Cultural Notes Fall II 2024
150th Anniversary of The Birth of Impressionism
Now On View: National Gallery of Art, DC
08 September 2024 – 19 January 2025
West Building, Main Floor
How did impressionism begin? Discover the origins of the French art movement in a new look at the radical 1874 exhibition considered the birth of modern painting.
A remarkable presentation of 130 works includes a rare reunion of many of the paintings first featured in that now-legendary exhibition. Revisit beloved paintings by Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, and Camille Pissarro and meet their lesser-known contemporaries. See the art norms they were rebelling against and learn what political and social shifts sparked their new approach to art.
Don’t miss the unique chance to immerse yourself in the dynamic Parisian art scene of 1874—the National Gallery of Art is the only American stop for this historic exhibition.
80th Anniversary of The Liberation of Paris
Adolf Hitler wanted Paris razed. Dwight D. Eisenhower wanted his troops to stay out of the city. In August 1944, an uprising by French resistance fighters forced the Allies to intervene.
Article by Erick Trickey - Smithsonian Magazine - 23 August 2024
The square outside Notre-Dame Cathedral, usually empty early on a Saturday morning, filled with hundreds of policemen on August 19, 1944, all of them converging on the fortress-like Prefecture of Police headquarters. A flag unfurled atop the building: the blue, white and red French tricolor, banned by Paris’ German occupiers and last flown officially four years prior. The French police, on strike against the occupation, had returned, this time in revolt. Paris’ uprising against the Nazis had begun.
Across the City of Light, gunfire crackled as Frenchmen hunted and shot German soldiers. Here and there a car roared by, painted with the letters FFI, an abbreviation for the French Forces of the Interior, a coalition of resistance fighters. American and British troops, who’d invaded Normandy two months earlier, were pushing the German Army east, but they were still 150 miles away from the French capital. Parisians rose up to avenge France’s 1940 defeat by the Nazis and their subsequent years of oppression, hoping to liberate the city themselves.
The risk was huge, the decision contentious. Some resistance leaders had feared starting a bloodbath and provoking German reprisals that might destroy the city. Their fears were justified. Just a few weeks earlier, Adolf Hitler had ordered Dietrich von Choltitz, his top general in Paris, to “stamp out” any insurrection “without pity.” Since then, Choltitz had also received orders to destroy Paris’ waterworks and power plants, as well as dozens of bridges over the River Seine: historic landmarks, from the centuries-old Pont Neuf to the stunning Pont Alexandre III.
As Paris’ revolt grew, Hitler’s orders to Choltitz escalated. On August 20, the Nazi leader demanded “the widest destruction possible” in the city. On August 23, Hitler dictated another order. “Paris must not fall into the hands of the enemy,” read the führer’s cable to Choltitz, “or, if it does, he must find there nothing but a field of ruins.”
Why didn’t the German Army destroy Paris, as Hitler wanted?
The answer is surprisingly simple: Because the Paris uprising forced Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower’s hand.
On August 20, Free French leader Charles de Gaulle, anxious to get to Paris and claim leadership over liberated France, arrived in Normandy and visited Eisenhower’s advance headquarters, located in an apple orchard in Granville, near Mont-Saint-Michel on the Atlantic coast. The supreme commander met de Gaulle in his map tent. Tapping the charts with a pointer, he explained the United States Army’s plans to surge around and past Paris.
“Why cross the Seine everywhere but Paris?” de Gaulle asked. He urged Eisenhower to reconsider. Liberating the capital was a matter of national importance to France, de Gaulle argued. He warned that the communists, a major force in the Paris resistance, might try to take over the city. Eisenhower told de Gaulle it was too early, concerned, he later recalled, that “we might get ourselves in a helluva fight there.”
Meanwhile, back in Paris, the 2,000 police inside the Prefecture had used Molotov cocktails to thwart an attack by three German tanks. A fragile cease-fire, negotiated by the Swedish consul in Paris, saved the French police just as their pistol and rifle ammunition was about to run out.
Resistance fighters erected around 600 street barricades—made of paving stones, trees, carts and sandbags—to stall and harass German troops. They seized government buildings, including the Hôtel de Ville (the city hall), where they pulled down a bust of Philippe Pétain, the French leader who’d collaborated with the Nazis, and replaced it with a portrait of de Gaulle. Uncensored newspapers appeared, their headlines celebrating Parisians’ fight: “France is resurrected!” “Paris wins its freedom.” “The Allies are approaching.” But the poorly armed resistance couldn’t push the Germans out of their strongholds around the city. According to Julian Jackson’s France: The Dark Years, 1940-1944, 901 FFI members and 582 French civilians died in the fighting.
Communist resistance leader Henri Rol-Tanguy sent an emissary, Roger Gallois, west through the war’s front lines to ask the Americans to airdrop arms. But as Gallois slipped across the German lines on August 22, he decided to urge the Allies to send troops instead. The insurrectionists could not liberate the city alone, a worried Gallois told American commanders; they would be killed if Allied soldiers didn’t arrive soon.
