Brigstocke - Defiant Laughter - Humour and the Aesthetics of Place in Late 19th Century Montmartre

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published online 6 October 2011Cultural GeographiesJulian Brigstocke

MontmartreDefiant laughter: humour and the aesthetics of place in late 19th century

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DOI: 10.1177/1474474011414637

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Defiant laughter: humour and

the aesthetics of place in late19th century Montmartre

Julian BrigstockeSchool of Geography, Politics & Sociology, University of Newcastle, UK

Abstract

Humour was at the core of the spatial imaginary of the emerging French avant-garde of the1880s. But what was the specific role of different forms of humour in their attempts to re-imagineurban place and community? In this article I develop a non-representational historical geography

of the aesthetics of place in fin-de-sicle Montmartre. The article analyses how Montmartreartists used humour in order to inject new life and vitality into the urban environment. Theambivalence of humour made it a powerful device through which to experiment with creating

a novel experience of place and stylizing an affirmative urban ethos. Two modes of humour inparticular were predominant: irony and pantomime buffoonery. Through irony, they attemptedto create an experience of place that encompassed the contradictory and fugitive nature of themodern city. In buffoonery, they found a way of affirming the citys potential at the same time as

remaining alive to its suffering and violence. In combination, this urban ethos can be theorized asa form of affirmative pessimism.

Keywords

affect, affirmative pessimism, art of living, avant-garde, biopolitics, Chat Noir, humour, Montmar-tre, non-representational history

Introduction

The small neighbourhood of Montmartre, in the north of Paris, spends much of its time illuminatedin a frenzy of camera flashes. As a powerful lieu de mmoire, Montmartre has come to embodya nostalgia for a romanticized image of liberal freedom: a cult of creativity, aestheticized individu-alism and bohemian chic.1 It has become an almost mythological emblem of urban vitality,

Corresponding author:

Julian Brigstocke, School of Geography, Politics & Sociology, Claremont Tower, Claremont Road, University of

Newcastle, Newcastle Upon Tyne NE1 7RU, UKEmail: [email protected]

14637CGJXXX10.1177/1474474011414637BrigstockeCultural Geographies

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2 cultural geographies

dynamism and aliveness, but one from which any sense of political engagement or radical critique anyawareness of its role in the Paris Commune, for example has all but disappeared. The origins ofMontmartres transformation from a neglected, poverty-stricken suburb of Paris into a centre ofFrench culture, however, can be found in the experiments of an urban avant-garde that was closelyallied to anarchist ideals of local autonomy, self-determination and equality. Poets, musicians andartists associated with small cabarets artistiques in Montmartre such as the Chat Noir (Black Cat)formulated an urban ethos that attempted to create a distance from the accepted values of fin-de-sicle liberalism. Anticipating later urban avant-gardes such as Surrealism and Situationism, theartistic experiments of these groups, infused with an anarchic vitality and sense of humour,attempted to actualize a new form of urban imaginary, a transformed art of urban living. 2In thisarticle, I excavate elements of the urban ethos of the Montmartre avant-garde, analysing somedistinctive ways in which its creative experiments sought to create a new style of urban living andto engineer a novel affective experience of urban place.3

The article intervenes in debates in cultural geography in two ways. First, it develops a newunderstanding of the role of humour in the production of place. Based on archival research draw-ing on late 19th-century periodicals, literature and other publications produced in Montmartresartistic cabarets, the article discusses the widespread use of two distinctive forms of humour:ironyand buffoonery. Humour, I will argue, had a particularly powerful place in the late 19thcentury urban politics of affect, and was a means by which the tragic elements of modern lifecould be re-appropriated in creative and productive new ways. The Montmartre avant-garde usedirony in order to articulate a dynamic experience where a sense of place and rootedness could coex-ist with a world experienced as mobile, contradictory and excessive. In order to evoke a moreembodied, libidinal and non-representational experience of place, however, the Montmartre avant-garde found it necessary to adopt a less sophisticated form of humour: pantomime buffoonery.The buffoonery of the pantomime was a wordless humour, a humour generated from the bodys

urges, desires, violence and vulnerability. The Montmartre avant-garde stylized arts of living aspantomime clowns, using this form of humour as a means of developing an ethos towards themodern city that could be affirmative at the same time as remaining acutely pessimistic concerningmodernitys violences, injustices and degradations.

Second, the article pushes the agenda of non-representational approaches into the study of thepast.4This introduces clear methodological difficulties: how is it possible to attend adequately toforms of affect whose force has long since dissipated? In response to this, my aim is not to describehow these affects felt or what they achieved. I do not build a narrative aiming to describe the pastas it was, but to create a non-representational historical narrative that extractsfrom the past a con-ceptual diagram of a specific ethos or art of living in the modern city. My argument, then, is not

that the Montmartre avant-garde succeeded in its goal of building an autonomous urban commu-nity. Nor is it that it managed to articulate a politics of affect that was entirely inclusive and egali-tarian. Rather, my argument is that it is possible to extract from their experiments a particular ethosof affirmative pessimism that was new, powerful, and might usefully be reactivated in creativeways in the present.

The free and proud city of Montmartre

In 1884 a poster for the municipal elections could be seen displayed throughout Montmartre. Theday has finally come, it announced, where Montmartre can and must claim its rights of autonomyagainst the rest of Paris . . . Montmartre is rich enough in finance, art and spirit to lead its own life.

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Electors! This is no mistake! Let the noble flag of Montmartre flutter to the winds of independence. . . Montmartre deserves to be more than an administrative ward. It must be a free and proud city.5The candidate in question was Rodolphe Salis, patron of the Chat Noir cabaret, which had openedsome three years earlier.6His campaign promises were short and simple:

1. Separation between Montmartre and the state.2. Nomination by the people of Montmartre of a Municipal Council and a Mayor of the New

City.3. Abolition of the local area tax and replacement of this hurtful levy with a tax on the lottery,

reorganized under the direction of Montmartre, which would allow our district to meet itsneeds and to help the nineteen mercantile or miserable districts of Paris.

