Part #287: Culture Vultures
“There has been a minor diplomatic incident in the Guinean city of Dakar, where – as part of an agreement by the Government of France to provide investment in new factories there – the Ambassador, His Excellency M. Teissier, was received at a reception by the Prime Minister of Guinea, the Right Honourable Mr Kwaku Mensa. Unfortunately, two incidents undermined the occasion; firstly the French anthem was poorly played by the official band, and secondly the bilingual French commentary was provided in the Nouvelle-Orléanais dialect rather than Parisian French. There has been no official comment from M. Teissier or His Most Christian Majesty’s Government, but there are reports that many ordinary French people on the country’s Motext network are castigating the so-called ‘insult’ from the Guineans. We now go over to Professor Richard Salisbury, an expert on the region, for comment. Richard?”
“Thank you Miss Jaxon. Well, over the past few hours, Prime Minister Mensa has commented briefly on the incident, apologising for any offence caused and explaining simply that his people had little history of contact with the French. But in fact, as the opposition leader in the Grand Palaver, the Right Honourable Mr Dauda Nazaki, said in an interview this evening in a critique of the Prime Minister’s statement, part of the logic behind the selection of Dakar for the reception was that it had been a French colony between 1677 and 1758.”
“That’s fascinating!”
“Yes, it was taken by American and English, or British I should say, forces during the Third War of Supremacy. Those days of French rule lie long in the past, and one would be forgiven for thinking there had never been contact between France and the Guinean lands of western Africa; you know, it is an interesting ‘what if’ of history if Dakar had been returned to France at the peace treaty, and perhaps French, rather than English, would have become the primary outsiders’ lingua franca of the region...”
– Transcription of a C-WNB News Motoscope broadcast,
recorded in Waccamaw Strand, Kingdom of Carolina, 12/04/2020
*
From: “A History of Modern France” by Bertrand Woode (1998)—
Ever since the Jacobin Revolution and the years of rule by Lisieux’s brutally utilitarian regime, Paris had lost its crown of Europe’s cultural capital to Vienna. Certainly, there had been a measured recovery since the days when France’s capital was nothing more than a dreary mass of straight roads and blocky warehouses designed to crumble within decades; the city had been reimagined and reimagined anew by generations of architects after the Restoration. Yet many of the old cultural channels were gone and would never return, or at least not in the same guise. The old salons of the pre-revolutionary days had vanished, and the Cytherean movement in France would be needed to plot new paths for women to regain and expand their old political influence.[1] The same would be true of the salons as a venue for new artists, whether they be musicians, painters or a host of other media, to be discovered by society. Indeed, in its old form, ‘society’ no longer existed. Nor did the stately homes and palaces of the aristocracy which had so often played host to such artists as a means of patronage.
Naturally, it is easy to bemoan this loss of heritage and forget that it was this very same elevated, ivory-tower Parisian culture that had thrived while the people starved and helped precipitate the Revolution in its original, idealistic form in the days of Le Diamant. Many Frenchmen and –women of humbler station, even if they had soured on the Republic, would not shed a tear that the painted and powdered aristocracy of the
ancien régime would never regain its former privileged isolation from the old Third Estate.
Yet it also meant that France’s cultural ‘industries’ had been set back to square one. Though France would continue to rise back to geopolitical prominence throughout the nineteenth century, the cultural shadow she cast lagged behind military power and political influence. In a large part, this was due to competition. Vienna had seized the crown of cultural capital of Europe in the aftermath of the Jacobin Wars and had held on tightly to it ever since. Paradoxically, this was all the more strengthened throughout the wasted years of Francis II’s rule, in which there was a sense that the clock could be wound back to the heady days of the
ancien régime just by shutting one’s eyes and wishing hard enough. Though greatly damaging in the short term to the prospects of the Hapsburg monarchy, this period was a boon for Vienna’s cultural output, with music, painting, architecture and fashion being powered by the rich fuel of nostalgia.
Culturally, this continued even after the Popular Wars, when the Hapsburg monarchy took a new modernising tack and Danubia was created. As new generations grew up, a new word was coined,
Schattensehnsucht: ‘longing for a shadow’ or, less literally, describing those who were nostalgic for an idealised image of a time they had never actually experienced themselves. This proved surprisingly persistent as a cornerstone of Viennese culture, also inspiring Rome in Italy to adopt a similar approach to ancient Roman fashion and art. Some historians even trace a direct line from nineteenth-century Viennese idealisation of the past to the Archie youth movement of the 1930s, though this remains controversial.
