French Melodrama and Chinese Politics by Michelle Chun-Han Hsu

Gary: Today’s episode is by Michelle Chun-Han. Michelle is a doctoral student in French from the University of Oxford where she is currently working on a thesis titled Gender and Empire in Turn-of-the-Century French Literature on China. Her project thinks of China as both a declining (but potentially rival) empire and a museum of beauty, cruelty, and ancient practices which occupied a unique and contradictory place in the imagination of fin-de-siècle France. Prior to her doctoral studies, she completed a Master’s degree in Littératures: théorie, histoire at the École normale supérieure in Paris, an MSt in Modern Languages at Oxford, and a BA in Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Taiwan University.

In today’s special episode Michelle uses a famous play to showcase how French people during the Belle Époque envisioned the Far East.

French Melodrama and Chinese Politics: La Fille du Ciel by Judith Gautier and Pierre Loti

Michelle: From April to August 2023, the Petit Palais devoted an outstanding exhibition to the ‘Divine’ Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923), actress, artist, and the star who served as the model for the character Berma in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. Sarah Bernhardt is an eminent figure in the French theatre of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The exhibition evokes some of her signature roles throughout the costumes she wore on stage, photographs, paintings, posters and other memorabilia. Among the roles are Cleopatra, Phaedra, Joan of Arc, and Hamlet. These figures are all prominent in the Western canon. However, there is one character that Sarah Bernhardt would have interpreted for a play she commissioned but abandoned when the draft was only at half-cock. This character is the protagonist for today’s talk. She was conceived for Bernhardt’s performance but did not make it to the repertoire of her plays. She is la Fille du Ciel, the daughter of heaven, the eponymous heroine of a play written by Judith Gautier and Pierre Loti, published in 1911.

My name is Michelle Hsu. I am a second-year DPhil student in French at the University of Oxford. I am interested in the French representation of China from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, especially as it involves gender identity and cross-cultural exchange. For me, this is not just about ferreting out forgotten fun stories situated in the interstices of overlapping networks of meaning and culture. I am also fascinated by what literature as a cultural product can tell us about the social, cultural, and political context in which it was created, read, and transformed.

Today’s talk presents a case in which issues of Chinese politics are dramatised by contemporary French authors known for their exotic writing. I will discuss how La Fille du Ciel blends French fantasies about China and politics of late-Qing dynasty with regard to the Chinese empire’s attempt at modernisation and self-reinvention. As a piece of melodrama, La Fille du Ciel makes the rift between imaginary narrative and political debate in the real world narrower than it seems.

In the late 1890s, China was in political upheaval. It was grappling with ways of modernisation to strengthen itself in face of imperialist advancements. The broad political questions that were being asked appear as background in La Fille du Ciel, a play co-authored by Pierre Loti and Judith Gautier. Loti was a naval officer known for his novels set in the Middle East, Japan, and Polynesia. Gautier was the daughter of a writer called Théophile Gautier, translator, and novelist. She was an Oriental scholar. Many of her works dealt with Chinese and Japanese themes. Gautier never set foot in China despite her interest in Chinese learning. Loti knew little about the Chinese language and its culture despite the fact that he stayed in Beijing as a military envoy after the Boxer uprising in 1900. Based on these credentials, they seem to be an unreliable duo to tell stories about China.

However, my argument is that La Fille du Cielis not simply an Orientalist product. By Orientalist, I mean Euro-centrically produced images about the Middle East and the Far East that alter the reality of these worlds by generating fantasies based on Europe’s attitude towards these regions. I would like to show that La Fille du Ciel celebrates the political thinking of a Chinese statesman called Kang Youwei (1858-1927), a reformer in the late-Qing period whom Gautier admires and represents as the emperor’s righthand man in the play. The romantic encounter between the Manchu emperor and the Han empress extols the cultural nationalism upheld by Kang, but this egalitarian vision of China as a modern nation-state is overshadowed by melodrama. In other words, La Fille du Ciel draws on issues of Chinese politics but its exaggeration of emotional appeal as one of the features of melodrama and stage production make it pretty hard to get the whole idea for the audience.

