Patrick Bade
Historical Introduction 1848-1914, Part 2

Patrick Bade | Historical Introduction 1848-1914, Part 2 | 07.14.21

- [Judi] Welcome, Patrick, and welcome everybody. Patrick, I will hand over to you.

Visuals displayed throughout the presentation.

• Thank you, Judi. And yes, good day to everybody. And as you can see, I’m actually just continuing from last week. I only really got about halfway through my introduction to the period 1848 to 1914. For anybody who didn’t see that, here are two images. Millet shown at Salon of 1848 and a Picasso of 1914, and I showed those two images to show the momentous cultural changes over this period of 64 years. I ended last time with a discussion of empires and imperialism. This is a rather excruciating image of a British person in India. I’m moving from imperialism now to nationalism and patriotism.

One of my favourite quotes of all times, Dr. Johnson, saying that, “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” We’ve seen plenty of examples of that with scoundrel politicians in recent years on both sides of the Atlantic. But 19th century sees an enormous, enormous increase in national awareness, nationalism, and patriotism. The painting we have here is by Ernest Meissonier, and you can see it’s a figure representing France with the tricolour flag and the guns pointing. I think we can say here in this picture, they’re pointing eastward towards Germany. There is this bitter, bitter hatred between France and Germany, but more on the French side, I would say, towards Germany after the war of 1870.

And so these hardened attitudes of patriotism and hostility to other nations, we can see that they’re sort of hardwired into the attitudes of Western Europe in the late 19th century. And with hindsight, it makes the First World War seem inevitable. So from birth, children are completely brainwashed, completely indoctrinated, so you could imagine some small English child, and their first reading is this. Our Queen and our Empress is greater and wiser than all foreign monarchs, including “der Kaiser.” Sadly, the disgraceful scenes that we’ve seen accompanying football matches show that these primitive tribal patriotic attitudes are still very much there. And so this growth in nationalism and patriotism is also linked to a new kind of racism in the 19th century.

You could say, scratch a human being, and eventually you’ll find that we all have a tribal racist element. We all tend to be fearful or suspicious or hostile to the other. Unfortunately, I think it’s human nature. It’s something we need to struggle with and deal with. But in the 19th century, I talked a little bit last time about how the ideas of Darwin were misappropriated, that the origin of the species and the whole idea of evolution, and this was transformed into theories of inequality of races that some races are higher up the chain than others. And the most notorious proponent of these theories was a French aristocrat called Arthur de Gobineau, had a great influence on Wagner and later on Nazi ideas. And I suppose really he is the origin of the kind of white supremacist theories that seem to be resurgent again in America.

So as part of this, actually de Gobineau himself was not especially antisemitic, but we also have this, Judi’s talked about this in great depth, so I’m not going to really bang on about it very much more, this new type of antisemitism in the late 19th century, which is not based on religion. It’s based on pseudoscientific racial theory. And you see a cover of the notorious French antisemitic journal, La Libre Parole, on the right-hand side. So as I said, I’m not going to go into that. What I do want to discuss is the impact of assimilation on Western culture. This was a really quite extraordinary phenomenon. I mean, the Jews had been there. They’d been there since the Middle Ages and earlier, but largely in Europe they were ghettoised, they were completely separate. So with very few exceptions, a few notable exceptions like Spinoza in the 17th century, Jews actually made remarkably little contribution to Western culture until the opening up of the ghettos.

Here, I know, Judi again has discussed the impact of Napoleon. He’s actually in some ways a rather ambiguous figure when it comes to the history of the Jews, but one thing he does is to accord Jews equal rights and to open up all the ghettos, and this was a fantastic opportunity, and many Jews seized this opportunity. And most famously of all, of course, the Rothschilds originating in Frankfurt, and then this famous story, which I’m sure you all know, of the five sons being sent to different cities, Naples, Paris, Berlin, London, and so on. And so here we have two sons of the Rothschild family, Baron James de Rothschild, who was the most important Rothschild in France, and Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild. He’s the one in the fancy dress on the right. He’s the most important Rothschild in Britain.

So their wealth was unimaginable in real terms, and, of course, they become very legendary figures, and the legend of the Rothschilds and their power and their wealth, in France it’s still totally there. I mean, I wish I had a free hot dinner that every time somebody in France had said to me over the last five years, “Ah, Macron. Yes, you know about him. He used to work for the Rothschilds,” with such implications of still this supposed incredible power of the Rothschilds. Well, they certainly had it in the 19th century, and they had the wealth, and the 19th century is a period where if you had the wealth, you flaunted it. And so this is the Rothschild country house at Valliere, not far from Paris, oddly, built by James Paxton, who was the designer of the Crystal Palace, so huge, sumptuous, amazing house. And in Britain, the two great Rothschild houses of Mentmore Towers, top, and Waddesdon, which you see in the lower half here.