4. Protection of public food. Protection of workers nationwide.7

Salis campaign was as much a publicity stunt as a serious political campaign his campaignslogan was Serious as ever and he missed election. One thing that the poster reveals, however,is a fierce attachment to the neighbourhood of Montmartre. Montmartre was not just a place, butthe expression of an ethos, a style of life. It had become an emblem of autonomy, freedom, andcreativity. And it was this intensely felt sense of place that made Montmartre such an attractiveneighbourhood for a cultural and political avant-garde who saw Montmartre as an alternativesociety where creativity would be rewarded and eccentricity tolerated, a high-spirited realm whereart rather than lucre determined status and social relations.8Montmartre had come to symbolizean ideal that in many ways embodied the anarchist version of utopia, not only in its championingof free creativity or local autonomy, but also in its balancing of the rural and the urban elements,the gardens and the cabarets . . . it preserved its own sacred space from which to gaze down uponthe metropolis, countering its economic dependence with cultural autonomy and radicalism.9

What was special about Montmartre, then, was its vigorous assertion of a distinctive place-identity and its fierce protection of local autonomy. The Chat Noir, and the artistic groups attachedto it such as the Fumistes, the Hydropathes and the Incoherents, was at the heart of attempts to re-imagine the possibilities of urban community and to engineer a deeply felt experience of place.Their use of humour in order to achieve this sense of place is particularly striking.

Romanticist Montmartre and the destruction of place

For the Romantics of the mid-19th century, the village of Montmartre, not yet annexed by Paris,had been imagined as a rural idyll: an authentic refuge from the alienation of the Metropolis.10Grard de Nerval wrote in 1855:

I lived for a long time in Montmartre, where one enjoys very pure air, varied prospects and discoversmagnificent views . . . There are windmills, cabarets and arbours, rustic paradises and quiet lanes, borderedwith cottages, barns and bushy gardens, green fields ending in cliffs where springs filter through the clay,gradually cutting off certain small islands of green where goats frisk and browse on the thistles that growout of the rocks; proud, surefooted little girls watch over them, playing amongst themselves.11

These comments evoke a typically Romanticist nostalgia for a purity of place and environment,isolated from the corrupting influence of urban industrialism. The experience of place, here, is tied

to the benevolent circulation of natures life and creativity. In Nervals description, Montmartre is



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an area, teeming with natural vitality, where life can be experienced in a more direct and pure fash-ion than is possible in the metropolis below.

The processes of modernization and urban expansion, however, quickly led Montmartre toacquire less idyllic characteristics. The area, largely proletarian, was formally annexed into the cityin 1860. mile Zolas 1877 description of lower Montmartre in LAssommoirportrays it in termsof a natural world that is now irredeemably corrupted. Zola describes the drab slope of Montmartreamid the tall forest of factory chimneys streaking the horizon, in that chalky, desolate city out-skirt.12The process of modernization, in Zolas account, had destroyed the natural life and vitalityof the neighbourhood. By the 1880s, Montmartre, through its association with poverty and theinsurrection of the Paris Commune, was widely considered an unhealthy milieu in which naturallife had become dangerously excessive or perverted. It seemed to be isolated from the healthyeconomic flows of the modern city a neighbourhood in which any genuine sense of place or natu-ral vitality had been destroyed.

Nonetheless, owing to cheap rents and remnants of a village-like feel, during the 1870sMontmartre had become a fashionable area for Impressionist artists to work. The art world wasundergoing a rapid change during this time, as the collapse of the Second Empire in 1870 precipi-tated the end of the close relationship between artist and state. In 1880 control of the annual salonwas relinquished by the government and taken over by the Socit des Artistes Franaises. In theyears following this, the systems of patronage were further undermined by the emergence ofincreasing numbers of commercial alternatives such as galleries, illustrated journals and the newcabarets artistiques, which supported and provided publicity and funds for emerging artists.13Bythe 1880s, artists were no longer protected by the state, and found themselves fully exposed to themarket. For all the insecurities that this created, it did allow them a new freedom to criticize boththe state and the established institutions of art upon which they had previously relied to survive,thereby providing the conditions for the emergence of the first artistic avant-gardes.14New groups

such as the Hydropathes and the Incoherents set to this task with zeal. Eventually they found theirhome in the Chat Noir, which soon became the loudest public voice of the spirit of Montmartre.Through humour, these artists sought a means by which to regenerate the life and vitality of theneighbourhood.

The holy city

On 14 January 1882, the first edition of the Chat Noirs satirical house journal was printed anddistributed. From the start it aggressively promoted a new, modern myth of Montmartre. Its open-ing article, titled Montmartre, posed a humorous challenge to the Church, the emblem of tradi-tional authority: It is high time to correct an error which has weighed down on more than sixtyentire generations, the article proclaimed. The writing which we call holy I dont really knowwhy has done nothing more, to put it politely, than make a mockery of the people.15The author-ity of religion was a particularly pressing matter for the inhabitants of Montmartre, since theBasilica de Sacr Coeur, a much-hated symbol of Pariss collective penance for the revolt of theCommune, was in the process of being constructed there.16The Sacr Coeur was supposed to expi-ate Montmartres sins, purifying a moral environment that had become diseased and dangerous.The basilica was part of an attempt by monarchist-sympathizing politicians to create a new identityfor Montmartre as a place of sacred pilgrimage, thereby undermining its association with working-class revolt.17In explicitly setting itself against the Church, the article immediately contested thisnew, arbitrary religious identity. In opposition to the new spiritual outlook envisioned by the state,



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it sketched the first elements of a different urban imaginary, one involving a rejection of traditionalauthority and a celebration of new, creative forms of modernity and modern experience.

The article evoked an interestingly ambiguous imaginative geography. As well as portraying itas a place of anti-clericalism and anti-traditionalism, it also depicted Montmartre as the exact cen-tre of the new modern world. The Biblical tradition, the article claimed, had erroneously neglectedto identify Montmartre as the original soil of humanity. Through a series of word plays leading

from Mont Ararat, via Mont-marrte to Montmartre, the article proved that after the flood,Noah had in fact cast his anchor, not at Mount Ararat, but at Montmartre. The texts ironic stand-point is obvious: religious imagery is used in order to assert the centrality of an emphatically secu-lar ethos, one that was to be given place by Montmartre. Salis habitually referred to Montmartreironically as the holy city, and in doing so, announced his rejection of religion and all forms oftraditional authority. Montmartre was to be the centre of a new, anti-authoritarian world: ThusMontmartre is the cradle of humanity . . . Montmartre is the centre of the world . . . It is Montmartrewhere the first city of humanity was built.18

In fact, Montmartre was to be more than a centre. The humour of the Chat Noir journal por-trayed it as a dynamic, centripetal force, drawing the rest of the world inexorably towards it. An

illustration in the journal shows a line of bourgeois people, depicted as farmyard animals, waitingto be photographed outside the Chat Noir (Figure 1). Nobody move!, the caption reads. Everyone

Figure 1. Rodolphe Steinlen, illustration in Le Chat Noir, vol. 1, 14 January 1882



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must pass through here.19The message was clear Montmartre was to be the new centre ofmodernity. In this urban imaginary, Montmartre, at the same time as possessing an irresistiblemagnetic force, was to remain a singularity, fiercely autonomous from the rest of world:

