The Spectacle of Degradation

The following is an exclusive excerpt from Dominique Kalifa’s new history of spectacle and the underworld, Vice, Crime, and Poverty: How the Western Imagination Invented the Underworld. In the following passage, we learn of how the wealthy toured poverty-stricken neighborhoods in the 19th century, and how collective tours by the rich, led by police and interlopers comfortable in both worlds, replaced the 18th century-style individual peregrinations of princes and writers, and tours focused on carousing changed to tours designed to show a spectacle of misery and degradation. Popularized first in London as “fashionable slumming,” then in Paris and beyond as “the Grand Dukes Tour,” these voyages by the wealthy into the unknown were as fleeting in their moments as they were long-lasting in their literary and cultural impact. Here, Kalifa takes us through the bizarre artifice, sudden decline, and enduring legacy of such tours. 

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“All of us have a more or less an uncontrollable taste for the horrible, the abnormal, and the monstrous,” wrote Émile Gautier in his prison treatise published in 1888. That idea was by no means new. The French elites of the Restoration and of the July Monarchy had rushed to Bicêtre to witness the convicts being put in irons and shipped off in chain gangs, and Parisians particularly appreciated visiting the morgue; the English had long flocked to witness the hanging of criminals, celebrated ones or not. But the Grand Dukes’ Tour, especially in its original Paris version, offered a few remarkable cultural and social singularities.

The tour had begun by reinventing a city that was partly real and partly fantasy. This was evident in Paris where, as we have seen, it gave rise to a sort of hollow city, an inverted city that tried to expose the spaces forgotten by Haussmann’s urban renewal or to invent others, mounds that testified to a disappeared Paris. But the same was true for New York and for London, where this form of tourism paradoxically turned a few sordid and miserable sites into national patrimony. Every city required its underside—its social, moral, aesthetic, or urban opposite—which ironically was necessary to provide the city above with its sparkle and luster. In Paris, the tour, as an ordered itinerary of the worst of the lower depths, was the exact antithesis of the boulevard, so it was not by chance that it emerged precisely at the moment of triumph for Haussmann’s renovated city. The new Paris needed a dark face, and so the remaining alleys or buildings that could represent the vanished city were overexploited. Or else a dark side was simply invented.

Moreover, history was happening in real time, and the most popular establishments disappeared at the very moment a tour to them was organized: Père Lunette was gone by 1896 and Château Rouge in 1898. In fact, the Grand Dukes’ Tour was always perceived in a nostalgic way. “The Grand Dukes’ Tour is dead,” wrote Georges Caïn in Le Figaro on October 8, 1911. This nostalgia not only related to urban criteria but also to its narrative. A story such as that of the tour had more than anecdotal scope; it arose from regret for the past, for a world that was finished, only a few vague images of it could be resuscitated. “One kind of Paris dies along with the Grand Dukes’ Tour,” noted Elie Richard. This characteristic became strongly accentuated after World War I. Like Montmartre, like the fortifications and little bistros tucked into the barriers, the tour became one of the constituents of the Belle Époque imaginary. “It was the age of the flashy foreigners living in Paris for gambling, prostitution and other kinds of transgressions, of princes in exile, and other improbable kings,” Joseph Casanova wrote in 1920. The boulevard assumed the aspect of the Suburra (ancient Rome’s red-light district), and French fantasy enjoyed its low-life wallow.” Joseph Kessel’s retrospective was explicit, making the tour one of the outstanding motifs of Paris circa 1900: “It was the era of the ‘Grand Dukes’ Tour,’ of floozies and courtesans. . . . The era of the first automobiles. And also the era of the first fascination with boxing.” The time frames that resulted were complex: simultaneously observing poverty and vice in the contemporary moment yet inscribing them in a past that was over, or at least dying. This produces a derealizing effect that dissociates the tableau from its whole social dimension and projects it backward onto the horizon of spectacle.

