French History, Vol. 28, No. 1 (2014)
doi:10.1093/fh/crt083
Advance Access publication 8 November 2013
B e au t y a n d B i g B u s i n e s s : G e n d e r ,
R ac e a n d C i v i l i z at i o na l D e c l i n e
i n F r e n c h B e au t y Pag e a n t s ,
1920–37
Aro Velmet*
Abstract—In 1920, journalist Maurice de Waleffe started the first modern French beauty
pageant, La Plus Belle Femme de France, which in the following two decades expanded to
Europe and the French colonies. This paper follows the history of interwar beauty contests
and explores the interactions of gender and race discourses with an emerging consumer
economy, illuminating the discursive and economic links that connected the beauty contests to the French Empire and invested national pageants with strong racial content. It
argues that the pageant started as an attempt to set a role model for an alternative view of
French modernity, one anchored in provincial tradition, in contrast to degenerative urban
modernity which, along with the Great War, had upset proper gender roles. However, in
examining the struggles between actors of various economic power and agency—elites
concerned with degeneration, the consumer industry, and women vying for the title of Miss
France—this paper argues that the pageants increasingly became a vehicle for the liberal
Modern Girl beauty ideal.
I
On 23 July 1937, the Paris police were called to the Iles des Cygnes, home to
the colonial section of the World Fair, to break up a riot of over 15,000 people.
This horde of disgruntled Parisians consisted of the audience for Miss France
d’Outre-Mer, a beauty contest of mixed-race women from the French colonies.
After having waited for nearly two hours for the contest’s organizer Maurice
de Waleffe to arrive, only then to be presented with the decision to postpone
the jury’s final decision until four days later, upset spectators took out their
frustration by breaking windows and attempting to enter the Moroccan pavilion where the jury convened.1. Frustrated by this anticlimactic finale, audience
members expressed their dissatisfaction by breaking windows, and attempting to enter the Moroccan pavillion where the jury had convened. What the
* Aro Velmet is a PhD student at New York University. He can be reached at [email protected].
The author would like to thank Herrick Chapman, Stéphane Gerson, and members of the Institute
of French Studies research seminar for thoughtful comments and feedback. Helpful comments
and research tips were offered by Laura Frader, Kathy Peiss, Emmanuelle Saada, Lorelle Semley
and Joan Tumblety. Finally, the Forum on Forms of Seeing generously offered both research funding and an wonderfully interdisciplinary discussion forum. All translations are by the author.
1 A[rchives] N[ationales] F12 12258, ‘Rapport sur le Concours du “Meilleur Mariage Colonial”’,
26 July, 1937.
© The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Study of French History.
All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]
Aro Velmet
67
contestants thought of all this was anybody’s guess, but some were ready to
hypothesize: ‘Electoral battles, as heated as they may be in exotic climates,
have surely never offered [the contestants] such spectacle’ declared the conservative newspaper Le Figaro a day later.2
For the editors of Le Figaro, ‘spectacle’ may have connoted frivolity, but
for others, this was the greatest strength of the event. When the project was
originally endorsed for state funding in 1936, President Albert Lebrun noted its
‘undeniable spectacular and attractive character’ expecting it to ‘constitute an
important source of revenues’ alongside the eugenicist aspect of the pageant.3
The contest’s organizer, Maurice de Waleffe sold Miss France d’Outre-Mer as a
solution for the problem of falling birth rates and the degeneration of French
society, a persistent concern for policymakers, pundits, and physicians. In his
view, regenerating the French race would begin with the ‘amalgamation of
[colonized peoples] with ours’, and the beauty contest would provide colonial
bureaucrats and businessmen with an indication of ‘which races to marry with
ours by their beauty, and which to abort in ugliness’.4
Miss France d’Outre-Mer’s built on a tradition of pageants that Maurice de
Waleffe had curated since 1920. These contests, whether they were national,
colonial, or international, promoted the quest for racial regeneration, fueled by
anxieties over shifting gender roles, the rise of the sexually and socially liberated Modern Girl, and fears of depopulation. In regional and national contests,
de Waleffe wanted to valorize provincial beauty, whose rural roots would guarantee the health, fertility, and tradition that France needed, while complementing it with a modern and popular flair that represented the ideals of the future.