That same day, Choltitz sat in the German Army headquarters in Paris’ Hotel Meurice, struggling with his conscience. Hitler’s military operations chief, Alfred Jodl, had just repeated his orders to demolish Paris’ industry and the Seine’s bridges—orders that Choltitz had stalled rather than carry out. Choltitz had seen Hitler in person in Germany just weeks earlier, and the führer’s ragged condition and spittle-flecked rants about “final victory” had convinced him of two things: first, that the Nazi chief was falling apart fast, and second, that Germany would lose the war.
Choltitz calculated that his 22,000 troops in Paris weren’t enough to stop a general uprising. He knew that the German high command was planning to withdraw more forces eastward. Paris would eventually fall to the Allies. So why destroy it? “To defend Paris against an enemy, even at the cost of its destruction, was a militarily valid act,” wrote Collins and Lapierre. “But wantonly [ravaging] the city for the sole satisfaction of wiping one of the wonders of Europe from the map was an act without military justification.”
To defuse the situation, Choltitz turned to Swedish Consul Raoul Nordling, a neutral diplomat. He told Nordling that Hitler had ordered him to destroy large parts of the city. If he ignored the demands much longer, he feared he would be relieved of command. The German general asked Nordling to pass a message to the Allied enemy: Come to Paris quickly. Emissaries, including Nordling’s own brother, headed west and crossed the front lines, with Choltitz’s permission.
Also on August 22, Eisenhower changed his mind about protecting the French capital. De Gaulle’s arguments had stuck with him. “It looks now as if we’d be compelled to go into Paris,” Eisenhower wrote to his chief of staff that evening, scribbling on the top of a letter from de Gaulle. He ordered a Free French division toward the capital. “Information indicated that no great battle would take place,” Eisenhower recalled in his 1948 memoir, Crusade in Europe.
What influenced Eisenhower’s decision besides de Gaulle? Some sources, like Collins and Lapierre, credit Gallois’ personal plea to U.S. commanders. Others, including Charles Williams’ 1993 biography of de Gaulle, note that the U.S. Army’s G-2 intelligence division had told the Allied commander that the situation in Paris was worsening and that the Germans might counterattack.
“[General Omar] Bradley and his G-2 think we can and must walk in,” Eisenhower wrote to his chief of staff. And though Nordling’s emissaries didn’t reach the American commanders until August 23, de Gaulle biographer Don Cook later wrote that a diplomatic cable from Nordling had reached Eisenhower via London, predicting that a quick advance would lead to a German surrender.
On August 25, 1944—80 years ago this week—the Free French Second Armored Division rolled into Paris, with the American Fourth Infantry Division close behind. Rapturous crowds jammed the streets to greet the Allies, who encountered “15 solid miles of cheering, deliriously happy people waiting to shake your hand, to kiss you, to shower you with food and wine,” as a U.S. Army major recalled.
French and German tanks exchanged fire on the Champs-Élysées and fought around the Jardin des Tuileries. The French troops reached the nearby Hotel Meurice, where Choltitz surrendered after a short firefight. The general spent the next several hours convincing German holdouts around the city to lay down their arms. The French division liberated the capital, losing around 100 to 150 soldiers. “Is Paris burning?” Hitler ranted inside his military headquarters. It wasn’t.
Cultural Notes Summer 2024
80th Anniversary of D-Day
"J’espère que la vie va continuer." Le doyen des Français vient de fêter ses 110 ans
Maurice Le Coutour, l'homme le plus âgé de France, vit en Normandie. Dimanche 12 mai, il célébrait ses 110 ans en grande pompe à Vicq-sur-Mer, dans la Manche.
Il est né la même année que Louis de Funès et Marguerite Duras, le 12 mai 1914, et vient de souffler une bougie de plus. À 110 ans, Maurice Le Coutour est l'homme le plus âgé de France. Dimanche 12 mai, tous ses proches étaient réunis pour célébrer en grande pompe son anniversaire.
"Chaque anniversaire depuis le centenaire est important. Il fallait fêter cela avec brio, pour lui faire sentir qu'on est toujours à ses côtés", évoque Maurice Ruel, le neveu du centenaire. "Pour nous, c'est un honneur" et "ça nous donne des espoirs", abonde-t-il.
"J’espère que la vie va continuer"
Cet ancien épicier de Cherbourg a connu deux guerres et participé aux combats de la bataille de la poche de Dunkerque, en 1940. Désormais domicilié en maison de retraite, Maurice Le Coutour garde "une santé de fer, un moral d'acier et un caractère très affirmé", fait savoir son neveu. Il reste aussi "chaleureux, bienveillant et généreux", complète-t-il.
Maurice Le Coutour, l'homme le plus âgé de France, vit en Normandie. Dimanche 12 mai, il célébrait ses 110 ans en grande pompe à Vicq-sur-Mer, dans la Manche. • ©Lara Dolan et Damien Nicolini / France 3 Normandie
"Si je donne un coup d’œil tout de suite sur la vie que j’ai eue jusqu’à 110 ans, elle n’a pas été très mauvaise. J’espère qu’elle va continuer", a glissé Maurice Le Coutour à une journaliste de France 3, ce dimanche.
"C'est quelqu'un qui a toujours été très mobile, pour participer à des tournois de belote dans toute la région, faire du jardinage, aller à la pêche, aller à la chasse... C'est peut-être le secret, d'ailleurs, de sa longévité", s'amuse Maurice Ruel, son neveu.