La Fille du Ciel is set in an imaginary period in which China is divided between Qing and a Han regime occupying Nanjing, a situation reminiscent of the Taiping rebellion from 1851 to 1864. The protagonist is the Manchu emperor Guangxu, whose righthand is Puits-des-bois, a rendering of the real-life minister Kang who launched a series of reforms in 1898. It was blocked by other factions of the Court headed by the empress dowager Cixi. In the play, the emperor visits the rebel capital Nanjing in disguise as a regional lord, in the company of Puits-des-bois, to pay tribute to the Han empress, la Fille du Ciel. He falls in love with her, but his identity is soon to be revealed as the Qing army is about to seize Nanjing. A captive brought to Beijing, the empress refuses the emperor’s proposal of marriage, presented as a reform for the empire’s benefit. Though she loves the emperor as long as he keeps his Chinese disguise, she would rather take poison to kill herself. The emperor becomes a heartbroken man. He kneels in front of the empress’s body and bids the crowd to prostrate themselves.

In spring 1903, Sarah Bernhardt asked Loti to write her a Chinese piece. Loti obtained Gautier’s agreement to collaborate with him and Bernhardt was initially happy with the arrangement. The actress specified that there should be an empress and characterised the role as ‘galant, glorious, and sanguine’.[1] La Fille du Ciel was thus conceived as a piece tailored to Bernhardt’s performance. In their correspondence, Pierre Loti indicated to Judith Gautier that ‘ce sera bien enfantin, bien mélo; mais elle le veut’(‘this will be pretty childish, pretty melodramatic; but she wants it’).[2]The play’s progress was bogged down by Loti’s itinerant life. As a naval officer, Loti was constantly on the move. He travelled around Paris, Rochefort, and Istanbul. What’s worse, the play’s development was full of the authors’ wrangling.[3]Dissatisfied with a draft shown to her in May 1904, Bernhardt declined to star in the play and ironically accepted a play by Judith Gautier’s ex-husband, Catulle Mendès in 1906.[4] La Fille du Ciel was left hanging for several years. It was first published serially in the Revue des deux mondes in 1911, then premiered in Century Theatre, New York in October 1912.

At the first glance, the romance between the Fille du Ciel and the Manchu emperor might appear to be a piece of sentimental naïveté. Gautier indicates, however, that Kang’s advice represents ‘une réconciliation pacifique et sincère entre les deux races ennemies’ (‘a pacifist and true-hearted reconciliation between two warring races’).[5]This refers to Kang’s conception of China as a modern nation-state based on equality among different ethnic/religious groups during the Hundred Days’ Reform. In the play, the minister Puits-des-bois accompanies the emperor to visit Nanjing incognito and provides him with confidential assistance. In doing so, Gautier celebrates the counsel offered by Kang in reality. Having identified the play’s pacifist position regarding the Manchu-Han tension in China, Michael Lerner is right in surmising that ‘the analysis of the real issues at stake and fuller characterisation have been subordinated to the interests of sensational theatrical presentation, whether spectacular, emotional or horrific’,[6]but dismissing the play as ‘shallow melodrama’ overlooks the very way in which the play interprets the political argument at stake, that is, representing ethnic reconciliation and national unification in amorous terms. The purpose of my research is to understand melodrama and political discourse in cooperative terms. In light of this, melodrama does not function as sheer sentimentalism, and lines of argumentation are not the only means of approaching political issues.

The Hundred Days Reform was an initiative to modernise China’s education system, economy, political system, and army. Some of the goals had been put in place while some had not. Among those that remained un-realised were constitutional monarchism and ethnic equality between the Manchu in power, Han, Mongols, Tibetans, Muslims, and other peoples. This was a period in which intellectuals started to conceive China as a nation instead of the possession of imperial dynasties. They realised that the Chinese nation did not really have a name and a defined body of members except the names of dynasties. The absence of a nation points at the fact that ‘China’ has long been the private possession of ruling families instead of a country and a national concept.