Regardless, Vienna had a driving principle behind the music, painting, sculpture, literature and other output of the artists who flocked there, while Paris was still looking to find a new identity, its roots cut off at the ankles by the sharp discontinuity of Lisieux. In particular, there was a big divide in the Parisian arts scene of the mid-century in whether to idealise or criticise industrialism and technology, reflecting the broader political divide between the pro-industry Diamantines and the more critical, Neo-Physiocratic Eden Movement of Jules Clément that influenced the Verts.[2] In other times, this conflict might itself have fuelled a cultural flowering, but Paris’ artistic scene was still sufficiently shaky and few in number that it was more a hindrance towards re-establishing a presence on the European stage.
But recovery proper had began by the second half of the nineteenth century, by which time the growth of the Sensualist movement in art had plotted a French-focused impact on European culture for the first time in years, in contrast to the Valladolid School Hyperrealism that had previously been prominent.[3] As France continued to grow in geopolitical power following the Pandoric War and the Panic of 1917, more heads began once more turning towards Paris to see what the next cultural trends would be, just as they had two centuries before. And it would be in Paris that the defining artistic movement of the Black Twenties would be born, known internationally as Morne – the French word for dreary or bleak.
Popular renditions of this period tend to portray Morne as being dominant in the 1920s and then pushed out by the more colourful and hopeful counter-movements of the 1930s. The reality is quite different, for the logical reason that patrons and consumers were more amenable to art dwelling on the pain and suffering of the Black Twenties once they were actually over, rather than in the middle of them. In reality, the 1920s saw a lot of frivolous and upbeat cultural output in a desperate attempt to keep the people’s spirits up; these media are today little remembered except in the ENA, which had some of the more memorable plays and musicals. Ironically, at the time these were often sold only as printed scripts and sheet music to perform at home, as actually performing them in public would be against public health regulations at the time.
In this regard, Morne is frequently compared to the
Danse macabre, a cultural movement in France centuries earlier that had been influenced by both the Black Death (the
last big plague pandemic before the Black Twenties) and the Hundred Years’ War. The
Danse macabre motifs had focused on the inevitability of death and how it was no respecter of persons, with frescoes depicting living people meeting their ancestors as cadavers who warn them of what is to come, and carnivals in which actors would dress up as corpses or skeletons and ‘dance with Death’. Much like the Morne period (but on a grander scale), the
Danse macabre did not flower
during the period of disaster that inspired it, but in the years afterwards, mostly the 1400s.
While almost everyone today will recognise the ‘look’ of Morne art (which has gone through periodic revivals, most recently in the 1990s), it remains contentious exactly where that look comes from. Gagnaire (1971) is one of many analysts to suggest that the oldest Morne art used contrasts of white and brown, or light brown and dark brown, and therefore stemmed from an imitation of how letters and drawings looked after they had been heated in an oven in an attempt to kill disease animalcules before passing into quarantine. There is some evidence for this claim, but the vast majority of Morne art uses contrasts of black and white, not brown, and if the browned quarantine documents were the original inspiration, that look was soon abandoned. Others have claimed that Morne art always began as monochrome black and white, and there were other sources of inspiration such as the dazzle camouflage on contemporary ships. Still others make the more prosaic claim that there was no direct real-life inspiration, and monochrome Morne was simply a sign-of-the-times reaction against the rich colours of Sensualism and other preceding artistic movements.
Regardless of this argument, which will most probably never be solved, Morne came to define the look and feel of the Black Twenties in later period pieces (even though, as said above, much of it was not produced until the 1930s). Like the
danse macabre, Morne often dwelt on the suffering of those hit by both plague and war at the same time, musing on the inevitability of death – though the more subversive pieces drew deliberate contrast with the better life available in countries at peace, such as Danubia and China. Incidentally, Chinese
Qinghua blue and white ceramic art is one of the more dubious suggestions for what inspired Morne’s monochrome style. Unlike many preceding monochrome art forms, however, Morne tended to emphasise the use of heavy blocks of black rather than just outlines. This rendered it unsuitable for mass depiction using standard woodcuts and printing presses of the time, which were not capable of simultaneously reproducing both thick areas of solid black while still preserving the subtle pointillism of other parts of an image. Whether deliberate or no (again, analysts argue) this had the effect of Morne standing out from the more mass-produced public art of the period. Originals were highly sought-after by collectors, something fairly unusual at the time for ink drawings rather than paintings.