Look at the Lights, My Love - Annie Ernaux
Text thanks to Los Angeles Times Book Review and David L. Ulin
A Nobel Prize-winning French author looks at a shopping mall. Magic ensues
“We choose our objects and our places of memory,” Annie Ernaux writes near the start of “Look at the Lights, My Love,” “or rather the spirit of the times decides what is worth remembering.” It’s a statement that could apply to her whole career. Ernaux, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature last October, has long been a writer who occupies the middle ground between experience and recollection, between the life that is lived and the one that is recalled.
At times, as in her astonishing pair of parental portraits, “A Man’s Place” and “A Woman’s Story,” this can seem close to the territory of elegy. Ernaux, however, has nothing so sentimental in mind. “This neutral way of writing,” she describes her approach in the first of those two books, as if she were a kind of anthropologist, sifting through the detritus of her own existence in search of a meaning only she can distill.
“Look at the Lights, My Love” turns a similar sort of attention toward the Trois-Fontaines shopping center, a Parisian big-box superstore. Originally published in France in 2013 and newly translated into English by Alison L. Strayer, the book is, Ernaux informs us, “not a systematic investigation or exploration but a journal, the form most in keeping with my temperament.”
If such a project might appear anomalous coming from a writer given to internal excavation, it is also rooted in her work. I am reminded of Ernaux’s 1993 book “Exteriors,” which also functions as a journal of sorts: a series of notes, aphorisms and brief bits of description that together comprise a fragmentary accounting of minor moments and half-articulated interactions in the author’s Paris suburb. “I have this need,” she admits in those pages, “to record … people’s words and gestures simply for their own sake, without any ulterior motive.” But is this all it is? More to the point, it reflects the central tension in her writing, between neutrality and subjectivity — the seen and the felt.
Ernaux is aware of this; as she confides in “Exteriors,”“I have put a lot of myself into these texts, far more than I originally planned.” Something similar might be said of “Look at the Lights, My Love,” which echoes a number of her earlier narratives, from its reflections on abortion — reminiscent of “Cleaned Out” and “Happening” — to observations about class and custom rooted in the author’s upbringing as the daughter of shopkeepers in the Norman village of Yvetot.
“The less money one has,” she tells us, “the more carefully one must shop, making no mistakes. More time is needed. A list must be made. … This is a form of economic labor, uncounted and obsessive, that fully occupies thousands of women and men. The beginning of wealth, of the levity of wealth, is discernible in the act of taking an item from a shelf of food without first checking the price.”
Ernaux is writing as both watcher and participant; she has lived on both ends of that divide. Raised working class, she entered the middle class through education at the exact moment postwar prosperity took hold. In her 2008 reminiscence “The Years,” she recalls the thrill of discovering Kate Millet and Germaine Greer, of finding herself in the world of ideas.
At the same time, where did that world of ideas leave her? In the complicated middle again. Contemporary culture, “Look at the Lights, My Love” insists, makes it impossible not to be a consumer. And to be a consumer is to be complicit, in Ernaux’s view. On April 24, she reports, “An eight-story building collapsed near Dhaka, Bangladesh. At least two hundred are thought to have died. Three thousand workers were employed in garment workshops there for Western brand names. To specify ‘Western’ has long been redundant.” Three weeks later, she offers an update: “The death count from the collapse of Rana Plaza in Bangladesh is 1,127. Found in the rubble were brand labels for Carrefour, Camaïeu, and Auchan.”
On the one hand, that’s an almost perfectly understated piece of writing, a brilliant encapsulation of Ernaux’s particular minimalism at work. There’s not a wasted word in that short passage, which is damning because of both what it specifies and what it leads us to infer. On the other, it returns us to the question of neutrality, which is both essential to the author’s intentions and necessarily unresolved.
“As I do every time I cease to record the present,” Ernaux acknowledges in the book’s closing entry, “I feel I am withdrawing from the movement of the world, giving up not only narrating my days, but seeing them too. Because seeing in order to write is to see in a different way. It means to distinguish objects, individuals, and mechanisms, and to give their existence value.”
For Ernaux, this is a matter of both personal and political engagement, and it reverberates, as does so much of her writing, back to her childhood in Yvetot. Still, if it’s impossible, reading this book, not to think about her parents’ grocery/café, Ernaux eschews any easy judgment in favor of a more subtle reckoning.
“It may be,” she concludes, “that this life will disappear with the proliferation of individualist sales schemes such as online ordering and curbside pickup, apparently gaining ground each day among the middle and upper classes. So today’s children, in adulthood, may remember with nostalgia Saturday shopping at the Hyper U, as those of over fifty remember the pungent grocers’ shops of the past where they went with a metal pitcher to get fresh milk.”
Each moment, in other words, exists independently and on its own terms, which means that even a suburban superstore, that late capitalist monument to consumption, is likely to be recalled one day through a more human lens.
Ulin is a former book editor and book critic of the Times
For Ernaux, this is a matter of both personal and political engagement, and it reverberates, as does so much of her writing, back to her childhood in Yvetot. Still, if it’s impossible, reading this book, not to think about her parents’ grocery/café, Ernaux eschews any easy judgment in favor of a more subtle reckoning.
