalist and novelist. 11 Quoted in Hamlaiui, “Simone Téry, Contre vents et marées, vers le bel ­avenir …,” L’ Humanité, 18 July 2012. 12 Regis-Leroi, “Mes Conférences. Simone Téry,” Minerva, n.d., dossier TER , B MD . 13 Claris, Souvenirs de soixante ans de journalisme, 5. 14 See essay on Simone in Normand, Rencontres, 91–100. 15 Renoult, Andrée Viollis, 95. 16 S. Téry, Front de la liberté, 130. 17 S. Téry, Une française en Union Soviétique, 48, 53.

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Notes to pages 75–8

18 See review “Seule en Russie,” La Renaissance, 1 October 1927. 19 S. Téry, Une française en Union Soviétique, 12, 21, 33–43, 65–73, 87. 20 Marx (aka Paz), C’est la lutte finale!; Gosset, Nitchevo! L’amour en Russie Soviétique. 21 Viollis, Le Japon et son empire, 141. 22 Viollis, L’Inde contre les anglais, 65, 74, 87. On her attitude toward the interview with Gandhi, see “Les Enquêtes. Chez les femmes, Une aprèsmidi avec Andrée Viollis,” Minerva, 10 February 1935, Fonds Bouglé, BHVP. 23 Letter to the Editor, L’Humanité, 28 July 1939. 24 Julia Hamlaiui, “Simone Téry, contre vents et marées, vers le bel avenir …” L’ Humanité, July 18, 2012. 25 Brienne, Gustave Téry et L’Oeuvre; G. Téry, Aristide Briand dit Aristidele-cynique and L’acquittement de Mme Caillaux. Brienne is quite biased, but is not inaccurate in all his assertions. 26 See publicity for L’Oeuvre at the BN F, Arsenal. 27 Téry, L’école des garçonnes; Bellanger et al., Histoire générale de la presse, 3:427, 3:429, 3:438–9, 3:471. 28 Quotes are from Roubaud, “Andrée Viollis, princesse du journalisme,” Minerva, 6 May 1934 and Sauret, “Les femmes et le journalisme: Andrée Viollis,” La Française, 2 May 1936, Fonds Bouglé, Articles de presse, Viollis, B HVP. Sauret’s article is cited several times in this chapter. She is best known as the biographer of Marie-Louise Bouglé, but she was a ­feminist, pacifist, and journalist who contributed to most of the women’s revues and fourteen major dailies, including the Petit Parisien and Vendredi. She interviewed many of the women discussed in this book. See Sahuqué, “Henriette Sauret, la munificent,” La Voix des Femmes, 25 March–10 April 1938. 29 Regis-Leroi, “Andrée Viollis du Petit Parisien,” Minerva, 23 December 1928. 30 S. Téry, “Le rôle de la femme dans le journalisme,” Les Nouvelles ­littéraires, 14 February 1929. 31 S. Téry, “Chez les femmes journalists, Devant les tours de Notre Dame avec Simone Téry,” Minerva, 12 May 1925. 32 Normand, Rencontres, 92. 33 Essay on Andrée Viollis in Normand, Rencontres, 71. 34 Jacob, Quarante ans de journalisme, 68, describes Viollis socializing with Helsey while on assignment in 1935. Viollis herself is silent about it. 35 S. Téry, Front de la Liberté, 37–3, 52–3, 304, 317–19. 36 Renoult, Andrée Viollis, 17–26.

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Notes to pages 78–82

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37 Dedication in Viollis, La vrai Mme de Lafayette. On the political ignorance of most girls, see Tilburg, Colette’s Republic. 38 Sauret, “Les femmes et le journalisme: Andrée Viollis,” La Française, 2 May 1936; Fréderic Lefebre, “Une heure avec Andrée Viollis,” Les Nouvelles littéraires, 23 April 1933. 39 Renoult, Andrée Viollis, 29–35. 40 In June and July 1918, and April, May, and June 1929, her datelines in Le Petit Parisien were from London. 41 Viollis, préface to Japon intime. 42 S. Téry, “Séverine,” Les Nouvelles littéraires, 27 April 1929, 9. 43 S. Téry, L’île des bards; S. Téry, En Irlande. 44 Jaloux, “Esprit des livres,” Les Nouvelles littéraires, 10 March 1931; Jaloux, “Correspondence,” Les Nouvelles littéraires, 24 August 1935, 8. 45 Viollis, La vrai Mme de Lafayette, 159–64. 46 Martin, Les grands reporters, 292. 47 Letters from A. Téry to M. Durand, 17 July, 6 and 11 September, and l October 1899, DOS TER, 091, BM D. 48 Brienne, Gustave Téry et L’Oeuvre, 5, 13, 17. 49 Lettres from Gustave Téry to Durand, 10 December 1901 and 22 April 1910, T ER, 091, BM D. 50 In L’Oeuvre, Vérone, 2 and 25 February and 26 March 1919; Misme, 9 and 16 March 1922. 51 A. Téry, “Les Congrès,” La Fronde, 19 June, 4, 10, 16, and 26 July 1900. 52 Fuchs, Contested Paternity, 146–9, 160–2. 53 A. Téry, “Un préjugé à combattre” La Fronde, 6 February 1990; A. Téry, “Le pire sourd,” La Fronde, 28 July 1900. 54 A. Téry, “Les petites filles,” La Fronde, 22 January 1902; A. Téry, “La ­morale hoministe,” La Fronde, 7 May 1902; A. Téry, “Deux bagnes,” La Fronde, 27 May 1902; A. Téry, “Tueurs de femmes,” La Fronde, 20 July 1902; A. Téry, “Toujours l’hominisme,” La Fronde, 7 November 1902; A. Téry, “Les femmes et l’internat,” La Fronde, 30 November 1902. 55 See A. Téry, “Serait-ce encore un erreur judiciaire?” La Fronde, 8 January 1900; A. Téry, “Couperons-nous la corde?” La Fronde, 9 January 1900. 56 Thérenty, “De La Fronde à la guerre,”146–7. 57 A. Téry, “L’autre cloche,” La Fronde, 3 January 1900; “A quoi tient le supériorité,” La Fronde, 16 January 1902; “Nouvel effort,” La Fronde, 18 January 1900; “Ce que m’a dit Miss Chamberlain,” La Fronde, 21 January 1900; “Pour et contre,” La Fronde, 7 February 1900. 58 Jacob, Quarante ans de journalisme, 68. 59 A. Téry, “Un tournant de l’histoire,” La Fronde, 6 July 1900.

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Notes to pages 82–4

60 For some of her better stories, see A. Téry, “Contes du Petit Parisien” ­column of Le Petit Parisien, 15 February 1909, 21 March 1911, and 4 February 1913. 61 A. Viollis (listed as “un correspondant particulier du Petit Parisien”), “A l’ambulance. Comment ils savent souffrir,” Le Petit Parisien, 25 March 1916. See also Henriette Sauret, “Les femmes et le journalisme: Andrée Viollis, ” La Française, 2 May 1936. 62 Darrow, French Women and the First World War, 153, 197–204. 63 Viollis to Harlon, 5 October 1915, Lettres, dossier V IO, B MD. 64 Viollis, “Avec le corps d’armée des femmes anglais,” datelined “Front britannique,” Le Petit Parisien, 14 January 1918, also published as “Le corps d’armée des femmes anglaises,” Revue de Paris, 7 (1918), 656. 65 Viollis, Lord Northcliffe. 66 Viollis, “Les enquêtes. Chez les femmes, Un après-midi avec Andrée Viollis,” Minerva, 10 February 1935; Sauret, “Les femmes et le journalisme.” 67 See articles on three trials on the front pages of Le Petit Parisien, 29 June and 4 July 1923, 25 January 1924, and 15 and 29 June 1925. On tennis, skiing, boxing, and the Olympics, see the front pages of 20 July 1921, and 31 January, 25 May, and 10, 13, and 19 July 1924. 68 Farge, “Penser et définir l’événement en historie,” 70. 69 Series on the trial of Mme Fortineau culminating in Le Petit Parisien, 25 March 1923, compared to Séverine, “La Famille” and “Moi d’abord,” L’Humanité, 16 and 22 June 1922. See also Renoult, Andrée Viollis, 85–6. 70 See, for example, S. Téry, “Les marchandes d’espoir, La ‘Femme du monde’ devoile l’avenir par les fluids,” Le Quotidien, 18 June 1926. 71 Series on working-class municipalities in L’Humanité beginning 7 March 1936. 72 Arasa, Les voyageuses d’Albert Kahn; S. Téry, Fièvre jaune (La Chine ­convulsé), dedication. 73 Quoted in Collomb, “Andree Viollis,” 250. 74 S. Téry, Dernière édition spécial, produced in 1937, Arts du spectacle, B NF  Richelieu. 75 Viollis, Criquet. 76 Margueritte, La garçonne; Roberts, Civilization without Sexes, 46–59. 77 Alaimo, “The Authority of Experts,” 164–77. 78 Lettre d’Andrée Viollis à Roger Martin du Gard, Paris, 12 April 1934, Manuscrits occidentaux, Nouvelles acquisitions françaises, Fonds Roger Martin du Gard, correspondance, tome 120, 224, B NF. 79 Viollis, Le secret de la Reine Christine.

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80 Normand, “Une grande journaliste: Andree Viollis,” Nouvelles littéraires, 1929, dossier VI O, BM D. 81 Water, “A Girton Girl on the Throne,” 41–60; Murat, La vie amoureuse de Christine de Suède, a translation of Oscar von Wertheiner’s biography, and two 1933 films, including one with Greta Garbo. The “vie amoureuse” of historical women engaged women writers in the 1920s, as in Harry, La vie amoureuse de Christine de Suède and Tinayre, La vie amoureuse de Mme de Pompidour. 82 With Jean Viollis, La perdrix dorée, republished as Puycerrampion. For reviews of Jean Viollis’s novels, see Recueil, Dossiers biographiques Boutillier du Retail, Documentation sur Andrée et Jean Viollis, dossier Fol-L N1 -232 (14717), BN F. 83 Viollis, “La réponse des femmes à Henry de Montherlant,” and S. Téry, “Séverine,” Les Nouvelles littéraires, 27 April 1929. See also Millet, Sexual Politics. 84 Milligan, The Forgotten Generation, 142–62. 85 S. Téry, Passagère. 86 Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire, 142; Healey, The Modernist Traveler. 87 S. Téry, Le coeur volé. 88 Letter S. Téry to Albert Lund, 2 August 1936, Nouvelles Acquisitions Françaises, AF, 15950, F, 147, BN F. 89 Kershaw, Forgotten Engagements, 63. 90 S. Téry, Où l’aube se lève; S. Téry, Porte du soleil. 91 Kershaw, “Simone Téry,” 8–20. Kershaw analyzes Téry’s fiction, but analysis of her reporting style reveals many similarities to her literary style. 92 S. Téry, En Irlande, 9, 11, 75, and 250. The datelines were 12, 13, 16, 20 August and 1, 2, 5, and 6 September 1921, and 15 August and 6 December 1922. 93 See Andrée Viollis’s coverage in Le Petit Parisien, 30 October, 2, 19 and 25 November, and 6 December 1922, and her account of that reporting in “Avec les républicains d’Irlande” in Une heure de ma carrière, 291–318. For Bois’s comments, see Andrée Viollis, “Les femmes et le reportage,” Marianne, 1 November 1933. 94 La Mazière, Nouvelle Espagne, 12–209. La Mazière also investigated the division of land holdings and women’s work as lace makers. 95 Casanova, A Short History of the Spanish Civil War. 96 “L’Arrestation de Mlle Simone Téry,” Le Temps, 9 November 1934; “Une mise au point de Mlle Simone Téry,” Le Temps, 12 November 1934; “Pour Rabate, Oppman et Mlle Téry,” L’Humanité, 9 November 1934.

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Notes to pages 88–91

  97 On the Comité Mondial’s involvement in the arrest, see Les femmes dans l’action mondiale, November 1934, back page.  98 Casanova, A Short History of the Spanish Civil War.  99 Manevy, Histoire de la presse, 323. 100 Pike, Conjecture, Propaganda, and Deceit, 4. 101 Viollis series “La Guerre civile des deux Espagnes,” on the front pages of Le Petit Parisien, 31 July 7, 8, 13, 22, 28, and 30 August 1936. 102 Viollis series “La Guerre civile des deux Espagnes,” on the front pages of Le Petit Parisien, 8, 10, 15 19, 22 and 28 October and 3 November 1936. 103 Racine-Lefaud, “Le Comité de vigilance,” 87–8. 104 Directors, “Lettre à M. Pierre Laval,” Vendredi, 29 November 1935, front page; Directors, “Histoire de Vendredi,” Vendredi, 22 May 1936, front page. 105 Pike, Conjecture, Propaganda, and Deceit. 106 The reports with her signature are on pages 2, 3, or 5 of L’Humanité, 13 February, 30 March, 26 November, 10, 17, and 28 December 1937, and 7 and 18 February 1938. 107 Ad for Front de la liberté, L’Humanité, 15 October 1938, 8. 108 S. Téry, Front de la liberté, 28–9, 75–7, 194–6. 109 Ibid., 319, 326, 329. 110 S. Téry, “Leurs enfants sont massacrés,” Russia d’Aujourd’hui, March 1939, dossier Téry, BM D. 111 “A la conférence internationale de la jeunesse, Andrée Viollis parle du ­fascisme et de la guerre,” L’Oeuvre, 14 April 1935; “Devant une salle enthousiaste,” L’Humanité, 13 October 1935; “Le Culture en danger,” L’Humanité, 14 November 1935. 112 “Un appel des intellectuels,” L’Humanité, 17 January 1939; “A l’Embassade d’Espagne à Paris,” L’Humanité, 15 April 1939; “La Semaine des intellectuels en faveur de l’Espagne républicaine,” L’Humanité, 16 October 1938; “Une semaine de blé pour l’Espagne,” L’Humanité, 11 January 1939. The figures for the food sent to Spain are in the last cited issue. 113 “Les conférences de Simone Téry sur l’Espagne obtienent un grand succès,” L’Humanité, 29 November 1938; “Ouvrez la frontière!”, L’Humanité, 14 January 1939; “Sauvons les patriots espagnols,” L’Humanité, 28 March 1939. 114 “Quelques echos encourageants de la campaigne du lait,” L’Humanité, 19 October 1938. 115 Whitney, “Embracing the Status Quo,” 29–43. 116 Reynolds, “The Lost Generation of French Feminists?,” 679–88.