And another person in a way who’s a symbol of this very conspicuous Jewish success is Benjamin Disraeli. And again, I don’t need to tell you very much about him, because well, he’s one of Judi’s great heroes, certainly an astonishing man. And I do find it really amazing that the Tory party, that’s the conservative party, they want to conserve things, they want to go backwards, they’re not looking forwards. This should have been the party to have the first Jewish prime minister, even though he was officially converted, but he never got away from his Jewishness, and all the political caricatures at the time really emphasised his Jewish appearance. And that the Tory party should also have been the first party to have a woman prime minister.

On the left, you can see this is a punch cartoon in 1875, when on the sly, behind the backs of the French, and with the help of Jewish bankers, he was able to gain control of the Suez Canal by buying all the shares that belonged to the Khedive of Egypt. And on the right-hand side, you can see exactly how important that was. You see, it was the key of India, it was a direct connection between Britain and its most important colonies, and of huge, huge economic significance, and it came, of course. It was opened in 1869. This is just the point when the railway systems of the world are being completed. So that absolutely revolutionises the economy of the world, that you could travel the world, well, probably in 80 days.

As Jules Verne said, “If you booked your train tickets and your steamship tickets, it enormously shrank the world.” So I want to talk mainly about the cultural contribution of Jews. And first I’m beginning with music, and, of course, Wagner wrote this very notorious essay, “Jewishness in Music,” which there are two versions of it, second one rather worse than the first. And he proposed this theory that Jews were incapable of profound art or true inspiration because they didn’t have deep enough roots in the soul of European culture. And the two composers that were really the object of his scorn and iron hostility were Felix Mendelssohn, who you see on the left, and Giacomo Meyerbeer in the middle.

On the right, we have Offenbach. Oddly, I don’t think he actually felt the same kind of hostility to Offenbach. He actually really liked the music of Offenbach. Well, actually I think he secretly liked quite a lot of the music of Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer. He certainly wasn’t above stealing ideas from both of them. So this theory that, of course, the Nazis take up, that Jews are incapable of true, spontaneous, and deep inspiration. Well, I’ve never heard anybody really say that. Now, I don’t think it’s a theory. That would have to be a tiny minority of loonies who thought it. But if anybody ever did say it to me, I would say to them, what I want you to do is to go and listen to Mendelssohn’s Octet that he wrote in his mid-teens.

If I had to choose any piece of music in the history of Western music to illustrate spontaneous inspiration and invention, I think I might choose that piece of music. It is the peak of Mendelssohn. I must admit, I don’t think he ever wrote anything quite so wonderful ever again. But just the outpouring of musical ideas is absolutely phenomenal. And Meyerbeer, poor man, his reputation was totally trashed by Wagner and the Nazis, and in his case I think mud stuck. And there is generally a low appreciation, a low opinion. Another problem with Meyerbeer is that his operas require so many great singers, and there just aren’t the singers really to do justice to Meyerbeer’s work.

I went to a performance a couple of years ago at Covent Garden of his opera, “Robert le diable,” and I’m not going to say it’s the greatest masterpiece ever written, but all the way through the performance, I thought, hmm, Wagner stole that, Verdi stole that, Gounod stole that. So he was a rich, rich source of inspiration for later 19th century composers. And Offenbach, what can I say about Offenbach. He’s my hero. I love him. And talk about originality, of course, he invents an entirely new art form, the operetta. How many composers can you say invent a completely new art form? I suppose Wagner, actually. You could put Wagner and Offenbach on a level there saying that they created a new kind of musical theatre.

In the middle, I’m not going to talk much about literature mainly because I don’t know enough about it, but here is the youthful Heinrich Heine, and I think I have mentioned him before, because one of the greatest writers, one of the greatest poets in the German language, and he’s one German writer who I think is more likely to be familiar to British audiences because so many of his poems were set to music by Schubert, Schumann, and others, Mendelssohn, and they are amongst the greatest songs ever written. And then we move onwards. I hope that nobody would think either of these composers was superficial.

This is Mahler on the left-hand side and Schoenberg on the right-hand side. Schoenberg’s certainly one of the most important innovators in the history of Western music. It’s a slightly different picture in the visual arts, and there is a kind of obvious explanation for this. The ban on imagery in Orthodox Judaism, not that either of these artists… we’ve got Max Liebermann on the left, we’ve got Pissarro on the right there, I suppose the two most notable artists of a Jewish background. I say Jewish background because neither was remotely religious, but this is a possible explanation that it took a little longer for Jews to really assimilate into the visual arts than it did in music and literature.

But then when you move, of course, into the early 20th century, particularly here in Paris, Ecole de Paris, we’ve got three leading artists of the Ecole de Paris, Soutine, Chagall, and Modigliani. And so, in fact, the Ecole de Paris, which thrived between the early 1900s and 1940 was a very Jewish phenomenon, major artists and minor artists, and somewhere where you can explore this and enjoy it, a museum I always recommend, one of my absolute favourite museums in Paris, you must all go there when you come to Paris, is the Museum of the 1930s, Boulogne-Billancourt, on the west side of Paris, and they have a whole floor devoted to the Ecole de Paris, most of whom, of course, are Jewish artists.

