Domestic Space in France and Belgium

Art, Literature and Design, 1850-1920

Claire Moran

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781501341700
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Interior Design

Domestic Space in France and Belgium offers a new addition to the growing body of work in Interior Studies. Focused on late 19th and early 20th-century France and Belgium, it addresses an overlooked area of modernity: the domestic sphere and its conception and representation in art, literature and material culture. Scholars from the US, UK, France, Italy, Canada and Belgium offer fresh and exciting interpretations of artworks, texts and modern homes. Comparative and interdisciplinary, it shows through a series of case-studies in literature, art and architecture, how modernity was expressed through domestic life at the turn of the century in France and Belgium.

Part One

Representing the Domestic Interior

1

‘Louis-Philippe ou l’intérieur’: The emergence of the modern interior in the visual culture of the July Monarchy

Matteo Piccioni

It is common knowledge that it was Walter Benjamin who suggested that a man’s dwelling was one of the founding elements of nineteenth-century culture:

The nineteenth century was more fervently addicted to the dwelling place than any other century. It viewed the residence as a receptacle for the person, and it encased him with all his appurtenances so deeply in the dwelling’s interior that one is almost reminded of the inside of a compass case, where the instrument with all its accessories lies embedded in deep – usually violet – folds of velvet.¹

Throughout the pages of the Passagen-Werk, a dwelling is both the middle-class man’s universe and his shell, as well as being a shelter from the outside world and a container for objects purchased in the shops of the arcades (his ‘appurtenances’); indeed, it is fundamentally linked to the arcades. In fact, to all intents and purposes, even the arcades are ‘protected’ indoor streets, crowded with shops. Vincenzo Mele, a sociologist from the University of Pisa, has perceptively stated that ‘if streets are the dwellings of a community, then the arcade is that community’s living room.’²

Initially, at least, the eighteenth century identified – and therefore depicted – domestic space as a space designed for the social rituals that defined modernity and, in a way, were its very foundation stone. In the nineteenth century, however, the dwelling’s interior was mostly characterized as a private conjugal and domestic space. As soon became apparent, the number of family nuclei increased along with the use of the apartment as the standard type of dwelling, which – as Michelle Perrot stated – caused the house to be considered: ‘the quintessence of privacy, […] seat of the family and a pillar of the social order’.³ In a cultural sense, this was reflected in scenes based on the conjugal ménage. For instance, persistent references to one’s home or one’s chez-soi⁴ recur in many pages of contemporary literature and historical research has borne this out.⁵ This aspect is also linked to the fact that in the nineteenth century the path to self-awareness of one’s own individuality – which had begun a century back – accentuated its solipsism (paving the way for the supremacy of the twentieth-century focus on interiority), stressing the sphere of private life which was an interior space, and yet it was also what remained outside the self. At that time, shutting the door of one’s room also meant shutting oneself in, and at the same time building one’s own world. Indeed, it is no mere coincidence that the century was to open with a Voyage autour de ma Chambre (1790–94) by Xavier de Maistre. In any event, private space ultimately became a space for interpersonal relationships, almost an arena, acquiring a central role in the visual and literary arts.⁶

If the dwelling’s interior was a specific theme in 1880s and 1890s in the art of French and Belgian painters – especially in the most introspective works linked to the intimist Nabis, such as Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard and Félix Vallotton,⁷ and also Xavier Mellery or Georges Le Brun,⁸ who investigated the disturbing and mysterious aspects of a dwelling – the origin of the importance assigned to these themes is likely to date back to those years on which Benjamin was focused, that is to say the years of the reign of Louis-Philippe I or the July Monarchy (1830–48).⁹

In this chapter, we will focus on this period in which depictions of modern domestic life started to become popular. Interest in everyday domestic life, as we will see here, brought about an iconographic transformation on the one hand, in the paintings shown at the Salon, although they were still, at this stage, unable to provide a significant response to the theme. On the other hand, domestic life was represented but the field of literary illustrations, caricatures and vignettes, which, after all, as Charles Baudelaire emphasized,¹⁰ was, to all intents and purposes, among the best artistic expressions of this period, especially following the introduction of the use of lithography in Paris.¹¹

Louis-Philippe, or the interior

Under Louis-Philippe, the private individual makes his entrance onto the stage of the history. ‘For the private individual, the place in which he dwells is differentiated from the place in which he works for the very first time. The former constitutes the interior [l’intérieur]. Its complement is the office [le comptoir].’¹²

