Rachilde and French Women's Authorship: From Decadence to Modernism

1925, JULY 2: Women and Surrealism: In which Rachilde gets into a bun fight

1925, july 2 Women and Surrealism In which Rachilde gets into a bun fight A number of witnesses and critics have described the banquet SaintPol -Roux, that memorable encounter on Thursday, July 2, 1925, that started out as a dinner organized by the Mercure to honor the poet and ended by deteriorating into a bun fight that staged a literary and literal confrontation between what was perceived as the old guard and the new avant-garde, represented by the surrealists. For Shattuck, for example, the event marked the end of “the banquet years,” that period of innovation and ferment that broke with both realism and finally even symbolism and led to modernism (359–60). And many people remember or repeat that, as the banquet came to an end, Rachilde was one of the people still fighting. According to Dauphiné (Rachilde [1991] 72), she came to blows with Max Ernst, for example. For Shattuck, the events unfolded as follows: Along with all the young bloods of surrealism, such venerable figures as Lugné-Poe and Rachilde were present. These former collaborators of Jarry’s were now considered reactionary. When, in the middle of the meal, Rachilde stoutly affirmed the patriotic sentiment that “a French-woman must never marry a German,” sufficient provocation had been provided for the start of hostilities. André Breton rose to defend the insulted nationality of Max Ernst, the German surrealist painter, present at the banquet. It is said Breton went so far as to fling his napkin in Madame Rachilde’s face and call her a fille à soldats. While shouts of Vive l’Allemagne resounded through the building, the tumult centered around the figure of Philippe Soupault , who was swinging from the chandelier capsizing glasses and dishes with his feet. The traditional pieces of overripe fruit found their mark among dignitaries of the banquet. An irate crowd formed outside, ready to attack the sales artistes who were now yelling out the window “Down with France.” There was considerable damage inside the restaurant, and the police could barely prevent a lynching as the banqueters emerged. The affair ended violently with several arrests and injuries. (359–60)1 In accounts such as these, Rachilde gets represented as beleaguered and victimized. She also consistently gets lined up with the old guard by virtue of her attack on the surrealists. Rachilde had not always been at odds with the surrealists, however. She had corresponded sympathetically with André Breton, and Cocteau had been a supporter in 1917, crowing, “Vive la France et Rachilde” (quoted in “Rachilde et la France” 45). This chapter reexamines Rachilde’s reactionary tendencies and argues that, while she certainly had many allegiances with fellow writers from the symbolist days, her hostility toward surrealism marked a resistance to a specific literary movement in which she felt she had no place rather than an attack on modernist tendencies in general. While in some senses she had no place because the movement valued innovative literary values that threatened to displace her own (innovative in their own day but now passé), the lack of place for her was not only about literary rivalry and old versus new. It was also about the displacement of women as writers and a certain view of what would be considered innovation (and hence modernism). At least one person, for example, thought that Rachilde had actually gone to the banquet looking for a fight. Her colleague at the Mercure de France Paul Léautaud noted in his diary the day after the banquet that she had gone to the dinner armed with a revolver (1:1618–21). Later in July, Léautaud also heard surrealist Louis Aragon’s version of events. According to him, no one had even touched Rachilde (1:1626).2 Léautaud frequently displays no small amount of animus toward Rachilde in his diary, so he was predisposed to believe that she was acting in bad faith and looking for trouble, but his observation is consistent with the way in which Rachilde liked to present herself. Rachilde’s pose as target, rather than attacker, was yet another example of her self-presentation as victim. On the one hand, this was typical of her consistent need to present herself as the underdog and her search for self-promotion and publicity through scandal, but the confusion about the real role that Rachilde played in this event is also a story about the way in which surrealism comes to dominate French modernism and the consequences...