Where Jews did play an absolutely crucial role is in the art trade and in the nurturing and developing of early modern art. Now, the art dealer was a completely new phenomenon in the 19th century… well, I suppose there had been dealers, but not in the 18th century or even earlier, but not playing the kind of decisive role that dealers did from the mid 19th century onwards. And the first really great modern art dealer was Paul Durand-Ruel, who played an absolutely crucial role in the impressionist movement. That’s a photograph of him on the right-hand side and his two sons painted by Renoir on the left-hand side.

But after Durand-Ruel, then if you start to look at all the really important dealers who nurtured new talent, they’re nearly all Jewish. It’s hard. It’s a bit like trying to think of a great violinist who’s not Jewish. It’s the same great dealer, an inventive, innovative dealer in modern art. Here are members of the Bernheim family. They followed Durand-Ruel as the most important dealers in Paris. You can see a picture of their gallery just near the Madeleine, and portraits of members of the family by Bonnard, bottom left, and Renoir, top right. Now Renoir, he’s a very ambivalent figure in all of this. This is his self-portrait as a young man on the left-hand side.

And around about 1880, actually from 1880 onwards, very often his clientele was a Jewish clientele. This is a portrait of a member of, what’s his first name? Cahen d'Anvers. Very important Jewish banking family. I can’t remember what his first name is, do I have it here? No, I don’t. You’d know about him if you’ve read “The Hare with the Amber Eyes.” There’s a new book called, “The House of Fragile Things.” It was promoted at Jewish Book Week, a very interesting book about these great French Jewish collectors of this period. He was the lover of Louise de Morpurgo, who was married to his cousin, and it was probably through him that Renoir got the commission to paint the three daughters of the Cahen d'Anvers family.

I interviewed the author, James McAuley, for Jewish Book Week. I think you can probably still see that interview. In any case, I recommend the book to you. The story of these girls, and particularly the story of the portrait on the right-hand side is incredibly heart-rending. It’s a very, very poignant story, what happened to the picture and what happened to the girls in the 20th century. Here’s another gentleman that you’ll be very familiar with if you’ve read “The Hare with the Amber Eyes.” This guy, as far as I’m concerned, he’s the most interesting character that’s discussed in that book.

This is Charles Ephrussi, another French Jewish banking family, very enlightened. Notice the little red dot on his jacket. That’s the rosette of the Légion d'honneur, so very much part of the establishment. And there is this very famous story, sorry if you all know it, of him commissioning a still life for money of a bunch of white asparagus, my favourite thing in the world to eat so I can sympathise with anybody wanting a picture of them. And he liked the picture so much that when he sent his fee to Manet, it was more than Manet had asked for. And Manet was very touched by this, and he painted this little picture, tiny picture.

Actually, I’d rather have this one. I think this is the most ravishing picture, because white asparagus is not really white, it’s got little touches of purple and green and so on. It’s a ravishing little picture of one piece of asparagus, and he sent it to Charles Ephrussi with a message saying, “Thank you so much for the money for the still life. I’m afraid one piece got left out.” I like to tell that story because it’s not all bad between French and Jews. I really want to emphasise that. I tried to emphasise it before when talking about the sons. One mustn’t over-dwell on the negative side. There are very positive stories as well, and this is one of them.

So he was a friend of Renoir, despite Renoir’s pretty nasty antisemitism. And he’s thought to be the man in the top hat in the background of one of Renoir’s most famous pictures, the Boatman’s Luncheon. There is the detail that shows him. That’s, I think, quite believable that is Charles Ephrussi. In collectors, of course, Jews played an important role in collecting in France. You’ve got this kind of pattern of there’ll be a patriarch of a banking family who will make enormous sums of money, and then the next two generations spend it on things. So you have the Camondo family originally from Turkey arriving the middle of the 19th century and making a tonne of money, and then the two cousins, Moise de Camondo and Isaac de Camondo, spending it on lovely things.

And there are many books on the Camondo family both in French and English, so I’m not going to go into great detail. You can easily look up the books, you can look up the story on the internet if you want to, and, again, do read “The House of Fragile Things.” That tells the story, again, a very tragic one. This is Moise de Camondo on the right-hand side, and he built this palace for himself on the Parc Monceau, which was the most exclusive part of Paris, and after the death of his beloved son, Nissim de Camondo, he dedicated the rest of his life to creating this extraordinary collection of French 18th century decorative arts that is now the Musee Nissim de Camondo, another absolute must for your next visit if you haven’t been there already. But in a way I find his cousin, Isaac, more interesting.