“It may be,” she concludes, “that this life will disappear with the proliferation of individualist sales schemes such as online ordering and curbside pickup, apparently gaining ground each day among the middle and upper classes. So today’s children, in adulthood, may remember with nostalgia Saturday shopping at the Hyper U, as those of over fifty remember the pungent grocers’ shops of the past where they went with a metal pitcher to get fresh milk.”
Each moment, in other words, exists independently and on its own terms, which means that even a suburban superstore, that late capitalist monument to consumption, is likely to be recalled one day through a more human lens.
David L. Ulin is a former book editor and book critic of the LA Times.
Cultural Notes Spring I 2023
Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges
Text thanks to RadioSuisseClassic
Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges (December 25, 1745 – June 10, 1799)[1] was a champion fencer, virtuoso violinist, and conductor of the leading symphony orchestra in Paris. Born in Guadeloupe, he was the son of George Bologne de Saint-Georges, a wealthy planter, and Nanon, his African slave.[2] During the French Revolution, Saint-Georges was colonel of the Légion St.-Georges,[3] the first all-black regiment in Europe, fighting on the side of the Republic. Today the Chevalier de Saint-Georges is best remembered as the first classical composer of African ancestry.
Youth and education
Born in Baillif, Basse-Terre, he was the son of George Bologne de Saint-Georges, a wealthy planter on the island of Guadeloupe, and Nanon, his African slave.[4] His father, called "de Saint-Georges" after one of his plantations in Guadeloupe, was a commoner until 1757, when he acquired the title of Gentilhomme ordinaire de la chambre du roi (Gentleman of the king’s chamber).[5] Misled by Roger de Beauvoir’s 1840 romantic novel Le Chevalier de Saint-Georges,[6] most of his biographers confused Joseph’s father with Guillaume-Pierre de Boullogne, Controller of Finance, whose family was ennobled in the 15th century. This led to the erroneous spelling of Saint-Georges’ family name as "Boulogne", persisting to this day, even in the BnF, Bibliothèque nationale de France.
In 1753, his father took Joseph, aged seven, to France for his education.[7] Two years later, on August 26, 1755, listed as passengers on the ship L’Aimable Rose, Bologne de Saint-Georges and Negresse Nanon landed in Bordeaux.[8] In Paris, reunited with their son Joseph, they moved into a spacious apartment at 49 rue Saint André de Arts.
Joseph was 13 when he was enrolled in Tessier de La Boëssière’s Académie royale polytechnique des armes et de ‘l’équitation (fencing and horsemanship). According to La Boëssière fils, son of the Master: “At 15 his [Saint-Georges’] progress was so rapid, that he was already beating the best swordsmen, and at 17 he developed the greatest speed imaginable.”[9] He was still a student when he beat Alexandre Picard, a fencing-master in Rouen, who had been mocking him as "Boëssière's mulatto", in public. That match, bet on heavily by a public divided into partisans and opponents of slavery, was an important coup for the latter. His father, proud of his feat, rewarded Joseph with a handsome horse and buggy.[10] In 1766 on graduating from the Academy, Joseph was made a Gendarme du roi (officer of the king’s bodyguard) and a chevalier.[11] Henceforth Joseph Bologne, by adopting the suffix of his father, would be known as the "Chevalier de Saint-Georges".
In 1764 when, at the end of the Seven Years' War George Bologne returned to Guadeloupe to look after his plantations, he left Joseph an annuity of 8000 francs and an adequate pension to Nanon who remained with her son in Paris.[12] According to his friend, Louise Fusil: "... admired for his fencing and riding prowess, he served as a model to young sportsmen … who formed a court around him."[13] A fine dancer, Saint-Georges was also invited to balls and welcomed in the salons (and boudoirs) of highborn ladies. "Partial for the music of liaisons where amour had real meaning… he loved and was loved."[14] Yet he continued to fence daily in the various salles of Paris. It was there he met the Angelos, father and son, fencing masters from London, the mysterious Chevalier d'Éon, and the teenage Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, all of whom would play a role in his future.