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C ha p t e r f i ve  1 Kroeger, Nellie Bly; Randall, Great Reporters.  2 Lutes, Front-Page Girls; Chambers, Steiner, and Fleming, Women and Journalism.  3 Fahs, Out on Assignment.  4 Muhlmann, A Political History of Journalism; Martin, Les grands reporters.   5 Forsdick, Basu, and Silton, “New Approaches to Twentieth-Century Travel Literature,” 46–7; Borella, Travel Narratives of Ella Maillart, 56–83.   6 Ruicong and Passman, “Japanese Scholarship on the Sino-Japanese War,” 287–9.  7 Borroff, Language and the Poet. Mary Shearman assisted with the analysis.   8 Thérenty, “Les ‘Vagabondes du télégraphe,’” 101–15.   9 Collins, “Traitorous Collaboration,” 83. 10 Martin, Les grands reporteurs, 73–133. On sob sisters, see Mills, A Place in the News, 27. 11 Roubaud, J’avais peur (eight reissues); Roubaud, Un homme nu dans une malle in a series called “A ne pas lire la nuit” (Not to be read at night) and Le crime des quatre jeudis in the “L’Heure du Crime” (The crime hour) collection, with which Germaine Beaumont was associated. 12 Boucharenc, L’écrivain-reporter, 17. 13 Todorov, Typologie du roman policier; Smith, Moving Lives, xvi, 3; Kemp, Defective Inspectors, 8, 10. 14 Viollis, “A propos du Prix Albert Londres, le grand reportage,” Vendredi, 15 May 1936. 15 Dalex, Bibliographie des premières femmes voyageuses. 16 McLaughlin, “A la recherche de l’aventure,” Berthier-McLaughlin, “Les Bourlingueuses de la plume.” 17 La Mazière, Le Maroc secret; La Mazière, En Tchécoslovaqui. 18 La Mazière, Le Maroc secret, 12–54. La Mazière also visited and critiqued the expropriation of indigenous land, though her solution was familiar: “protect the indigenous from the excesses of civilization” (216) and teach them new methods of cultivation. 19 Forsdick, Basu, and Silton, “New Approaches to Twentieth-Century Travel Literature,” 79. 20 Borella, Travel Narratives of Ella Maillart, 7, 14–25, 46. 21 On aviatrices, Reynolds, France between the Wars, 75. 22 Berthier-McLaughlin, “Devenir Titayna,” 293–306; Heimermann, Titaÿna, 109–15.

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Notes to pages 100–3

23 Undated note from Titayna about trip to Indian Ocean, and letter from Titayna to the Director M. Raud, 12 June 1933, Dossiers des Journalistes, Titayna, L’Oeuvre, 3AR 2, AN . 24 Heimermann, Titaÿna, 143, 150–1, 168–9, 193–7, 249–53. 25 Assouline, Albert Londres, 227–8. 26 Redfern, Writing on the Move, 207–8. 27 Boucharenc, L’écrivain-reporter, 31–4. 28 Pinson, “Tintin avant Tintin,” 11–25. 29 Londres, Au Bagne; on the campaign, Assouline, Albert Londres, 244–70. 30 Londres, Chez les fous. 31 Redfern, Writing on the Move, 11, 83. 32 Londres, Dans la Russie des soviets; Londres, Les comitadjis ou le terrorisme dans les Balkans; Londres, La Chine en folie. 33 Londres, Terre d’ébène; Londres, Les forçats de la route. See also Corday, “Les Livres qui font penser,” Progrès Civique, 23 March 1923; Rives, “Le travail forcé. Y a’t’il encore des esclaves?” La République, 16 June 1924. 34 Maul, “The International Labour Organization,” 477–500. 35 Seydoux, “La leçon d’une enquête,” Le Petit Parisien, 17 November 1928; Seydoux, “Des interpellations à la chambre sur la politique colonial,” Le Petit Parisien, 15 June 1929; Danjou, “Le drame du Chemin de Fer CongoOcean,” Le Quotidien, 3 March 1929. 36 Daughton, “Behind the Imperial Curtain,” 528. 37 In chronological order, Londres’s books: Indochine; Dante n’avait rien vu; Dans la Russie des soviets; Le chemin de Buenos-Aires; Marseille, porte du Sud; L’homme qui s’évada; Terre d’ébène; Le Juif errant est arrivé; Pêcheurs de perles; Les comitadjis ou le terrorisme dans les Balkans; Les forçats de la route; and Histoires des grands chemins. 38 Dossier on Le Petit Parisien, Fonds Albert Londres, 76A s 13, A N; Dossier on Articles des envois spéciaux, 1928–1936, Fonds Le Petit Parisien, 11A r 578, A N. 39 Lambert, “Esthésie de la dénonciation,” 75–92. For reviews, see Les grands reportages, 76AS 8, Fonds Albert Londres, Archives privés, A N. 40 Pierre Mille, “Histoire authentique d’une interview,” Le Temps, 9 April 1932, 3. 41 Liste des lauréates au prix Albert Londres de 1933–1939 et 1946 à 1982, 76A S 16, Fonds Albert Londres, AN ; Assouline, Albert Londres, 265. 42 Viollis, Alsace et Lorraine au dessus des passions; Viollis, Seule en Russie, de la Baltique à la Caspienne; Viollis, Tourmente sur l’Afghanistan; Viollis, L’Inde contre les Anglais.

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43 Viollis, Le Japon et son empire; Viollis, Le Japon intime; Viollis, Indochine S.O.S.; Viollis, Notre Tunisie. After the Second World War, she published L’Afrique du Sud and Le vérité sur Vietnam. 44 Londres, La Chine en folie; Londres, Mourir pour Shanghai. 45 Viollis, Changhai et le destin de la Chine. 46 Renoult, Andrée Viollis, 50; Jeandel, Andrée Viollis, 49–50. 47 The full text of Londres’s article, dated 22 September 1914, is in Assouline, Albert Londres, 14–16; Helsey, Envoy special, 158, 168; Quinn, “Dipping the Pen into the Wound,” 49, 53, 52. 48 Assouline, Albert Londres, 74, 125, 132–4; Redfern, Writing on the Move, 36–44, 50. 49 Viollis, “Ambulence! Comme ils savent souffrir,” Le Petit Parisien, 25 March 1916, 1–2. 50 Articles from ‘our special envoy, Andrée Viollis’ in ibid., 14 January, 26 May, 4 June and 8 July 1918. See also letter to Harlon, 5 October 1915, Andrée Viollis, Lettres, BM D. 51 Viollis, Changhai et le destin de la Chine, 99, 131. 52 Londres, Mourir pour Shanghai, 62; Viollis, “Près les hostilités sino-­ japonaises,” Le Petit Parisien, 5 March 1932. 53 Londres, “Une chasse au tigre”; Viollis, “Avec les républicains d’Irlande.” 54 Viollis, Seule en Russie, 21; Smith, Moving Lives, 121. 55 Viollis, Tourment en Afghanstan, 19, 20. 56 Ibid., 219. 57 Londres, Au bagne, 11, 25, 147. 58 Ibid., 38, 40. 59 See, for example, introductory notes to Viollis series on Afghanistan, Le Petit Parisien, 18 October 1929, and to Viollis, Tourmente, 7; and introductory note to Londres’s series on Indochina, Excelsior, 3 November 1922. 60 Viollis, “Les Grandes enquêtes du Petit Parisien. Sous le masque japonais,” Le Petit Parisien, 11 October 1932. 61 Viollis, Changhai et le destin de la Chine, 222. 62 Viollis, “La disparition d’Albert Londres,” Le Petit Parisien, 14 June 1932. 63 Martin, Les grands reporteurs, 294. He mentions Henri Beraud and Londres, but could have mentioned Helsey and Claude Blanchard. 64 Ibid., 295. 65 Redfern, Writing on the Move, 12, 77, 96; Muhlman, A Political History of Journalism, 82. 66 Amouroux, introduction to Grands reportages, n.p.

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Notes to pages 108–13

67 Londres, La Chine en folie, 148; “Le livre du jour, La Chine en folie,” Revue française, 17 January 1926, AS 18, 76 A N. 68 Boucharenc, L’écrivain-reporter, 79, 80. 69 Freadman, “Being There,” 4–15. 70 Assouline, Albert Londres, 88, 97. 71 Helsey, Envoy special, 86, 98. 72 Ibid., 27–49. For a female example, see Jacob, Quarante ans de journalisme, 16–33. Of course, her previous jobs were secretarial, his were not. 73 Renoult, Andrée Viollis, 17–107. 74 Assouline, Albert Londres, 25–57; Redfern, Writing on the Move, 23–3. 75 Londres, Mourir pour Shanghai, 89. 76 Élie-Joseph Bois, ed., “Albert Londres,” Le Petit Parisien, 6 June 1932; Viollis, “Albert Londres, Prince des Reporters,” Les Nouvelles littéraires, 5 September 1932. See also Roubaud, “Andrée Viollis, princesse du journalisme,” Le Petit Parisien, 13 May 1934, and “Andrée Viollis, princesse du journalisme,” Minerva, 6 May 1934. 77 Registres des Appointments, 1923–1939, Fonds Le Petit Parisien, 11A R /460, 461 and 462, Archives Privés, AN. 78 Registre des Appointements 1919–1924, Fonds Le Petit Parisien, 11A R /460, AN . 79 Fonds de L’Oeuvre, dossiers des journalistes, dossier Dusser, 3A R /1, A N. 80 Londres, Dans la Russie des Soviets, 26, 40, 58–9. 81 Viollis, Préface to Seule en Russie, 9–11. 82 Pedersen, “Regulating Abortion and Birth Control,” 673–98. 83 Viollis, Seule en Russie, 238–49. 84 Londres, Mourir pour Shanghai, 40–7. 85 Roubaud, Le dragon s’éveille. 86 S. Téry, Fièvre jaune (La Chine convulsée), vii, 55–6, 71, 172, 233. 87 Forsdick, Basu, and Silton, “New Approaches to Twentieth-Century Travel Literature,” 47. 88 Lacassin, Preface, “Albert Londres ou ‘la plume dans la plaie,’” Mourir pour Shanghai et la Chine en folie, 12. 89 Londres, “Grande enquête Extrême-Orient,” Excelsior, 24 March–May 1922. 90 Londres, La Chine en folie, 176–7, 199, 220, 252, (on Shanghai) 256–9. 91 See especially, “Le livre du jour. La Chine en folie,” Paris Midi, 2 January 1926, 76A S /8, AN . 92 Londres, Mourir pour Shanghai, 15, 40, 51, 72, 87, 126. 93 Ibid., 99, 102. 94 Rohrer, introduction to Changhaï et le destin de la Chine, 9th ed., 66.