He was a banker. He was apparently quite a gifted composer. He wrote an opera that was performed at the Paris Opera with a fantastic cast, an American star, Geraldine Farrar, and so on. Got good reviews and has disappeared. I’d love somebody to revive it. Did he get the good reviews because he paid for them, or were those good reviews genuine? That’s the question. But he was also a great collector. He collected the same kind of stuff as his brother. Let’s go back for minute. This kind of taste with a strong emphasis on very blingy 18th century French decorative arts often described as le goût Rothschild, Rothschild taste, and that has negative connotations of being that showing in vulgar and so on. So he had all of that kind of stuff too, which he donated to the Louvre.

But more interestingly, he was passionately interested in modern art, and he bought some of the greatest masterpieces of Degas and Renoir and other artists. This, for instance, is probably Renoir’s greatest masterpiece, “The Moulin de la Galette.” He owned this, and as you can see in the middle of this on the right-hand side one of Degas’s greatest masterpieces, “Absence.” And so instead of glorifying himself by setting up a museum or insisting that everything should be shown together, he just quietly gave them to the French nation. Dealers. This is Henri Kahnweiler in a portrait by van Dongen on the left, and then a photograph where you can see a Picasso drawing behind him on the wall. He was one of the great promoters of cubism. A very extraordinary life actually, because he was German.

So he built up a highly successful business and made a fortune twice and lost them twice. His first time, of course, he had to flee from Paris at the outbreak of the First World War. He comes back to Paris, rebuilds his business, and in 1940 history repeats itself, and he has to flee and he again loses everything. This is his portrait by Picasso on the left. And these wonderful chairs, these are early 19th century chairs, that have cubist embroidery, is that the correct word for this? These covers that were actually designed for Kahnweiler by Juan Gris, another great Catalan Cubist, and these are to be seen in the Museum of the 1930s at Boulogne-Billancourt. The Rosenberg brothers, Leonce and Paul, here, again, great promoters of cubism. And so up to now I have just been talking about Paris, Paris being really the centre of modern art, but Berlin actually came around about 1910.

From 1910 till 1933, Berlin is at least as interesting as Paris as the centre of modern art. All that killed dead, of course, overnight in 1933 with the arrival of Hitler. But the most important and interesting modern art dealer in Berlin, maybe in Europe at the time, was Herwarth Walden. He’s not committed to one particular art movement. He gave Chagall his first one-man show, he was promoting expressionism. There’s a portrait of him by Oskar Kokoschka on the right-hand side. He’s also promoting futurism and Dada and cubism, so he’s a very open-minded dealer. Here he is with his wife, Nelly, and you can see two paintings by Chagall on the wall behind them. He was smart enough to see which way the wind was blowing. In 1932, ahead of the Nazi takeover, he decided to sell up and leave Berlin, but he made a big mistake.

Instead of going to America, as most of these people did, he decided to go east to Russia, and that meant instead of dying in a concentration camp, he died in a gulag. So, who is the most influential Jew of the 19th century? Again, I’m going to only talk about this very superficially because I don’t have the knowledge that Judi has, and I know she’s talked about all of this in great detail already, but Karl Marx, I think you have to say, is one of the most influential prophets in the history of the Western world for good or bad. He published the Communist Manifesto in 1848 with its ringing call for workers of the world to unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains, and his ideas sort of worked through in great detail.

I have read the Communist Manifesto, but I can’t pretend I’ve ever attempted to read Das Kapital. I’m not sure if it’s still readable. He develops this idea that the way that capitalism is going, it’s going to self-destruct because the rich keep on getting richer and the poor keep on getting poorer and something’s going to break and there’s going to be a revolution. Well, interestingly, for much of the Western world, it didn’t happen as he predicted, I think mainly because actually the rich, the capitalists, voluntarily did give up some of their wealth. And his idea that there was going to be this ever-increasing gap between rich and poor didn’t turn out for most of the 20th century.

Of course, it may still happen because certainly since the 1980s, Reagan and Thatcher and so on, that tendency for the gap to narrow has been reversed, and especially since the big economic crisis of 2009. The percentage of the wealth of the world is being concentrated ever more in a tiny group of people. So already in the 19th century, I think a lot of people, moral people, sensible people, were taking on board that you couldn’t continue exploiting the workers in such a terrible and brutal way. Certainly in Britain and in other countries laws were introduced to improve the quality of life of workers. There were limits to the number of hours they could work. There were safety measures introduced.

So you still, of course, had this incredible contrast with the rich of the 19th century in real terms. Well, I’m not sure. Maybe Bill Gates and people like that in real terms are equally rich. But the contrast between the people who could afford “cottages” on Rhode Island, Newport, and the incredible squalor of the living conditions of the working class as seen here on the right-hand side by Gustav Dore on a visit to London, and it did lead to huge social tensions, not just communism, but anarchism, and in the late 19th century there was this spectre of anarchism, political assassinations, the president of America, the empress of Austria, the present .