Music
Nothing is known about Saint-Georges’s early musical training. "Platon", a fictional whip-toting slave commander on Saint-Domingue who, in Beauvoir’s novel "taught little Saint-Georges" the violin, is a figment of the author’s imagination.[15] Given his prodigious technique as an adult, Saint-Georges must have practised the violin seriously as a child. Yet, not before 1764, when violinist Antonio Lolli composed two concertos, Op.2 for him,[16] and 1766, when François Gossec dedicated a set of six string trios, Op.9[17] to Saint Georges, was it revealed that the famous swordsman also played the violin. The dedications also suggest that Lolli polished his violin technique and Gossec was his composition teacher. There is no basis to the not always reliable François-Joseph Fétis’ claim that Saint-Georges studied violin with Jean-Marie Leclair, however similar traits in technique indicate Pierre Gaviniès as one of his mentors. Other composers who later dedicated works to Saint-Georges were Carl Stamitz in 1770,[18] and Avolio in 1778.[19]
In 1769, the Parisian public was amazed to see Saint-Georges, the great fencer, among the violins of Gossec’s new orchestra, Le Concert des Amateurs. Two years later he became its concertmaster, and in 1772 he created a sensation with his debut as a soloist, playing his first two violin concertos, Op. II, with Gossec conducting the orchestra. "These concertos were performed last winter at a concert of the Amateurs by the author himself, who received great applause as much for their performance as for their composition."[20] According to another source, "The celebrated Saint-Georges, mulatto fencer [and] violinist, created a sensation in Paris ... [when] two years later ... at the Concert Spirituel, he was appreciated not as much for his compositions as for his performances, enrapturing especially the feminine members of his audience."[21]
Saint-Georges' first compositions, Op. I, were a set of six string Quartets, among the first in France. They were inspired by Haydn’s earliest quartets imported from Vienna by the eccentric Baron Bagge,[22] whose musicales were frequented by some of the best musicians in Paris, including Joseph. Two more sets of six string quartets, three charming forte-piano and violin sonatas, a sonata for harp and flute and six violin duos make up his chamber music output. A cello sonata performed in Lille in 1792, a concerto for clarinet and one for bassoon were lost. Twelve additional violin concertos, two symphonies and eight symphonie-concertantes, a new, intrinsically Parisian genre of which Saint-Georges was one of the chief exponents complete the list of his instrumental works, published between 1771 and 1779, a short span of eight years. Six opéras comiques and a number of songs in manuscript complete the list of his works, remarkable considering his many extra-musical activities.
In 1773, when Gossec took over the direction of the prestigious but troubled Concert Spirituel, he designated Saint-Georges as his successor as director of the Concert des Amateurs. Less than two years under his direction, “Performing with great precision and delicate nuances [the Amateurs] became the best orchestra for symphonies in Paris, and perhaps in all of Europe.”[23] As the Queen attended some of Saint-Georges' concerts at the Palais de Soubise, arriving sometimes without notice, the orchestra wore court attire for all its performances. "Dressed in rich velvet or damask with gold or silver braid and fine lace on their cuffs and collars and with their parade swords and plumed hats placed next to them on their benches, the combined effect was as pleasing to the eye as it was flattering to the ear."[24] Saint-Georges played all his violin concertos as soloist with his orchestra. Their corner movements are replete with daring batteries and bariolages,[25] brilliant technical effects made possible by the new bow designed by Nicholas Pierre Tourte Père - a perfect foil in the hands of a great swordsman. While their fast movements reveal the composer probing the outer limits of his instrument, his slow movements are lyrical and expressive, with an occasional touch of Creole nostalgia.
Saint-Georges was fortunate to be already established as a professional musician, because in 1774, when his father died in Guadeloupe, his annuity was awarded to his legitimate half-sister, Elisabeth Benedictine.[26] While before that he contributed his services to the Amateurs, he now asked for and was willingly granted a generous fee by the sponsors of the orchestra, which he had turned into the largest and most prestigious ensemble in Europe.
In 1776 the Académie royale de musique, the Paris Opéra, was once again in dire straits. Saint Georges was proposed as the next director of the opera. As creator of the first disciplined French orchestra since Lully, he was the obvious choice to rescue the prestige of that troubled institution. However, alarmed by his reputation as a taskmaster, three of its leading ladies “... presented a placet (petition) to the Queen [Marie Antoinette] assuring her Majesty that their honor and delicate conscience could never allow them to submit to the orders of a mulatto.”[27] To keep the affair from embarrassing the queen, Saint-Georges promptly withdrew his name from the proposal. Meanwhile, to defuse the brewing scandal, Louis XVI took the Opéra back from the city of Paris - ceded to it by Louis XIV a century ago - to be managed by his Intendant of Light Entertainments. Following the “affair,” Marie-Antoinette preferred to hold her musicales in the salon of her petit appartement de la reine in Versailles. The audience was limited to her intimate circle and only a few musicians, among them the Chevalier de Saint-Georges. “Invited to play music with the queen,”[28] Saint-Georges probably played his violin sonatas, with her Majesty playing the forte-piano.
The placet also ended forever Saint-Georges’ aspirations to the highest position of any musician in Paris. It was, as far we know, the most serious setback he suffered due to his color. Compared to the upheavals to come, it was a tempest in a teapot, but the wound it inflicted on Saint-Georges would fester until the Revolution. Over the next two years he published two more violin concertos and a pair of his Symphonies concertantes. Thereafter, despite of his humiliation by the operatic divas, except for his final set of quartets (Op. 14, 1785), Saint-Georges, fascinated by the stage, abandoned composing instrumental music in favor of opera.