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Notes to pages 113–18

229

 95 Coble, Facing Japan.  96 Viollis, Changhai et le destin de la Chine, 73, 121–32.  97 Viollis, Le Japon et son empire, 1; Jordan, China’s Trial by Fire, 186.  98 Viollis, Le Japon et son empire, 2, 15, 23, 27–33.   99 Ibid., 67–95; description of parade on 95. 100 Viollis, “La jeune armée nippone,” Vendredi, 6 March 1936, front page. 101 Viollis, “Appel à l’opinion publique français pour l’aide de la Chine attaquée,” L’Humanité, 30 October 1937; Viollis, “Conférence d’information avec film sur les événements en Chine,” L’Humanité, 3 November 1937. 102 Viollis, “Le conflit Sino–Japonais,” Cahiers du Cercle Descartes, no. 7 (1938). 103 Bois, “Les grandes enquêtes du Petit Parisien. Sous le masque japonais,” Le Petit Parisien, 11 October 1932. 104 “La Chine en Folie. Shanghai,” Populaire de Nantes, 25 December 1925; Author, “Le livre du jour. La Chine en folie,” Revue française, 17 January 1926; Charles Miske, “Voyages,” Mercure de France, 15 November 1926. These and other reviews can be found in Fonds Londres, 76A S/8, A N. 105 Muhlman, A Political History of Journalism, 19, 22–3. 106 Londres, Mourir pour Shanghai et La Chine en folie, 135–42. 107 Ibid., 180–97. 108 Ibid., 158. 109 Viollis, Tourmente en Afghanistan, 7. Compare to Viollis, “Dans Kaboul delivre Nadar Khan,” Le Petit Parisien, 18 October 1929, 1. 110 Londres, Au bagne, 23; Londres, Terre d’ébène, 3–6. 111 Malraux, introduction to Indochine S.O.S., vii. 112 Muhlman, A Political History of Journalism, 85, 135. 113 Viollis, Indochine S.O.S., 53–4, 123–5, appendix. See also Viollis, Changhai et le destin de la Chine, 73, 85, 122. 114 Viollis, “De Haiphong à Hong-Kong,” Le Petit Parisien, 24 December 1931. 115 Londres, Terre d’ébène and Au bagne. The pattern of self references is less pronounced in the earlier book. 116 Muhlman, A Political History of Journalism, 28–9, 79–82. 117 Ibid., 34–6. 118 Londres, Terre d’ébène, 189–96. 119 For examples of these kinds of racist remarks in Londres, Mourir pour Shanghai, see 18, 47, 82, 84, and 93. For examples in Viollis’s newspaper series, see Le Petit Parisien, 24 and 25 December 1931 and 15 and 28 January 1932. For stereotypes of Asians and Chinese, see Vann,

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Notes to pages 118–23

“The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” 187–205; and for perceptions of Asian men’s bodies as effeminate, see Frader, “Depuis les muscles jusqu’aux nerfs,” 111–44. 120 Viollis, Changhai et le destin de la Chine, 203. 121 Londres, Mourir pour Shanghai, 63. 122 Viollis, “Parmi la foule grouillante de Changhai,” Le Petit Parisien, 6 March 1932. 123 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 201.

Chapter six  1 Leblond, Après l’exotisme de Loti, 61.   2 Drake, “The PCF, the Surrealists, Clarté and the Rif War,” 173–88; Thomas, The French Empire between the Wars, 186.   3 Viollis, “Le problème colonial,” Vendredi, 19 November 1935; Sauret, “Les femmes et le journalisme: Andrée Viollis,” La Française, 2 May 1936, Fonds Bouglé, Articles de presse, Viollis, BHV P.   4 Ageron, “La perception de la puissance française en 1938–1939,” 234–5.   5 O’Reilly, “Jean Dorsenne,” 221–2.   6 Conklin, “Histories of Colonialism,” 305–32; Dirlik, “The Postcolonial Aura,” 328–56.   7 See Rajan and Park, “Postcolonial Feminism/Postcolonialism and Feminism,” 23–52.   8 Bancel and Blanchard, “To Civilize: The Invention of the Native (1918– 1940),” 171–9.  9 Roubaud, Les enfants de Caïn; Roubaud, Démons et déments. 10 Roubaud, Le Petit Parisien, “Le Petit Parisien en Indochine” series, 10 May–11 September 1930; follow-up article in Le Petit Parisien, 19 October 1930; Roubaud, Viet-Nam. 11 Roubaud, “Les interpellations sur l’Indochine au Palais Bourbon,” Le Petit Parisien, 7 June 1930. 12 Van, In the Crossfire, 46–7. 13 Pelletier and Roubaud, Images et réalités colonials; Pelletier and Roubaud, Empire ou colonies; Roubaud, Mograb and La Bourdonnaise in the collection Les grandes figures colonials. La Bourdonnais won the Prix de l’Académie française. 14 Roubaud, Viet Nam, la tragedie indochinoise suivi d’autres écrits sur le colonialism. 15 Regis-Leroi, “Ce qu’Andrée Viollis a vu aux Indes,” Minerva, 26 April 1931; Lévi, Préface to Viollis, L’Inde contre les Anglais, 7.

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Notes to pages 123–6

231

16 Viollis, L’Inde contre les Anglais, 34–5. 17 Viollis, “Epilogue. Le Petit Parisien en Afghanistan,” Le Petit Parisien, 28 October 1929. 18 Viollis, L’Inde contre les Anglais, 266, 269. 19 Amaury, Histoire du Petit Parisien. 20 Thompson, French Indo-china, 407. 21 Viollis, “M. Reynaud en Indochine,” Le Petit Parisien, 21 October 1931; Viollis, “Quatre jours d’enchantement,” Le Petit Parisien, 27 October 1931; Viollis, “M. Paul Reynaud poursuivant son enquête visite l’Annam,” Le Petit Parisien, 6 November 1931; Viollis, “M. Paul Reynaud est à Hanoi,” Le Petit Parisien, 9 November 1931; Viollis,“Visions rapide d’un Tonkin éblouissant et fantomatique,” Le Petit Parisien, 17 November 1931; Viollis, “L’Adieu de M. Reynaud à l’Indochine,” Le Petit Parisien, 20 November 1931. I did not include her dispatches en route. 22 Robequain, L’Indochine française. 23 Monet, Les Jauniers. Histoire vraie. 24 Viollis, “Quelques notes sur l’Indochine,” L’Esprit, December 1933. 25 Mounier, “Pour la vérité en Extrême-Orient,” L’Esprit, January 1934. 26 Viollis, Indochine S.O.S. 27 Thompson, French Indo-china, 406. 28 Cooper, France in Indochina, 95–6; Cooper, “Colonial Humanism in the 1930s,” 189–205. 29 Dorsenne, “M. Renaud va trouver l’Indochine en plein marasme économique,” Le Petit Parisien, 14 October 1931; Dorsenne, “En Indochine, le movement communiste semble momentément enrayé,” Le Petit Parisien, 5 November 1931; Dorsenne, “L’Avenir de l’Indochine,” series in Le Petit Parisien, 17 March–3 August 1932; Dorsenne, Faudra-t-il évacuer l’Indochine? 30 See the review of C’etait le soir des dieux by Edmond Jaloux, Les Nouvelles littéraires, 16 July 1922, Recueil dossiers biographiques Boutiller du Retail, Documentation sur Jean Dorsenne, B NF. The most f­requently reissued novel was Les filles de volupté. 31 Segelan, Essai sur l’exoticisme, 29, 63; Sourieau, “Max Radiguet et les ‘derniers sauvages,’” 675. 32 Daughton, An Empire Divided, 5, 16–18. 33 Cooper, “(En)Gendering Indochina,” 749–59. 34 Thomas, “Albert Sarraut,” 917–55. 35 Daughton, An Empire Divided, 9, 21. 36 Thomas, The French Empire between the Wars, 1–2, 17–18. 37 Persell, The French Colonial Lobby, 1889–1938, 141–58. 38 Thomas, The French Empire between the Wars, 104–18.

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Notes to pages 126–33

39 Donadey, “‘Y’a bon Banania,’” 9–29. 40 L’Exposition nationale coloniale de Marseille and Le Monde colonial ­illustré. L’Exposition Coloniale internationale de 1931. 41 Thomas, The French Empire between the Wars, 118–20. 42 Morton, Hybrid Modernities, 3–6, 71–2. 43 Martin, L’empire triomphant, 417. 44 Gemie, “Loti, Orientalism,” 149–65. 45 Morembert, “Helys, Hortense-Marie Heliard, Mme Carlos Lera, dit Marc,” Dictionaires Letouzey et Ané, dossier biographique, Marc Helys, B NF . See also Helys, Le Jardin fermé. 46 Capy, L’Egypte au coeur du monde, 12, 15. 47 Randau, “La littérature coloniale,” 416–34. 48 Leblond, Après l’exotisme de Loti, 7–23, 56–60; Lorcin, Historicizing Colonial Nostalgia, 93–6. 49 Lorcin, Historicizing Colonial Nostalgia, 51–3, 60–2; Eberhardt, Mes journaliers; Leblond, Après l’exotisme de Loti, 24–5. 50 Boittin, Colonial Metropolis, 187. 51 Lorcin, Historicizing Colonial Nostalgia, 10; Boittin, Colonial Metropolis, 187–93; Fell, “Beyond the Bonhomme Banania,” 224–45. 52 Daughton, An Empire Divided, 19, 29; Thomas, The French Empire between the Wars, 18, 23, 32, 57–63. 53 Lam, Colonialism Experienced, 40–3, 45–8; Roubaud, Viet-Nam, 198–205. 54 Marr, Vietnamese Anticolonialism, 256–9. 55 Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille, 200–27. 56 Roubaud, Viet-Nam, 23–4. 57 Ibid., 9–14. 58 Malraux, The Royal Way. 59 Robson and Yee, Introduction to France and “Indochina,” 3–6; Vann, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” 60 Robson and Yee, Introduction to France and “Indochina,” 5–6. 61 Viollis, Tourment sur l’Afghanistan, 24, 28. 62 Roubaud, Viet-Nam, 60–2. 63 Ibid., 252. 64 Pelletier and Roubaud, Empire ou colonies? 3–29. 65 Ibid., 32–70. 66 Slavin, “The French Left and the Rif War,” 5–32. 67 Roubaud, Mograb, 9–11, 113–14. 68 Ibid., 12–19. 69 Ibid., 20–40, 185–201. 70 Ibid., 122–48.

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Notes to pages 133–8

233

71 Ibid., 167, 250. 72 Grey, “Les livres et la politique, Ce qu’Andrée Viollis a vu en Chine et au Japon,” Minerva, 13 May 1933, Fonds Bouglé, Actualités, 80, dossier Viollis, BHVP. 73 Monet, Les Jauniers. See http://belleindochine.free.fr/LesJauniers.htm for more details. 74 Viollis, Indochine S.O.S., Annexes and Bibliographie. The Bibliothèque Nationale only contains later versions of Ho Chi Minh’s book. 75 Healey, “Andrée Viollis in Indochina,” 26. 76 Viollis, Indochine S.O.S., 123–5. 77 Ibid., 169. 78 Notice about meeting of the Amnesty Committee, L’Humanité, 14 May 1933; “L’Odieuse verdict de Saigon,” L’Humanité, 6 July 1933; “Pour ­sauver l’Indochine!” L’Humanité, 2 February 1936; notice for a meeting “Pour l’amnestie totale,” L’Humanité, 18 February 1936. 79 P.L., “Aujourn’hui. A propos de Mme Andrée Viollis,” no source indicated, dossier V I O, BM D. 80 M.R., “Jean Viollis,” Le Petit Parisien, 20 December 1932, 2. 81 Some short articles datelined Indochina might have been written but not signed by Dorsenne. 82 Dorsenne, “M. Reynaud va trouver l’Indochine en pleine marasme économique,” Le Petit Parisien, 24 October 1931; Dorsenne, “En Indochine, le movement communiste semble momentanement enrayé,” Le Petit Parisien, 4 November 1931. 83 Dorsenne, “L’avenir de l’Indochine,” Le Petit Parisien, 17, 20, 22, and 28 March 1932. 84 Cooper, France in Indochina, 96. 85 Directors, “Histoire de Vendredi,” Vendredi, 22 May 1936. 86 Normand, “Une grande journaliste: Andrée Viollis,” Nouvelles littéraires, 1929, dossier VI O, BM D. 87 Viollis, Seule en Russie; Viollis, Tourmente sur l’Afghanistan, 24. 88 Viollis, L’Inde contre les anglais, 77–91, 266–9. 89 Viollis, “Le Miracle du Peuple Espagnol,” Vendredi, 1 September 1936. On the struggle to reconcile pacifism and antifascism, see “A la conférence internationale de la jeunesse, Andrée Viollis parle du fascisme et de la guerre,” L’Oeuvre, 14 April 1935, dossier V IO, B MD. 90 Viollis, Alsace et Lorraine au-dessus des passions. See especially the lettre-­ préface by the president of France, R. Poincaré. 91 Viollis, Notre Tunisie. On Italian actions in the Ethiopian war, see A V , “Attentat contre la paix,” Vendredi, 20 December 1935.

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Notes to pages 139–45

 92 Viollis, Indochine S.O.S., 112–13.   93 Ibid., 166.   94 Ha, “French Women and the Empire,” 107–17.  95 Cooper, France in Indochina, 100–3.  96 Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire, 24, 32.  97 Viollis, Indochine S.O.S., 56.   98 Ibid., 115.   99 Ibid., 57. 100 Ibid., 59–60. 101 Ibid., 54. 102 “Le sang doit cesser de couler en Indochine,” Le Front National, 14 November 1945; Viollis, “Désillusion provisoire.” 103 Malraux, preface to Indochine S.O.S.

C h a p t e r se ve n   1 Cartoon, 11AR 697, AN .   2 Maréchal, Geneviève Tabouis, 11–12, 27.    3 Books related to Tabouis’s journalism published before the 1950s were Albion perfide ou loyal. De la guerre de cent ans á nos jours [trans. Perfidious Albion-entente cordial]; Chantage à la guerre [trans. Blackmail or War]; Ils l’ont appelée Cassandre [trans. They Called Me Cassandra]; and The Sixth Column: Inside the Nazi-Occupied Countries.   4 Tabouis, “L’Oeuvre en U RS S ,” L’Oeuvre, 16–23 September 1933.   5 Tabouis, Vingt ans de suspense diplomatique, 158.    6 Jeanneney, “Sur la venalité du journalism français,” 717–38.   7 Maréchal, Geneviève Tabouis, 97.    8 Tabouis, “En marge de l’insurrecion Espagnole,” L’Oeuvre, 1 August 1936; Tabouis, “Le duce voulait faire fusiller ses officiers vaincus à Guadalajar,” L’Oeuvre, 4 April 1937; Tabouis, “L’Europe à la fièvre,” L’Oeuvre, 17 March 1938; and a notice about one of Tabouis’s talks in L’Oeuvre, 22 September 1938.    9 Tabouis columns on Dernières Nouvelles pages of L’Oeuvre, 4–15 August 1936.   10 Tabouis, “L’opinion mondiale s’indigne devant la sauvage destruction de Guernica,” on front page of L’Oeuvre, 30 April 1937.   11 “Grace á la génerosité de nos lecteurs …” L’Oeuvre, 20 January 1939.   12 According to Maréchal, Geneviève Tabouis, 57–9, these are her three most significant contributions.

