Rediscovering Georges de Peyrebrune by Marie Martine

Gary:

Today’s special episode is by Marie Martine. Marie is a third year PhD student at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on women writers from the end of the nineteenth century in France, Germany, and Norway. Her thesis looks at how those writers have responded to contemporary discourses around women’s sexuality and mental health, notably in naturalist fiction. Before her PhD, she did her masters in German and Comparative Literature at the universities of Bonn and St Andrews. She has a bachelor degree in Franco-German studies from the universities of La Sorbonne and of Bonn, in Germany.

Her talk is about Mathilde-Marie Georgina Élisabeth de Peyrebrune, known by her penname as George de Peyrebrune. While Peyrebrune’s works are not as well-known today, she was one of the most popular novelists of her age, who lived a remarkable life during the French Belle Époque.

Introduction

Today, I would like to talk about the French writer Georges de Peyrebrune. But before I discuss her trajectory, from an illegitimate child from the Périgord to a successful fin-de-siècle writer in Paris, I would like to share an anecdote that perfectly illustrates her strong character.

Imagine: it is the 4th of June 1908. You are part of the numerous people attending the transfer of the ashes of Emile Zola to the Panthéon. This is a symbolic day, honouring the French author not only for his literary career, but also for his political engagement. In the 1890s, Zola publicly defended Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish captain, falsely accused by a martial court of spying for the German Empire. You saw that Dreyfus is here, attending the ceremony for the man who defended him when French society was sharply divided, with one faction advocating for his innocence while another was driven by the prevalent anti-Semitic sentiments of the era.

Suddenly, you hear a gunshot. A man tried to kill Dreyfus, right here and there, on the steps leading to the Panthéon. But he missed… How? The attempted murder was stopped by a 67-year-old woman and her umbrella! That woman, who hit him, is Georges de Peyrebrune.

Now, you might ask yourself: How come have I never come across this anecdote in French history books before? A woman who stopped an eventual new ideological civil war only with an umbrella! Let me correct this wrong by telling you about Georges de Peyrebrune, her life and work. Georges de Peyrebrune was a ‘bas-bleu’, a French woman writer at the end of nineteenth century, a feminist, and an activist whose literary work reflected her political ideas.

Short biography

Before giving a short biography, I would like to say that this podcast is largely based on the fantastic biography written by Jean-Paul Socard and the collection of letters assembled and edited by Nelly Sanchez. Thanks to those two scholars, we are today able to know Peyrebrune’s story and legacy.

Georges de Peyrebrune was born Mathilde Marie Georgina Elisabeth de Peyrebrune Judicis on the 18th of April 1841 in the Dordogne. Her father, whose identity remains uncertain, never recognised her. She marries at the age of 18 a man ten years older than her, and their marriage is an unhappy one. She starts publishing in regional journals soon after and goes to Paris after the 1870 war, at 30 years old. Despite her literary success, Georges de Peyrebrune will struggle all her life with money and will die in poverty, in 1917.

Georges de Peyrebrune as a woman and a feminist

Being a woman and a writer in nineteenth-century France is not easy. Writers like George Sand and Madame de Staël have certainly paved the way for the next generation of women wanting to write; but men still reproach women to be too fragile and sentimental and that writing is a distraction from women’s one and only duty: motherhood. For instance, the Decadent writer, Barbey d’Aurevilly, claims he can ‘smell’ a woman writer from a book, because the feminine odour always betrays itself, even if the author used a male pseudonym. A very accurate science, to be sure… He uses the qualifier ‘bas-bleu’ to negatively designate women with literary ambitions, a name derived directly from the English ‘blue stocking’. For him and numerous of his contemporaries, women are physically incapable to write books comparable to those by men. French men worry about the increasing number of women writing. For them, this can only be a sign of decadence as women leave the private sphere that was assigned to them by gender norms.

Georges de Peyrebrune is well aware of those discourses, but she proudly reappropriates the term ‘bas-bleu’ to designate herself and her peers. She directly responds to those male anxieties in her play Jupiter et les Bas-bleu from 1894. In this comic play, she stages Zola under the traits of Jupiter, posing as a judge putting her contemporaries on trial.

The women writers, however, respond to his acerb critiques. The text ends with the judgement: ‘elles n’enteront jamais à l’Académie !’ (They will never get into the French Academy). This is unfortunately true: the French Academy will only admit women as their members in 1980. Ironically, Zola himself will never get admitted either! What is interesting with this recently republished text is that Georges de Peyrebrune smartly mocks the anxieties of men writers fearing the competition from women. She debunks their pseudo-scientific arguments to justify women’s exclusion from public life and shows that the women of her generation have proven their ability to write.