It was a dangerous job being the head of state in the 1890s. You were immediately a target for anarchists. And bombs. I mean, we’ve been frightened, of course, in the last few years by mad Islamist terror attacks, but people lived in great fear of terrorism in the late 19th century and the early 20th century. There were bombs thrown into luxury restaurants, there were bombs thrown at the opera, and this is a very famous incident that you can see Winston Churchill here as Home Secretary, young Winston Churchill. This is the Sidney Street siege in London in 1911 when the police trapped a group of eastern European anarchists. But yes, you’ve got the very, very rich and the very poor, but increasingly you have the middle classes.

And I want to introduce you to my family. This is my family in the early 1890s. The little girl in the middle, in the foreground, that’s my granny. I still remember sitting on her knee. The little boy on the horse is my great-uncle Harold. And the man on the left, he came from the working classes, but he was a self-made man. He actually became quite wealthy in the insurance business. And sitting ramrod straight is his wife to the right of centre. My granny said she was absolutely terrified, not a glimmer of human warmth. And here again is my beautiful family. The same fearsome granny, great-great-granny on the right-hand side, and some lovely maiden aunts in the middle. And this brings me to the women question.

We’ve dealt with the “Jewish question.” We’ve talked about the assimilation of Jews, but women needed to be assimilated really into Western culture. If somebody wants to say that something is sexist and misogynist and retrograde, politicians will usually say, “Oh, it’s Victorian.” But here I wish to defend the Victorians and say that certainly an element in Victorian society was very progressive. There were people in Victorian England who were the first, well not actually the very first, you would go back to the late 18th century and Mary Wilson Croft. But you get many people, men and women, in the Victorian period who understood that women are oppressed, that they’re exploited, and they needed to have the same rights as men.

This is a painting by an artist called Richard Redgrave. Not a wonderful painter, I would say, but he is much studied in universities today because he made these almost missionary images showing the plight of women and calling for something to be done about it. This is a middle class, because if a woman did not inherit independent wealth, she could marry it, of course, but if you weren’t married and you didn’t inherit wealth, you were adrift even if you were middle class. So this is a middle class girl. What could she do? She could sign up as a governess. Somewhere or other, it’s back in London. I’m afraid I can’t read it to you.

I’ve got a wonderful advertisement from a newspaper saying that this nice middle class family wanted a governess. She had to be completely fluent in French and German, she had to be a good musician, she had to be able to sew and make clothes. So on, so on, so on, so on, so on. She must have uninterrupted good humour and good health. She’s not even allowed to be ill. And at the end of all of this it says 26 pounds a year is what she’s going to be offered. So this painting shows the young governess, her situation is contrasted with that of the young girls of the wealthy family. She’s had a bereavement because she’s got a letter with black borders and she’s dressed in black, and she’s completely alone and unprotected in the world.

So her situation is dire, but not as bad as this woman in another painting by Richard Redgrave. She’s a seamstress. So if you didn’t want to be involved in prostitution, you could be a cleaning woman or seamstress. The conditions of the pay was miserable. They had to work through the night, they went blind, and there was a very famous poem that really in a way woke up the nation to the plight of seamstresses called “The Song of the Shirt.” And it’s exactly the same date as this painting of a woman working through the night, the dawn breaking, desperately to earn a crust of bread. So what was the alternative? Well, the alternative was prostitution.

And here again, I remember Mrs. Thatcher saying, “Oh, let’s return to Victorian values.” Yes, to some of them. But the 19th century was the golden age of prostitution. It was everywhere. I mean, a huge percentage of the female population of Europe was engaged in some kind of prostitution because it was the only way to live. And, of course, prostitution is a major theme of Western literature and Western painting in the mid-to-late 19th century, because you get a rather different take on it on either side of the channel.

So this is prostitution English style as depicted by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It’s not much fun. This is the girl who’s come up to London, and she’s fallen into bad ways, and she’s just walking home from a hard night’s work, and she bumps into her former fiance, who’s a healthy young farmer, who’s come up to London to sell his calf, and she collapses in shame in the street. This is prostitution French style by Degas. It’s called “The Madame’s Birthday.” It’s completely the atmosphere of Guy de Maupassant. I should have put it on your list, “La Maison Tellier”, which is a very funny, very delightful short story about life in a brothel, which actually sounds probably a lot better than life for a lot of harassed and miserable middle class married women. Prostitution took all sorts of forms. You’ve got the so-called . I mentioned last time.

This is the beautiful Contessa Castiglione. She has those wonderful, fleshy, rounded shoulders, which were so admired in the middle of the 19th century. And on the right-hand side is La Belle Otero. She was a Spanish courtesan. She counted among her lovers pretty well the entire royalty of Europe from the Tsar Nicholas II, to Kaiser Wilhelm II, to the Prince of Wales, of course, and everyone else. Fascinating life. She lived into her late 90s.