Operas
Ernestine, Saint-Georges’s first opera, with a libretto by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, future author of Les Liaisons dangereuses, was performed on July 19, 1777 at the Comédie-Italienne. It did not survive its premiere. The critics liked the music, but panned the weak libretto, given precedence over the music at the time.[29] The Queen was there with her entourage. She came to support Saint-Georges’s opera but, after the audience kept echoing a character cracking his whip and crying “Ohé, Ohé,” the Queen gave it the coup de grace by calling to her driver: “to Versailles, Ohé!”[30]
Thanks to that fiasco, the Marquise de Montesson, morganatic wife of the Duke of Orléans, realized her ambition to engage Saint-Georges as music director of her fashionable private theater. As the failure of Ernestine had left Saint Georges insolvent, he was glad that his new position also entitled him to an apartment in the ducal mansion on the Chaussée d’Antin. After his mother died in Paris, Mozart stayed there with Melchior Grimm, who, as personal secretary of the Duke, lived in the mansion. The fact that Mozart spent over two months under the same roof with Saint-Georges, confirms that they knew each other.[33] As an added incentive, the duke appointed Saint-Georges Lieutenant de la chasse of his vast hunting grounds at Raincy, with an additional salary of 2000 Livres a year. "Saint-Georges the mulatto so strong, so adroit, was one of the hunters..."[34] Saint-Georges wrote and rehearsed his second opera, appropriately named La Chasse at Raincy. At its premiere in the Théâtre Italien, "The public received the work with loud applause. Vastly superior compared with ‘Ernestine’ ... there is every reason to encourage him to continue [writing operas].”[35] La chasse was repeated at her Majesty’s request at the royal chateau at Marly.[36] Saint-Georges’ most successful opéra comique was L’Amant anonyme, with a libretto based on a play by Mme de Genlis.[37] As a close friend of Saint-Georges, could Félicité Genlis’ anonymous hero, who woos his adored from afar but dares not to allow her to see his face, have been modeled on Saint-Georges, a ‘mulatto,’ able to be loved but never married by European women?[38]
In 1781, due to the massive financial losses incurred by its patrons in shipping arms to the American Revolution,[39] Saint Georges’s Concert des Amateurs had to be disbanded. Not one to let it go without a fight, Saint-Georges turned to his friend and admirer, Philippe D’Orléans, duc de Chartres, for help. In 1773 at age 26, Philippe was elected Grand Master of the 'Grand Orient de France' after uniting all the Masonic organizations in France. Responding to Saint-Georges’s plea, Philippe revived the orchestra as part of the Loge Olympique, an exclusive Freemason Lodge. Renamed Le Concert Olympique, with practically the same personnel, it performed in the grand salon of the Palais Royal. In 1785, Count D’Ogny, grandmaster of the Lodge and member of its cello section, authorized Saint-Georges to commission Haydn to compose six new symphonies for the “Concert Olympique.” Conducted by Saint-Georges, Haydn’s "Paris" symphonies were first performed at the Salle des Gardes-Suisses of the Tuileries, a much larger hall, in order to accommodate the huge public demand to hear Haydn’s new works.
In 1785, the Duke of Orléans died. The Marquise de Montesson, his morganatic wife, having been forbidden by the king to mourn him, shuttered their mansion, closed her theater, and retired to a convent near Paris. With his patrons gone, Saint-Georges lost not only his positions, but also his apartment. Once again it was his friend, Philippe, now Duke of Orléans, who presented him with a small flat in the Palais Royal. Living in the Palais, Saint-Georges was inevitably drawn into the whirlpool of political activity around Philippe, the new leader of the Orléanist party, the main opposition to the absolute monarchy. As a strong Anglophile, Philippe, who visited England frequently, formed a close friendship with George, Prince of Wales. Due to the recurring mental illness of King George III, the prince was expected soon to become Regent. While Philippe admired Britain’s parliamentary system, Jacques Pierre Brissot de Warville, his chief of staff, envisioned France as a constitutional monarchy, on the way towards a republic. With Philippe as France's “Lieutenant-general” he promoted him as the sole alternative to a bloody revolution.
Meanwhile the duke’s ambitious plans for re-constructing the Palais-Royal left the Orchestre Olympique without a home and Saint-Georges unemployed. Seeing his protégé at loose ends and recalling that the Prince of Wales often expressed a wish to meet the legendary fencer, Philippe approved Brissot’s plan to dispatch Saint-Georges to London to ensure the Regent-in-waiting’s support of Philippe as future “Regent” of France. But Brissot had a secret agenda as well. He considered Saint-Georges, a “man of color,” the ideal person to contact his fellow abolitionists in London and ask their advice about his plans for Les Amis des Noirs (Friends of the Blacks) modeled on the English anti-slavery movement.[40]
London and Lille
In London, Saint-Georges stayed with fencing masters Domenico Angelo and Henry, his son, whom he knew as an apprentice from the halls of arms of Paris. They arranged exhibition matches for him including one at Carlton House, before the Prince of Wales, who received Saint-Georges graciously.[41] After sparring with him, carte and tierce,[42] the prince matched him with several renowned masters, including the mysterious transvestite, La Chevalière D’Éon, aged 59, in a voluminous black dress[43] A painting by Charles Jean Robineau[44] showing the Prince and his entourage watching "Mlle" D’Éon score a hit on Saint-Georges gave rise to rumors that he allowed it out of gallantry for a lady.[45] But, as Saint-Georges knew "her" having fenced with dragoon Captain D’Eon in Paris, it was probably in deference to D’Eon’s age. And, though Saint-Georges spent the rest of his stay entertaining his exigent friend, the Prince, he still took time to play one of his concertos at the Anacreontic Society.[46] He also delivered Brissot’s request to the abolitionists MPs William Wilberforce, John Wilkes, and the Reverend Thomas Clarkson. Before Saint-Georges left England, Prinny, as his intimates called him, presented him with a brace of pistols, so true as to kill at 30 yards’ distance. Prinny also had him sit for his portrait.[47] Asked by Mrs Angelo if it was a true likeness, Saint-Georges replied, "Alas, Madame it is frightfully so."[48]
Back in Paris, he completed and produced his latest opéra comique, La Fille Garçon, also at the Théâtre des Italiens. Once again the critics found the "poem" wanting. (Could it be that since operas were sung in French the weakness of their librettos became more evident?) "The piece, [was] sustained only by the music of Monsieur de Saint Georges.... The success he obtained should serve as encouragement to continue enriching this theatre with his productions."[49]
Compared with London, Saint-Georges found Paris seething with pre-revolutionary fervor. It was less than a year before the great conflagration. Meanwhile, with the re-construction of the Palais nearly finished, Philippe had opened several new theaters. The smallest of them was the Théâtre Beaujolais, a marionette theater for children, named after his youngest son, the duc de Beaujolais. The lead singers of the Opéra provided the voices for the puppets. It is for them Saint-Georges wrote the music of Le Marchand de Marrons (The Chestnut Vendor) with a libretto by Mme. De Genlis, Philippe's former mistress and then confidential adviser.