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Notes to pages 146–9

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13 Tabouis published many articles in the New Republic, 1938–40, and notably “Will France Abandon Democracy?” in The Virginia Quarterly Review 15, no. 4 (1939). The two books on foreign policy were Perfidious Albionentente cordial, and Blackmail or War, both published in 1938. 14 Tabouis famille dossier, information dated April 1934, GT3, A PP. 15 Tabouis, Jules Cambon par l’un des siens; The Life of Jules Cambon. 16 Déjeuner de la Presse Diplomatique Française, 23 April 1970, Tabouis Associations, dossier on Discours de G. Tabouis, 27A R /251, A N. 17 Tabouis, Ils l’ont appelée Cassandre, 20, 43. 18 Coupures de presse, articles G. Tabouis, Le Petit Marseillais and La Gironde, 27AR/89, AN . 19 Tabouis, Ils l’ont appelée Cassandre, 17–18. 20 Tabouis, Le Pharaon Tout Ank Amon [trans. The Private Life of Tutankhamen]; Nabuchodonosor et le triomphe de Babylone [trans. Nebuchadnezzar]; Salomon, roi d’Israel [trans. The Private Life of Solomon]. The first two were also translated into Arabic. 21 See the reviews by Mme G.R. in the Revue des deux mondes, n.d.; and Loiseau, in Le Correspondent, 25 September 1928, Coupures de presse, Tabouis, Recueil, Boutillier du Retail, BNF. 22 Normand, “Les femmes savants: Une historienne de Tout-Ank-Amen,” Les Nouvelles littéraires, 13 October 1928; Normand, “En France et dehors de France,” Les Nouvelles littéraires, 22 June 1929. 23 Tabouis, “Les cultures spécialisées du Val de Loire”; Sybaris: Les Grecs en Italie. 24 Tabouis, Ils l’ont appelée Cassandre, 176. 25 Ibid., 120–2. 26 Ibid., 135–44, 155. See also Tabouis, “Impressions de Genève” columns, La Gironde, 15 March 1933 and 24 November 1932. 27 Paul Allard, “Le double jeu de Partinax et de Tabouis la voyante agents de l’Angleterre,” no newspaper or date, Coupures de presse, articles G. Tabouis, dossier La Petite Gironde (1932), 27A R /89, A N. 28 Tabouis, Ils l’ont apellée Cassandre, 116–7. 29 David, “Pour ceux qui l’ont entendue à la Salle de l’Institut, Une femme courageuse: Geneviève Tabouis,” La France du Centre, 11 October 1939, dossier Autres Journaux, 1939–1940, 27A R /89, A N. 30 “Souvenirs diplomatiques,” Notre Europe, 14 (1952): 57–8 and frontpage articles on 15 and 17 March 1938. 31 Tabouis’s articles in “Dernières Nouvelles,” L’Oeuvre, 15, 18, 24, and 25 March 1938.

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Notes to pages 149–55

32 Jacob article in L’Oeuvre, 27 July 1936; Gosset articles L’Oeuvre, 2 January 1935 and 8 April 1937, and Decarie articles L’Oeuvre, 11 April 1937, 22 March 1938, and 28 March 1938. 33 Tabouis, Ils l’ont appelée Cassandre, 46, 73–4. 34 Kershaw, “Women’s Writing,” 58. 35 “Le Congrès de l’Union Nationale pour le suffrage des femmes,” Le Petit Marseilles, 29 January 1933. 36 Tabouis, “Le féminisme dans l’Egypt ancienne,” Les Nouvelles littéraires, 25 May 1929, 8. 37 Tabouis, Ils l’ont appelée Cassandre, 28, 110. 38 Davison, “Diplomatic Reporting,” 138–46. 39 Discours 50 ans de l’Association de la Presse diplomatique française, Tabouis Associations, Dossiers on Statuts, Membership, and Discours de G. Tabouis, 27AR/251, AN . 40 Société des gens de letters, 27AR/251, AN . 41 Maréchal, Geneviève Tabouis, 22–4. 42 Tabouis, “Twenty Years of Journalism,” 1942, 27A R /92, A N; Tabouis, “Souvenirs de trente ans de journalism,” Les Conférences du Cénacle (25 July 1952), 27AR/ 93, AN . 43 Tabouis, Ils l’ont appelée Cassandre, 124–6. 44 Tabouis, “Le bilan des deux journées genevoises,” L’Oeuvre, 12 April 1934, 3. 45 Tabouis, “Impressions de Genève” column, Le Petit Marseillais, 22 February 1933. 46 “L’Affaire Geneviève Tabouis ou les Affaires étrangères, l’Agence Havas et les journalists,” Bulletin du Syndicat des Journalistes, no date listed, dossiers biographiques, Tabouis, Recueil, B NF. 47 “Twenty Years of Journalism,” Tabouis Conférences, 27A R /92, A N. 48 Tabouis, Ils l’ont appelée Cassandre, 210. 49 Ibid., 128. 50 Ibid., 121, 131–5. 51 Tabouis, front-page articles, L’Oeuvre, 23–30 April 1933. 52 Tabouis, front-page articles, L’Oeuvre, 2 and 4 May 1933. 53 Tabouis, front-page articles, L’Oeuvre, 23 April 1933. See her reporting of the same visit in La Gironde, 29 April 1933. 54 Tabouis, Grandeurs et servitudes américaines, 26, 186. 55 Tabouis, La femme dans l’histoire. 56 Tabouis, L’Oeuvre, 2, 4, 7, 11, and 12 July 1933, front and “Dernières Nouvelles” page, 3. 57 Tabouis, The Life of Jules Cambon.

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58 Cambon, “The Permanent Bases of French Foreign Policy,” 173–85. 59 Tabouis, Perfidious Albion-entente cordiale, 1–93, 271–310. 60 Compare reviews by Normand in Les Nouvelles littéraires, 21 January 1939 and in Le Temps, 31 December 1938 to reviews by George Peel in International Affairs 18, no. 4 (July–August 1939): 562; and G.L. Vershoyle, “Blackmail or War” in International Affairs 17, no. 4 (1 July 1938): 573–4. 61 Tabouis, “Le President Roosevelt declare la paix au monde,” L’Oeuvre, 4 January 1938; Tabouis, “Le President Roosevelt déclare la paix au monde,” L’Oeuvre, 2 February 1939; Tabouis, “Après la déclaration Roousevelt,” L’Oeuvre, 3 February 1939. 62 Tabouis, “Hitler’s Danzig Plans,” The New Republic, 23 August 1939, dossier Autres Journaux, 1939–1940, 27A R /89, A N. 63 Soucey, “French Press Reactions,” 21–38. 64 Tabouis, “Dernìeres Nouvelles,” L’Oeuvre, 10 May 1934. 65 Tabouis, “M. Pierre Laval partira ce soir pour Rome,” L’Oeuvre, 3 January 1935; Tabouis, “M. Pierre Laval a été accueilli a Rome par une foule enthousiaste,” L’Oeuvre, 5 January 1935; Tabouis, “Les accords Franco-Italiens ont été signes hier,” L’Oeuvre, 8 January 1935. 66 Tabouis, “Dernières Nouvelles,” L’Oeuvre, 5 March; “Tunisie! Tunisie!” front-page articles running in L’Oeuvre, 30 November and 1 December 1938. 67 Tabouis, “La question juive a été posee devant l’Assemblée de Genève,” L’Oeuvre, 4 October 1933; Tabouis, “Les négociations de Genève sur le désarmement,” L’Oeuvre, 11 October 1933; Tabouis, “L’Allemagne se retire de la S.D.N. et de la Conférence du Désarmenment,” L’Oeuvre, 15 October 1933; Tabouis, “La conférence du désarmement ajournée au 4 decembre,” L’Oeuvre, 19 October 1933. 68 Tabouis, “Dernières Nouvelles” entries in L’Oeuvre, 16 January–2 February 1934, 3–14 May, and 13–17 June 1934. 69 Tabouis, “Hitler’s Danzig Plans,” The New Republic, 23 August 1939. To make some sense of the story, see Steiner, The Triumph of the Dark, 690–2, 732–3, 839–44, 691. 70 Tabouis, “À l’Assemblée de Genève,” L’Oeuvre, 28 September 1933; Tabouis, “Week-end genèvoisl! Dans l’attent du programme hitlérien, des nouvelles d’Autriche et d’Angleterre,” L’Oeuvre, 1 October 1933. 71 Tabouis, “Les troupes allemandes ont pénétrer en Autriche,” L’Oeuvre, 12 March 1938; Tabouis, “Adolph Hitler à Vienne” articles on 12 and 13 March 1938 and other of her front-page articles on Austria on 14 and 15 March 1938.

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Notes to pages 157–64

72 Tabouis, “Twenty Years of Journalism,” Tabouis Conferences, 27AR/92, AN. 73 Information dated 15 and 16 January, 3 March, 18 and 16 May, and 19 ­November 1938, and 15 February 1939, Tabouis famille dossier, GT, APP. 74 Moran, “La terreur hitlérienne et les femmes,” Le Peuple, 29 June 1934; Moran, “Comment s’est deroule le procès des incendiaires du Reichstag,” Le Peuple, 23 July 1934; Moran, “Dans la Troisieme Reich, L’enfer des camps de concentration,” Le Peuple, 12 November 1934. 75 Viollis, “Une enquête du Petit Parisien, Les conditions de plebiscite Sarrois,” Le Petit Parisien, 13 and 15 November 1934; Viollis, “Les Conclusions d’une conférence,” Vendredi, 6 December 1935. 76 Viollis, series on “Coeur d’Europe,” Ce Soir, 2–12 May 1938. 77 Tabouis, “Pas de guerre à la moment,” L’Oeuvre, 3 January 1939. 78 Tabouis, “Faut-il s’ attend comme nous l’avons fait prévoir un prochaine offensive germano-italien,” L’Oeuvre, 9 February 1939, but see also 18 March 1939. 79 See Tabouis’s articles, L’Oeuvre, 1–22 October 1940. 80 “Le derniers plans d’Hitler,” Speech by Tabouis to Conférence Ambassadeurs, 13 April 1940, 27AR/92, A N. 81 Tabouis, “Son ultime allié!” Marianne Magazine, 24 November 1939; Tabouis, “Deux mots interdits par Hitler,” France Magazine, 2 January 1940; Tabouis, “Les sept Saint-Sylestre du Fuhrer,” Marianne, 3 January 1940, 27A R /92, AN ; Tabouis, “Un article inédit de Geneviève Tabouis,” France européene, 20 January 1942, dossier Tabouis, Recueil biographique, BN F. 82 Tabouis, Ils l’ont appelée Cassandre, 12–15. 83 Tabouis, Grandeurs et servitudes américaines, 5, 27–8. 84 New York Times, 8 August 1940, 13; Washington Post, 5 September 1940; Washington Post, 11 and 22 March 1941, 3. 85 Tabouis, Grandeurs et servitudes américaines, 136–41. 86 “Geneviève Tabouis confondue par l’agence soviétique Tass,” Pariser Zeitung, 18 February 1944, Fonds Tabouis, 11A R /697, A N. 87 Nettleback, “L’Édition française à New York,” 224.

Chapter eight  1 Lévèque, Les journalistes sociaux, 60–1.   2 For example, Vernet, “Après une douloureuse tragédie: Pour la libération du travail,” Le Peuple, 23 July 1928.