Another thing for you to try and get to see, it’s not so easy, is the Hotel Paiva. It’s now, well maybe appropriately, it’s a gentleman’s club on the Champs Elysees. You can only go on a guided tour, and you have to book a very long time in advance. And I think they only allow one tour a week. This was the most lavish private palace in Paris in the period of the second empire, and that’s 1850s and ‘60s. And it was built for a woman who was known as La Paiva. Her real name was Therese Lachmann. She was born into grinding poverty in a Jewish ghetto in Russia. She was ruthlessly ambitious, and she slapped her way to the top by way of a famous concert pianist and then a Portuguese aristocrat who gave her the title La Paiva. And then she hooked up and actually married eventually a Prussian prince who was incredibly wealthy from silver mines and things in Sardinia.

And he built this palace, which is just jaw dropping. The staircase you see on the left-hand side is made out of the semi-precious stone onyx. It’s solid onyx from top to bottom. And this is her bathroom where you have a solid silver bath encased in onyx. It’s just the blingiest house in Paris. Fashion. This is the period where Paris is clearly the fashion centre of the world, and very wealthy women all came to Paris to do their shopping. And it’s the beginning of the idea of haute couture, where you have a designer who will be a man, who’s a kind of dictator, and he decides what the fashions, what colours, what shapes, where the waist is going to be this season. And ironically, the first ever great couturier was not a Frenchman.

He was an Englishman called Charles Worth. He wasn’t the inventor of the crinoline, but he is the designer who’s most associated with the crinoline and its point of maximum extent, which was in the mid-1860s. On the right-hand side is his wife, Marie, who was in a way the first supermodel, and she would drive around the race courses in an open carriage to display his fashions. This crinoline, I’ve mentioned before, is really a big bird cage.

The point of the crinoline, I suppose, as I said, you wanted to display your wealth in the 19th century, and that’s what your wife is there for. She’s just there to show how rich you are. And you do that by making your poor wife walk around wearing a tent of fabulously expensive fabrics. Of course, very hazardous. I don’t think crinolines would be allowed today on health and safety grounds just trying to move around the city. Certainly trying to use public transport using a crinoline was a pretty dangerous thing to do.

Here are paintings that show you can date these paintings very, very precisely. It’s a Bouda which shows the Empress Eugenie on the left-hand side, and a Monet of his wife in the garden on the right-hand side. And so the crinoline became so wide by about 1865, it couldn’t go any further. I mean, it was impossible for a woman to get through a door, two women could not pass one another, and the solution, this was Charles Worth’s idea, was to sweep back the dress and to create a little platform to hold up the material on your bottom. This was the bustle. More images of the bustle. Imagine travelling by train wearing crinolines. Late 19th century, it’s very interesting how a woman’s… it’s from this time onwards.

You can say from the 1860s till now, women’s shape has changed decade by decade, so you can look at an image and you can say straightaway, 1920s, 1950s, 1960s, because of the shape of the woman. And that is the shape is created in all sorts ways by padding, corsetting, dieting, exercise, all these different things. So we have the ideal shape. This is the Baroness de Rothschild on right-hand side again with those fleshy rounded shoulders, everything suggesting massivity. You get to the 1890s, this is Sergeant on the left, this is the “new woman,” with her Arnold Schwarzenegger shoulders, and her Sergeant Major chest, something really quite masculine, certainly very assertive about her. And this is reflecting, of course, changes in social attitudes.

If you see photographs or paintings of society around 1900, what’s surprising is how much bigger the women look than the men, and that’s because they’re probably on platform shoes, the skirts are going down to the ground, they’ve got all this padding around their bum, padding on the chest. They like to have these huge shoulders. The hair is up and then there’s more kind of padding, socks or whatever, and then you have the hat on the top, these incredible tall hats. So certainly somebody coming from Mars or from say Japan or Africa seeing these women, they would be astonished by them, and they would really have no idea what the actual body of the woman was like underneath all of this. And corsets, of course, dreadful. I mean, so many women died in childbirth.

I mean, there were women who even had lower ribs removed because you wanted to have this tiny, tiny waist, and a lot of money and effort invested in hats. You never went out without a hat. And so this is the period, as I said, the new woman where women are asserting, beginning to assert themselves. They’re beginning to protest, they’re beginning to educate themselves, and at least for an elite, things are opening up with sporting possibilities, although you’d be a bit hampered, I think, playing hockey in these dresses. This is the first woman to achieve a double-first at Cambridge, must be about 1890 from the dress.

And these two inventions did probably more to liberate women than anything in hundreds of years. The sewing machine. There were various versions, but I suppose the Singer one is the most famous one. There’s another very important Jewish contribution to Western culture, the Singer sewing machine. This meant that there was an alternative. For a woman who had a baby, had to look after children, there was an alternative to prostitution because she could stay at home, and this was certainly a great improvement on the poor woman threading the shirt that I showed you earlier. A Victorian looking at this picture would’ve been able to read it immediately because it was a kind of a cliche.

If you were a wealthy young man, you couldn’t have sex with women of your own class. You’d have sex with servants, with lower class women. And, of course, there wasn’t very good birth control. You might get them pregnant. You couldn’t possibly marry them. What do you do? The decent thing for a nice young man who gets a girl pregnant is to give her a sewing machine. And that’s obviously what’s happened here. The young man, I think, is outside the picture. You can see the girl has collapsed weeping, and the mother is looking accusingly at the young man.