Later, the contests migrated to the ‘other provinces’, the French colonies, where
colonial administrators were desperately seeking profitable ventures to revitalize colonial tourism. There, paralleling discourses of ‘assimilation’, which
stated that some colonized people could become civilized through Republican
education, De Waleffe promoted ‘amalgamation’, hoping that the fertility and
natural lifestyle of compatible colonized women could be harnessed through
intermarriage, and directed towards regenerating the French population.
Miss France was not a rejection of modernity, but rather an attempt to marry
patriarchal, purportedly traditional, and bourgeois notions of femininity with
progressive ideals. The pageant, as its name suggests, was inspired by similar
American contests. It took advantage of cinema, modern advertising techniques
and popular newspapers to spread its message. The economic success of the
contests brought them to the attention of colonial administrators, who lobbied to host Miss Europe, and the French state, which sponsored Miss France
d’Outre-Mer. Yet in the long run, the same economic changes that made Miss
France possible also ensured its ideological failure, as cosmetics companies
and movie producers catered to their primary market – women of all classes
2 Le Figaro, 24 Sept. 1937.
F60 950 (4), papiers Jean Locquin, minutes 5 May, 1936, 152.
4 AN FN12 12258, ‘Concours du Meilleur Mariage Colonial, exposé du projet’, 15 Apr. 1936.
3 AN
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– and ensured that winners of Miss France would look more like Modern Girls
than provincial women. Finally, while commentators tried to serve the increasingly ‘modern’ Miss contests as increasingly irrelevant to the nation, beauty
queens in both the metropole and the colonies found ways to defy such value
judgments, becoming independent professionals and contributing to the legitimization of Modern Girl gender norms.5
Mainstream pageants, whether in France or elsewhere, have often been analysed as attempts at constructing a seemingly inclusive, popular, and modern
representation of a national ideal of femininity.6 Others have complicated this
view by noting how other contests such as Black pageants in interwar New
York could empower women, and provide alternatives to hegemonic notions
of beauty.7 In the French context, national and colonial pageants have been
analysed separately, the former largely in conjunction with interwar gender
debates and Americanization, the latter through the lenses of race and sexuality.8 Miss France d’Outre-Mer, by far the centre of most scholarly attention,
has been seen as an aberrant celebration of mixed marriages at a time of widespread racial angst, or as a classic example of colonial hypocrisy, where strict
hierarchies and stereotypes structured a seemingly progressive contest.9 In
contrast to these analyses, by looking at the early twentieth century ‘Miss’
pageants together, this study allows us to see how concerns of French (and
European) degeneration were framed in both gender and racial terms from the
very beginning. Instead of focusing exclusively on nation-building or female
agency, this study looks at how the pageants became sites of struggle between
different value systems and economic interests that often went beyond the
nation. Moreover, by emphasizing the role of the consumer economy in the
pageants’ financial success and discursive failure, this study shows how consumer choices, economic competition, and the movement of capital within and
across imperial borders, were instrumental in shaping the outcomes of discursive battles that have traditionally interested historians of gender and race.10
5 The terms ‘modern’ and ‘provincial’ should here and hereafter be always read as within
quotation marks.
6 D. M. Pomfret, ‘ “A Muse for the Masses”: Gender, Age, and Nation in France, Fin-de-Siècle’,
The Am Hist R, 109 (2004), 1439–74; S. Banet-Weiser, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World:
Beauty Pageants and National Identity (Berkeley, 1999), 6–8; L. Banner, American Beauty
(New York, 1983), 249.
7 K. Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture (New York, 1998), 190–1,
213–15, E. Chapman, Prove It On New Negroes, Sex, and Popular Culture in the 1920s (Oxford,
2012), 109–14.
8 Pomfret, ‘ “A Muse for the Masses” ‘; H. L. Grout, ‘The Production, Practice, and Performance
of Femininity in France, 1880–1939’ (PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2008), 210–12.
