Mephistopheles and Monkeys: Rejuvenation, Race, and Sexuality in Popular Culture in Interwar France

Give back the passions unabated,
        That deepest joy, alive with pain,
Love's power and the strength of hatred,
        Give back my youth to me again.

—Goethe, Faust

I've had enough, I swear it, of youth and of disheartening adventure.
Yes, I want to see the winter.

—Jean Rieux, Non, merci, Vorognonoff!

In 1929 Félicien Champsaur, a Rabelaisian author of much pulp fiction, published Nora, la guenon devenue femme (Nora the She-Monkey Becomes a Woman). The cover illustration of Champsaur's book featured a svelte black woman wearing nothing but a banana skirt, looking not unlike the African American entertainer Josephine Baker, who, just a few years earlier, had taken Paris by storm. Champsaur opened his novel with the image of a half-naked Nora, dancing with unbridled energy at the Folies-Bergère. At the end of the performance a celebrated politician, baffled by Nora's antics and appearance, queried a scientist in attendance: "Is she a woman or an animal?" The scientist replied, "Call her a she-monkey who became a woman, and you will be correct."¹ Indeed, Nora was a "she-monkey" who had become a woman: she was born of a union between a man and a monkey. When the monkey Nora was two years of age scientists implanted into her the ovaries of a Russian ex-princess and the pineal gland of a man. To the delight and expectations of scientists, Nora evolved into a brown-skinned woman—symbolically, Josephine Baker.

Champsaur's novel deserves attention if only for its bizarre, unreal, racist parody of Baker. To study Champsaur's racism would certainly contribute to our understanding of the contours of the interwar French mentality. Perhaps, though, a more expansive contribution to historical scholarship can be made. The cultural historian Robert Darnton has claimed that when we examine a document "where it is most opaque, we may be able to unravel an alien system of meaning."² Champsaur's novel truly opens to us an alien world of interwar beliefs and anxieties not only about race but also about rejuvenation and sexuality.

In fact, Champsaur's roman à clef is an exaggerated, fictive account of the real Serge Voronoff (1866-1951) and his actual medical experiments in France in the 1920s. Voronoff, a naturalized Russian Jewish émigré, invented and practiced a method of rejuvenation by grafting monkey testicles into the scrotum of senile, often impotent, men. His patients, he claimed, regained their youthful vigor in more ways than one. Voronoff was an international celebrity, training numerous doctors and having his scientific studies translated into several languages. Holding a post at the Collège de France, Voronoff was a serious, albeit controversial, scientist who attempted to advance science but who practiced weird medicine, even by contemporary standards.

Scholars have turned their attention to the rejuvenation movement in recent years, and its place in the development of modern medical science is well understood.³ However, the cultural meanings that nonscientists invested in such scientific achievements have not been adequately examined. In this essay I argue that in French popular culture—newspapers, literature, and iconography—writers and artists represented rejuvenation by using a literary metaphor: the Faustian myth. When Voronoff's experiments made Faust's quest for a long life and perpetual sensual pleasure an ostensible reality for all, the popular media of the day celebrated but ultimately rejected the practice. This rejection demonstrated a conservative approach to the human life cycle, insisting that people should gracefully accept the consequences of aging. The response also reflected a fear of racialized sexuality and miscegenation, since monkeys were closely associated with blacks in the social imagination of the interwar French.

The annual fall meeting of the Congrès français de chirurgie was not typically fodder for sensational...