While Saint-Georges was away, the Concert Olympique had resumed performing at the Hôtel de Soubise, the old hall of the Amateurs, but with a different conductor: the Italian violinist Jean-Baptiste Viotti.[50] Disenchanted, Saint-George, together with the talented young singer Louise Fusil, and his friend, the horn virtuoso Lamothe, embarked on a brief concert tour in the North of France. On May 5, 1789, the opening day of the fateful Estates General, Saint-Georges, seated in the gallery with Laclos, heard Jacques Necker[51] raising his feeble voice to state, "The slave trade is a barbarous practice and must be eliminated." Choderlos de Laclos, who replaced Brissot as Philippe’s chief of staff, intensified Brissot’s campaign promoting Philippe as an alternative to the monarchy. Concerned by its success, Louis dispatched Philippe on a bogus mission to London. On July 14, 1789, the fall of the Bastille, King Louis XVI missed his opportunity to govern, and Philippe, Duke of Orléans, missed his chance to save the monarchy.
Saint-Georges, sent ahead by Laclos, stayed at Grenier’s; this hotel in Jermyn Street was a place for those bent on extravagance[52] and it was patronised by French refugees. Saint-Georges was entertaining himself lavishly.[53] His salaries gone, his largesse had to come from Philippe. Once again his assignment was to stay close to the Prince of Wales. It was not a difficult task. As soon as he arrived, Prinny took Saint-Georges to his fabled Marine Pavilion in Brighton, where he won bets placed on his guest’s prowess, took him fox hunting and to the races at Newmarket. But when Philippe arrived, it was he who became Prinny’s regular companion. Saint-Georges was rather relieved at not having to cater to Prinny's extravagant caprices, like making him jump through a speeding carriage or vault Richmond Castle's moat (presumably on horseback), to keep Philippe in the prince's thoughts.[54] Incidentally, while either Philippe or Saint-Georges were often seen with the Prince of Wales, it was never both at the same time.
A cartoon captioned "St. George & the Dragon" with the dragon symbolizing the slave trade, appeared in the Morning Post on April 12, 1789. On his previous trip to London, when Saint-Georges passed Brissot’s request onto the British abolitionists, they complied by translating their literature into French for his fledgling Société des amis des Noirs. Saint-Georges met with them again, this time on his own account. "Early in July, walking home from Greenwich, a man armed with a pistol demanded his purse. The Chevalier disarmed the man… but when four more rogues hidden until then attacked him, he put them all out of commission. M. de Saint Georges received only some contusions which did not keep him from going on that night to play music in the company of friends."[55] The nature of the attack, with four attackers emerging after the first one made sure they had the right victim, was obviously an attempt on his life disguised as a hold-up, arranged by the “Trade” to put an end to his abolitionist activities.[56]
In late June, Philippe, dubbed "The Red Duke" in London, finally realized that his “mission” there was a ruse used by the king to get him out of France. At first he consoled himself by attending horse races, trussing girls and swilling champagne with his friend, Prinny.[57] At that point, perhaps, to save his pride, Philippe clung to a vague promise made by King Louis to make him Regent of the Southern Netherlands. But when the harebrained attempt to impose him on the Belgians who wanted a Republic, failed miserably,[58] Saint-Georges, disillusioned by Philippe’s self-serving behavior, instead of returning to London, headed North, back to France.