9 E. Camiscioli, Reproducing the French Race: Immigration, Intimacy, and Embodiment in
the Early Twentieth Century (Durham, NC, 2009), 80n22; E. Saada, Les Enfants de la Colonie:
Les métis de l’Empire francais entre sujétion et citoyenneté (Paris, 2007), 231; E. Ezra, The
Colonial Unconscious: Race and Culture in Interwar France (Ithaca, 2000), 36–40.
10 M. L. Roberts, Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1919–
1927 (Chicago, 1994); D. S. Hale, Races on Display: French Representations of Colonized People
(Bloomington, 2008). The transnational framework is developed in The Modern Girl Research
Group, The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity and Globalization
(Durham, 2008).
Aro Velmet
69
II
The fear of ‘degeneration’ had engendered a fascination with competitive
assessments of female beauty once before. In fin-de-siècle France, communities around the country were obsessed with the Festival for the Crowning of
the People’s Muse, a musical procession of varying length and complexity, centered around the crowning of the Muse, a working-class girl, symbol of virtue and youth, elected from within the local municipality.11 The festival drew
from similar ceremonies that often dated back to prerevolutionary times, but
substituted their monarchical and religious trappings for a discourse of fervent nationalism. At a time when France had only just started to recover from
the Franco-Prussian war, its population was stagnating, and the newly unified
Germany was perceived increasingly as a threat, the Muse became a feminine
representation of the nation, a symbol of youth, health, virility, and beauty.12
These concerns were combined with anxieties over shifting gender roles as
bourgeois women entered the workforce and made increasing demands for
legal and social equality. Along with restrictions on women’s working hours,
antifeminist polemics on the pages of Catholic newspapers and rhetorical denials of women’s agency in making reproductive choices, the Muse festival was
another response to this threat to the nation and to male dominance, which in
both elite and popular literature became known as ‘decadence’, ‘degeneration’
or ‘overcivilization’.13
In the beginning of the twentieth century the increasing popularity of
Marxism and socialism, the improvement in standards of living, and the rise
of nationalist sentiments made degeneration seem less immediate and the possibility of progress more viable. Discussions of decline continued, but they
were displaced from everyday social commentary to specialist fields of social
hygienism, eugenics and anthropology.14 Then, however, came the Great War.
It took a huge toll on the nation: 1.4 million Frenchmen dead, 1 million permanently incapacitated, more than three million injured in one way or another.
These losses reawakened older anxieties about the perils of industrialization,
urbanization and the reorganization of social relations. Talk of degeneracy
resumed, but as much as they followed the paths set by their fin-de-siècle forerunners, interwar discourses of decline were concerned with their own, specific problems.
One of these concerns was the rise of the Modern Girl. The war and its
aftermath profoundly altered the socioeconomic conditions of French women.
Middle-class women, their families bankrupted by the war and ensuing inflation, entered the labour force, while working-class women moved from
11 Pomfret, ‘ “A Muse for the Masses” ‘, 1439–74.
Cole, The Power of Large Numbers: Population, Politics and Gender in Nineteenth
Century France (Ithaca, 2000); K. Offen, ‘Depopulation, nationalism and feminism in Fin-desiècle France’, Am Hist R, 89 (1984), 648–76.
13 Pomfret, ‘ “A Muse for the Masses” ‘, 1442.
14 D. Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–1918 (Cambridge, 1989),
102–6; K. Swart, The Sense of Decadence in Nineteenth Century France (Utrecht, 1964), 193–202.
12 J.
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domestic service and textile jobs to more lucrative employment in the service
sector.15 The increasing visibility of women of all classes, combined with their
increased purchasing power and the emergence of an international market for
consumer beauty products created the conditions for a new kind of aesthetic
that crossed borders and travelled oceans on the backs of multinational companies powered by the American economy. This Modern Girl aesthetic was
defined by short hair, slim figure, increased use of cosmetics, simple, straight,
yet revealing dresses, an emphasis on expressing sexuality and a desire for
entertainment, glamour, and self-reliance.16, Thanks to technological advances
and rising wages, even working-class women could now afford beauty products, making the Modern Girl far more visible than the fin-de-siècle New
Woman.17 While feminists saw the new fashion as a sign of female independence from both restrictive clothes and restrictive men, its critics – Catholics,
natalists, and journalists of all political persuasions – saw the Modern Girl as
impersonal, sterile, and a sign of French decline brought on by the war. The
connection was easily made: French women, who increasingly rejected traditional notions of domesticity and fertility, busy working in factories, enjoying
themselves at the movies, and fashioning themselves to the benefit of seemingly no-one but themselves, were too narcissistic and too disinterested in the
family to have babies.