Therefore, to reform China is to reach a new conception of what China consists of as a modern nation-state. This is not just about finding a name to baptise the nation, but a renewal of historiography and discursive strategies for the self-representation of an imagined community, whose identity, as Benedict Anderson argues in his seminal Imagined Communities, is ‘to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined’.[7]Among the eminent thinkers in China’s nationalistic debate were Kang and Zhang Taiyen (章太炎, 1869-1936) , who respectively put forward a proposal to name the country and define the Chinese nation. For Kang, both Manchu and Han are natural members of China thanks to the acculturation of Confucianism,[8]so there is no need to maintain the distinction within the concept of Chinese nationhood. He suggested that ethnic categories should be eliminated so that China can ‘unify as one and eradicate suspicion and rancour for good’ and ‘become strong together and empower China’.[9]In contrast, Zhang believes the Han nation is the only legitimate subject of China and the boundaries of the ‘Republic of China’ should be delineated along lines of ethnicity. Kang supports constitutional monarchism while Zhang advocates revolution fuelled by anti-Manchu sentiments. Kang’s position is identified by Shen Sungchiaoas ‘cultural nationalism’, which uses cultural identity as the source of nationalistic alignment, and Zhang’s version of Chinese nationhood is regarded as a form of ‘racial nationalism’, which draws on racial distinction as a source of identity.[10]

In La Fille du Ciel, cultural nationalism is articulated through melodrama, given the play’s combination of love story and political allusions to piggyback on political convulsions ranging from the Taiping uprising to revolutionary movements that came to overthrow the Qing dynasty in 1911. Apparently, the mix-and-match of historical events hardly has any sense of historical accuracy. It maximises the sense of political turbulence as the backdrop for an impossible love story. In fact, Gautier’s access to the social network of sinologists and Chinese coterie in Paris played a significant role. She befriended one of the Chinese ambassadors in Paris and was among the guests of some of the events held by the Chinese embassy. This offered a source of inspiration for her writing based on real-world politics instead of pure fantasy. Thus, it is important to see how melodrama infiltrates ethnic reconciliation in the play and how Gautier interprets Kang’s ideas in her writing on Chinese politics.

The play has been criticised because of its excess in gallantry.[11]At one point, the emperor in disguise as a lord declares that he would rather be the Tartare emperor so that he could consign the whole realm to the Fille du Ciel.[12] He also suggests that their union will engender a new China, which will gain vitality and dominate the world.[13]So, the consummation of his love will bring about a revitalised national destiny.

Another dimension of melodrama involves patriotic zeal. Despite her feelings for the emperor, the empress harbours an ineradicable hatred against the Manchu. As the Manchu army storms the palace in Nanjing, the empress is cast as an indestructible warrior who abolishes the act of prostration and commits her life to defending the Han nation. Before killing herself, the empress’s share of the play’s romance lies in her acknowledgement of their feelings for each other. She compares their relationship to two stars separated by a great abyss. Regardless of the abyss, their love is like the starlight that shines through it. Her passion, courage, and suicide tick all the boxes for ‘galante, glorieuse et sanguinaire’.

More importantly, the empress is portrayed in the same way as the ‘filles-fétiches’ (‘fetish-girls’) of the Boxers in Loti’s Chinese travel notes Les derniers jours de Pékin (‘The Last Days of Beijing’) and women revolutionaries in ‘L’Âme chinoise’(‘Cheese Soul’), a political commentary written by Gautier in 1919. Both Loti and Gautier compare these figures to Joan of Arc and the Fille du Ciel is characterised in the same terms. When the Manchu emperor meets the empress as a prisoner in Beijing, he alludes to her valour in the battlefield:

Dites que vous avez été héroïne sublime, la grande impératrice guerrière, la déesse des combats qui défiait les flèches et la mitraille, celle qui revivra éternellement dans les poèmes et l’histoire![14]

[Say that you have a sublime heroine, the great warrior empress, the goddess of combat who defied arrows and grapeshot, the one who will live forever in poems and history!]

In Act IV Scene 1, commoners at an execution site of Beijing also recall that ‘les balles, la mitraille, tout cela passait au travers d’elle, comme au travers d’une ombre’ (Gautier and Loti 1911, 166). This echoes the image of Joan of Arc, used by Loti to describe the ‘filles-fétiches’ of the Boxers in Les derniers jours de Pékin and by Gautier to describe women revolutionaries in 1911 in ‘L’Âme chinoise’ (1919). In ‘Les deux déesses des Boxers’ (‘Two Goddesses of Boxers’), Loti records his visit to a hall where two women shamans are detained. Seated in a room strewn with ‘leurs atours de guerrières et de déesses’, they collapse into a state of consternation and are described as follows:

elles étaient des espèces de Jeanne d’Arc […] elles étaient des filles-fétiches que l’on posait dans les pagodes criblées d’obus pour en protéger les autels, des inspirées qui marchaient au feu avec des cris pour entraîner les soldats. Elles étaient les déesses de ces incompréhensibles Boxers, à la fois atroces et admirables, grands  [sic] hystériques de la patrie chinoise.[15]

[they were a kind of Joan of Arc […] they were fetish girls who were placed in pagodas riddled with shells to protect their altars, inspired women who walked through fire with cries to train the soldiers. They were the goddesses of those incomprehensible Boxers, both atrocious and admirable, great hysterics of the Chinese fatherland.]