Morne was not solely a visual medium, with Morne music, drama and architecture also being produced. The running theme is one of gloom and despair, but also sharp contrasts to reflect the harsh black and white of the visual form. Morne music has not had the staying power of Morne visual art, with its experimental, discordant chords (influenced by the gamelan music of Javanese exiles according to some) not appealing to all but the most avant-garde. Conversely, Morne architecture is probably the part of the movement that has had the longest lasting impact, with neo-Morne buildings still popular today. This is probably because the black and white contrast in that context is less immediately evocative of the despair that the original movement dwelt on, and many unfamiliar with the history of the movement consider Morne buildings to be merely striking rather than cheerless.
As is always the case in popular descriptions of cultural eras, Morne was never as defining or as dominant as modern films set in the 1920s would have us believe. Nonetheless, it had a large long-term impact. Not only did it create a visual and artistic style that would leave long shadows in memory of the grief and horror of the Black Twenties (particularly upon European culture), but it cemented into the minds of all that after years of playing catch-up, the culture of Paris was back...
Morne is also somewhat unusual, and perhaps symptomatic of the more collectivist and less individualistic
esprit du temps[4] of the 1920s, in which nations pulled together to resist the punishing threats from within and without. Less than most artistic movements, Morne is less defined by its individual artists and more by its general climate. While it is possible to reel off a list of iconic Paris-based Morne artists, such as the painter Ollier, the playwright Caillaud and the sequent artists Montcharmont and Bouvard, these are considered less defining than listing the Sensualist artists of a generation before. This lack of a Central Character [Great Man] approach the genre is partly driven by the brutal reality that so many of the artists produced relatively little before succumbing to the plague or, more prosaically, fleeing Paris for the countryside. It was not the individual talent that mattered, but the collective genius of the
shared vision of the Morne artists in their Paris clique, which remained like a greater organism with a Ship of Theseus continuity, even as it shed some ‘cells’ and others joined it.[5]
Of course, this does not stop collectors talking up the works of individuals, and indeed having achieved only a small amount before succumbing to a tragically young death has always been seen as something of a bonus for artists whom collectors choose to place on a pedestal. However, this approach has never been too successful with Morne art, not least because its iconic style is often difficult to associate with a particular artist. Furthermore, many of them bought into the collectivist idea at the time, and deliberately did not sign their work, or signed it with a symbol denoting a collective effort. One exception to this is the case of sequent artists; Morne sequents are typically long enough that a particular style can be recognised, and so it is the work of men like Montcharmont and Bouvard that becomes particularly sought after. It was via the need to produce sequents in larger numbers that printing technology eventually adapted to be able to reproduce the Morne style en masse; this, as much as fading memories of the Black Twenties, contributed to the decline of the genre after the 1930s.[6]
Though Morne was the defining artistic movement in Paris in this period, it was not the only cultural influence France had on Europe and the wider world – for better or for worse. Religious and spiritual responses to the challenge of the Black Twenties were abundant, just as they had been for the Black Death of centuries prior. Both existing orthodox and heterodox movements saw growth in the period (the Old Believers in Russia are one example, despite attempts at persecution from above). There were also splinters from the existing churches; for example, the New Reformed Wesleyans in England and later America, better known by their nickname ‘Straight Shooters’, who adopted a number of unusual beliefs from their leader Pastor Frederick Granville. Among these was a belief that singing the same hymn twice in a month (or repeating any part of it at all in an encore) was an affront to the Almighty. Some speculate this began as something as simple as Granville, in his youth, being annoyed that a large chunk of the existing Wesleyan hymnal was never used in his church due to the pastor and congregation’s enthusiasm for a few old favourites repeated over and over. If its origins were as prosaic as that, though, it became an article of faith for the Straight Shooters. Many of their other unusual ideas also focus on music, such as only using musical instruments explicitly mentioned in the Bible (of which there are fortuitously many, but some disagreements over translation) and playing at extremely loud volume in reference to Psalm 150:5 (“Praise him upon the loud cymbals: praise him with the clash of cymbals”). This made the Straight Shooters popular as a youth revival movement, especially in the ENA, but less than popular with their neighbours, especially as their services often took place as midnight. More intriguingly, the Straight Shooters also devoted much scholarship into attempting to reconstruct the lost Israelite tunes mentioned in the Psalms that the words were originally set to; though most archaeologists consider the results to be nothing more than wishful thinking, the Straight Shooters’ scholars discovered several innovative cryptographic techniques in the process.[7]
There are many other examples that could be discussed around the world (with China in particular home to some especially intriguing movements) but let us return to France and the infamous Massilians. Sociologists still disagree on the exact origins of the movement and which component was most significant. For many years, it was assumed that the primary source of inspiration was a group of Moronite refugees who had been exiled from Tierra del Fuego after the Societists took over and imposed their laws. While the influence of these Moronites (who had eventually made their way to France, probably with the returning IEF) was doubtless important, the assumption that it was the key influence has been more recently criticised by scholars. Guibal (1984), in particular, accuses earlier scholarship of over-emphasising the Moronites simply because of their ‘colourful’, ‘exotic’ and ‘outrageous’ nature. He also notes that relatively few sources survive on the Moronites’ way of life in Tierra del Fuego in the years prior to the Pandoric War and Societist Revolution, and invokes evidence suggesting that the group in question were actually considered heterodox deviant outcasts from the community there as a whole – hence why they were able to escape earlier. Guibal’s assertion is controversial, because it is accounts by the Moronites’ spiritual leader Adam Barmoroni that have formed the basis for modern reconstructions of what all Moronites were supposed to have believed before the Societist takeover. There remains independent evidence for some sociological points, such as them practising simultaneous polygamy and polyandry in which each man took three wives and each wife had three husbands, but many of Barmoroni’s claims about their theology have now come under greater scrutiny.