Of course, the Modern Girl was not a stable image. Its parameters were
shaped in a transnational space informed by the interests of multinational cosmetics and entertainment companies, as well as by those of local consumers. In
South Africa, Modern Girl imagery was tailored for both white and black consumers, whereas in Indian advertising, the image was used to emphasize the
importance of ‘whitening’ one’s skin. In the United States, Modern Girls could
look ‘exotic’, their features made darker or ‘asiatic’ by the use of eyeliner and
powder, while in Nazi Germany, Modern Girls became blonder and more athletic.18 In France anxiety over the bobbed hair of the femme moderne peaked
during the mid-1920s, while fashion designers in the 1930s blended Modern
Girl looks with longer hemlines, tighter waists, and more “respectable” styles,
suggesting that the originally scandalous look had been absorbed into the cultural mainstream.19 While the Miss pageants reflected this evolution, they also
highlighted the extent to which the ‘modern’ in Modern Girl was not something to be rejected wholesale, but which had to be channelled into a proper
15 L. A. Tilly and J. Scott, Women, Work, and Family (New York, 1978), 149–76; S. Zerner, ‘De
La Couture aux presses: L’emploi féminine entre les deux guerres’, Le Mouvement Social 140
(1987), 8–25.
16 In the US the Modern Girl was known as the flapper, in Germany as the neue frau, in Japan
as modan garu, in China as modeng xiaojie and so forth. Modern Girl Around the World, 8–15.
My thanks to Jane Burbank for alerting me to this international dimension.
17 M. L. Roberts, ‘Samson and Delilah Revisited: The Politics of Women’s Fashion in 1920s
France’, Am Hist R, 98 (1993), 665–7, 668–73.
18 Modern Girl Around the World Research Group (eds), ‘The Modern Girl Around the World:
A Research Agenda and Preliminary Findings’, Gender & History, 17 (2005), 281–4.
19 M.-L. Roberts, “Samson and Delilah Revisited”, 683–4; Civilization Without Sexes, 215–17.
Aro Velmet
71
form. The attention paid to the Miss contests of the late 1930s indicated that
even in its gentrified form, the associations with the entertainment industry,
female independence and relative sexual liberty remained potent and sometimes troubling.20 The term Modern Girl is used here with an understanding of
the stability of these particular connotations of the image, without neglecting
the changes that occurred during the interwar decades.
Maurice de Waleffe embodied the contradictions of many bourgeois elites
who insisted on restoring the old patriarchal social order, while enjoying the
fruits of the emerging industrial consumer economy. After moving to Paris in
1897 at the age of 23, he made a remarkable career as a traveling journalist.
Two decades later he had published a book on his travels in Central America,
started a mid-sized daily newspaper Paris-Midi, and made a name for himself
as a fashion expert, commenting on everything from the virtues of American
jewellery to the vices of overly constrictive corsets.21 He pretended to be above
partisan fray, but his nostalgic fondness for royalty, and close friendships with
many important Radicals, not to mention his public support for Mussolini,
leave little doubt that his politics, although shot through with internationalism, leaned heavily to the right.22 Well-connected in the cultural world, he was
famous at least by the standards of satirical magazines, who mocked his often
pompous rhetoric, his Belgian origins, and suggested that his rise to the upper
ranks of art and fashion critics might have had less to do with his quality of
writing and more with the size of his aristocratic mother’s wallet.23
This statement was not entirely fair. In spite of de Waleffe’s origins, his trajectory during and after war was representative of many bourgeois elites, from
prewar success to postwar struggle. After returning from his brief tour of duty
with the 102nd infantry group as a discharged asthmatic, de Waleffe found his
newspaper in shambles, its circulation having declined from 150,000 to less
than 10,000, and its advertising revenues reduced to zero.24 He was remarkably
adept at incorporating the issues of the day in his writings. For instance, as concerns about gender roles increased during the war years, de Waleffe suggested
in a controversial article that widowed women be given orphaned children,
as the only means of guaranteeing their happiness and saving them from the
‘death of heart’.25 While his ideas might have often been highly idiosyncratic,
his social and ideological positions were representative of the conservative
political and artistic establishment.