What I find particularly touching about Georges de Peyrebrune’s personality is her clear solidarity with other women writers and her wish to build a literary network made of women, despite the obstacles. We unfortunately have few archives left from Georges de Peyrebrune, but some letters she received enable us to see how her contemporaries considered her as a generous mentor figure. For instance, Julia Daudet (the wife of the well-known writer Alphonse Daudet) asks Peyrebrune to support the publication of another woman writer. Daudet reflects on the numerous opportunities given to men to get their works published and publicized, compared to the few women get. Her letter shows her confidence in Peyrebrune’s influence. Georges de Peyrebrune correspondence shows her as ready to help young writers by sharing her contacts within the publishing world and by giving her advice. One could think that in a society so hostile to women’s writing, the few who dared to publish would jealously protect their secret, but Georges de Peyrebrune was clearly a woman who valued other talents and strived to help other writers.

This engagement led Georges de Peyrebrune to be part of the first jury of the Prix de la Vie Heureuse. In 1904, several feminist and women intellectuals were tired to see that the prestigious Prix Goncourt was again given to a man despite the talent of a potential female candidate Myriam Harry with her novel La Conquête de Jérusalem. They thus decided to build their own literary prize to finally recognize and reward women’s talents, as well as encourage contacts among women writers. Among Georges de Peyrebrune, we find in the jury Anna de Noailles, Julia Daudet, Daniel Lesueur, Marcelle Tinayre, Gabrielle Réval, Séverine and Lucie Delarue-Maldrus all brilliant and influential writers of the time. This prize will become the Femina prize in 1917 and is still awarded today.

All those names are forgotten, except for a few maybe, known by lovers of the French ‘matrimoine’ (a neologism derived from ‘patrimoine’, designating women’s heritage and legacy), but it is important to highlight here that all of them were successful writers. Georges de Peyrebrune herself was awarded the prize of the Académie Française twice in her life, once in 1896 for Vers l'amour and another time in 1899 for Au pied du mât. This institutional recognition shows that she was read and appreciated by her contemporaries. The erasure of women’s contribution to French cultural and intellectual life is a complex phenomenon that has nothing to do with the actual quality of the work they produced.

In Georges de Peyrebrune’s literary circle, there was also Rachilde who made an appearance in the French History Podcast with the episode with Rachel Mesch entitled ‘Before Trans’ which I really recommend. Rachilde is known for being ‘the queen of the Decadents’ in fin-de-siècle France. She scandalized French audiences with her bold portraits of independent and sadistic heroines in her novels Monsieur Vénus and La Marquise de Sade. Interestingly, she claimed loud and clear that she was not a feminist (she even published a pamphlet on that matter in 1908) and often refused to be associated with other women writers, instead calling herself ‘homme de lettres’ (man of letters). Georges de Peyrebrune, on the contrary, clearly revendicated to be a feminist, but her female characters can seem rather tame compared to the ones of Rachilde. Rachilde published several critiques of Georges de Peyrebrune’s novels in the Mercure de France and underlined her moralising tone. Georges de Peyrebrune makes Rachilde appear under fictional traits in the novel La Décadente (The Decadent Woman) in which she criticizes the morbid values of the Decadents. A friendship between the two can thus seem quite surprising. However, their letters clearly show that despite different worldviews both women admired and respected each other. Both come from the Périgord and tried their luck as writers in Paris. At first, Georges de Peyrebrune appears as a mentor for the young Rachilde who tries to navigate the capital city and its literary circles. As she marries Alfred Valette, director of the influential journal Mercure de France, Rachilde gains more influence. It was now Georges de Peyrebrune’s turn to ask for Rachilde’s support through her literary critiques to publicize Peyrebrune’s new publications. I think this is an interesting friendship to explore: despite their radically different opinions and literary production, Georges de Peyrebrune and Rachilde are a great example of a true literary friendship. Georges de Peyrebrune and Zola

As I started with Georges de Peyrebrune’s iconic gesture at Zola’s funeral, I ought to say a few words on their relationship. While Zola was honoured at his death, his literary career was marked by hurdles and rejection. After the publication of L’Assommoir (1877), the naturalist writer is harshly criticized for his uncompromising representation of France’s unromantic sides: prostitution, alcoholism, violence… Critics considered Zola a mere ‘pornographer’ who was only looking for the worst in humanity. The writer defended himself by arguing that his naturalist poetics were aimed to represent the truth, and only the truth. In 1879, in a regional journal, Peyrebrune defends Zola. She is one of the first among his contemporaries to recognize the literary revolution that the Naturalist school represents and claims that it should be a model for future literature. Her own literary works are inspired by naturalist topics and style, notably Victoire la Rouge (1883) that tells the tragic story of a maid in the countryside, and Les Ensevelis (1887) which is based on a true story of an accident in a mine. Peyrebrune shares the same compassion for the most vulnerable members of society as Zola and uses a naturalist style to convey her indignation.