Regardless, the Moronite exiles in Marseilles were not the only potential source of influence. Gnativist people, often of Métis descent, had left the former Superior Republic after its occupation and division by the ENA and Russians after the Pandoric War. Some of these, led by a French-speaking Huron engineer named Jacques Hochelay,[8] also settled in the South of France and were objects of fascination by the locals. Finally, often excluded from analyses because of their seeming banality, are the French themselves; the Neo-Physiocratic Eden Movement, though no longer as influential upon politics as it once had been, continued to have its supporters among the people. Indeed, near its beginning the movement was often described as a ‘Neo-Edenite’ one by outsiders.
Whatever the relative portions that made up the cocktail of influences, the group later known as the Massilians first came to prominence immediately before the Black Twenties, around 1921, but became much more significant when war and plague came. The Massilians advocated a back-to-nature idea that looked down on modern technology, and claimed humans had grown more sickly as a result of modern agriculture and industry. Evoking the idea of an earthly paradise, they tried to live as latter-day hunter-gatherers – which some argue signifies a rejection of Societism’s orderly notion of a succession of civilisation from hunter-gatherer to tribe to city to nation to Final Society, perhaps indicative of influence from the Moronites or more straightforward Meridian Refugiados. Regardless, what saw the most fascination from the locals, and what has defined them ever since, was their practice of nudism. It was rather fortunate, of course, that their movement had grown up in Provence around the city of Marseilles; such commitment to principle would have been rather bolder in Helsingfors!
The Massilians, named after the old Latin name of the city, were viewed as a curiosity for a while, with occasional condemnations from public authority (both sacred and secular). It was the coming of the plague in 1923 which changed matters. The Massilians began preaching that their ‘natural’ lifestyle would protect them from the plague, in particular exposing their bodies to sunlight, and began more boldly campaigning in the streets, rather than sticking to the beaches and their own communes. This led to a riot in November (by which point the Massilians were having to be a little more principled about eschewing clothing, even in Marseilles) and the Parlement-Provincial of Provence got involved, expelling the group from its territory. A few went west to Languedoc, but more went east to the Ligurian hinterland of Genoa in Italy, where they were generally tolerated and still exist as a curiosity to this day...
[1] See Part #125 in Volume III.
[2] See Part #166 in Volume IV.
[3] See Part #221 in Volume V.
[4] This term is used here with the meaning of ‘zeitgeist’, although in OTL French (in the singular) it more usually conveys simply ‘punctual’.
[5] The appeal to a biological, cell-based metaphor is another sign of the times and influence from recent scientific work, as discussed in Part #273 of Volume VII in the context of its influence on early Diversitarianism. The Ship of Theseus is a famous invocation of the paradox that can one replace every part of an entity and still have it be considered the same entity?
[6] To someone from OTL, Morne sequents would probably superficially evoke the look of some Japanese manga in their use of sharp black and white contrast and hard angles, though the actual style is very different.
[7] For example, Psalms 57, 58, 59 and 75 are speculated to have been set to a tune titled ‘Do Not Destroy’, though scholars disagree on whether that is actually the significance of the phrase.
[8] This is probably an alias, as ‘Jacques’ was an old French term for the Huron or Wyandot people with the implication of ‘peasant’, and Hochelay is an old Huron town or group from centuries earlier which the French might have recognised.