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Notes to pages 164–7

239

  3 Sancery, “La Presse pourrie aux ordres des ‘privilégiés’ acclame la “grande pénitence,” L’Information Sociale, 25 July 1933. See also Manevy, Histoire de la presse, 323–5.   4 Dell, “Festival and Revolution,” 599–631.   5 Bodin, “La réforme de l’Enseignement,” L’Humanité, 10 November 1921; Vernet, “Tribune féminin: La Grande injustice,” “Libres Opinions. Pour l’École unique,” Le Peuple, 9 January 1928; Jouenne, “Les Problèmes de l’éducation. Grave question,” Le Peuple, 27 December 1929, Fonds Bouglé, Articles de presse, Thémes, boite 5, B HV P.   6 Mole, “L’égalité dans la diversité,” 22–33; Garnier, “Les fondateurs de l’école unique,” 35–45; Gutierrez, “Les premières années du Groupe Français d’Éducation Nouvelle,” 27–39.   7 Jouenne, “Tribune Féminin. Éducation maternelle,” Le Peuple, 1 April 1925. On Jouenne, see “Figures et portraits de femmes, Mme Alice Jouenne, chef de cabinet,” Le Mouvement féministe, 2 December 1936, www.e-periodica.ch/cntmng?var=true&pid=emi-001:1936:24::376.   8 Bodin, “Le problème de l’éducation,” La Voix des Femmes, 8 July 1920; Suzanne Normand, “L’Eternelle responsable,” La Française, 29 November 1930; Sandy, “La Tribune de Minerva. Les Mères contre les monstres,” Minerva, 23 May 1933; Dudit, “Dans l’Enfer des mines … lorsque des enfants de six ans travaillaient douze heures par jour,” Minerva, 12 September 1937. On political papers on this subject, see Read, The Republic of Men, 135–40.  9 Manevy, Histoire de la presse, 228–9. 10 “Les grandes enquêtes du Quotidien: Les enfants devant les juges,” Le Quotidien, June–July 1926; also in Fonds Bouglé, Coupeurs de presse, Articles de journaux Thèmes enfants, boîte 5, B HV P. 11 Boissel, “Les enfants de Caïn, Louis Roubaud,” 7–10. 12 La Mazière, “Notes féminists. La dure loi des patronages,” L’Ère Nouvelle, 30 March 1925, 1. 13 La Mazière, “Nos enquêtes. L’enfance malheureuse,” L’Ère Nouvelle, 29 July 1925, 1. 14 La Mazière, “L’enquête de ‘L’Ère nouvelle,’ L’enfance malheureuse,” L’Ère Nouvelle, 4 August 1925, 1. 15 La Mazière, “L’enquête de ‘L’Ère nouvelle,’ Le pouvoir absolu des patronages,” L’Ère Nouvelle, 25 August 1925, 1. 16 La Mazière, “Nos chroniques, L’enfance malheureuse,” La Volonté, 17 December 1925. 17 Dubasque, “Le Quotidien (1921–1936),” 12.

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Notes to pages 167–70

18 La Mazière, Les épaves du front, extract from La Revue de Paris, 1 December 1917. 19 L’Humanité, 24, 26, and 29 November 1919, front-page notices of the S F I O slate. 20 Gaston Derys, “Candidates d’hier et d’aujourd’hui,” accessed 11 November 2017, http://la-brochure.over-blog.com/article-­temoignagesur-le-droit-de-vote-des-femmes-119271577.html. The site credits Le Figaro, 10 May 1924, but I was unable to find the article in any of that month’s issues. 21 La Mazière, Sauvons les bébés, extract from the Bulletin de L’union ­française pour le suffrage des femmes. 22 See segments of the series titled “Enfants malheureux,” L’Humanité, 27 December 1936, 20, 23, 24, 30, and 31 January, 7, 9, 25, and 27 February 1937. 23 Gosset, “Eysses [bagnes de gosses] a reçu la visite de M. Marc Rucart,” L’Oeuvre, 10 April 1937. 24 Annuaire de la presse, 1936, 724. 25 Bellanger et al., Histoire générale de la presse, 3:583. 26 Bonnard, “L’Enfer des tissues” on “La Page Sociale” of Le Peuple, 22 January 1924, 4. 27 For examples of the broader coverage of women’s issues in “La femme et le foyer” page of Le Populaire, see “Darlès, “Le sort des femmes” in the 8 June 1930 issue; Darlès, “Le vote des femmes,” in the 22 June 1930 issue, and Darlès, “Une réponse” (on suffrage) in the 13 July 1930 issue. 28 Read, The Republic of Men, 42–3. 29 See, for example, Jouenne, “Tribune Féminin” column on “Suffrage universal,” Le Peuple, 7 July 1924, 4; and Prévost,“Rénovation sociale,” Le Peuple, 15 September 1924, 6. 30 Clar, “Besogne de guerre,” Bonnet Rouge, 12 February 1916, dossier Clar, B MD . 31 “Fanny Clar,” post by Collend, Calendrier de l’Avent du domaine public, accessed 12 November 2017, www.aventdudomainepublic.org/clar. 32 Clar, “La joie,” Le Populaire, 24 April 1922; Clar, “L’horloger qui ‘écouta les horloges,’” Le Quotidien, 20 September 1924; Clar, “Prière à l’ascensionniste,” L’Ère nouvelle, 2 February 1925, and Clar, “En Marge” columns in L’Ère nouvelle, 20 January 1926 and 25 January 1927. 33 Clar, Les trois souhaits de Babette et Les trois biens du pauvre homme; La maison des sept compagnons; Vitivit et sa nichée. Histoire d’une famille de pinsons; L’enfant sans larmes; La Colombe blessée; Sans rimes … non sans raisons; L’île aux épouvantails; and Dix-sept et un.

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Notes to pages 170–2

241

34 “Fanny Clar n’est plus,” L’Oeuvre, 25 February 1944; “Fanny Clar est morte,” France Socialiste, 25 February 1944; Atelier, 4 March 1944, all in Receuil bibliographique, Boutillier de Retail, Documentation sur Fanny Clar, BN F. 35 Clar, “Maintenant et ensuite,” Le Populaire, 22 May 1919, 3. 36 Clar, “Feuilles au vent” column subtitled “Vainqueurs, vaincu,” Le Populaire, 17 April 1919, 3. On alcoholism and the First World War see Kudlick, “Fighting the Internal and External Enemies,” 127–58. 37 Clar, “La démobilisation des usines,” Le Populaire, 28 December 1918, 1. See also chapter 2 in this volume. 38 See the Cahiers columns of 24 May 1937 and 28 May 1938 in Le Peuple. 39 Clar, Le Peuple, 20 February, 14 March, 11 July and 18 August 1932, and 22 and 29 May 1934; Clar, L’appel de l’homme de l’usine, du chantier, manifeste. 40 Clar, “Les Cahiers des Gens du Travail,” columns in Le Peuple, 3 October 1929, 28 July 1931, 4 December 1932, and 29 August 1933. An article very similar to 4 December 1932 column appeared as “La femme et la vie” in L’Ère nouvelle, 1 August 1933. 41 Dessertine and Faure, Combattre la tuberculose, 123–38. 42 Clar, “La honte des cités,” Le Peuple, 20 March 1928; Clar, “Un mal social. Defends-toi et defends les tiens,” Le Peuple, 10 April 1928; Clar, “Un mal social, L’éducation de l’égoisme,” Le Peuple, April 1928; Clar, “Sauver l’enfant, le preserver plutôt,” Le Peuple, 13 May 1928; Clar, “La lutte contre la tuberculose,” Le Peuple, 28 May 1928. 43 Greene, “Children in Glass Houses.” 44 Articles on 11 July and 6 August 1932, 7 April 1934 and “Tristes dimanches,” Le Peuple, 29 April–6 May 1939. 45 Alliance d’hygiène sociale, Congrès de Paris, L’hygiène sociale par l’enseignement et l’éducation, 22–3; Congrès des Associations d’hygìène sociale tenu au Musée Social, La rôle des Associations d’Hygiène sociale, 12-21; and De Luca Barrusse, Population en danger! 119–23, 142–3. 46 See Alliance d’Hygène sociale, Congrès de Clermont-Ferrrande, 1921, 10; Alliance d’Hygène sociale, Congrès de Rouen, 1922, 8, 132, 150, 153; Alliance d’Hygène sociale, Congrès de Strasbourg, 1923, 11–12; Alliance d’hygiène sociale, Congrès des Associations d’hygìène sociale tenu au Musée Social, La rôle des Associations d’Hygiène sociale, 14–16, 21–2. 47 Office Nationale d’Hygiène sociale, Réperatoire bibliographique … du documentation 1930–1931; Office Nationale d’Hygiène sociale, Réperatoire biliographique … 1935. 48 L’Hygiène par exemple, 1923–41.

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Notes to pages 172–4

49 Schneider, “Héredité, sang et immigration,” 104–17; Schneider, “The Eugenics Movement in France,” 69–109. 50 Professeur Pinard, “L’eugenétique,” 293–6. 51 Clar, “Chronique d’une villageoise, La servante promise,” Le Peuple, 31 May 1926; Clar, “Les Cahiers des Gens du Travail. Quand dimanche est fini …,” Le Peuple, 24 July 1929. 52 Rosental, “Eugenics and Social Security,” 454. 53 “Le martyrologie des enfants assistés: Comment s’opere le système de placement,” Le Peuple, 18 October 1924; “Les rapports officiels” Le Peuple, 1 December 1924; “Les rapports non officiels,” Le Peuple, 6 December 1924; “Ma documentation,” Le Peuple, 8 December 1924. 54 “Le martyrologie …, La comédie de l’inspection,” Le Peuple, 21 October 1924. 55 Fuchs, Abandoned Children. 56 Wikipedia, s.v. “L’Atalante,” last modified 31 October 2017, 11:07, https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/L’Atalante_(film). 57 “L’agent de liaison,” Le Peuple, 15 April 1925; “Libres opinions: L’éducation de la liberté,” Le Peuple, 23 September 1925. 58 “Les cahiers des gens du travail” columns subtitled “Hommes, usines, chantiers,” Le Peuple, 20 February 1932; “Ensuite des distractions,” Le Peuple, 2 April 1932; “Beaumarchais au village,” Le Peuple, 28 April 1932; and “Musique, joie et besoin,” Le Peuple, 12 October 1932. 59 “Joies tardives” series, Le Peuple, 4–20 September 1937. 60 Clar, “Une nouvelle enquête du peuple: Mangeront-ils demain?” Le Peuple, 29 and 31 January, 1 and 2 February 1938. 61 Clar, “Les fêtes forains” series in Le Peuple, 16–22 December 1938. 62 Clar, La ronde de la maison; Clar, “Le chemin abrupt,” Le Peuple, 8 January 1927. 63 In the “Tribune Féminin” column: Jouhaux, “La détresse des filles-mères,” Le Peuple, 27 October 1924; Fauchère, “L’aide aux tout petits,” Le Peuple, 1 April 1925; Jouhaix, “Les Maisons maternelles, Comment combattre efficacement l’avortement,” Le Peuple, 25 September 1925; Jouhaix, “Les Problèmes de l’éducation,” Le Peuple, 27 December 1929. 64 Moran, “Pour tuer l’ennui, Mademoiselle, rien de mieux que les œuvres,” Le Quotidien, 7 February 1923; Moran, “En déniant aux femmes l’aptitude au vote, le Sénat a pris une position indéfendable,” La Lumière, 16 September 1922, Articles de Presse, Auteurs, boîte 2, Denise Moran, Fonds Bouglé, BHVP. 65 Moran, Tchad; Gide, Voyage au Congo; Gide, Le retour de Tchad. 66 See the short bio in Lydon, “The Unraveling of a Neglected Source,” 562–4.

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Notes to pages 174–8

243

67 Boittin, Colonial Metropolis, 203–7. 68 Moran, “Au phare de France: Les aveugles de guerre …,” Le Journal, 26 December 1925; Moran, “Il y a 12,000 oeuvres de bienfaisance à Paris et l’on peut y mourir de faim,” Le Quotidien, 19 April 1926. All can be found in dossier Moran, BM D. 69 Moran, “Pour les femmes” column titled “Toto, fils unique,” Le Quotidien, n.d. in dossier Moran, BM D. 70 Moran, “Ce qu’est en Espagnel’anarcho-syndicalisme?” L’Oeuvre, 21 April 1936. 71 Both articles were entitled “Faut-il légaliser l’avortement?” La Lumière, 22 and 29 July 1933. Circulation figure from Annuaire de la Presse, 1936, 704. 72 Moran, “Femmes révolutionnaires,” Le Peuple, 4 March–2 April 1934. 73 Moran, “Les Enquêtes du Peuple: Le travail féminin et la crise,” Le Peuple, 30 January–26 February 1934. 74 Moran, “Un budget et quelques salaires,” Le Peuple, 30 January 1934. 75 Moran, “La grande misère des quartiers ouvriers,” series in Le Peuple, 9–30 April 1934. 76 Moran, “Les Enquêtes … I: Des foyers ou rien ne cuit,” Le Peuple, 9 April 1934. 77 Moran, “Les Enquêtes … II,” Le Peuple, 26 April 1934. 78 Moran, “La grande misère des petits retraites,” Le Peuple, 3–12 April 1934; quote on 12 April 1934. 79 Boittin, Colonial Metropolis, 101–2, 202–3, 206; Fonds Bouglé, Articles de presse, Auteurs, boite 2, dossier Moran, B HV P. 80 Letter from Directeur des Renseignements Généraux to Prefect of Police, 12 February 1936, dossier journalistes politiques, 1914–1939, B A 2125, APP. 81 Moran, Deux missions internationals. 82 Lydon, “The Unraveling of a Neglected Source,” 562–4. 83 Paligot, Races, racism et antiracism, 19–22, 136–46; Jahoda, “IntraEuropean Racism,” 37–56. 84 Larbiou, “René Martial, 1873–1955,” 98–120. 85 Ferré, Autour du racisme, 1. See also Ferré, Le racisme et la question juive. 86 Darbois, “Les mythes politiques,” Le Nouvel age, 12 January 1938, Fonds Bouglé, Articles de presse, Auteurs, boîte 1, dossier Anne Darbois, B HV P; Darbois, Pourquoi j’ai quitté “Nouvel age.” 87 X X X , Le racisme Hitlérien. 88 Clar, “Libres opinions: La civilisation et les races dites inférieures, ” Le Peuple, 20 July 1925.