Montmartre is isolated, because it is sufficient in itself. This centre is absolutely autonomous. It is said that

in a small village located a long way from Montmartre, which travellers call Paris, a local academy isdiscussing the conditions of municipal autonomy. It is a long time since this question was resolved inMontmartre.20

Readers would hardly have needed reminding that 11 years earlier the issue of municipal autonomyhad indeed been settled during the semaine sanglante that brought the Commune to a devastatingend.21The message of the article was clear, however. The suppression of the Commune spelled theend of one form of autonomy; but the Montmartre avant-garde was committed to finding a newsolution to the problem of local autonomy. This ghost of the Commune was evoked again a fewissues later, in a rumbustious article titled The Assault of Montmartre:

Today, April 1st, at a quarter past four in the morning, an attempted assault was launched againstMontmartre. In defiance of the most solemn promises, Lon Gambetta, at the head of the troops of theChause-dAntin, has infiltrated the country of Montmartre . . . The call has sounded out on the mountain;the Moulin de la Galette has been put in a state of defence; the soldiers of the Sacr Coeur have beenconfined to their church . . . The Montmartre homeland is not in danger; it is simply threatened. Thehenchmen of tyranny want to undermine our immemorial hills at their foundations. No! The strength, themuscular elasticity of the autochthons of the Mount of Martyrs are the guarantees of the future success ofour armies.22

In an imaginary conversation with Gambetta (the recently ousted Prime Minister, suspected by his

adversaries of planning to engineer an executive dictatorship), who asks why Montmartre hasrevolted against Paris, a leader of the insurrection insists: Rebellion? Know, ignorant traveller,that this is a just revindication of the rights of the first aboriginal people against its oppressor.Montmartres aim is to win independence, autochthony.23

Three principle features are discernible in this humorous imaginative geography of Paris. First,Montmartre was portrayed as a neighbourhood in which traditional authority both Church andState was to be rejected and undermined at every opportunity. Second, it was a place that was tobe at the centre of the modern world, the point through which it would be necessary to pass to bepart of the most dynamic and subversive forces of modernity. Third, Montmartre would also be aplace that was autonomous from the rest of the world and, above all, from Paris. Even as the world

passed through its gates its borders would be fiercely protected.This humorous representation of the spirit of Montmartre, then, was highly ambiguous. How

could it be, on the one hand, a place that required every modern subject to pass through it and, onthe other, a place that was fully isolated and autonomous from the outside world? The paradox isembodied by the frequent references in Le Chat Noir to the autochthons of Montmartre. Anautochthon is a son of the soil, a dweller with the deepest possible roots in the area that he livesin; so the idea of autochthony is one linking place to the richest possible depth of time and tradi-tion. To be an autochthon is the very opposite of being an inhabitant of modernity, a celebrator ofthe fleeting moment. Here, however, the portrayals of Montmartre inLe Chat Noirproclaimed anintention, saturated with contradiction, to create a distinctively modern form of autochthony, a

sense of place born of the most fleeting, unstable and iconoclastic impulses.



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The vitality of humour

Place, construed in the broadest terms, can be defined as the ways in which geographic areas areexperienced and made meaningful. It is often considered to have three necessary and sufficientfeatures: a geographic location; a material form; and an investment with meaning and value.24

Since this meaningfulness is often achieved through tradition, authenticity and rootedness, placepolitics have been argued to involve an inherent conservatism, a resistance to change and prog-ress.25It is important to recognize, however, that the politics of place are not reducible to the nego-tiation of competing discursive representations.26Place politics are centred upon the mobilizationof affective experiences that can be far more contradictory and ambiguous than any specific repre-sentation of place. Understanding the ways in which place is created and contested, therefore,requires an analysis of the production of forms of experience that may not be reducible to anysingle, coherent representation of it. And humour, perhaps, is a powerful form of experiencethrough which a distinctive sense of place can emerge and one which has received little attentionin the academic literature on place.

Humour like place often functions as a way of creating and consolidating an inside andoutside. Scholars have discovered numerous ways in which humour has the power to include andexclude, since in order to work it relies upon nuanced sensitivities to shared histories, traditions orcodes.27A shared sense of humour is a highly effective social bond, as well as means of naturaliz-ing learned differences and, hence, social hierarchies.28As well as consolidating group boundariesand identities, however, humour can also disrupt them, and scholars have uncovered a variety ofways in which humour can challenge established representations and thereby operate as a form ofcreative resistance.29Discursive analysis of humour, then, has proved highly effective in uncover-ing the ways in which humour operates in the production, reproduction and contestation of hege-monic identities and representations. What academic scholarship on humour has paid less attention

to, however, are the non-representational aspects of humour, the means by which humour movesus in ways that are not reducible to their semantic content.30There is a powerful corporeal, embod-ied, affective element to humour, in other words, which needs to be understood more clearly.Understanding the affective qualities of humour requires attending to its dynamism and experien-tial intensity the ways in which it mobilizes an experience of vitality and liveliness.

Laughter is the expression of an affective energy: it literally movesus. Kant put this by sayingthat the gratification of laughter is a corporeal, animal pleasure, one emerging from the further-ance of the vital bodily processes and causing a feeling of health. 31During the 19th century,influential theorists such as Spencer, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Bergson came to regardhumour as an expression of biological vitality. For Bergson, for example, humour arises from

moments where people fall into mechanical inelasticity and are unable organically to adapt totheir environment such as when a man trips over a paving stone.32Relatedly, the English phi-losopher Alexander Bain argued that laughter is an expression of a physiological increase of vital-ity and a heightening of the powers of life.33Laughter, Bain suggested, emerges out of a releasefrom constraint, since such a release produces pleasure and an increase in nervous energy.34Hesaw in laughter an anarchic destructiveness, a rebellion against order a temptation to a danger-ous moment of anarchy against the severe demands of social constraint.35

Such ideas were echoed throughout the second half of the 19th century. By the 1880s, humourhad been thoroughly incorporated into biopolitical discourses through which laughter becameassociated with an increase in life, health or vitality. As a form of experience that was vital and

close to nature, it was particularly associated with the primitive and the animalistic.36

CharlesDarwin had chosen laughter as the first demonstration of his thesis that humans share expressive



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gestures with animals such as monkeys and that the reason for this is their descent from a commonprogenitor.37Laughter was also associated with hysteria, a much-debated fin-de-sicle psychologi-cal malady.38 By taking up humour as their most characteristic form of expression, then, theMontmartre avant-garde were appropriating biopolitical discourses that problematized the bodyand its affects in relation to values such as health, vigour and liveliness. Through humour, placecould be invested with new forms of vitality.

