Heroes and Legends of Fin-de-siècle France: Gender, Politics, and National Identity by Venita Datta (review)

Venita Datta’s lively and readable study starts from the relatively straightforward premise that fin-de-siècle France “needed national heroes who could unify in their persons both the idea of an eternal nation and that of a modern republic” (11). Heroism, however, was not what it had once been. Disinterested, Cornelian heroism now seemed abstract and unattainable, and the Nietzschean ideal completely un-French. Despite the panache of Rostand’s Cyrano, the traditional, military idea of heroism was now being undermined both by a generalized crisis of masculinity and a pervasive sense of vulnerability. Yet, at the same time, heroism was becoming increasingly commodified. Audiences at the boulevard theaters and readers of the popular press avidly consumed melodramatic representations of heroism. The lines between fact and fiction became blurred, as France played out her anxieties and her political tensions through the creation of heroes and heroines for a modern, democratic age.

Datta’s journey through fin-de-siècle and belle époque heroism (a term that proves to be somewhat elastic) focuses on five case studies or causes célèbres. The underlying narrative is that, between about 1880 and the start of the Great War, France gradually overcame her political divisions and achieved national consensus through the vigorous debate about heroism that these cases provoked. Focusing successively on the Bazar de la Charité fire of May 1897, the staging of Cyrano de Bergerac at the end of that year, the cult of Napoleon in theater and literature at the fin de siècle, theatrical representations of Joan of Arc, and finally the scandal of the Ullmo spy case of 1907–1908, Datta tells of the emergence of a new concept of heroism, infused with more sensitive values, a sense of intimacy and even banality, and in most cases a sense, too, of sexual ambiguity. Thus, for example, “the Napoleonic legend and the manly hero were […] destabilized by authors of the fin de siècle” (141). The greatest and most unifying hero of all, the one who appeared to reconcile France’s past with her present, was Cyrano; yet, as Datta asserts, Rostand simultaneously celebrates and undermines heroic qualities in this character (92–93), whose unconsummated love for Roxane is played out through what is arguably a more important relationship with another man.

Alongside the heroes and heroines portrayed in literature and the press, Datta also traces the emergence of another kind of hero in this book, namely the modern celebrity. If Rostand himself becomes a cult figure, so too does the actor Coquelin who plays Cyrano; but the real star of this extended media show is without question Sarah Bernhardt. Her renderings of the Duc de Reichstadt in Rostand’s L’Aiglon (1900), or of Joan of Arc in Barbier’s Jeanne d’Arc (1890) then Moreau’s Le Procès de Jeanne d’Arc (1909), are a massive hit with audiences. Joan of Arc herself is a sexually ambiguous, cross-dressing heroine, ideal for the fin de siècle, but as Datta points out, Bernhardt is also the ideal actress to portray her: a cross-dresser playing a cross-dresser, a Jew playing a Christian, an icon of the modern commercial age playing the role of beauty, purity, and disinterestedness. The ambiguity and the irony could not be more exquisitely staged.

If there is a weak point in the argument of this perceptive study, it emerges in the final substantive chapter, which examines the trial of the spy Ullmo and its reverberations in the press. Ullmo, who attempted to sell naval secrets to the Germans in order both to feed his gambling and opium habits, and to maintain his expensive mistress, was a failure in every respect. He was definitely not a hero by any stretch of the imagination. While Datta is able to show that there is a...