Sculpting Empire

Paris, June 2009—In New York City, in front of the American Museum of Natural History, stands a sculpture of a man on horseback, accompanied by two men on foot. The man on the horse is U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, naturalist, friend of the museum, and, of course, the soldier who won Puerto Rico, Guantánamo, and the Philippines for the United States. He appears to be dressed in the Rough Rider uniform of those victories.

The other two men are nameless, meant to represent not individuals at all, but continents. A generic African and a generic Native American, they’re leading TR’s horse, and they’re dressed in almost nothing at all. In my youth, during the years that the movement for racial equality was becoming militant, I wondered how that statue, so near Harlem, was allowed to stand, unmolested, not even graffiti’d. No one else even complained about it, at least not publicly

I met its ideological twin in Paris the other day.

More precisely, I met its ideological sextuplets. They’re also in front of a museum, in this case the Musée d’Orsay, and all six of them depict continents: Six larger-than-life female figures representing, from left to right, Europe (yes, Europe comes first), Asia, Africa, North America, South America, and “Oceania.” Like Roosevelt, the statue of “Europe” is somewhat military, despite being female; she seems to be modeled on Athena and is dressed head-to-toe in flowing robes and a suggestion of armor, with a helmet on her head. And, like Roosevelt’s companions, the other five are all half naked.

This is so curious it bears repetition: Seven generic “natives,” created on separate continents and in different centuries, are nevertheless all bare-breasted and accompanying fully clothed white people. What were those sculptors thinking? Surely they never let themselves think what the figures imply …

This is what we know about the sculptures: The Musée d’Orsay sculptures were made for the Trocadero Palace and the Universal Exposition of 1878. Six sculptors were commissioned to create them: Alexandre Schoenewerk, to sculpt the figure representing “Europe”; Alexandre Falguière to create “Asia”; Eugène Delaplanche, “Africa”; Ernest-Eugène Hiolle, “North America”; Aimé Millet, South America; and Mathurin Moreau, “Oceania.” Each did his job; the six works graced the Trocadero during the Exposition and then were discarded and found after the Orsay railroad station was converted into a museum in 1986. The Roosevelt statue was sculpted by James Earle Fraser and placed on the museum plaza and dedicated in 1940.

Those are the bare facts, so to speak. Their meaning would be clear to a child and indeed has presumably been clear to the generations of children who have been taken on school trips to those museums. There is, however, one difference worth noting between the two groups; they are very close ideological relatives, but not quite identical.

The French group was created when Europe truly ran the world, its mastery supported by the ideas shouted by those statues. The group in New York was sculpted just at the moment when the mantle of empire was passing to the United States, which might do well to take to heart the lesson Europe had to learn, the sequel—what empires do after they rise.

They fall.

© Judith Mahoney Pasternak 2009

photo by Brian Pasternak © 2009

A Very Political Landscape

For a century and a half, almost anybody in Paris who had been anybody in life was laid to rest at Père Lachaise after death—along with many who had been nobody of note. Once, a hundred odd who had been less than nobody, who were of the canaille (“rabble,” “riffraff,” "mob,” sometimes “scum”), were slaughtered there.

Atop a hill in the 20th arrondissement of eastern Paris, Cimetiére Père Lachaise is named for a 17-th century priest who lived there before the cemetery was built. At 48 hectares (118.5 acres), it is the city’s largest cemetery. It holds the remains of more than 300,000 people, including the beloved French singer Edith Piaf (1915-1963), U.S. rocker-poet Jim Morrison (1943-1971), composer Georges Bizet (1838-1875); medieval lovers Héloïse (1101-1164) and Abelard (1079-1142); actor-spouses Simone Signoret (1921-1985) and Yves Montand (1921-1991); and writers Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), Colette (1873-1954), and Gertrude Stein (1874-1946). Under one monument, in the southeast corner of the cemetery, lie “a few of the ashes of the seven thousand French martyrs murdered by the Nazis at the camp of Neuengamme.”

Few tracts of real estate in the world are as politically charged as that corner. Within a few yards of the Neuengamme stone are monuments to the victims of half a dozen other concentration camps, to the French volunteers of the International Brigades that fought for the Spanish Republic, and to the Central Committee of the French Communist party.

They’re not there by accident. Those memorials are directly across a narrow roadway from the Mur des Fédérés, the Wall of the Communards. Against that wall, on May 28, 1871, the French Army shot 147 defenders of the Paris Commune, the world’s first—albeit tragically short-lived—socialist-anarchist revolution.