The very strong codification of the tour accentuates this aspect. As we have seen, the circuit was limited in both its geography and its themes. But, from the beginning, it was accused of subtly theatrical effects, of offering rigged scenes and arranged encounters. The very presence of the policeman or copper, succeeded by that of “trackers” or tour guides, guaranteed both the existence and safety of the spectacle. The Père Lunette was “a bouge au chiqué (simulated dive), as they say in Paris. Here there is nothing to fear,” remembered a guide in 1904. This was not novel either. The Lapin Blanc had been somewhat refitted after Maurras’s era, and many writers were already complaining in the 1880s about the “pseudo-Middle Ages cabarets whose customers were actually daubers and reporters.” In Dubut de Laforest’s novel, the tour has an impresario, the business agent Harry Smith, who prepared the attractions: “Tonight I must make them witness (after some excursions) a rowdy police raid on a den.” Such jaunts gradually assumed a more commercial nature, favoring establishments that could offer dramatically staged scenes. “At the right moments, they knew when to shout, to draw a knife from the pocket, and to calm down when offered a big bowl of vin brûlé. The lovely ladies fainted into the arms of the guides or went into raptures with little bird cries.” According to Harry Greenwall, the Paris correspondent of the Daily Express during the Great War, the guides offering to lead tourists into apache bars or nightclubs had become so numerous (and most of them so dishonest) that they were one of the plagues of Paris. In any case, they signaled the now fully standardized dimension of this form of tourism. The perils of the tour—being robbed, fleeced, or kidnapped, even murdered—were now no more than pretexts for ideological or crudely moralizing novels. “It smelled of theatrics. The [real] apaches were elsewhere.” Moreover, establishments were being created all over the place to exploit this stratagem. Between the wars a false dive of this type existed in Algiers that was called (naturally) Les Bas-Fonds. “This is the abusive name given to an old barn camouflaged as a café where they dislodged the rats in order to poison the people,” explained Lucienne Favre.

The ostentatious taste of the Chat Noir, the Bruant, and of parts of Montmartre devoted to foreign customers, all endure in a somewhat anachronistic manner. [. . .] On the walls slathered with whitewash, the chops of Mistinguett, the face of Damia [the “realistic” singer whose songs were of hooligans and prostitutes], and the mask of Charlie [Chaplin] face each other. Fragments of a skeleton arranged in a panoply and desiccated manly attributes conserved in soup tureens are the principal attractions of these places.

Some gradually isolated motifs came to symbolize this Parisian underworld. This was the case with the “apache dance,” a particularly brutal waltz or java, combined with slaps and punches that were supposed to simulate the relationship between pimp and prostitute. Its spectacular dimension made it a strong cinematographic trope from the beginning. It was the key scene in Yves Mirande’s scenario for La tournée des grand-ducs (1910). Then Feuillade made it into a much-anthologized scene in the first episode of the Vampires serial in 1915. The apache dance gradually shifted into a music hall number meant to characterize the Paris of pleasure and of crime, and the American cinema became particularly fond of it. Chaplin used it in a mem- orable scene in City Lights in 1931. Lewis Seiler pushed it to an extreme in Charlie Chan in Paris (1935): the dancer is killed at the end of the number. Other films, such as William Clemens’s Sweater Girl (1942) and William Castle’s Crime Doctor’s Gamble (1947), made it the symbol of the agitated life in Paris, which in turn was parodied in Carlo Bragaglia’s Toto le Moko (1949). In fact, the world of the lower depths was now being exhibited as cabaret scenes. In Paris in the 1950s, “there still existed on the Rue des Anglais a bal musette with anachronistic décor of tables and benches screwed into the floor, apaches and female gigolos at the bar, costumed attractions, and ‘tough java’ dances for the last of the night-owl Romantics.”