All those elements, especially Peyrebrune’s positioning in favour of Zola when most of the French audience rejected his works, could lead us to think that Zola recognised in Peyrebrune an ally and maybe even an equal… The truth is a bit more disappointing and complicated.

Scholars have long thought that Zola never knew Georges de Peyrebrune, a hypothesis which considerably underestimate Peyrebrune’s literary successes and social influence, even if limited as a woman. The discovery of letters between the two authors demonstrates the opposite: Zola knew Peyrebrune. We don’t have proof of Zola thanking her after her series of articles defending him, nor of him reviewing her books. However, we do know that in a letter from 1881, Zola refuses to collaborate with the young author. His flair for new talents is contradicted by the success of her novel Marco, published the same year. Much later, in 1893, Zola coldly answers to a letter by Peyrebrune asking for money from the Société des gens de lettres of which Zola is president. One can only imagine the bitter humiliation it must have been for Peyrebrune, who struggled with money all her life, to be denied any help from a man she admired and defended when he was isolated.

Those anecdotes are not aimed at giving a portrait of Zola as an evil man, but we saw that he had little consideration for one of his female contemporaries who certainly had earned the right to call herself an equal. This lack of recognition for Zola did not stop Georges de Peyrebrune: we have seen her witty response to the ‘master’s’ indifference in her comic play in which Zola appears as a blind Jupiter, unable to recognize the talents of his female counterparts. She also productively went against this lack of recognition by developing, as we have seen, feminist networks. I wanted to explore the relationship between those two authors because it shows the weight of gender dynamics in nineteenth-century literary circles and how sexism could blind one of the best authors of this generation. One can only wonder how much this intentional siding of women writers as they were alive has impacted our own reception of their legacy.

Why read Georges de Peyrebrune today?

I want to finish this podcast by encouraging you to read Georges de Peyrebrune, to rediscover her rich literary world. What can you find in it? Why read Georges de Peyrebrune today?

First and foremost, Georges de Peyrebrune’s is worth rediscovering for her feminist engagement. She was a generous figure who encouraged other women of her generation to write and, as we have seen, this was not a small feat in a society that denied women intelligence or creativity. Her feminist views, while maybe not entirely parallel to our own today, are expressed in a subtle but engaging way in her works.

For instance, she extensible dealt with the topic of sexual violence. In a letter from June 1886, addressed to Georges de Peyrebrune, Rachilde mentions the way sexual harassment is a banal occurrence for young female writers. All have to deal with unwanted sexual advances from publishers and journalists and sometimes have to compromise to get published. Georges de Peyrebrune deals with this issue in Le Roman d’un bas-bleu (The novel of a Blue-Stocking) where she tells the destiny of a young writer who falls into despair as she refuses to compromise her self-worth for literary success. This novel poignantly reflects the debates started by the #MeToo movement which unveiled the harassment and abuse faced by women in every sphere of their lives. Already in the nineteenth century, Georges de Peyrebrune denounced this harassment and how it kept women from accessing the public sphere as equals to men. Her message, I think, strongly resonates with contemporary debates.

She was sensitive to socialist ideas, shown in her novel Les Ensevelis where she denounces the working conditions of miners. Using literature as a political tool, Georges de Peyrebrune aims to awake her reader’s empathy towards the suffering of society’s most vulnerable individuals.

Her work is also admirable because of its multiple genres and topics. Georges de Peyrebrune never confined herself to one style or one story. Her view on the world is truly worth rediscovering today. You can read her novel A Decadent Woman in translation, published by Snuggly Books or if you can read French, Victoire la Rouge has been republished by Talents Hauts. Exploring her writings will help you grasp the feminist ideas of the late 19th century and gain a deeper understanding of France’s intellectual history.

I hope this short introduction into the destiny of an exceptional figure has given you an idea of how women, despite obstacles, were able to shape their own success in fin-de-siècle France. Most importantly, how women like Georges de Peyrebrune chose solidarity when facing rejection from their male counterparts and used literature to express her feminist and political views.

Thank you!