The Commune was born out of dire circumstances. After the loss of the Franco-Prussian War, in the spring of 1871, the poor and hungry workers of Paris—including both socialists and anarchists—declared the city an independent political entity and held elections for a governing council, or commune. The existing government fled to Versailles; the Commune, flying the red flag of revolution rather than the French tricoleur, took office on March 28. It elected as its leader the jailed socialist revolutionary Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881) and rapidly instituted a series of laws and regulations meant to create political and economic equality, mandates that included a strong feminist component as well.

Blanqui never took office. The French government in Versailles sent the army out against the Commune. After weeks of skirmishes, the army re-occupied Paris. The last 147 defenders of the Commune were shot by a firing squad in Père Lachaise on May 28 at the end of what is still called la Semaine Sanglante, the Bloody Week, which saw the summary executions by the French troops of tens of thousands of suspected communards.

One survivor, the poet Eugène Pottier (1816-1887), later wrote a poem that, set to music by composer Pierre De Geyter (1848-1932), became the anthem of socialists and anarchists around the world as “The Internationale.” It was sung for me once at the Mur des Fédérés, which remains a beacon for the hope for economic equality; French fighters for freedom and justice, including Blanqui and Pottier, have been buried or commemorated near it ever since.

The events of 1871 are also commemorated beyond the walls of Père Lachaise. A Parisian café is named for the Commune’s favorite song, “The Cherries of Springtime,” and a few miles south of the Mur des Fédérés, a boulevard in the Left Bank’s 13th arrondissement bears the name August Blanqui.

© Judith Mahoney Pasternak 2009

Courtesy

12TH ARRONDISSEMENT, PARIS—I’m at a dinner party in Paris; I am, in fact, the reason for the dinner party, the guest of honor, the visiting American. Five of us sit around a table, eating, drinking wine, and chatting, amiably and aimlessly, about the world situation, music, theatre, travel, and whatever else arises. My hosts are a French sociologist—whose research brings her from time to time to the United States, which is how I met her—and her student-son. The other two guests are a scholar in the slightly rarefied field of Southeast Asian tourism, and her husband, the director of international relations for a town just outside Paris. (His specialty is also Southeast Asia.)

Among them, the four speak several languages: French, of course, Spanish, Portuguese, German, I think, Indonesian, and smatterings of other Asian languages. And English. Everyone here speaks English, mostly as a third or fourth or fifth language rather than as a second, and mostly less than perfectly. But tonight, they’re all speaking English—

Because the American in the room is competent in only one language: her own. I speak enough French for shopping, but not enough to be comfortable conversing in it.

If any of my companions are equally self-conscious about their less-than-perfect English, it doesn’t show. All evening, as a courtesy to me, they speak my language. Sometimes they fall into French for a moment, but after a couple of sentences, the conversation stops, one of them checks to see if I understood, and they go back to English.

During one such moment, I wonder if I’ve ever seen this happen in reverse. Have I ever been in a room in the United States in which everyone present was speaking a language not their own—that they didn’t even use in their work—to accommodate a non-English-speaking visitor?

My companions stop and explain the last two sentences to me, and I lose the thought. Half an hour later, during another French moment, I come back to it, this time with the answer: Never. I’ve never been at a U.S. party at which everyone spoke a visitor’s language instead of English.

Are the French, then—by custom or nature—more courteous than the people of the United States? Possibly. Could there be another explanation for this particular act of kindness, one that doesn’t involve ethnic or cultural stereotypes?

Well, Europe and the United States are almost exactly the same size—Europe’s area is 3.9 million square miles, the United States’ 3.79 million. But Europe’s population is more than double the U.S. population—700 million to some 300 million. And while the United States has one national language, Europe has dozens. As one corollary among many, Europeans are far more likely to learn multiple languages, to speak some better than others, and to be used to a world in which people speak multiple languages—some better than others.

I find the thought—that these four Parisians are less uncomfortable speaking imperfect English than I am speaking imperfect French—more comforting than credible. They may simply be more willing to get past their discomfort in order to make me comfortable—that is, they may, after all, simply be more deeply courteous than I am.

Either way, the evening is lovely and memorable. I leave wishing to acquire at least a bit of my hosts’ language habit, to speak French more while in France—and perhaps someday, in the company of another visitor to a country not her own, to return the courtesy shown to me tonight.

© Judith Mahoney Pasternak 2009