It was believed that the martial arts and magic practiced by the Boxers could protect the human body from weapons of all sorts, including European guns. Depicting the empress as imperishable in the hail of bullets makes a clear reference to this. ‘L’Âme chinoise’ is a political commentary about the Hundred Days’ Reform and the 1911 revolution. In this article, Gautier writes that Chinese women want to sacrifice their life for the Republic and she compares them to ‘des Jeanne d’Arc, sans mysticisme, [qui] ont plusieurs fois sauvé des villes et des provinces’.[16]Just as the Fille du Ciel sacrifices herself for her nation, women revolutionaries die for the Republic and the detained shamans are ready to receive divine inspiration overcoming the fear of death—are they not all, in a way, daughters of heaven whose images are mapped onto Joan of Arc by French writers to make sense of Chinese xenophobia and patriotism? Some broader implications of this use of a figure from France’s own nation-building narrative can be teased out, gesturing towards a transcultural and strategic rapprochement to make it easier to sympathise with the Fille du Ciel. It is important to note that Joan of Arc is one of Sarah Bernhardt’s iconic roles. Associating the Fille du Ciel with the French national heroine seems to be a nice way of aligning the Chinese monarch with the actress’s signature appearance.

So, it is interesting to see how La Fille du Ciel acts as a go-between negotiating melodrama, political thinking, and cultural perception between France and China. It is a work that deals with indigenous politics in a synthetic and sympathetic way. By envisioning a new and egalitarian China set out in amorous terms, it blends Chinese reformist thinking and French melodrama, incorporating allusions to Kang Youwei’s ideas for reform to balance the love story with a nation-building blueprint.

[1] Letter from Loti to Gautier, 21 April 1903, fonds Daniel Halévy, Médiathèque de Rochefort-sur-Mer (DH417), cited by Daniel 2012.

[2] Ibid.

[3] For an account of the play’s long gestation, fraught with wrangling, see Michael G. Lerner, Pierre Loti’s Dramatic Works (New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1998), pp. 51-66.

[4] See Joanna Richardson, Judith Gautier: A Biography (London: Quartet Books, 1986), p. 182.

[5] Gautier and Loti, ‘Avant-propos’, La Fille du Ciel: Drame chinois (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1911), iv.

[6] Lerner, Pierre Loti’s Dramatic Works, p. 65.

[7] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), p. 6.

[8] See Kang, 〈海外亞美歐非澳五洲二百埠中華憲政會僑民公上請願書〉 (1907), pp. 611-12.

[9] See Shen Sung-chiao (沈松僑), ‘The Myth of Huang-ti (Yellow Emperor) and the Construction of Chinese Nationhood in Late Qing’ 〈我以我血薦軒轅——黃帝神話與晚清的國族建構〉, Taiwan: A Radical Quarterly in Social Studies《台灣社會研究季刊》(December 1997), No. 28, pp. 1-77.

[10] In ‘The Myth of Huang-ti (Yellow Emperor) and the Construction of Chinese Nationhood in Late Qing’, Shen borrows the concept ‘cultural nationalism’ from John Hutchinson, who divides nationalism into political, or civic nationalism and cultural nationalism. See Hutchinson, The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1987), pp. 12-13. Shen also indicates that ‘racial nationalism’ comes from the notion put forward by Frank Dikotter in his ‘Culture, “race” and nation: The formation of national identity in the twentieth century China,’ Journal of International Affairs, vol. 49 (January 1996).

[11] William Schwartz, The Imaginative Interpretation of the Far East in Modern French Literature: 1800-1925 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1927), p. 57.

[12] Gautier and Loti, La Fille du Ciel, p. 85.

[13] Ibid., p. 209.

[14] Gautier and Loti, La Fille du Ciel, p. 114.

[15] Loti, Les derniers jours de Pékin in Voyages (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2018), p. 1042.

[16] Gautier, Les Parfums de la pagode (Paris: Charpentier, 1919), p. 170.