At the same time as participating in such biopolitical discourse, however, the Montmartre avant-garde set out to test its terms. Rather than accepting the established Republican preoccupation withpromoting life, health and organic urban growth, artists associated with the Chat Noir promoted aform of vitality that resulted from afallfrom nature, a deliberate self-alienation from the organiclife of the city.

Irony and the fall from life

The Montmartre avant-garde, we have seen, drew upon a paradoxical affirmation of both autoch-thony and exile, both rootedness and mobility. In doing so, they adopted and transformed estab-lished Romanticist theorizations of nature, place and irony. One of the cardinal virtues inRomanticism was creativity. This partly motivated the Romantics interest in the natural world,since nature, they believed, possessed a creative vitality that was absent from the mechanized andalienating world of the modern metropolis.39 For many Romantics, therefore, the aim was toachieve as close a unity as possible with nature. For a subversive strain of Romanticism associatedwith the Jena school, however, the goal was not at all to achieve harmony with natural life.40Foralthough nature was creative, it created according to its own innate tendencies. In contrast to this,humanity had the capacity to present itself as something otherthan its immanent self-development.Unlike natural life, human life was capable of being other than any fixed nature. The need to raiseitself above humanity wrote Schlegel, is humanitys prime characteristic.41However, this alsomeant that human creation would always involve a fall from nature, a slowing of life into inertobjectivity. This meant, in turn, that ironyand buffoonerywere fundamental features of the humancondition: irony, because humanity is always something other than what it is; and buffoonery,since humanity is always falling from creative life into inert objectivity, like a clown slipping ona banana skin.42Through irony and buffoonery, human subjectivity distinguished itself from natu-ral life and affirmed its distance from it as a condition of a specifically human and thereforehigher form of creativity. It is the ethos of this strain of Romanticism, which emphasized man-kinds separation from natures immanent self-unfolding, which was taken up and reconfigured bythe Montmartre avant-garde. By evoking an experience of place through ironic humour, they wereat once asserting Montmartres modernity and also making a specific statement about their attitudetowards it.

Irony is a difficult word to define; it is sometimes characterized as a figure of speech in whichwhat is said is the opposite of what is meant. In such cases, irony implicitly affirms the stability ofan underlying world of meaning secured by the context of a speaking subject. In 19th-centuryRomanticism, however, irony developed greater complexity, becoming not just an oppositionbetween what is said and what is meant, but a way of saying one thing at the same time as allowingfor the possible validity of its contrary.43Through irony, the world itself could become dynamic,mobile and contradictory. Indeed, the order between world and concept became reversed: it is nolonger a case of life being interpreted through language and concepts, the Romantics argued, but acase of language and concepts being effects of an infinite, dynamic life force that goes beyond anycontext.44Such a life cannot be known, for knowledge works through static concepts. However, it



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can be experienced, and irony, with its ability to speak the contradiction by which the world bothis and is not identical with itself, is particularly well suited to making the dynamism of the worldperceptible in experience. Irony creates a condition by which life, as a dynamic, creative force, canbecome available to experience.

Read through this strain of 19th-century Romanticist aesthetic theory, then, irony can be seen asmore than a mere figure of speech, but as a style of life an ethos towards the modern world. Byexpressing something of modern life through ironic humour, the Montmartre avant-garde hoped tograsp an essential experience of modernitys mode of being its contradictoriness, its lack of iden-tity with itself. Through irony, it was possible both to describe the world as it was, but also thedetermination to transform it, to make it something otherthan what it was. Understood in thesetheoretical terms, it becomes apparent that the usefulness of irony for developing a new experienceof place, for Montmartre bohemians, lay in its ability to allow the contradictions of modernity tobecome available to experience, rather being artificially or arbitrarily excluded, resolved, or subli-mated. Through irony, a non-representational ethos towards the city could be explored throughaffective experience. Interpreted in this way, the seriousness of intent behind the ironic stance ofthe Chat Noirs artists and writers becomes clear. Irony was a means by which a specific attitudetowards the urban environment could achieve expression. First, irony was a way of making thefleeting, fugitive or contradictory elements of modern urban living perceptible in experience.Ironic humour offered a way to experience the dynamism and vitality of the city. Second, ironymade it possible to develop an experience of place that incorporated contradictory elements: on theone hand, a celebration of modern cosmopolitanism, anti-traditionalism and anti-authoritarianism;and on the other hand, acquiescence to the intensity and autonomy of experience associated withrootedness, autochthony and autonomy. Ironic humour was a means of creating a new, affectiveexperience of place in which an iconoclastic impulse to destroy tradition and autochthony couldcoexist with a nostalgia for authenticity and rootedness. Through irony, authenticity could be found

in creativity and rootedness transfigured as an experience of exile.Irony is a predominantly linguistic form of expression, a form of experience that is predicated

upon humanitys separation from nature and its mastery of it through language. Its limits, then, liein its inability adequately to express the tragicelement of modernity: the ways in which the accel-erating dynamism and flux of the world evade individuals control and in which the forces ofmodernity threaten to make the individual a passive plaything of frighteningly impersonal, objec-tive forces.45In order to find a response to this tragic vision of modernity, it was necessary to turnto more directly physical forms of humour.

Pierrot and the modern carnivalesqueIt was through the carnivalesque buffoonery of the traditional pantomime character Pierrot that thewriters of the Chat Noir moved towards a more directly physical, corporeal, and libidinal experi-ence of place. Pantomime was the art of dramatizing silence and spoke to the bodys convulsions,violences and unrestrained appetites. The Montmartre avant-garde not only explored such forms ofhumour in its literature and performances, but also took it directly into the spaces of everyday life.In doing so, they experimented with a novel ethos towards the transformation of the affectiveeconomy of Montmartre.

In Adolphe Willettes cartoon depictions of Pierrot in the Chat Noirjournal, pantomime wasconverted for the first time into comic strip form (Figure 2). In order to do this, Willette rejectedthe tradition by which cartoons were accompanied by explicative captions, leaving his drawings ashistoires sans paroles (stories without words). When readers complained that they could not



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understand the stories contained in these often ambiguous depictions, Willette replied: Comprenez

lcriture Pierrotglyphique! Understand Pierrot-glyphic writing!

46

The spirit evoked by Pierrotinvolved a direct corporeality that would brook no linguistic mediation. It explored a life of sensa-tion rather than representation.

