The seeming “lack” of coherence between visual and verbal depictions exist not only between Vallotton’s prints and the texts that comment on them but also with Courboin’s vignettes. For instance, in “Insulting the Police Forces” (“Outrage aux Agents”), the novelist and theatre critic Lucien Muhlfeld writes the story of a peaceful merchant framed by an abhorrent police. The plot consists of a merchant knocked over by a running policeman, the former accused of having insulted the latter. Then the policeman’s two colleagues come to arrest the merchant.188 Vallotton’s illustration (Fig. 71) which presents three policemen corresponds to the plot perfectly although this situation is rare in the book. However, Courboin’s vignettes present a totally different case. In the first one, a suspect on a roof is hiding behind a wall to escape the policemen’s chase (Fig. 102). The second vignette shows the crowd who is gathering in order to see some important men put in the police carriage (Fig. 103), while the last two illustrations of the same chapter represent two portraits of policemen (Figs. 104 and 105). Though all these vignettes have some relevance with the title, “Insulting the Police Forces”; they do not actually fit into the plot written by Muhlfeld. Indeed, the three policemen arrest the merchant easily in the street, and they do not need to run after a suspect on a rooftop. Though Courboin’s illustrations are inserted within the texts, they do not necessarily rely on them. This disjunction between Courboin’s vignettes and the texts also reflects the incoherent relationship between image and text in Badauderies Parisiennes.
The incoherence produced by the multiplicity of authors convened by Uzanne in Badauderies Parisiennes is a reproach that does not apply only for the relationship between the image and the text, but also between Vallotton’s illustrations and Courboin’s vignettes. It applies throughout the entire book.
188 Badauderies Parisiennes, p. 215.
Between Vallotton’s illustration and Courboin’s vignette, no truly coherent storyline could be found. For instance, in the chapter about the angler (“Le Pêcheur à la Ligne”) (Fig. 8), Vallotton tells a complete story in one image, while Courboin’s vignettes, beside presenting scenes different from Vallotton’s composition, multiply fishing scenes (Fig. 30, 31 and 41). The fact that all the anglers are different protagonists impeaches the audience to reconstruct a coherent storyline. This heterogeneity is not only taking place between Courboin’s and Vallotton’s images but also throughout Vallotton’s thirty prints. If we attempt to link up Vallotton’s thirty images, there is no possibility to recognize a coherent storyline, either.
Chapter after chapter, the shifts between dramatic scenes and daily life experiences have the effect to emphasize the impression of inconsistency. This incoherence effect is similar to the experience one can have in a modern city. One can be attracted and stimulated by anything one sees on the street, no matter the kind of event or non-significant event one is confronted to. This experience is exactly that of a badaud driven by curiosity.
In his preface Uzanne pointed out that his book attempted to be “a work of transition, indicating the heterodox marriage between the illustration of yesterday and that of tomorrow, with all foreseen possibilities for obtaining a divorce without lacerations or ill-treatment.”189 Here, though Uzanne had the ambition to present a transitional work in the history of the illustrated book, he still anticipated the risk associated with the possible incapacityof Badauderies Parisiennes to live up to the stated expectation. The incoherencies we have mentioned might cause a potential risk of divorce, for the reader might have troubles in reading the inconsequent storyline and associating illustrations with invented plot. However, on the other hand, this
189 “[L’Editeur]…il a surtout prétendu montrer une œuvre de transition, indiquant le mariage hétérodoxe entre l’illustration d’hier et celle de demain, avec toutes possibilités prévues pour un divorce à obtenir sans lacérations ni sévices.” Octave Uzanne, “Prologue: Félix Vallotton et l’origine de ce Livre des Rassemlements; La bibliophilie et la jeunesse littéraire contemporaine,” in: Badauderies Parisiennes, VIII.
divorce could be seen as a cut-off from conventional or well-received approach to working out this illustrated book. This reading experience was truly modern but not totally new or unfamiliar to the reader of newspapers, since the structure and the content of Badauderies Parisiennes seem to replicate—all things considered—what David Banash has described for the newspaper page as the “riotous mosaic of voices with which the reader must participate.”190
Uzanne’s preface offers the key to understand the specificity of Badauderies Parisiennes. He claimed that “if this work formed by the Rassemblements suggests—
in its entirety—some appearance of incoherency, it will have, nevertheless, the unquestionable merit of variety and the unexpected.” In some way the ever changing ruptures between image and text, between the images themselves, as well as between the chapters provide a coherent and true portrait of the crowd as well as a modern reading experience comparable to that of the reading of the newspaper, the model Badauderies might have tried to emulate. This could have been only possible through a work produced by a collectivity of two artists and fifteen authors. It is therefore possible to understand the coherence of the whole project behind the appearance of its incoherent—or at least heterogeneous content and form. Far from a failure, the heterogeneous aspects or “inconsistencies” unfolding throughout the book translate the multifarious dimension of the crowd and modernity.