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Notes to pages 179–86

89 See Folléas, Putain d’Afrique!, 51; Dedet and Petr, “Le voyageur en Afrique,” 323–36. 90 Moran, “Les Enquêtes du Peuple: La détresse du Tchad,” 1 to 8, Le Peuple, 4–15 December 1933; quotes from the first and eighth segments. 91 Moran, Tchad, 9–11, 43–4. 92 Ibid., 59. 93 Ibid., 304–6. 94 Moran, Noirs et blancs, 1. 95 Lydon, “The Unraveling of a Neglected Source,” 567–8. 96 Clark, Onions Are My Husband. For its reception, see Robertson’s review in the Journal of African History 37, no. 3 (1996): 520–1.

Chapter nine  1 Harp, Desperately Seeking Women Readers.   2 Lévêque, Les journalistes sociaux, 61.   3 Green, “Gender, Fascism and the Croix de Feu,” 229–39.   4 Manevy, Histoire de la presse, 223.   5 Mesch, Having It All in the Belle Epoque; Stewart, Dressing Modern Frenchwomen.   6 Cynthia White used the same typology of women’s, and fashion magazines in her path-breaking study, Women’s Magazines 1693–1968, 82, 85.   7 L’Annuaire de la presse française, 1930, section on fashion magazines. Several of these magazines were distributed outside of France.   8 Figures from the women’s, fashion, and society magazine sections of L’Annuaire de la presse française, 1920–39, and analysis of them in Dubois, “La presse féminine.”   9 The following section draws heavily on my book, Dressing Modern Frenchwomen, 59–65. 10 Françoise, “Quelques opinions féminines”; Vauglin, “Quels journaux choisir?” 11 Department stores, which sold a lot of women’s and children’s wear, took out full- or half-page ads that remained on the back pages. 12 L’Annuaire de la presse française, 1924; Bonvoisin and Maignien, La Presse féminine, 19. 13 See “Madame, votre plus grand désir est d’être conseillée,” Vogue, 1 March 1923. 14 In 1933, Comtesse Riguidi wrote a “Chroniquette” for L’Oeuvre. One of her two books on style was L’Epoque. Les moeurs. Les modes. Le style.

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Notes to pages 186–94

245

15 On synthetic personalization, see McLoughlin, The Language of Magazines, 68–73. 16 Annuaire de la presse française, 1939, 624. 17 It is possible that one or two of the women’s columnists who did not sign their names, and could not be identified, later assumed other duties under their own names. 18 See the articles on filles-mères in the Fonds Bouglé, Articles de presse, Thèmes, boîte 5, BHVP. See also Misme, “Carnet d’une féministe, maternité libre,” L’Oeuvre, 27 September 1923. Minerva also reported regularly on the situation of single mothers and their children. 19 Read, The Republic of Men, 145–70. 20 Annuaire de la presse française, 1923. 21 Arnold, Fashion, Desire and Anxiety, xiii–xiv. 22 Camille Duguet went on to pen the column “Visions élégants” in Chiffons from 1919 to 1932 and the “Entre Nous” column in La Mode Illustrée in 1926–27. 23 She initialed R. on “Entre Nous.” 24 In the Annuaire de la presse, 1939, list of pseudonyms, about a dozen noblewomen wrote under pseudonyms, and dozens of others used familial titles such as cousin or evocative terms such as Ego for their byline. Several signed masculine names or non-gender-specific names. 25 Rosine, Le Figaro, 2 March 1928. 26 Rosine, Le Figaro, 11 May 1920 and 18 March 1925. 27 Rosine, Le Figaro, 16 January 1929. 28 Rosine, Le Figaro, 12 September 1923 (plugging Amy Linker) and 23 December 1925 (plugging Dorat). 29 Rosine, Le Figaro, 16 November 1925–27 January 1928. 30 Rosine, Le Figaro, 20 November 1930 and 12 October 1933. 31 Stewart, Dressing Modern Frenchwomen, 60; Sparke, “Interior Decoration and Haute Couture,” 101–7. 32 Annuaire de la presse française, 1925, pages not recorded; Annuaire de la presse française, 1930, 678, 697. 33 “Pour Vous, Madame,” L’Intransigéant, 9 and 16 January 1924. 34 “Pour Vous, Madame,” L’Intransigéant, 23 January 1921. 35 “Pour Vous, Madame,” L’Intransigéant, 15 January, 2 March 1925, and 12 January 1927. 36 “Pour Vous, Madame,” L’Intransigéant, 12 January 1927. 37 “Pour Vous, Madame,” L’Intransigéant, 5 January, 8 February, 25 May, and 8 June 1919.

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Notes to pages 195–7

38 “Pour Vous, Madame,” L’Intransigéant, 22 February, 10 August 1919, and 18 January 1920. 39 “Pour Vous, Madame,” L’Intransigéant, 17 February and 21 March 1920. 40 “Pour Vous, Madame,” L’Intransigéant, 16 May and 28 November 1920. 41 Chaumont, “Quand les femmes veulent, Les enfants sans père,” L’Intransigeant, 17 August 1931. 42 Bard, Les filles de Marianne, 421. The novels are La vie ardent and Un mari modern. 43 Front material of Revue officielle des forces féminines françaises, no. 24 (March 1933). 44 Kohn-Enriquez, “De la régime matrimonial,” Revue officielle des forces féminines françaises, no. 24 (March 1933): 10; Chaumont, “Signature,” Revue officielle des forces féminines françaises, no. 24 (March 1933): 18. 45 Garden, “La femme au foyer,” Revue officielle des forces féminines françaises, no. 110 (December 1938); and short obituary of Chaumont in Revue officielle des forces féminines françaises, no. 114 (April 1939). 46 Bard, Les filles de Marianne, 271. 47 L’Union nationale des femmes: Défense des intérêts féminins, familiaux et professionnels, Revue des électrices, BMD. 48 Bellanger et al., Histoire générale de la presse, 3:535. 49 Les portes sont murées and Cinq personnes sans alibi. On the prize, see http://www.academie-francaise.fr/prix-dacademie, 1953. 50 Chandet, “Paris vaut bien une robe,” “La femme de 1937,” and “Croisade en faveur de l’élégance,” “La femme de 1937,” L’Epoque, 19 and 27 August 1937. 51 Chandet, “Cocktail de la laine,” “La femme de 1938,” L’Epoque, 4 May 1938. 52 Chandet, “Mode snobisme et politique,” “La femme de 1938,” L’Epoque, 26 February 1938. 53 Chandet, “La femme de 1937,” subtitled “L’art de voyager,” L’Epoque, n.d., Fonds Bouglé, Articles de presse, Auteurs, boite 1, B HV P. 54 Chandet, “Jeune femme d’aujourd’hui,” “La femme de 1937,” L’Epoque, 5 September 1937. 55 Chandet, ““L’instinct maternel,” “La femme de 1937,” L’Epoque, 3 September 1937. 56 Chandet, “La Maison prend ses quartiers d’automne,” “La femme de 1937,” and “De la Rivière au court bouillon,” “La femme de 1937,” L’Epoque, 11 August and 4 September 1937. 57 Chandet and Desternes, Cuisine d’urgence and Cuisine sans frontiers.

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Notes to pages 197–9

247

58 Chandet, “Au Congrès de la femme au foyer,” “La femme de 1939,” L’Epoque, 4 July 1939. 59 Chandet, “La profession d’infirmière,” “La femme de 1938,” and “Carrières féminines,” L’Epoque, 24 February and 28 August 1938; Chandet, “Sport et journalisme,” “La femme de 1938,” L’Epoque, 6 September 1939. 60 Chandet, “Service civil feminin,” “La femme de 1938,” L’Epoque, 27 February 1938; Chandet, “Une soirée féminine international,” “La femme de 1938,” L’Epoque, 18 March 1938. 61 “Femmes de 1939 à Versailles” and “La Réforme des regimes matrimoniaux,” L’Epoque, 6 April 1939 (on the domestic politics page) and 15 June 1939. 62 She signed the petition for peace in “La bataille des idees. Pour la paix,” L’Ère nouvelle, 9 July 1925. 63 Chandet, “L’office du Niger,” “La femme de 1937,” L’Epoque, n.d., Fonds Bouglé, Articles de presse, auteurs, boîte 1, B HV P; Chandet, “Quelques nouvelles d’extrême orient,” “La femme de 1939,” L’Epoque, 29 April 1939. 64 Chandet, “La propagande française,” “La femme de 1939,” L’Epoque, 4 April 1939; and “Les chauffeuses et des chemises de la défense nationale,”“La femme de 1939,” L’Epoque, 8 April 1939. 65 Chandet, “Dans la cantine de la gare de Nancy,” “La femme de 1939,” and “L’Oeuvre immense accomplie par l’Union des Femmes de France,” “Les femmes et la guerre,” L’Epoque, 23 and 29 October 1939. 66 Chandet, “La femme de 1939,” subtitled “Ils veulent de vos nouvelles,” L’Epoque, 25 October 1939; Chandet, “La femme de 1939,” subtitled “Pensons à nos fillettes,” L’Epoque, 27 October 1939.

C o nc l us i o n  1 Mitchell, Nazi Paris, 30, 122–3.

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272 Bibliography – Le pharaon Tout Ank Amon. Paris: Éditions de la Seine, 1928. – The Private Life of Solomon. Translated by George Dunning Gribble. London: Routledge, 1936. – The Private Life of Tutankhamen: Love, Religion and Politics at the Court of an Egyptian King. N.p: Routledge, 1931. – Salomon, roi d’Israel. Paris: Payot, 1934. – Sybaris. Les Grecs en Italie. Paris: Payot, 1958. – The Sixth Column: Inside the Nazi-Occupied Countries. New York: Alliance Books, 1942. – They Called Me Cassandra. New York: Da Capo Press, 1973. – Vingt ans de suspense diplomatique. Paris: Michel, 1958. Téry, Gustav. L’acquittement de Mme Caillaux. Paris: L’Oeuvre, 21 July 1914. – Aristide Briand dit Aristide-le-cynique. Paris: L’Oeuvre, 1909. – L’école des garçonnes. Paris: L’Oeuvre, 1924. Téry, Simone. Le coeur volé. Paris: Denoël, 1937. – “Dernière édition spéciale.” Comédie en 3 actes. N.d. Typescript at B NF Richelieu, Arts et Spectacles. – En Irlande. De la guerre d’indépendance à la guerre civile (1914–1923). Paris: Flammarion, 1923. – Fièvre jaune (La Chine convulsé). Paris: Flammarion, 1928. – Une française en Union Soviétique. Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1952. – Front de la liberté. Espagne, 1937–1938. Paris: Éditions Sociales Internationales, 1938. – L’Ile des bards. Notes sur la littérature irlandaise contemporaine. Paris: Flammarion, 1925. – Où l’aube se lève. New York: Brentano’s, 1945. – Passagère. Paris: Librairie Valois, 1930. – La porte du soleil. Paris: Éditions Hier et Aujourd’hui, 1947. Thébaud, Françoise. Les femmes aux temps de la guerre de 14. Paris: Éditions Payot & Rivages, 2013. Thérenty, Marie-Ève. “La chronique et le reportage: Du ‘genre’ (gender) des genres journalistiques.” Études littéraires 40, no. 3 (2009): 115–25. – “De La Fronde à la guerre (1897–1918): Les premières femmes reporters.” Autour de Vallès (2010): 153–6. – “Séverine (1855–1929).” In La civilisation du journal. Histoire culturelle et littéraire de la presse française au XIXe siècle, edited by Dominique Kalifa, Philippe Régnier, Marie-Ève Thérenty, and Alain Vaillant, 1285–90. Paris: Nouveau Monde, 2011.

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Bibliography 273 – “Songez que je n’ai aucune des conditions du journalisme. Poétique journalistique de George Sand.” In George Sand, Écritures et représentations, edited by Éric Bordas and Christine Planté, 207–38. Cazaubon: Eurédit, 2004. – “Les ‘Vagabonds du Télégraphe’: Représentations et poétiques du grand reportage avant 1914.” Sociétés & Représentations 1, no. 21 (2006): 101–15. Thérenty, Marie-Ève, ed. George Sand journaliste. Saint-Étienne: Presses Universitaires de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2011. Thiesse, Anne-Marie. Le roman de quotidien. Lecteurs et lectures populaires à la Belle Epoque. Paris: Seuil, 2000. Thomas, Martin. “Albert Sarraut, French Colonial Development, and the Communist Threat, 1919–1930.” Journal of Modern History 77, no. 4 (2005): 917–55. – The French Empire between the Wars: Imperialism, Politics and Society. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005. Thompson, Virginia. French Indo-china. New York: Octagon Books, 1968. Reprint of 1937 edition for the American Council, Institute of Pacific Relations. Throgmorton, Clyde. The National Daily Press of France. Birmingham, A L : Summa Publications, 1998. Thurman, Judith. Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999. Tiersten, Lisa. Marianne in the Market: Envisioning Consumer Society in Fin-de-Siècle France. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Tilburg, Patricia. Colette’s Republic: Work, Gender, and Popular Culture in France, 1870–1914. New York: Berghahn, 2009. Tinayre, Marcelle. La vie amoureuse de Mme de Pompidou. Paris: Flammarion, 1924. Todorov, Tzvetan. Typologie du roman policier. Poétique de la prose. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1971. Toux Vallet, Claire-Hélène. “Les femmes journalistes syndiquées au Syndicat National des Journalistes (1928–1940).” 2011. Typescript, BMD. – “Presence et représentativité des femmes dans la profession du journaliste en France pendant la periode de l’entre deux-guerres.” 2009. Typescript, BM D. Valette, Aline. “Extrait de La Petite République: Le syndicat de la presse féminine et féministe.” Bulletin Bimestriel du Société pour l’amelioration du Sort de la Femme et la Revendication de ses Droits, January 30, 1896, 403–6.