Pierrot soon came to be recognized as the personification of Montmartres urban imaginary. Hewas considered to stand for a whole community, persecuted but joyous. Pierrot was a timeless heroof French pantomime and, as a figure of the lowest form of art, he offered fin-de-sicle bohemi-ans an alternative identity, an ironic disguisefor their creative ambitions. In a bourgeois world inwhich true art and beauty went unrecognized, according to this way of thinking, such art had todisguise itself in base forms such as pantomime. This was not new as such. French Romanticism isfull of situations in which a great hero is forced to adopt an ignoble disguise. Victor Hugos Hernani

was forced to become an outlaw because his legitimate claims to public recognition were denied;another of Hugos heroes, Ruy Blas, strived to maintain honour in a valets uniform; MussetsLorenzaccio was a noble rebel who disguised himself as a pander and a cheap, often comic

Figure 2. Adolphe Willette, Pierrot Fumiste, in Le Chat Noir, 18 March 1882



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entertainer.47Baudelaire had described the hero of modernity as a secret agent, a traitor to his ownclass. The figure of Pierrot evolved through the century, however, and Willette was the first todepict Pierrot as a bohemian artist (and, conversely, the bohemian artist as Pierrot). In doing so,

Pierrots iconography changed: he became noticeably paler in face and started to dress in black.His pallor, resembling that of moonlight, emphasized that he was an outcast, a child of the Moon.His black clothes were a parody of those of the bourgeois class: he was to present the bourgeoisieat once with a degrading parody of itself and with an image of its victim.48

Pierrots behaviour in Willettes cartoons is exuberant, playful, violent and lascivious. On occa-sion his adventures end in success, and he ends up embracing a beautiful woman (Figure 3). Moreoften, he is abused, ignored and sacrificed to the bourgeois god of money (Figure 4). There was aclear spirit of Carnival invoked by this form of humour. However, it is too quick a step to associatethe humour of the Montmartre avant-garde, as Michael Wilson does, directly with the kind ofRenaissance carnivalesque spirit evoked by Mikhail Bakhtin.49Certainly Montmartre writers did

exhibit a fondness for Rabelais, whose literature epitomizes the anarchic spirit of Renaissancecarnival. Yet the Montmartre carnivalesque was, in certain respects, a distinctively modern one.Although it adapted forms of humour that were hundreds of years old, it did so in a way that

Figure 3. Adolphe Willette, Pierrot Amoureux, in Le Chat Noir, 8 April 1882



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responded to distinctively modern concerns. Specifically, it was a direct reaction to the saturninepessimism of two of the most important cultural movements of late 19th century modernity:Naturalism and Symbolism. Both movements were founded on modern forms of biopoliticalknowledges concerning the nature of healthy, vital urban milieus.50Naturalism (associated with thenovels of Zola and inspired by evolutionary theory) and Symbolism (an artistic movement explor-ing the hidden associations of words and images, associated with figures such as Mallarm andMaeterlinck) were both informed by a pervasive pessimism, a sense that in modernity, life andnatural vitality were becoming irredeemably corrupted and the social body starting to degenerate.51The emphasis on buffoonery and pantomime humour at the Chat Noir can be interpreted as a directresponse to this pervasive fin-de-sicle pessimism one which contested the models of urban vital-ity and healthiness upon which they relied. The use of carnivalesque humour was a way of break-ing both with the optimistic rhetoric of Republican political discourse andthe saturnine pessimismof the Republics Naturalist and Symbolist critics. Symbolists, inspired by Schopenhauer, pursuedmystical forms of experience that accessed a realm beyond will, life, desire and the body. Theystrived to create a wholly abstractspaceof experience, one in which the destabilizing dynamism oftime and the tragic element of modern existence could be put at bay. The writers of the Chat Noir,

Figure 4. Adolphe Willette, Passage de Venus sur le soleil, in Le Chat Noir, 9 December 1882



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by contrast, by insisting on givingplaceto experience in the new creative quarter of Montmartre,asked whether it might not be possible to develop an ethos towards the modern city that coulddevelop through, rather than against, the dynamic forces of desire and the body.

According to Baudelaire, pantomime humour is a form of humour that speaks directly to thebody.52In it, true comic savagery can be found. This makes the essence of laughter its diaboli-calelement readily apparent. Laughter, Baudelaire writes, is satanic: it is thus profoundlyhuman.53In this motif of redemption via a fall, Baudelaire added a distinctively modern sensi-

bility to the thinking of carnivalesque humour. The Garden of Eden, Baudelaire observes, wasdevoid of laughter and tears. When mankind enjoys a unity with God and with Nature, laughterand tears are not possible: they exist only after mankind has fallen from innocence. The panto-mime clown, his laughter veiling his tears, embodies both of these emblems of humanitys fallfrom life. Pantomime humour, then, stages the modern alienation of man from natural life. Thisalienation, however this fall from nature is not something to be mourned. Despite being con-tinually abused by fate, the characters in pantomime never cease to affirm their existence.Baudelaire describes characters who:

feel themselves forcibly projected into a new existence. They do not seem at all put out. They set aboutpreparing for the great disasters and the tumultuous destiny that awaits them, like a man who spits on hishands and rubs them together before doing some heroic deed . . . Every gesture, every cry, every lookseems to be saying: The fairy has willed it, and our fate hurls us on.54

The Montmartre avant-garde adopted and radicalized pantomime buffoonery, using it as a way ofdeveloping an affirmative ethos that remained alive to modernitys violences, injustices and degra-dations. Like Baudelaire, the artists of the Chat Noir identified themselves with pantomime char-acters such as Pierrot. However, whereas Baudelaire merely used the clown as a metaphor for the

modern artist, this later generation stylized a way of livingas such clown-artist hybrids. As artists,they were destined to suffer, but by becoming artist-clowns, they could find a way to transfigure alife of suffering and affirm it, just as the characters of the pantomime do. And Montmartre was tobe the home in which such a life of buffoonery could be practised.

Figures associated with the Chat Noir, then, experimented with creating a new, dynamic experi-ence of place through an ethos towards modernity based upon the affirmative stance of pantomimehumour. Performances at the Chat Noir involved a continual succession of japes and practicaljokes. One typically macabre hoax, for example, involved advertising the death of the owner of thecabaret Rodolphe Salis. When mourners arrived at the cabaret to join the funeral procession, theyfound the cabaret open due to a bereavement, and Salis, posing as his brother, welcoming them

in to enjoy a drink.55

Other writers and artists also carefully cultivated this pantomimic persona.The poet Gustave Kahn described Willette as a real life Pierrot character:

Willette is . . . the very pavement of the Paris streets, come alive with all its blague, all its wit, lit up bytenderness, giving off smoky glimmers of passing political passions. Willette is patriotic, Willette isworking class. He will be generous, he will be cruel, he will be sympathetic, he will be hateful, accordingto the direction of the wind . . . There is in Willette a figure who will man the barricades for the fun of it.56

This impulse towards a typically avant-gardist confusion of art and life is also discernible in sev-eral masked balls, processions and festivals that were organized on the streets of Montmartre. One

such occasion was an anarchic festival organized by Willette called the Fte de la Vache Enrage,rivalling an official Parisian festival on the same day and dedicated to those inhabitants ofMontmartre who were reduced to hunger and starvation, or, in the popular idiom, forced to



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manger une vache enrage, or eat an angry cow.57It asserted an affinity between workers andbohemians, both dismally poor but fiercely proud of the independence and anti-authoritarianism oftheir neighbourhood. As the poster for the festival claimed: Citizens of the Butte [Montmartre].