190 David Banash, Collage Culture : Readymades, Meaning, and the Age of Consumption, Amsterdam and New York 2013, p. 89.
Conclusion
When publishing Badauderies Parisiennes, Uzanne proclaimed the ambition of
“show(ing) a work of transition.” He wanted to establish what he coined a “heterodox marriage between the illustration of yesterday and that of tomorrow with all foreseen possibilities for obtaining a divorce without lacerations or ill-treatment.” In order to analyze Uzanne’s project, this thesis has been divided into three chapters, each centering on a single perspective aiming at defining the transitional aspects that characterize the whole book.
In the first chapter, I have considered the relationship of the publisher and the illustrators in an attempt to confirm the transitional role played by the illustrations in Badauderies Parisiennes. The publisher deliberately employed two illustrators—
namely Courboin and Vallotton in order to epitomize respectively the “illustration of yesterday” and “that of tomorrow.” The comparison of these two different styles leads to the conclusion that the nature of Uzanne’s Badauderies Parisiennes has to be recognized as intrinsically transitional, straddling over two different styles and thereby underscoring the discontinuity between tradition and modernity. The fact that Vallotton’s humorous and plate style challenged the traditional bibliophile’s liking for delicate and fine illustrated books, pushed Uzanne to employ Courboin as the second illustrator in order to alleviate the expected offence that might have hurt the most conservative and traditional collectors. However, the feedback from the 200 subscribers of the Bibliophiles Indépendants is nowhere to find—if not non-existent. The impossibility to retrace the history of the reception of the book, especially when it was published, impeaches us to know whether Uzanne’s strategy might have functioned satisfyingly. Nevertheless, after examining in the first chapter the combination of these two visual styles, it appears clearly that they could not really reach a harmonious effect in terms of coherency. However, Badauderies Parisiennes proposes a diversity of styles that could on the one side embody both the idea of tradition and modernity and on the
other side, illustrate the idea of diversity that is at play in terms of content with the crowds of various gawkers and the multiplicity of different gatherings depicted in the book.
The second chapter has shown to which extent the topic of the crowd constituting the main content of the book is at the time epitomizing the concept of transition. By recontextualizing the specificity of Vallotton’s book jacket, the thirty relief prints and his previous depictions of the urban crowd at the time—when sociological theories of the crowd were reaching their peak—for which I have provided a better understanding of the badaud. Two specificities inherent in his work such as multiplicity and transience have also been discussed. Each of them embodies a striking feature of Vallotton’s time:
the notion of multiplicity that refers to the increasing growth of population in France as well as the idea of transience that resonates with the unstable urbanization in the French society.
Built upon this sociological background, I have attempted to underline the contrast between the badaud and the flâneur. The badaud in Vallotton’s illustration is seen from the point of view of the flâneur. It is a critical stance. In addition to Vallotton’s fascination with, and depiction of the badaud, this chapter also brings into discussion the way this figure was shaped in the fait divers and how Vallotton renegotiated some of its features according to the tropes common to the columns of the fait divers press. After comparing the visualization of the crowd in Vallotton’s prints and in the fait divers press, it was possible to understand Vallotton’s attitude toward the badauds. He supports its activities with a humorous tone smoothing the tension that might be intrinsic to the events at play, while, on the other hand, he mocks the way the crowd makes the individuals lose their individuality when they belong to a mass of the anonymous. In fact, according to his biographers, Vallotton harbored some sympathy for the socialists and anarchists, and it could be distinctly seen from his previous graphic works such as The Anarchist and The Charge of 1892, or The Demonstration
of 1893 (Figs. 106-108).191 This political “sympathy” can be identified also in the last chapter of Badauderies Parisiennes, “The Demonstrators” (“Les Manifestants”) (Fig.
73). It can be also identified in the persons he collaborated with. Vallotton had previously worked at La Revue Blanche with Félix Fénéon, a declared anarchist, who contributed also to Badauderies Parisienne. It would have been interesting in this respect to develop further on and analyze the way Vallotton expressed his political beliefs in Badauderies Parisiennes. Whatever the case, one can also consider that the incoherencies we have analyzed in this thesis, might also be an expression of the anarchistic tendencies and sympathies at play within the intelligentsia of the time.
Finally, I have attempted to re-contextualize the relationships existing between image and text within the context of the history of illustrated books and measure to which extent Badauderies Parisienne plays a transitional role in this history. It appears first that images have gained power in detriment to the text during the nineteenth century, as it is the case in Badauderies Parisiennes. Resting upon the priority of images over text in its production process, we have seen that such a unique phenomenon heralds the emergence of the Artist’s Book and thereby manifests the transitional role that Badauderies Parisiennes embodies throughout the history of illustrated books.
Thus, Badauderies Parisiennes lives up to the expectation as a transitional work in terms of its illustrations, its printing technique, its content, its theme and the changing relationship between image and text in the history of the illustrated book.