The identity overlap of the interior and Louis-Philippe’s reign, as Benjamin has highlighted, focuses on the attitude of the social class represented by the ‘bourgeois’ monarch. In the view of this class the master of the house was the sovereign of his realm, namely his dwelling, and thus his life was an extension of the private life of the King of France. With the beginning of the July Monarchy the private citizen finally acquired the leading role that he had been trying to take on since 1789.¹³ The living space, the ‘place of dwelling’,¹⁴ was gaining more and more importance in everyday life: away from the workplace, in an apartment furnished with ‘dreams’ – that is to say, in Benjamin’s view, the montage of different styles based on the function accorded to each room¹⁵ – he took shelter in a world where ‘he brings together the far away and the long ago. His living room is a box in the theatre of the world’.¹⁶ In this private space, the nineteenth-century bourgeois kept a number of devices which would allow him to live beyond his time (in the shape of purchased objects or objects that had been passed down from one generation to another, traces of remote or more recent times, mostly since 1839, thanks to the Daguerreotype and later to photography) and his space (as he was now able to get to know the world by actually travelling or comfortably seated in his armchair while reading literature or adventure books).¹⁷ Moreover, if we continue to subscribe to Benjamin’s idea – that the arcade is the external equivalent to the interior – this also implies the need to ‘domesticate’ the urban environment, that is to gentrify it and to capitalize on it. From a different standpoint, it can be seen how such a link is expressed through the phenomenon of collecting, since luxurious and rare collectable objects were sold in ateliers located in the arcades.¹⁸ Therefore, the intérieur, ‘the shelter of art’,¹⁹ is intended to be a complementary element to the comptoir (the place of work, but also the shop), where the object therefore loses value in being used as a commodity.²⁰ Collecting and collectors were often depicted in interior illustrations created during the July Monarchy and the very first years of the Second French Empire. This is documented by both the section dedicated to collectors taken from the most important ‘physiological’ work of the time, Les Français peints par eux-mêmes (1840–2),²¹ and the many illustrations created by Honoré Daumier devoted to amateurs and connoisseurs of prints. Ultimately, the intérieur was presented as the opposite of flânerie. The bourgeois man protected himself from the shock of being confronted with the crowd and the streets – into which, however, flâneurs were happy to dive headfirst²² – thanks to their comfortable apartments and their well-lined pouches, surrounded by their bibelots, as shown in a painting by François-Etienne Villeret (1848, New York, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum) (Figure 1.1) depicting an antechamber owned by a Parisian collector, thus providing tangible proof of Benjamin’s considerations.

Figure 1.1 François-Etienne Villeret, Dressing Room with Tented Ceiling, Brush and gouache, watercolour, graphite on tan paper (1848, New York: Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum).

The pivotal role of the interior under Louis-Philippe is expressed primarily in literature, where particular attention is devoted to domestic life, for which detailed descriptions of rooms are given.²³ It is in the pages of Honoré de Balzac’s novels that one may find the first modern descriptions of interiors, which were considered as settings for contemporary mores.²⁴ Along with him, Paul Gavarni and Honoré Daumier stand out as key players in a ‘human comedy’ performed through images.²⁵ The complementary relationship between the former and the latter is a theme which has been particularly thoroughly investigated by critics, starting with Baudelaire.²⁶

The only way in which illustrators were able to get around the 1835 September censorial laws was moral satire.²⁷ These laws forbade caricatures of politicians in France; thus, satire could be used to indirectly lampoon political figures by criticizing bourgeois values and hypocrisy.²⁸ This also meant exposure for the ruling class which these individuals represented. As a result, it was the need to illustrate modern habits through irony that increased the circulation of representations of interiors during the years of the July Monarchy.

If the setting par excellence was the dwelling, the main expression of modern values was conjugal life. Again, the first reference was given by Balzac in La Physiologie du marriage (1829) and then in Petites misères de la vie conjugale (1846). Both of them – included in the Comédie humaine – belonged to the Etudes analytiques. Having said that, however, they cannot be considered mere novels: La Physiologie du marriage and Petites misères de la vie conjugale are ironic – almost humorous – sociological and philosophical reflections, and probably the closest thing to the caricatures of the author’s contemporaries.

Scenes of private life: The marital ménage in Balzac, Bertall and Grandville

To understand how, at that time, domestic life and the spaces connected with it were the preferred field of investigation for the analysis of everyday reality – especially in a satirical way – it is useful to dwell on Petites misères de la vie conjugale.²⁹ These are a series of anecdotes which tell the emotional and domestic stories of a young married couple. The couple’s daily life is described as though seen through the lens of their own home – their bedroom, their living room, their dining room – as if they were set on a stage performing the nineteenth-century bourgeois family ménage. The novel talks about a veritable battle of the sexes, exemplified by the ‘conjugal battle’ between Adolphe and Caroline who, through witty remarks and petty betrayals, overpower one another in turn. Balzac’s perspective is, however, clearly antifeminist and describes – by contrast – the key role of the modern patriarchal society. Discussing the nineteenth-century dwelling, Jean Baudrillard wrote in The System of Objects: ‘The typical bourgeois interior is patriarchal; its foundation is the dining-room/bedroom combination.’³⁰ In the nineteenth-century urban community, the link between space, home furnishing and the family led to a symbolization of the rooms in a house, where ‘monumental furniture’³¹ such as the bed or the table stood out among the other pieces. When placed in the middle of their respective rooms, this furniture dominated the space as a metaphor of domestic life and personal relationships: the parlour was the room intended for family meetings, while the bedroom was the room intended for conjugal encounters.

In Petites misères de la vie conjugale, the environment is portrayed not so much in the text itself as in the illustrations of Bert...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Plates
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Cultures of domestic space in the nineteenth century
• Part 1 Representing the Domestic Interior
• Part 2 Gender and Domestic Space
• Part 3 Aesthetics and the Domestic Interior
• Notes
• Index
• Imprint