Noble children of the sacred hill. Artists and merchants, artisans and poets. Everyone, especially inMontmartre, knows what the vache enrage is. Against the charge that the festival was simply aromanticizing celebration of poverty, one organizer of the festival insisted: By dedicating a paradeto the Vache Enrage, we are scoffing at misery. Our laughter is not a grimace of submission or ofcomplicity but rather one of defiance.58Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the painter who produced themost evocative images of Montmartre popular culture, created the front cover of a journal that waspublished in conjunction with the festival (see Figure 5). The poster encapsulates the sense of placeembodied by the festival: a joyous Pierrot accompanied by a masked beauty, leading a revoltagainst a terrified bourgeois who flees down the hill to the safety of Paris.

My argument then, is that through carnivalesque humour drawn from the tradition of French

pantomime, the Montmartre avant-garde attempted to engineer an experience of place that wasrooted in a sense of exile, suffering and oppression, and yet at the same time was capable of trans-figuring this suffering into an affirmative attitude of joy and autonomy. The intimate connection of

Figure 5. Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, La Vache Enrage, vol. 1, 1896



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such forms of humour with bodily desires and forces enabled them to conceive of a modern formof humour that incorporated a connection with the soil of Montmartre. This degraded, primitiveform of humour was to be an experience that created the form of dynamic autochthony that theywere searching for a deeply felt, embodied connection with a place in continual flux.

Conclusion

The writers and artists of Montmartre, I have argued in this article, sought in humour a means ofconstructing a new, modern and dynamic sense of place in the modern city. By adopting the postureof the ironist and the clown, Montmartre bohemians sought to harness novel and creative affectiveenergies. There is little doubt that this was, in certain respects, successful. The ensuing prolifera-tion of the Montmartre cultural industries soon dramatically transformed the landscape ofMontmartre and, eventually, of Paris itself; the opening of the Moulin Rouge dance hall in 1889confirmed Montmartres new status as a dynamic, creative, and relatively economically successfulregion of Paris. Whether any lasting social benefit was accrued by their experiments, however, isless clear. Certainly their dream of making Montmartre into a genuinely autonomous urban com-munity, separate from the metropolis that was in the process of swallowing it up, was unrealizedand unrealizable. Nevertheless, there was something in the ethos that was cultivated there, I amsuggesting, that might be usefully reactivated.

These considerations concerning the role of humour in Montmartre culture make it possible tosketch a conceptual diagram of Montmartre as the name of a certain ethos, a stance towards urbanlife, experience and subjectivity. My aim in this article has not been to develop a full representa-tional account of the affects and experiences that circulated in Montmartre during this time. Acomplete portrait of the affective politics of fin-de-sicle Montmartre would have to account forcountless other circuits of affect that intersected with, interfered with, and disrupted the circuit thatI have sketched in this article. My aim, however, has been to extract one particular circuit of affectin order to trace it in detail, extracting from the archival materials a non-representational diagramof a specific art of living in the modern city. Montmartre, I have argued, can be appropriated asthe name for a specific form of affirmation. In this, there was a certain Nietzschean element presentin their urban experiments (even if there is no evidence to suggest that Montmartre bohemians hadever read Nietzsche).59This variety of affirmation had three key features.

First, it was an affirmation of varieties of experience that exceeded the type of cognition thatoperates according to a logic of either/or. It was a commitment to saying yes to an experiencethat exceeds the necessity to judge, an experience in which difference, mobility and changecould be invested with the weight and richness of autochthony. It was a commitment towardsexpanding contradiction rather than resolving it and living this contradiction in the affectiveresponses of the body.

Second, it was a form of affirmativepessimism. It involved a refusal to accept that modern lifewould have a successful outcome if it continued as it was doing. It required recognition thatpower and domination will always exist, that desires will remain unrealized and that it will neverbe possible to gain an unalienated unity with life. Instead, it acknowledged mankinds inevitablefall from natural life, its necessary alienation, and searched for ways of making productive use ofthis fall, of creating new forms of life that exceed life in the form in which it was currentlydetermined.

Finally, it was an affirmation of desire. Rather than judging desire according to criteria aroundits satisfaction, for example an enterprise that is destined to lead, as Schopenhauer discovered,only to pain and misery this attitude involved a celebration of desire as an active process that is



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creative, dynamic and open. Pierrots continual failure successfully to live the modern life, as hesuffered violence, poverty and thwarted dreams, was met not with bitterness but with joy in thenext adventure. Thus, desire emerged as an energy that created new possibilities and openings forlife, regardless of their fulfilment or satisfaction.

The stance of living life as a pantomime character was one way in which Montmartre bohemi-ans sought to enunciate a truth, saturated with experience, which challenged biopolitical knowl-edges of healthy and vibrant urban place. It called the lie to modernitys pretence at being rational,reasonable and progressive. It exposed a world in which values had been turned upside down, inwhich the artist was forced to wear a disguise because true creativity, life and place had been sac-rificed to the bourgeois gods of commerce and empire. It revealed modern life as a form of absur-dity, a life that was impossible to live, a life in which nothing could come to fruition or completion,where true creativity was stifled and stamped upon. The heart of modern life, it proclaimed, wasnot rational enlightenment through technological progress, but a chaotic series of chance encoun-ters with power and domination. By living life as if it were a pantomime, Montmartre artistsinsisted that mankinds fall from life could never be reversed and sought new means of affirmingand generating creative opportunities from the tragedy of modern urban living.

Funding

This research was funded by an ESRC doctoral award.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks indeed to JD Dewsbury, Robert Mayhew, Kevin Hetherington, Mark Jackson and ClaireBlencowe for their comments on versions of this article. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers for theircareful reading of the paper and their very productive suggestions.

Notes

1 N. Hewitt, From "Lieu de Plaisir" to "Lieu de Mmoire": Montmartre and Parisian Cultural Topogra-phy,French Studies, LIV(4), 2000, pp. 45367; M. Agulhon, Paris: A Traversal From East to West, inP. Nora (ed.)Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, III, Symbols(New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1998), pp. 523554.