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274 Bibliography Valette, Aline, and Marcelle Capy. Femmes et travaille au XIXe siècle: Enquêtes de “La Fronde” et “La Bataille syndicaliste.” Edited by MarieHélène Zylberberg-Hocquard and Évelyne Diebolt. Paris: Syros, 1984. Vallier, Jean. C’était Marguerite Durand. Paris: A. Fayard, 2006. Van, Ngo. In the Crossfire: Adventures of a Vietnamese Revolutionary. Edited by Ken Knabb and Hélène Fleury. Translated by Hélène Fleury, Hilary Horrocks, Ken Knabb and Naomi Sager. Chico, C A : A K Press, 2010. van Zoonen, Liesbet. “One of the Girls? The Changing Gender of Journalism.” In News, Gender and Power, edited by Cynthia Carter, Gill Branston, and Stuart Allan, 17–32. New York: Routledge, 1998. Vann, Michael G. “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Variation and Difference in French Racism in Colonial Indochine.” In The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France, edited by Sue Peabody and Tyler Stovall, 187–97. Durham, N C: Duke University Press, 2003. Vauglin, André. “Quels journaux choisir pour toucher une clientèle déterminée?” Vendre (April 1928). Viollis, Andrée. L’Afrique du Sud. Paris: Hachette, 1948. – Alsace et Lorraine au dessus des passions. Paris: Victor Attinger, 1926. – “Avec les républicains d’Irlande.” In Une heure de ma carrière, Souvenirs et Interviews, 291–318. Paris: Editions Baudinière, 1926. – Changhai et le destin de la Chine. Paris: Corréa, 1933. – Criquet. Paris: Calman Levy, 1913; Gallimard, 1934. – “Désillusion provisoire.” In La verité sur Viet-Nam, 2–3. Paris: La Bibliothèque française, 1948. – La grande pitié des femmes et des enfants d’Espagne. Paris: Secours international aux femmes et aux enfants des républicains espagnols, 1937. – L’Inde contre les anglais. Paris: Éditions des Portiques, 1930. – Indochine S.O.S. Paris: Gallimard, 1935. – Le Japon et son empire. Paris: Grasset, 1933. – Le Japon intime. Paris: F. Aubier, 1934. – Lord Northcliffe. Paris: Grasset, 1919. – Notre Tunisie. Paris: Grasset, 1939. – “Quelques notes sur l’Indochine.” Esprit 2, no. 3 (December 1933): 401–48. – Le secret de la Reine Christine. Lyon: Éditions Agence Gutenberg, 1944. – Seule en Russie, de la Baltique à la Caspienne. Paris: Gallimard, Les Documents bleus, 1927.

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Bibliography 275 – “Sir Edward Carson. Lord Northcliffe.” La Revue de Paris, July 1917, 868–94. – Tourmente sur l’Afghanistan. Paris: Valois, 1930. – Le verité sur Vietnam. Paris: La Bibliothèque française, 1948. – “La vie généreuse de Séverine.” Les Nouvelles littéraires, 28 March 1931, 7. – La vrai Mme de La Fayette. Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1926. Viollis, Andrée, and Jean Viollis. La perdrix dorée. Paris: Baudinière, 1925. Reissued as Puycerrampion. Paris: La Bibliothèque française, 1947. Walker, David H. Outrage and Insight: Modern French Writers and the Faits Divers. Oxford: Berg, 1995. – “Writing between Faits Divers and Procès-Verbal.” French Cultural Studies 12 (2001): 237–42. Water, S. “A Girton Girl on the Throne: Queen Christina and Versions of Lesbianism, 1906–1933.” Feminist Review 46 (1994): 41–60. White, Cynthia. Women’s Magazines 1693–1968. London: Michael Joseph, 1970. Whitney, Susan B. “Embracing the Status Quo: French Communists, Young Women and the Popular Front.” Journal of Social History, 30 (Fall 1996): 29–43. Woolf, Virginia. Journal d’un écrivain. Translated by G. Beaumont. Monaco: Éditions du Rocher, 1958. X X X [pseud. A. Viollis]. Le racisme Hitlérien. Machine de guerre contre la France. 1943. 2nd ed. Paris: les Éditions de la clandestinité, 1977. Yakira, Elhanan. Post-Zionism, Post-Holocaust: Three Essays on Denial, Forgetting, and the Delegitimation of Israel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Yver, Colette. Femmes d’aujourd’hui. Enquête sur les nouvelles carrières féminines. Paris: Calman-Levy, 1929. Zinoman, Peter. The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862–1940. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations abortion, 22, 43, 111, 174, 197 L’Action, 28, 58, 76 Afghanistan: Elsa Maillart on, 100; Andrée Viollis on, 12, 73, 88, 103, 107, 109, 115, 123, 131, 134 Alliance d’hygiène sociale, 171–2 Amis de Lucie Delarue-Mardrus gastronomic club, 210n79 Amis de Séverine Club, 35 Les Annales politiques et littéraires, 25 antifascist agitation, 35; Marcelle Capy and, 50–1; Fanny Clar and, 156; Comitè de vigilance des intellectuels antifascists (Antifascist Intellectuals’ Vigilance Committee), 89; Denise Moran and, 156, 158, 176; Geneviève Tabouis and, 16, 152, 156–9; Simone Téry and, 89–91, 156, 169, 176; Andrée Viollis and, 89–91, 138, 156, 158, 176 anti-Semitism, 11, 14, 76, 156, 158. See also antifascist agitation; Dreyfus Affair

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Association des journalists parisiens (Association of Parisian Journalists), 30, 33, 210n69 La Bataille syndicaliste, 38, 39, 40, 46, 170 Beaumont, Germaine, 29, 55, 190, 199, 200, 212n21; as editor at Le Matin, 61, 198, 202, 203; and feminism, 65–6, 187; fiction by, 53–4, 57, 58–9, 68–9, 84, 85, 196, 225n11; journalism on women’s fashion, 67–8; journalism on women’s work, 66–7; mentoring by Colette, 15, 61–70, 216n12 birth control, 23, 43, 111, 197 Blum, Léon, 89, 91 Bly, Nelly (Elizabeth Cochran), 24, 39, 82, 108, 116–17 Bodin, Louise, 29 Bois, Élie-Joseph, 79, 87, 109–10, 114, 134, 159, 202–3 Borroff, Marie, 13 Boucharenc, Myriam, 99, 108 Bretailles, Countess de, 208n41

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278 Index Briand, Aristide, 149, 151 Brisson, Adolphe, 24–5 Brisson, Jean-François, 25 Brisson, Madeleine, 24–5 Brisson, Pierre, 25 Brunschvicg, Cécile, 91, 171 Cambon, Jules, 146–7, 149, 151, 153, 154–5 Cambon, Paul, 146, 149 Capy, Marcelle (Marcelle Marques), 15, 25, 127, 199, 202; at La Bataille syndicaliste, 38, 39, 40, 46; and Pierre Brizon, 47, 48; Une femme dans la melée, 46–7; Les hommes passèrent, winner of Prix Séverine, 44–5; influence of Séverine on, 37–52; and integral pacifism, 46–51; journalism on women’s work, 39–45, 51, 164, 170–1; views on suffrage, 46; at La Voix des femmes, 46 Casanova, Danielle, 91 Casanova, Julián, 87, 88 Ce Soir, 74, 91, 134, 158 Chamberlain, Austen, 149 Chamberlain, Joseph, 149 Chamberlain, Neville, 149, 155, 158 Chandet, Henriette, 182, 196–9, 205n12 Chaumont, Magdeleine, 192, 193– 6, 205n12 children in the judicial and penal system, journalism about, 26, 123, 165–9 China, 129; journalism about, 12, 73, 82, 98, 102, 108, 111–19, 131 Choisy, Maryse, 33–4, 210n71, 219n3 Clar, Fanny, 50, 156, 169–73, 177, 178, 181, 201

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Clark, Linda, 12 Colette (Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette), 11, 29, 53–4, 54, 167, 199, 208n41; and family connections, 56–7; fiction by, 57–8, 61, 79, 84, 85, 216n12; journalism on women’s fashion, 64–5; mentoring of Germaine Beaumont, 15, 60–70 colonial literature, propaganda, 126–8 colonies, 125–6; grand reporters on, 99–100, 102, 118, 121–2. See also India; Indochina; Roubaud, Louis: on Indochina; Viollis, Andrée: on Indochina communism, 111, 120, 126, 129, 136 Communist Party, 31, 50, 75, 91, 121, 130, 133, 137. See also Ce Soir; L’Humanité Conseil national des femmes françaises (National Council of Women), 35 Cooper, Nicola, 124–5, 136, 137, 138, 139–40 court reporting, 4, 26, 29, 63–4, 82–3 Cousturier, Lucie, 128 daily newspapers: circulation of, 5, 10, 31–2, 101, 198; number of, 209n55. See also specific newspapers Darbois, Anne, 177–8 Decarie, Germaine, 30–1, 81, 149 Delarue-Mardrus, Lucie, 58, 195, 208n41 Dell, Stephen, 164–5 Dematres, Claire (Claire Gonon), 32

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Index 279 diplomatic reporting. See Tabouis, Geneviève Dorsenne, Jean (Jean Troufleau), 122, 125, 132, 135–6, 141–2, 233n81 Dreyfus Affair, 11, 63; Séverine and La Fronde on, 22–3, 27 Duguet, Camille (Mme de Latour), 190, 245n22 Durand, Marguerite, 21–2, 24; editor at La Fronde, 3, 15, 27–9; and feminism, 27, 28–9, 32; founding of La Française, 25, 28; hiring of women reporters, 23, 27, 36, 79, 80; joining mixed-sex journalist associations, 15, 33; and Andrée and Gustave Téry, 80–1 Eberhardt, Isabelle, 128 L’Echo de Paris, 89, 145, 159 L’École normale supérieure de jeunes filles (Sèvres Normal School), 21, 54, 119 education of journalists, 6, 8, 12, 14, 17, 21, 29, 201; of Tabouis, 146–7; of Andrée Viollis and Simone Téry, 78–9, 83; of Viollis versus Londres, 108, 120 enfants assistés (children in care), 172–3 L’Epoque, 183, 196 L’Ère nouvelle, 4, 23, 35, 38, 48, 166–7, 170, 183 L’Esprit, 124, 136, 141 eugenics, 168, 172–3 faits divers, 9–10, 11, 31, 163 family support of journalists, 24–6, 56–7, 59–61, 71–93

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fashion magazines, 11, 54, 65, 182, 184–6, 194, 244nn6–7 Fau, Hélène, 54, 59 Femina, 185, 191 feminism and integral pacifism, 46–51 feminism and journalism, 21, 28–30, 65–6, 150, 208n41, 210n71, 210n79 feminist issues in daily press. See abortion; birth control; suffrage; women and work feminist reporters. See Beaumont, Germaine; Chaumont, Magdeleine; Durand, Marguerite; Séverine; Viollis, Andrée Ferré, Louise-Marie, 177 feuilletons, 9, 11, 31, 59 Le Figaro, 4, 24, 130, 186, 190, 193, 216n24 First World War, 42, 104–5, 109; impact on women in journalism, 4–5; indigenous service in, 126 Fleming, Ian, 97–8, 112 Forsdick, Charles, 13, 97–8 Foussarigues, Yvonne, 208n41 La Française, 25, 28, 30, 33, 35, 91 Freadman, Anne, 63–4 La Fronde, 22, 32, 35; circulation of, 27; folding of, 25, 28, 82; founded by Marguerite Durand, 3, 21, 27; Jane Misme as reporter at, 25; mentoring of female reporters at, 15; Séverine as reporter at, 23; Andrée Viollis as reporter at, 80, 81, 92 Gabin, Jean, 90 Gandhi, 76, 103, 123, 137, 138

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280 Index garçonne style, views on, 65, 67 Garnier, Huguette, 208n41 gender, definition of, 5–6 generation, definition of, 6 Gide, André, 72, 102, 174 Girardin, Denise de, 8 “girl-reporter” stunts. See “stunt journalism” Gosset, Hélène, 75, 81, 149, 210n79 grand reporters, 12–13, 52, 72–3, 79, 80, 90, 97–120, 121, 130, 144, 171, 178–9, 200 Great Depression, 6, 44, 126, 133, 135, 175, 177, 180 Great War: effect on journalism, journalists, 4–5, 8, 28, 30–1, 34, 64, 76, 78, 81, 88, 99, 104, 109, 138, 153, 155–6, 167, 170, 199; and literature, 44, 48, 127, 136; and pacifism, 38; and the woman’s page, 184, 190, 194; and women’s work, 42–3, 175 Grinberg, Suzanne, 195 Grossir, Claudine, 9 Guéhenno, Jean, 89 Guesde, Jules, rift with Séverine, 22 Harry, Myriam, 131, 223n81 Helsey, Edouard, 104, 220n34 Helys, Marc (Marie Léra), 33, 82, 127 Herriot, Édouard, 144, 148, 152, 153–4 L’Humanité, 4, 23, 29, 74, 83, 89, 90, 134–5, 163, 168, 200 India, Andrèe Viollis on, 123–4 Indochina, journalism on, 12 16, 123, 125–32, 133–42, 198, 233n81