"On Thursday, July 8, 1790, in Lille’s municipal ballroom, the famous Saint-Georges was the principal antagonist in a brilliant fencing tournament. Though ill, he fought with that grace which is his trademark. Lightning is no faster than his arms and in spite of running a fever, he demonstrated astonishing vigor."[59] Two days later looking worse but in need of funds, he offered another assault, this one for the officers of the garrison. But his illness proved so serious that it sent him to bed for six long weeks.[60] The diagnosis according to medical science at the time was “brain fever” (probably meningitis). Unconscious for days, he was taken in and nursed by some kind citizens of Lille. While still bedridden, deeply grateful to the people who were caring for him, Saint-Georges began to compose an opera for Lille’s theater company. Calling it Guillome tout Coeur, ou les amis du village, he dedicated it to the citizens of Lille. "Guillaume is an opera in one act. ...The music by Saint-George is full of sweet warmth of motion and spirt...Its [individual] pieces distinguished by their melodic lines and the vigor of their harmony. The public...made the hall resound with its justly reserved applause."[61] It was to be his last opera, lost, including its libretto.
Louise Fusil, who had idolized Saint-Georges since she was a girl of 15, wrote: "In 1791, I stopped in Amiens where St. Georges and Lamothe were waiting for me, committed to give some concerts over the Easter holidays. We were to repeat them in Tournai. But the French refugees assembled in that town just across the border, could not abide the Créole they believed to be an agent of the despised Duke of Orléans. St. Georges was even advised [by its commandant] not to stop there for long."[62] According to a report by a local newspaper: "The dining room of the hotel where St. Georges, a citizen of France, was also staying, refused to serve him, but he remained perfectly calm; remarkable for a man with his means to defend himself."[63]
Louise describes the scenario of Saint-Georges's “Love and Death of the Poor Little Bird”, a programmatic piece for violin alone, which he was constantly entreated to play especially by the ladies. Its three parts depicted the little bird greeting the spring; passionately pursuing the object of his love, who alas, has chosen another; its voice grows weaker then, after the last sigh, it is stilled forever. This kind of program music or sound painting of scenarios such as love scenes, tempests, or battles complete with cannonades and the cries of the wounded, conveyed by a lone violin, was by that time nearly forgotten. Saint-Georges must have had fun inventing it as he went along. Louise places his improvisational style on a par with her subsequent musical idol, Hector Berlioz: “We did not know then this expressive …depiction a dramatic scene, which Mr. Berlioz later revealed to us… making us feel an emotion that identifies us with the subject.” Curiously, some of Saint-Georges’s biographers are still looking for its score, but Louise’s account leaves no doubt that it belonged to the lost art of spontaneous improvisation.[64]
Tired of politics yet faithful to his ideals, St. Georges decided to serve the Revolution, directly. With 50,000 Austrian troops massed on its borders, the first citizen’s army in modern history was calling for volunteers. In 1790, having recovered from his illness, Saint-George was one of the first in Lille to join its Garde Nationale.[65] But not even his military duties in the Garde Nationale could prevent St. Georges from giving concerts. Once again he was building an orchestra which, according to the announcement in the paper, “Will give a concert every week until Easter.”[66] At the conclusion of the last concert, the mayor of Lille placed a crown of laurels on St. Georges’ brow and read a poem dedicated to him.[67]
On April 20, 1792, compelled by the National Assembly, Louis XVI declared war against his brother-in-law, Francis II.[68] General Dillon, commander of Lille, was ordered by Dumouriez to attack Tournai, reportedly only lightly defended. Instead, massive fire by the Austrian artillery turned an orderly retreat into a rout by the regular cavalry but not that of the volunteers of the National Guard.[69] Captain St. Georges, promoted in 1791,[70] commanded the company of volunteers that held the line at Baisieux.[71] A month later, "M. St. Georges took charge of the music for a solemn requiem held [in Lille] for the souls of those who perished for their city on the fateful day of April 29."[72]
Légion St.-Georges
On September 7, 1792, Julien Raimond, leader of a delegation of free men of color from Saint-Domingue (Haiti), petitioned the National Assembly to authorize the formation of a Legion of volunteers, so “We too may spill our blood for the defense of the motherland.” The next day, the Assembly authorized the formation of a cavalry brigade of "men of color", to be called Légion nationale des Américains[73] & du midi, and appointed Citizen St. Georges[74] colonel of the new regiment.[75] St. Georges’ Légion, the first all colored regiment in Europe, “grew rapidly as volunteers [attracted by his name] flocked to it from all over France.”[76]
Among its officers was Thomas Alexandre Dumas, the novelist’s father, one of St. Georges’s two lieutenant colonels.[77] Colonel St. Georges found it difficult to obtain the funds allocated to his unit towards equipment and horses badly needed by his regiment. With a number of green recruits still on foot, it took his Legion three days to reach its training camp in Laon. In February, when Pache,[78] the minister of war, ordered St. Georges to take his regiment to Lille and hence to the front, he protested that, “Short of horses, equipment and officers, I cannot lead my men to be slaughtered …without a chance to teach them to tell their left from their right.”[79]
That May, Citizen Maillard denounced St. Georges’ Legion to the Committee of Public Safety, for enrolling individuals suspected of royalist sentiments; he did not mention their being “men of color.”[80] Meanwhile Commissaire Dufrenne, one of Pache’s henchmen, accused St. Georges as: ”A man to watch; riddled by debts he had been paid I think 300,000 livres to equip his regiment; he used most of it I am convinced to pay his debts; with a penchant for luxury he keeps, they say, 30 horses in his stables, some of them worth 3000 livres; what horror…”[81] Though Dufrenne’s accusations were