The other way that women could cause a great boon for women was the typewriter, because this meant that a woman could now go outside the home and earn a living by typing in an office. You may not think that’s all that wonderful, but believe me, at the time, it was. The suffragette movement actually became violent. It’s the outrage that women would do these things, that they would throw bricks through windows, that they would physically attack people. It’s a bit like the outrage in America about the violence of the BLM movement. I mean, total hysteria about this unnatural violence of women who want the vote.

So, I’m coming galloping to the end. I’m just going to do a very rapid look at the different regimes in Europe. Victoria and Albert on the left-hand side, opening the great exhibition of 1851. If you had to say, when did Great Britain reach its peak? The date I would give would be 1851. The Empire was reaching its maximum extent. Britain was certainly the most powerful country in the world, and that’s reflected, of course, in all the red areas on the map. France had a very bumpy ride. You had the revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, defeat, revolutions in 1830, 1848, and what seemed like stability with the second empire from 1852 to 1870, Louis Napoleon.

I have to say I think in the end he was as idiotic as he looks in this picture on the right-hand side, and his beautiful, obnoxious trophy wife, Eugenie, on the left-hand side wearing lovely Charles Worth dresses surrounded by her ladies. Paris was a megalopolis, but, of course, small compared to the great city today, and everybody knew each other. The great document of all of this is the Goncourt brothers’ diary. See the Goncourts on the right, Edmond the left brother, Jules the right. Jules died of syphilis in 1870. Edmond continued the diary till the end of the century, bitchy, sharp, nasty, very readable, horribly antisemitic. What else can I say about him?

It’s a huge, huge diary in many, many volumes, and it’s one of the most important sources. He would meet up in a cafe with Degas, with Manet, with Zola, with Flaubert, and there’d be all this sort of bitchy repartee, and you wouldn’t dare go to the toilet because your reputation would be ruined by the time you came back again. And this very famous painting by Manet on the left, “Music in the Tuilerie Gardens, 1862,” where it’s full of, there’s Voltaire, there’s Gautier, there’s Offenbach, Tulimond in the Garden of the Tuileries. That the disaster of the stupidest war in history, the Franco-Prussian War.

How stupid was that pointless silly war that in a way led inevitably to the two world wars in the 20th century. It’s followed by a communist-driven, abortive communist revolution, very destructive. You can see from this. The Tuillerie Paris burned down. The Louvre was very lucky to escape. It might have been lost entirely. These are victims of the Paris commune. The right wing government came back into the city, and put down the workers’ uprising very briefly, brutally. Then into the ‘70s and '80s, it’s party time in Paris, celebrated by great artists like Degas on the left, Lautrec on the right.

This is where Paris for Brits gets its very loose reputation. I remember there was a time when I would say, “Oh, I’m going to Paris for the weekend,” and people would say, “Oh, yes?” They’d assume that I was doing something very naughty in Paris. It’s probably easier to be naughty in London if you want to be. This is a detail of a painting by Augustus Egg of a woman who’s fallen from the path of virtue, has an illegitimate child, and she’s sleeping under the arches at Charing Cross, and behind her you’ve got one of the, I don’t know if you can read it here, it says, “Pleasure excursions to Paris.”

And actually I’m going to stop here because I’m running out of time. I just had a few images to go. Oh, this I’ve got to talk to you about because, oh, this is a painting that puts me in a total rage every time I see it. It’s in the National Gallery in Berlin, and it’s a gloating painting by a Prussian artist called Anton von Werner, which is meant to show the superiority of Germanic couture over all that frothy French decadence. So we here have these nice pink-faced German soldiers with mud on their boots in the salon of a French chateau with all this decadent French tuile Louis taste, and the soldier is… in the actual painting you can read what the music is on the stand. It’s a song of Schumann. So the whole point of this is, of course, noble German culture and decadent frothy French culture being contrasted.

And so I am going to finish right there and see what we’ve got.

• [Judi] Thank you Patrick. There are a few questions if you’d like to just go through them.

Q&A and Comments

• Yep. Darwin always gets a free pass with regard to racism since social Darwinism cannot be derived from the origin of the species, but in the dissent of man, Darwin certainly does endorse social Darwinism. I’m sure it’s very complicated. I’m not sure I could give you an informed opinion about that.

The Mendelssohn Octet. Yes. If you Google Mendelssohn, there is only one Octet, a string octet by Mendelssohn. It’s the most divine… You’ll float. It’s just most wonderful piece. A joyous, amazing piece of music.

Related to Soutine, unfortunately he did not leave. I wish he’d give me a painting. I loved Soutine and actually much prefer him to Chagall, although I might be struck down by lightning for saying that. The painting behind me actually is quite Soutine-like. It’s by an artist called Francis West, who was a great friend who died recently, and I will talk about him when I talk about the contents of this flat because I’ve got several paintings by him. I think he’s a wonderful, really wonderful artist. I would really recommend anybody who likes that kind of quite tough expressionism, you can buy his works quite reasonably.