2 On geographies of the avant-garde, see, for example, A. Bonnett, Art, Ideology and Everyday Space:Subversive Tendencies from Dada to Postmodernism,Environment and Planning D: Society and Space,10(1), 1992, pp. 6986; D. Pinder, Cartographies Unbound, cultural geographies, 13(3), 2007, pp.45362; A. Vasudevan, Symptomatic Acts, Experimental Embodiments: Theatres of Scientific Protest

in Interwar Germany, Environment and Planning A, 39(8), 2007, pp. 181237; S. Rycroft, SwingingCity: A Cultural Geography of London 1950-1974(Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). 3 On geographies of humour, comedy and laughter, see H. Macpherson, I Dont Know Why They Call

it the Lake District. They Might as Well Call it the Rock District! The Workings of Humour andLaughter in Research With Members of Visually Impaired Walking Groups,Environment and PlanningD: Society and Space, 26(6), 2008, pp. 108095; K. Epstein and K. Iveson, Locking Down the City(Well, Not Quite): APEC 2007 and Urban Citizenship in Sydney,Australian Geographer, 40(3), 2009,pp. 27195; N. Gregson and L. Crewe, The Bargain, the Knowledge, and the Spectacle: Making Senseof Consumption in the Space of the Car-Boot Sale, Environment and Planning D: Society & Space,15(1), 1997, pp. 87112; J. Ridanp, Geopolitics of Humour: The Muhammed Cartoon Crisis and theKaltioComic Strip Episode in Finland, Geopolitics, 14(4), 2009, pp. 72949.

4 See also A. Vasudevan, Writing the Asphalt Jungle: Berlin and the Performance of Classical GermanModernity, 19001933, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 21(2), 2003, pp. 16984;T. Edensor, The Ghosts of Industrial Ruins: Ordering and Disordering Memory in Excessive Space,



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Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 23(6), 2005, pp. 82949; C. DeSilvey, Salvage Mem-ory: Constellating Material Histories on a Hardscrabble Homestead, cultural geographies, 13(3), 2007,pp. 40124; C. Griffin and A. Evans (eds)Embodied Practices in Historical Geography(Thematic issue,Historical Geography, 2008).

5 . Goudeau,Dix ans de Bohme(Paris: Librairie illustre, 1888): Le jour est enfin venu o Montmartre

peut et doit revendiquer ses droits dautonomie contre le restant de Paris . . . Montmartre est assez richede finances, dart et desprit pour vivre de sa vie propre. lecteurs ! Il ny a pas derreur ! Faisons claquerau vent de lindpendance le noble drapeau de Montmartre . . . Montmartre mrite dtre mieux quunarrondissement. Il droit tre une cit libre et fire (p. 275).

6 See P.D. Cate and M. Shaw (eds), The Spirit of Montmartre: Cabarets, Humor, and the Avant-Garde,1875-1905(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996); L. Chevalier, Montmartre du plaisir etdu crime(Paris: ditions Robert Laffont, 1995); M. Oberthur,Le cabaret du Chat Noir Montmartre(Geneva: Slatkine, 2007); G. Weisberg (ed.),Montmartre and the Making of Mass Culture(New Bruns-wick, NJ: University of Rutgers Press, 2001).

7 Goudeau,Dix ans de Bohme: 1. La sparation de Montmartre et de ltat; 2. La nomination par lesMontmartrois dun Conseil Municipal et dun Maire de la Cit Nouvelle; 3. Labolition de loctroi pour

larrondissement, et le remplacement de cette taxe vexatoire par un impt sur la Loterie, rorganise sousla rgie de Montmartre, qui permettrait notre quartier de subvenir ses besoins et daider les dix-neuf arrondissements mercantiles ou misrables de Paris; 4. La protection de lalimentation publique.La protection des ouvriers nationaux (p. 275).

8 R. Sonn,Anarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin-de-Sicle France(Lincoln, NE: University of NebraskaPress, 1989), p. 94.

9 Sonn,Anarchism, p. 94.10 P. Jullian,Montmartre(Oxford: Phaidon, 1977).11 G de Nerval, Promenades et souvenirs. Lettres Jenny Pandora(Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1972),

cited in Jullian,Montmartre: Jai longtemps habit Montmartre; on y jouit d'un air trs pur, de perspec-tives varies, et lon y dcouvre des horizons magnifiques . . . Il y a l des moulins, des cabarets et des

tonnelles, des lyses champtres et des ruelles silencieuses, bordes de chaumires, de granges et de jar-dins touffus, des plaines vertes coupes de prcipices, o les sources filtrent dans la glaise, dtachant peu peu certains lots de verdure o sbattent des chvres, qui broutent lacanthe suspendue aux rochers;des petites filles loeil fier, au pied montagnard, les surveillent en jouant entre elles (p. 21).

12 . Zola,LAssommoir(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 253.13 P.D. Cate, The Spirit of Montmartre, in P.D. Cate and M. Shaw (eds) The Spirit of Montmartre:

Cabarets, Humor and the Avant-Garde, 1875-1905(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996),pp. 194; P. Mainardi, The End of the Salon: Art and the State in the Early Third Republic (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1993).

14 R. Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France 1885-1918 (New York:Vintage Books, 1968); J. Henderson, The First Avant-Garde 1887-1894: Sources of the Modern French

Theatre(London: George G. Harrap & Co., 1971); Cate and Shaw (eds) The Spirit of Montmartre.15 J. Lehardy, Montmartre,Le Chat Noir, 1, 1882: Il est grand temps de rectifier une erreur qui a pes sur

plus de soixante gnrations compltes. Lcriture que lon dit sainte je ne sais trop pourquoi, na faitpour parler poliment, que se moquer du peuple (p. 1).

16 D. Harvey,Paris: Capital of Modernity(New York: Routledge, 2003).17 R. Jonas, Sacred Tourism and Secular Pilgrimage: Montmartre and the Basilica of Sacr Coeur, in

G. Weisberg (ed.)Montmartre and the Making of Mass Culture(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UniversityPress, 2001), pp. 94119.

18 Lehardy, Montmartre: Montmartre est le berceau de lhumanit . . . Montmartre est le centre du monde. . . Cest Montmartre que fut construite la premire ville de la humanit (p. 1).

19 Le Chat Noir, 14 January 1882, p. 3: Ne bougeons plus ! Tout le monde y passera !

20 Lehardy, Montmartre: Montmartre est isol, parce quil se suffit a lui seul. Ce centre est absolu-ment autonome. Dans une petite ville situe a une grande distance de Montmartre et que les voyageurs



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nomment Paris, une acadmie locale discute, dit-on, les conditions de lautonomie municipale. Il y alongtemps que cette question est rsolue Montmartre. Les peuples qui pullulent la surface du globenont qu venir sen assurer (p. 1).

