Preface

Preface B ELLE ÉPOQUE": if every cultural period is ambiguous, no appellation in modern history better illustrates this ambiguity. 'Belle" for whom? Granted, the period witnessed unprecedented economic development and scientific progress, as well as remarkable literary and artistic achievements. However, it may be the very nature of literary history (as well as art history and cinema) that has conferred on the years ranging from the 188Os to World War I a glitz that is in large part a post-mortem fabrication. Actually, the era persistently challenges the common belief (possibly reinforced by a misreading of Foucault) in the cultural consistency of a given period, sharply differentiated from the next. As a matter of fact, we may not have yet left the mental and political framework inherited from those years—still caught in what Philippe Muray has called Le dix-neuvième siècle à travers les âges. ' Without reverting to notions of cultural unity or resorting to conceptual grids such as Dumezil's, it is still possible to note a number of concerns or obsessions that the last twenty years of the 20th century share with the Belle Époque. As Régis Debray has suggested, we seem in some respects to be repeating the end of the 19th century.2 Here are a few examples among others: Late 19th century the Balkans colonial empire race socialism women's education and employment decadence sexual inversion virus, syphilis pornography (photography) cocaine, morphine melodrama (opera) the Princess of Wales Late 20th century former Yugoslavia post-colonial studies ethnicity welfare women's education and employment family values gender definition virus, AIDS pornography (video) cocaine, heroin melodrama (soap-operas) the Princess of Wales Vol. XXXVII, No. 4 L'Esprit Créateur Most of these themes and issues touch in some way upon women and their ambiguous centrality to the culture, as the striking visual contrasts offered by two recent books illustrate: The first one, called Paradis perdus: l'Europe symboliste, is the splendid catalogue of a gigantic exhibition organized in Quebec after the end of communism released hundreds of symbolist paintings that had been held in Eastern Europe.3 Displayed next to British, French, and American masterpieces, these works offer a magnificent but surreal gallery of female divinities, nymphs, Salomes, and vamps in mythological garb. Through female iconography, the symbolist imagination elevated itself above its own social and material conditions of possibilities. As the catalogue editors say: Pris entre la fin du naturalisme et les débuts de notre modernité, le symbolisme est un Janus qui regarde vers le passé avec nostalgie... et qui appréhende avec anxiété le monde à venir, voulant ne rien savoir des conquêtes du progrès scientifique ni des prouesses d'une technique devenue planétaire. (17) The second book concerns itself with a far less glamorous topic: the representation of women through postcards during the 1900s.4 You will not meet la duchesse de Guermantes here. The book is organized thematically, with such chapter headings as: Professions féminines Au fil des jours Les métiers du chiffon Les femmes dans l'industrie Les femmes de la côte Les femmes des campagnes Etoiles et courtisanes Accusées, levez-vous! Most of the 240 pages constitute a collection of worn out and wrinkled faces of women, some in traditional regional dress, working on assembly lines or deploying fishnets. La Belle Époque may not have been that "belle" for them. Finally, we should remember that this was the France of the Third Republic, the only republic in Europe at the time. Yes, it repressed workers , ruthlessly built a vast colonial empire, and obsessively prepared for 6 Winter 1997 Preface the next war with Germany. Nevertheless, it did away with the privilege of birth, encouraged arts, letters, and scientific research, and, through the priority it granted to education and individual merit, literally uplifted entire segments of the working class and the peasant population. One has to start somewhere: "l'institutrice" of the Third Republic may very well be the ancestor of today's professional woman. The essays we have gathered for this special issue address, each in its own way and sometimes one against the other, the contradictions presented by...