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informational press, 10, 164. See also Le Figaro; Le Matin; Le Petit Parisien integral pacifism. See under pacifism international colonial exhibitions, 1931, 124 intersectionality approach, 14, 108–10, 204 L’Intransigéant, 4, 23, 163, 166, 193, 194, 195 Jacob, Madeline, 25–6, 29, 149, 199, 203, 228n72 Jaurès, Jean, 63, 80; influence on Marcelle Capy, 37 Jouenne, Alice, 212n21 journalists, French, number of, 10; women, 10 journalists’ professional associations and unions: Association syndicale professionnelle des journalistes republicains (Union Association of Professional Republican Journalists), 30; Association des journalists parisiens (Association of Parisian Journalists), 30; National Journalists’ Union, 30, 31, 32, 33, 152; Union of Professional Republican Journalists, 32; Association confraternelle et mutuelle de la press judiciaire parisienne (Confraternal and Mutual Association of the Parisian Judicial Press), 34 Jouvenel, Henry de, 58, 60–1 Kergomard, Pauline, 27 Kershaw, Angela, 86, 223n91 Kollontai, Alexandra, 43, 111

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Index 281 Kristeva, Julia, 6, 56 Lafayette, Mme de, 79–80 La Mazière, Alice, 35, 165, 201, 210n69, 210n79, 223n94, 225n18; on children in the judicial system, 166–8, 181; on Morocco, 100; on Spain, 87 Lapeyre, Nathalie, 7 League of Nations, 114, 126, 147– 8, 153–4, 156–7 Leroux, Gaston, 99 lesbianism, 48, 57, 60, 84–5, 100, 214n71 Lévèque, Sandrine, 163, 183 Ligue international de combattants de la paix (International League of Peace Fighters), 49, 51 Ligue international de femmes pour la paix et la liberté (Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom), 48, 50 literature and journalism, 7, 9, 29, 84–86. See also Beaumont, Germaine; Capy, Marcelle; Colette; Téry, Simone; Viollis, Andrée Locarno Treaties, 149, 151 Londres, Albert, 16, 98, 99, 131, 166, 171, 229n115; on Russia, 102, 110–11; on China, 98, 102, 103, 108, 109, 111–13, 115, 117, 118, 120 Lyautey, Hubert, 127, 128 Magali-Boisnard, 128 Maillart, Elsa, 97–8, 100, 112 Malraux, André, 90, 116, 130–1, 141 Malraux, Clara, 130

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Manevy, Raymond, 165, 183 Mangueneau, Dominique, 13 Maréchal, Denis, 144, 150–1, 234n12 Margadent, Jo Burr, 12 Martial, René, 177 Martin, Marc, 4, 97, 227n63 Marx (aka Paz), Madeleine, 75 Le Matin, 4, 10, 29, 31, 99, 105, 109, 163, 183, 187, 188, 190, 199, 202; Colette and Germaine Beaumont at, 53–70 Maugeret, Marie, 27 mentoring, definition of, 7 Minerva, 30, 245n18 Misme, Jane, 29, 33, 35, 81, 208n41; cofounding La Française with Marguerite Durand, 25, 28 “modern woman,” the, 4, 29, 55, 57–8, 67–70, 85–6, 106, 179, 191–2, 194, 197–8, 200 Monet, Paul, 134 Moran, Denise, 50, 156, 158, 169, 173–7, 178–81, 199, 201 Muhlman, Géraldine, 24, 97, 114, 116–17 National Journalists’ Union, 30, 31, 32, 33, 152 National Union for the Vote for Women, 196 Netter, Yvonne, 208n41 “new woman,” the, 42, 58, 100, 184, 200 Nguyen (H)Ai Quoc (Ho Chi Minh), 129, 132 Normand, Suzanne, 219n10 Northcliffe, Lord, 78, 82 Les Nouvelles littéraires, 68, 85, 109

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282 Index Nozière, Violette, Madeleine Jacob reporting on, 26 L’Oeuvre, 4, 110, 164–5, 199; circulation of, 58, 74, 153; Germaine Beaumont in, 76; Marcelle Capy in, 42, 43; Germaine Decarie in, 30–1; Madeleine Jacob in, 26; Jane Misme in, 35; Séverine in, 23; Geneviève Tabouis in, 143, 144, 145, 147, 149, 150, 152, 153–4, 156–7, 158; Gustave Téry founding of, 74, 76, 80–1; Simone Téry reporting for, 74, 88; Titayna in, 100–1; women’s page in, 183, 186 Orientalism, 108–9, 117–18, 123, 127 Oulié, Marthe, 128 pacifism, 50, 52, 170; Comité international d’action et de propagande pour la paix (International Committee for Peace Action and Propaganda), 47; Comité mondiale de femmes contre la guerre et le fascism (World Committee of Women against War and Fascism), 50, 88, 176; Comité national française de resistance à la guerre et à l’oppression (French National Committee of Resistance to War and Oppression), 47, 51; feminism and, 46–51; integral, 37, 82; Ligue international de combattants de la paix (International League of Peace Fighters), 49, 51; Ligue international de femmes pour la paix et la liberté

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(Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom), 48, 50 Paligot, Carole, 14 Paul-Boncour, Joseph, 148–9 pay, 30–1, 42–3, 80, 110 Pelletier, Gaston, 132 Pène, Annie (Désirée Poutrel) de, 58–9, 60 Pertinax (André Géraud), 145, 159 Le Petit Journal, 9–10, 31 Le Petit Parisien, 79, 159, 163, 193, 199; Albert Londres in, 102, 109; Andrée Viollis at, 12, 73, 82–3, 88, 103, 105, 109, 110, 113, 124, 134, 158, 174; circulation of, 4, 31, 185; Jean Dorsenne in, 125, 135; Louis Roubaud in, 111, 122–3; women’s page in, 183, 185, 188 petit presse, 9 petit reportage, 11 Le Peuple, 4, 164, 165, 169–76, 178, 183, 187 Pognon, Maria, 27 Le Populaire, 4, 163, 169–70 Popular Bloc, 121 La Presse, 8, 9, 27 press laws: of 1852, 7; of 1881, 10 Prix Séverine, 35, 74, 219n10; awarded to Marcelle Capy, 44–5 pronatalism, 43, 173, 174 pseudonyms, use of, 190, 245n24 Quinn, Tom, 104–5 Le Quotidien, 165–6, 167, 168, 188 Rachilde, 208n41 racialism: defined, 122; and journalism, 14, 120, 122, 142

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Index 283 racism: defined, 122; and journalism, 16, 43, 50, 118, 121–42, 177–81 Raud, Henri, 153 Read, Geoff, 187–8 Reid, Martine, 8 Renoir, Jean, 90 Roberts, Mary-Louise, 66 Rolland, Romaine, 46, 47; influence on Marcelle Capy, 37 Rosine (pen name), 205n1, 216n24, 245n24; 59, 60; used by Annie de Pène (Désirée Poutrel), 59; used by columnist at Le Figaro, 190–2; used by Germaine Beaumont, 59 Roubaud, Louis, 103, 110; on children in the judicial system, 165– 7, 181; on China, 111–12, 117–18; and detective fiction, 99; on Indochina, 122–3, 130, 131–2, 134, 141–2; on North Africa, 133; on Spain, 88 Royer, Clément, 27 Russia, journalism on, 99; by Albert Londres, 102, 110–11; by Elsa Maillart, 100; by Geneviève Tabouis, 144–5; by Simone Téry, 75, 90; by Andrée Viollis, 73, 75, 86, 103, 106–7, 109, 110–11, 134 Saint-Croix, Avril de, 27–8, 195, 210n79 Salmon, André, 88 Sand, George (Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin), 9, 57 Sarcey, Francisque, 24, 25 Sarcey, Yvonne (Madeleine Brisson), 24–5

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Sauret, Henriette, 39, 170, 220n28 Sarraut, Albert, 126, 128–9, 141 Séverine (Caroline Rémy de Guebhard), 128; entry into ­journalism, 21–4; influence on Marcelle Capy, 25, 37–52; mentoring other women in journalism, 15, 21, 22–4, 25, 36; and occupational organizations, 33, 34, 35; and pacifism, 170; and reporting on the Dreyfus Affair, 22–3, 27 Le Siècle, 8, 9 social hygiene, 171–2 social reporting: antiracism, 177– 81; children and the judicial system, 165–9, 181; definition of, 163–4; social hygiene, 172–3, 181; work, 169–71, 173–6, 181 Spanish Civil War, reporting on, 50, 87–90, 138, 145, 169, 176 special envoy, 26, 79, 98, 100–1, 135, 147 special pages in the dailies, 31, 163, 183 sports reporting, 5, 31, 34, 64, 67, 82–3, 97, 163, 183, 188, 203 “stunt journalism,” 24, 39, 40, 42, 81–2, 97, 103–4 suffrage. See women’s suffrage Syndicat de la presse feminine et feministe (Union of the Women’s and Feminist Press), 34–5 Tabouis, Geneviève, 81, 199, 200; and Jules and Paul Cambon, 146–7, 149, 151, 153, 154–5; and antifascist reporting, 16, 152, 156–9; books, 234n3, 235n13, 235n20; diplomatic

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284 Index reporting, 29, 144–52, 153–4, 201–2, 234n12; family contacts, 108, 146–7; and feminism, 149– 50, 160; interview of Eleanor Roosevelt, 154 teachers in journalism, 92; Clar as an educator, 165, 170, 173; Darbois as a teacher, 177; on l’école unique, 165; Moran and her husband, Jean Savineau, as teachers, 174, 176; at L’Oeuvre, 153; Andrée and Gustave Téry as teachers, 74, 80 Le Temps, 9, 24, 103, 163 Téry, Andrée, née Françoise Jacquet de La Verryère. See Viollis, Andrée Téry, Gustave, 58, 59, 74, 75, 76, 80–1, 92, 153, 208n41 Téry, Simone, 50, 71–93, 73, 111, 145, 199, 201, 223nn91–2; and antifascism, 156, 176; on children in the judicial system, 165, 168–9, 181; parental influence on, 74–8; winning the Prix Séverine, 74, 219n10 time, conceptions of, 188–9 Tinayre, Marcelle, 58, 208n41, 210n79, 223n81 Titayna (Elisabeth Sauvy), 100–1, 114, 143 Toux Vallet, Claire-Hélène, 32 travelogues, 127–8 Union française pour le suffrage des femmes (French Union for Women’s Suffrage), 35, 91, 167–8 Valette, Aline, 39 Vallès, Jules, 22

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van Zoonen, Liesbet, 64 Vendredi, 158, 176, 183, 220n28; founding by Andrée Viollis, 36, 89, 121, 202, 218n77 Vernet, Madeleine, 47, 49–50, 170, 172–3 Vérone, Maria, 27, 34, 35, 81, 208n41 Vietnam. See Indochina, journalism on Viollis, Andrée (Françoise Caroline Claudius Jacquet de La Verryère), 12, 28, 72, 145, 168, 199, 200, 201, 208n41, 210n79, 220n34, 227n43; on Afghanistan, 131, 134; and antifascism, 156, 158, 176, 178, 181; attitude toward Séverine, 22, 79; on China, 16, 73, 82, 98, 108–9, 111–12, 113– 14, 116, 117–18; entrance into journalism, 80–3; family background, 78–80; founding of and journalism in Vendredi, 36, 89, 114, 121, 158, 176, 183, 202, 218n77; and grand reporting, 97–120; on Indochina, 16, 122– 5, 131, 133–5, 136–42; and occupational organizations, 32, 33; and pacifism, 50; influence on Simone Téry’s journalism, 74–8; prizes won by, 73, 74, 135; on Russia, 73, 75, 86, 103, 106–7, 109, 110–11, 134; and women’s pages, 218n77; on women’s suffrage, 36 Viollis, Jean (Henri d’Ardenne de Tizac), 74, 79, 82, 85, 92, 135 Vogt, Blanche, 208n41, 210n79 Vogue, 26, 65, 185, 191, 193, 216n24

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Index 285 La Voix de la paix, 51 La Voix des femmes, 29, 46 La Volonté, 35, 167 von Papen, Franz, 151–2 war widows, journalism on, 44, 47, 170, 212n21 Weiss, Louise, 4, 73, 143, 149, 219n3 women and work, 169–71, 173–6, 181 women’s pages, 11, 16, 33, 169, 182–98, 218n77, 244n11 women’s press clubs, 15, 34–36, 92, 93, 159 women’s suffrage, 32, 35–36, 195– 6; Germaine Beaumont and,

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65–6, 187; Marcelle Capy’s view of, 46; Fanny Clar and, 170; Alice la Mazière and, 167–8; Denise Moran and, 174; Geneviève Tabouis and, 149–50, 159–60; Union française pour le suffrage des femmes (French Union for Women’s Suffrage), 35, 91, 167–8; Andrée Viollis and, 36, 81 Yen Bay mutiny (1930), 16, 98, 121–2, 124, 129–30; reporting after, 131–2 Yver, Colette, 11, 208n41 Zola, Émile, “J’Accuse,” 8, 22–3, 27

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