But even this ersatz version did not prevent the tour from arousing a whole palette of strong sensations and passions that would evolve over time. Foppish Tom and Jerry’s underworld in the 1820s had been dominated by gin and vice, but it was also a world full of jovial figures, a carnivalesque universe where the poorest took good-natured part in a general pantomime. Logic says to Tom, “I am quite satisfied in my mind that it is the lower order of society who really enjoy themselves. They eat with a good appetite. [. . .] They drink with a zest [. . .] and among all the scenes that we have witnessed together where the lower orders have been taking their pleasure, I confess they have appeared all happiness. I am sorry I cannot say as much for the higher ranks of society.” The atmosphere was comparable in Smeeton’s Doings in London, which described a joyous free-for-all among various kinds of marginals who gave no thought to tomorrow and became inebriated with good humor. “Black-legs, Gamblers, Dandies, Fortune-hunters, fraudulent Bankrupts, Lawyers, Pigeons, Greeks, Quacks, Chimney-sweeps, Pimps, Bawds, Prostitutes, Bullies and Panders, Clergymen, Soldiers, Sailors, Thieves, Sprigs of Nobility, [and] upstart Gentry” arranged the chaos of their joy and insouciance together. But the tone changed in the second half of the nineteenth century when more repulsive realities were being depicted. Again, we have to distinguish the spectacle of crime from that of degradation, which the French expression les bas-fonds strongly connotes. Visiting infamous neighborhoods and encountering sinister glances from pimps and fallen girls delivered a “delicious shiver” to those who were bored with ordinary pleasures. “One entered the Assassins [club] with a delicious contraction of one’s innards,” remembers Elie Richard. The troubling but spicy sensation of this promiscuity, like that of a kinky relationship, was both existential and aesthetic and had linked the poets’ world to that of the bandits since the times of François Villon (the truand poet of the Middle Ages). But now the forbidden, the exotic, the erotic, the desire for shadows and transgression, was topped off with the anxiety provoked by a menacing glance or a fierce gesture. That savoring of the picturesque belonged to a well-known register and was augmented by the pleasure of being able to boast (after the fact) about the aureole of some evil perilously confronted. As a gentleman told a lady: “This dance-hall is a very dangerous place, exclusively frequented by hookers and procurers. Do you know that, mademoiselle?”—“Perfectly. In fact, that special audience is what attracts us here.”

But the spectacle of extreme poverty after descending into the abyss was quite different. There, whether exotic or spicy, the spectacle became “nauseating and sinister,” a plunge into the unnamable and abject. Seeing vague forms lying on benches or on the ground, piles of human flesh and rags accompanied by snoring and groaning, wheezing and screaming, drove the desire for social voyeurism to its limits. In flophouse rooms or night shelters, the senses were subjected to another kind of ordeal, which was almost unbearable. Seeing how low degradation could go was one thing, but hearing and, especially, smelling it was quite another. The Grappe d’Or “smelled of wine, muck, and moldy clothing.” The dirt and the residues of vomit and excrement became unbearable. “An odor of wild animals, horribly acrid, gripped us by the throat so that it was difficult to stay more than a few minutes,” noted Paul de Chamberet. “We could hold on no longer, we were suffocating, we needed to breathe,” added Jean Lorrain. “Air, some air!” Even the philanthropic alibi is swallowed up in this type of encounter. Rare were the visitors who, like Charlie Chaplin, managed to perceive the “beauty in the slums [. . .] despite the dirt and sordidness. There are people reacting toward another there—there is LIFE, and that’s the whole thing.”

The Tour gradually deserted these sordid places where one met “the face without make-up, the soul without pantomime, belonging to the atrocious extras of the lower depths.” Instead it stuck to a few pleasure establishments that were increasingly normalized as the sources of the new meaning of the term. Although the expression had grown roots—and made fortunes—it was at the cost of a radical inversion of meaning. Even in modern times, doing the Grand Dukes’ Tour means undertaking a nighttime razzle with friends to chic restaurants, select bars, or trendy nightclubs. And the expression is all the more commonly employed because the eponymous and successful film by André Pellenc (1953)—with the comic actor Louis de Funès—is often shown on French TV as if to recall the existence of the tour. Accomplished in barely half a century, this astonishing semantic reversal testifies to both the gradual democratization of leisure and to its takeover by the cultural industries, which try to neutralize those aspects judged to be inconvenient or unproductive while exploiting their references and traditions. Viewing the poor is still possible on an organized trip, such as that depicted by novelist Lydie Salvayre in Les belles âmes, but this is no longer possible as part of a respectable soirée.

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From Vice, Crime, and Poverty: How the Western Imagination Invented the Underworld by Dominique Kalifa, courtesy of Columbia University Press. Copyright © 2019 by Dominique Kalifa.