The book about the Renoir girls is called “The House of Fragile Things” by James McAuley.

The gallery in Paris where you can get Soutine, Chagall, and Modigliani, the best examples would be at the Pompidou Centre, but the gallery I was talking about is the Museum of the 1930s, Musée des Années Trente at Boulogne-Billancourt.

Yeah, tapestry, you’re right. Of course, it’s tapestry on the chairs. The work of a lesser known school of artists, Michel Kikoïne, were left at Tel Aviv University some years ago. Yeah, I’m sure there must be lots of very good…

Somebody I’m really interested in is, she eventually became Israeli, is the sculptor, Chana Orloff, and I only recently discovered that her studio still exists on the Left Banke and it’s visitable, so that’s another thing high up my list of things to see.

Judith, my husband had a connection to some works by Pissarro. He had a cousin from Berlin who was an art dealer. He realised the need to escape, managed to get to Glasgow just before the outbreak of war, and then to USA. Before leaving Germany, a German art dealer who he could trust, hid the Pissarros disguised by being over-painted… That’s really smart. …and they were retrieved afterward. That’s a rare story. That is actually a very interesting rare story.

Uhhh. Right.

My grandparents, this is Margaret, were raised with Victorian standards during World War II under rationing. My mother was sent to live with them, her new in-laws, and told a story that Grandfather always had first right to butter, jam, etc. I bet there was a lot of that around still till probably, I don’t know, the 1960s.

Q: If prostitution was widespread, how widespread was syphilis? A: I have only one figure to give you on that, and it is estimated that one person in five in Paris had syphilis in the late 19th century. So yes, syphilis was extremely widespread, and, of course, an unmentionable subject.

The hotel particularly is the Hotel Paiva, P-A-I-V-A. I think she’s on my list, Contessa La Paiva. Hotel Paiva.

Yes, of course. That’s what we think now, that typewriters… …before the invention of computers and so on, you had to be very careful asking a female secretary to type something for you because it felt demeaning, she might have felt that, and the same with sewing machines, but I’m just saying see them in context. Now we see them as being things that held women down, but at the time they were liberating things for women.

I think you’ve got the list of Parisian restaurants, or you should have it. It’s been sent out a couple of times.

The myth that women had ribs removed for fashion has been debunked for years. Well, maybe. I’ll tell you who’s supposed to have had it done is the actress, Polaire, that’s P-O-L-A-I-R-E, and I want you to look her up and see images of her and see if her shape is possible without having a rib removed.

The trouble with Offenbach is that the English had generally managed to ruin his operas. Not just the English. Everybody ruins Offenbach these days. Although I saw a fantastic Belle Helene at Theatre des Champs-Elysee about 10 days ago. Unfortunately, it’s such a special style, effervescent style, and it’s more or less disappeared, but, yes.

Letters to Camondo by Edmund de Waal, somebody mentioning.

On the Ephressi family, I’ll leave that. Read. If you want to know about the Ephressi family, read Edmund de Waal and read “The House of Fragile Things.” It would be a talk, another talk, but probably not from me. It needs to be done by somebody who’s really researched them.

Leo and Gertrude Stein. Yes, of course. They’re so interesting. But in a way, and, of course, they arrived in Paris right at the end of the period I’m talking about. I’ll probably find a way to put them into a later lecture. Right. Now let me see.

Ralph Friedman. Yeah, I probably have rather unpopular views on the subject of patriotism. I’m afraid I do feel very, very strongly that patriotism is largely a negative thing. What we really need actually, I would like to have a debate between Dennis and David about which has been the greater negative in human history, the most destructive thing. Is it nationalism and patriotism on one side or is it religion? Which of the two has caused more death and destruction? I think that would be a very interesting debate to have.

Oh, am I coming to the end?

And somebody, they’ve just looked up Polaire, and it sure looks as if she’s had more than ribs removed. Yes. She had a 14-inch waist and a 38-inch bust. She did not live to a ripe old age.

Tours of Paris. Well, I’m happy for anybody to directly email me, but for my Paris tours, I mainly work for the organised tours anyway. Martin Randall, they’re expensive. I think they’re worth every penny because they’re so fantastically well organised. No queuing. Everything runs like clockwork. I love working for Martin Randall. That’s absolutely brilliant.

My family. That branch of the family lived in Lancashire in the late 19th century.

Somebody’s saying religion for sure. Yeah, well it depends. Of course, the Holocaust. Now what is the Holocaust down to? I mean, you could say ultimately there is a big religious factor in the attitudes that led to the Holocaust, but also all those people who did what they were told for patriotic reasons, so it’s not totally simple. Right. I think that’s it. I’ve got to the end.

• [Judi] Thank you, Patrick.

• Thanks. Thanks. Thanks everybody.