Nevertheless, the significance of Badauderies Parisiennes should be measured beyond the scope of the issue of its transitional dimension. After analyzing how the texts enter into dialogue with Vallotton’s images, we have noticed numerous incoherencies. The texts supposed to comment on the images present details and plots that are often very different, if not remote from what one can infer from Vallotton’s images. The multiplicity of voices expressed in the texts characterize the multiplicity
191 Field, (as note 4), p. 72.
of the badauds’ points of view. The absence of strict correspondences between the images and the texts which may be seen as a problem of coherence is on the contrary an effect Uzanne had anticipated and desired when publishing his book. If we examine Uzanne’s unorthodox pairing of illustrations and extend it to the multiple fragmentations that punctuate the entire book—such as the dynamics between the images and the texts and the discontinuity within the chapters themselves, all of which point to suggest that Badauderies Parisiennes plays both with the oxymoronic concepts of ill-matching and uncut-disunion, or with what Uzanne had coined in his own words an “heterodox marriage” or a “divorce without lacerations or ill-treatment.” Far from showing an unhappy marriage the book epitomizes the idea of a peaceful and happy divorce. The fragmentary aspect of the book as well as the deliberate incoherencies that punctuate it not only echoes Vallotton’s ability to depict the crowd as an intrinsic multiple and transient entity, but also responds to Uzanne’s first ambition to describe it with the same heterogeneity and multiplicity that characterize it, by hiring a “mosaic of voices”—the two illustrators and the fifteen authors—to embody and represent it with the most acute accuracy.
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Figures
Fig. 1 Félix Vallotton, Book jacket of Badauderies parisiennes - Les Rassemblements, physiologies de la rue, 1896, Photo-relief, 34.1 × 54.1 cm, Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
Fig. 2 François Courboin’s vignette and Félix Vallotton’s plate facing each other in Badauderies Parisiennes
Fig. 3 Félix Vallotton, Portrait of Octave Uzanne, woodcut, in L’Art et l’Idée, 1892
Fig. 4 Félix Vallotton, Self-portrait, woodcut, in L’Art et l’Idée, 1892
Fig. 5 Félix Vallotton, “The Car’s Accident” (“L’Accident de Voiture”) from Badauderies Parisiennes,1896
Fig. 6 Félix Vallotton, “The Hercules of the Crossroad” (“L’Hercule de Carrefour”) from Badauderies Parisiennes,1896
Fig. 7 Félix Vallotton, “The Modern Billposting ” (“L’Affichage Moderne”) from Badauderies Parisiennes,1896
Fig. 8 Félix Vallotton, “The Angler” (“Le Pêcheur à la Ligne”) from Badauderies Parisiennes,1896
Fig. 9 Félix Vallotton, “The Palais-Bourbon’s Exit” (“La Sortie du Palais-Bourbon”) from Badauderies Parisiennes,1896
Fig. 10 Félix Vallotton, “The Victim of Drowning” (“Le Noyé”) from Badauderies Parisiennes,1896
Fig. 11 Félix Vallotton, “The Military Music” (“La Musique militaire”) from Badauderies Parisiennes,1896
Fig. 12 Félix Vallotton, “Around the Summer Concert Café” (“Autour du Café-Concert d’Été”) from Badauderies Parisiennes,1896
Fig. 13 Félix Vallotton, “The Hawker” (“Le Camelot”) from Badauderies Parisiennes,1896
Fig. 14 Félix Vallotton, “Insulting the Police Forces” (“Outrage aux Agents”) from Badauderies Parisiennes,1896
Fig. 15 Félix Vallotton, “Transport Network’s Work” (“Travaux de Voirie”) from Badauderies Parisiennes,1896
Fig. 16 Félix Vallotton, “The Marriage” (“Le Mariage”) from Badauderies Parisiennes,1896
Fig. 17 Félix Vallotton, “The Drunkard” (“L’Ivrogne”) from Badauderies Parisiennes,1896
Fig. 18 Félix Vallotton, “The Funeral” (“L’Enterrement”) from Badauderies Parisiennes,1896
Fig. 19 Félix Vallotton, “The Bomb” (“La Bombe”) from Badauderies Parisiennes,1896
Fig. 20 Félix Vallotton, “The Police Van” (“Le Panier à Salade”) from Badauderies Parisiennes,1896
Fig. 21 Félix Vallotton, “The Fire Accident ” (“L’Incendie”) from Badauderies Parisiennes,1896
Fig. 22 Félix Vallotton, Un enterrement en province, 1891, woodcut, 25.7 × 35.2 cm
Fig. 23 Félix Vallotton, La Foule à Paris, 1892, woodcut, 13.7 × 19.4 cm, Armstrong Fine Art
Fig. 24 Gustave Courbet, A Burial at Ornans, 1849-50, oil on canvas, 315 × 668 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris
Fig. 25 Enlargement from Félix Vallotton, “The Angler” (“Le Pêcheur à la Ligne”) from Badauderies Parisiennes,1896