De Waleffe’s concerns about the effects of the war on the changing gender
order led to the establishment of the Miss France contests. The first iteration,
20 Modern Girl Around the World Research Group (eds.),’The Modern Girl Around the World:
A Research Agenda and Preliminary Findings’, 249.
21 M. de Waleffe, ‘La Propagande francaise’, Les Modes 178 (1918), 2–18: M. de Waleffe, ‘L’Avenir
des modes des francaises après la guerre: le bijou’, Les Modes 189 (1920), 2–5.
22 ‘La Politique vous intéresse-t-elle?’, L’Européen, 6 Sept. 1935, 6–7.
23 M.J. Ernest Charles, ‘La Vie litteraire’, Revue Bleue: Revue Politique et Litteraire 4 (1906),
237.
24 De Waleffe, Quand Paris Était un Paradis, 330–2.
25 ‘On demande des enfants’, L’Action Féministe, Oct.-Nov. 1916.
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B e au t y a n d B i g B u s i n e s s
started in 1920, was initially titled La Plus Belle Femme de France. Although
it was a financial success, de Waleffe suspended the contest for five years, as
he was both occupied with his journalistic career and disappointed with the
results of the contests. The contest returned as Miss France in 1927, and in 1929
de Waleffe expanded to an international stage by founding Miss Europe. He
then helped start a beauty contest in Lebanon, took Miss Europe to Algeria and
Tunisia, and brought métisse beauties to Paris with Miss France d’Outre-Mer.
Wherever de Waleffe went, journalists would follow: for the next decade, the
contests secured front page coverage in all major French dailies, fashion journalists dissected the dresses and haircuts, and social commentators celebrated
or decried the ‘modern girl’ attitudes of the winners. In less than twenty years,
de Waleffe had founded an industry, one which revealed the tensions of a bourgeois order in search of stability.
III
Although the details of his arguments changed with the times, the core ideology of Miss France remained remarkably stable over the two decades. De
Waleffe wanted to ‘display physical health on the stage […] and find the distinctive type of a nation’.26 This type, he hoped, would combine good health
and physical fitness seen as conducive for fertility with the positive aspects
of modernity: popular democracy and technological advancement, and distinctively French cultural traits. In addition, the pageant would determine the
viability of mixed-race marriages, according to the then prevalent definition
of race, which encompassed perceptions of ethnic, national and regional difference.27 The legacy of war rarely left de Waleffe’s mind, although his precise
argumentation could change drastically. In 1920, he spoke in terms of international competition:
There are American magazines which believe that France has come
forth bloodless and exhausted from her victory and that we are a
decadent race. Show them that the orchards of France will always
produce proud and splendid soldiers. […]28
By contrast, in 1930, de Waleffe framed the competition in terms of pacifism:
If the Berlinoise of 1914 had had a charm similar to the Parisienne,
the exhilarating war of the Kronprinz would have passed us by.
[…] Do you believe that it is by chance that France today is at the
26 Comoedia, July 1920, 3.
Reproducing the French Race, 155–8.
28 M. de Waleffe, Le Journal, quoted in ‘The Most Beautiful Woman of France’, La France: An
American Magazine, May 1920, 399.
27 Camiscioli,
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forefront of pacifism, and that the spirit of Locarno haunts the Quai
d’Orsay?29
Part of de Waleffe’s success arose from his ability to sense the prevalent mood
of the media and adapt, shifting from championing the mothers of soldiers
in the immediate post-war climate, to becoming an ardent promoter of pacifism through seduction, after the 1928 Kellogg-Briand pact. Yet his rhetoric,
instrumental as it may have been at times, was underwritten by his deeper
convictions.