21 On the history of the Commune, see, for example, R. Tombs, The Paris Commune, 1871 (London:Longman, 1999).

22 A. Kempis, LAssaut de Montmartre,Le Chat Noir, 12, 1882: Aujourdhui, 1er avril, quatre heurespour le quart du matin, une tentative dassaut a t faite contre Montmartre. Au mpris des promessesles plus solennelles, Lon Gambetta, la tte des troupes de la Chausse-dAntin, a pntr dans le paysMontmartrais . . . Le rappel a sonn sur la montagne; le Moulin de la Galette a t mis en tat de dfense ;les soldats du Sacr-Cur sont consigns dans leur glise . . . La patrie Montmartre nest pas en danger,elle est tout simplement menace. Les suppts de la tyrannie veulent saper dans leur base nos buttesimmmoriales. Non ! La vigueur, llasticit des muscles des autochtones de la montagne des Martyrssont les garants des futures succs de nos armes (p. 1).

23 Chanouard, Il Faut Lutter, Le Chat Noir, 13: Moi (vivement). Rbellion !!! Sachez, voyageurignare que cest la juste revendication du premier peuple aborigne contre loppresseur. De quel droit laplaine veut-elle gouverner la montagne ? Gambetta. Je ne discute pas, jinterroge. Quels sont vos pro-

jets ? Moi. Conqurir lindpendance, lautochtonie. On Gambetta, see J.P.T. Bury, Gambettas FinalYears: The Era of Difficulties, 1877-1882(London: Longman, 1982), p. 1.

24 T. Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004); Gieryn, A Space for Place inSociology,Annual Review of Sociology, 26(1), 2000, pp. 46396.

25 D. Harvey, From Space to Place and Back Again: Reflections on the Condition of Postmodernity, inJ. Bird, B. Cutris, T. Putnam and T. Tickner (eds)Mapping the Future: Local Cultures, Global Change(London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 329.

26 N. Thrift, Steps to an Ecology of Place, in D. Massey, J. Allen and P. Sarre (eds)Human GeographyToday(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), pp. 295322.

27 S. Lockyer and M. Pickering (eds) Beyond a Joke: The Limits of Humour (Basingstoke: PalgraveMacmillan, 2005); S. Lockyer and M. Pickering, You Must Be Joking: The Sociological Critique of

Humour and Comic Media, Sociology Compass, 2(3), 2005, pp. 80820.28 G. Kuipers, Good Humor, Bad Taste: A Sociology of the Joke(Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter,

2006).29 S. Weaver, The Other Laughs Back: Humour and Resistance in Anti-Racist Comedy, Sociology,

44(1), 2010, pp. 3148.30 Macphersons study is an important exception.31 I. Kant, The Critique of Judgment(New York: Prometheus, 2000), p. 223.32 H. Bergson, Comedy(New York: Doubleday, 1956).33 A. Bain, The Senses and the Intellect(Whitefish, MA: Kessinger, 2004 [1868]), p. 291. See M. Billig,

Laughter and Ridicule: Towards A Social Critique of Humour(London: SAGE, 2005).34 A. Bain, The Emotions and the Will(London: J. W. Parker and Son, 1859), p. 291.

35 Billig,Laughter and Ridicule.36 R.B. Gordon,Dances with Darwin, 1875-1910: Vernacular Modernity in France(Aldershot: Ashgate,

2009).37 C. Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals(London: Murray, 1872).38 M.N. Evans,Fits and Starts: A Genealogy of Hysteria in Modern France(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University

Press, 1991).39 O. Oerlemans,Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002).40 P. Lacoue-Labarthe and J.-L. Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Roman-

ticism(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988).41 F. von Schlegel,Philosophical Fragments(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 96.42 C. Colebrook,Irony(London: Routledge, 2004).

43 F. Garber (ed.)Romantic Irony(Budapest: Akadmiai Kiad, 1988).44 Colebrook,Irony.



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45 See G. Simmel, The Concept and Tragedy of Culture, in D. Frisby and M. Featherstone (eds) Simmelon Culture: Selected Writings(London: SAGE, 1997), pp. 5574.

46 D. Kunzle, The Voices of Silence: Willette, Steinlen and the Introduction of the Silent Strip in the ChatNoir, With a German Coda, in R. Varnum and C. Gibbons (eds) The Language of Comics: Word andImage(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), pp. 318.

47 L. Jones, Sad Clowns and Pale Pierrots: Literature and the Popular Comic Arts in 19th-Century France(Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1984).48 Jones, Sad Clowns and Pale Pierrots.49 M. Bakhtin,Rabelais and His World(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984); M. Wilson,

Portrait of the Artist as a Louis XIII Chair, in G. Weisberg (ed.)Montmartre and the Making of MassCulture(New Brunswick, NJ: University of Rutgers Press, 2001), pp. 180204.

50 P. Rabinow,French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,1989); T. Osborne and N. Rose, Governing Cities: Notes on the Spatialisation of Virtue,Environmentand Planning D: Society and Space, 17(6), 1999, pp. 73760.

51 J. Carroll, Evolution and Literary Theory (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995); J. Lucas,From Naturalism to Symbolism,Renaissance and Modern Studies, 21(1), 1977, pp. 12439; F. Deak,

Symbolist Theater: The Formation of an Avant-Garde(Baltimore, MA: Johns Hopkins University Press,1993).

52 C. Baudelaire, On the Essence of Laughter, in J. Mayne (ed.) The Painter of Modern Life, and OtherEssays(London: Phaidon, 1964), p. 159.

53 Baudelaire, On the Essence of Laughter, p. 159.54 Baudelaire, On the Essence of Laughter, p. 162.55 Goudeau,Dix ans de Bohme. Cited in Datta, p. 203.56 Cited in Jones, Sad Clowns and Pale Pierrots, p. 194.57 V. Datta, A Bohemian Festival: La Fte de la Vache Enrage,Journal of Contemporary History, 28(2),

1993, pp. 195213; L. Bihl, LArme du Chahut: Les Deux Vachalcades de 1896 et 1897, Socits& Reprsentations, 27, 2001.

58 Cited in Datta, Bohemian Festival, p. 203.59 J. Dienstag, Nietzsches Dionysian Pessimism, The American Political Science Review, 95(4), 2001,

pp. 92337; C. Forth,Zarathustra in Paris: The Nietzsche Vogue in France, 1891-1918(DeKalb, IL:Northern Illinois University Press, 2001).

Julian Brigstockeis Postdoctoral Research Associate at Newcastle University and Senior Research Assistantat Northumbria University. He completed his PhD thesis, The Life of the City: Aesthetics of Existence infin-de-sicle Montmartre,at the University of Bristol in 2010. His research focuses on urban avant-gardes,imaginaries of urban community, and theories of authority, experience and temporality.

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Brigstocke - Defiant Laughter - Humour and the Aesthetics of Place in Late 19th Century Montmartre