De Waleffe’s core convictions reflected prevalent hygienist thought at the
time, explaining why his pageants received immediate popularity: First, de
Waleffe argued, beauty pageants were the means for regenerating the French
race, whose physique had fallen into decay through over-civilization and the
horrors of war. This was a global phenomenon – the journalist argued that
‘corporally, plastically, the Frenchwoman is like all others – uglier’.30 Following
a neo-Lamarckian logic, as the lack of light and physical exercise in ‘working
class cities’ accelerated decadence and ‘marrying into money’ displaced aesthetic concerns in the upper classes, ‘decadence’ accelerated around the world
and ugliness was reproduced over generations.31 While de Waleffe was not
willing to admit defeat, he admitted that this physical degeneration manifested
itself in the form of ‘weak natality’ signifying France ‘dying on his laurels’.32
This was not an original claim. Similar arguments were used to promote
interwar physical culture movements, which sought to push men to rejuvenate
their masculinity through get-fit guides, exercise societies and sports contests.33
The epitome of this practical approach to physical culture was Marcel Rouet,
a bodybuilder who used his own body as an example in popular get-fit guides
that spread across 1930s France, and encouraged a strict regime of ‘rational’
exercise and dieting to prevent men from getting too effeminate through the
comforts of modernity.34 These claims echoed in public health campaigns
against venereal disease in the military, political mass movements on the left
and the right, and among eugenicists, though the degree of pessimism and the
radicaleness of proposed solutions varied widely.35 De Waleffe reflected these
claims when he argued that only sport prevented civilized men from becoming
29 M. de Waleffe, ‘D’où nous viendra la plus belle femme d’Europe?’, Paris-Midi, 3 Jan. 1930,
Fonds Rondel, B[ibliothéque] N[ationale de] F[rance].
30 De Waleffe, Quand Paris était un paradis, 452
31 M. de Waleffe, ‘La Plus Belle Femme de France’, Le Journal, 25 Dec., 1919.
32 Ibid.
33 J. Tumblety, Remaking the Male Body:Masculinity and the uses of physical culture in
interwar and Vichy France (Oxford, 2012), 3–4; C. Forth, Masculinity in the Modern West:
Gender, Civilisation and the Body (London, 2008).
34 Tumblety, Remaking the Male Body, 4. M. Rouet, Santé et beauté plastique: cours complet
de culture physique et mentale pour obtenir un corps harmonieux et parfait équilibre (Paris,
1937).
35 W. H. Schneider, Quality and Quantity: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth
Century France (Cambridge: 1990), 283–5.
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B e au t y a n d B i g B u s i n e s s
fat and froglike, and that beauty contests were the female equivalents of the
Olympic Games.36 Yet he was no radical – he saw degeneration as a threat,
rather than a fact, and although he embraced positive eugenics as ‘the secret
desire of all’, he denounced violent race-pride as ‘senseless and idiotic’.37 The
way forward was through positive role models and self-improvement. Second,
if the contest was to do its job, it had to deal with the particular challenges facing women. The boyish short hair, waistless dresses and independent lifestyle
of the Modern Girl were, for Catholic and conservative commentators, signs
not simply of an erasure of gender difference, but of a loss of the natural gender
hierarchy.38 While get-fit guides for men urged the youth of France to prove
themselves through sport, get-fit guides for women, such as the highly popular
Muscle et beauté plastique, emphasized the importance of caring for one’s
‘natural beauty’. This meant both a healthy lifestyle defined against Victorian
trappings such as corsets and overly constricting heels, but also a capacity for
seduction, charm, and above all fertility – healthy mothers were thought to
give birth to healthy children.39 Both approaches broke with pre-war understandings of beauty, and embraced practices closely associated with modernity
– physical exercise and cosmetics – while using them to valorize a notion of
femininity that celebrated motherhood, heterosexual attraction and subservience over work, self-care and independence. In de Waleffe’s words: ‘The social
role of feminine beauty is, above all, that of pleasing man.’40
The search for a distinctively French beauty ideal that was also healthy and
therefore fertile, led de Waleffe to the French provinces. First, in accordance
with ideas of ‘natural beauty’, provincial fresh air and self-care unconstrained
by artifice was supposed to counter the monotonous and unnatural bleakness
of urban life.41 This would counter the ‘vanity’ of ‘city damsels’, and demonstrate that healthy beauty was also traditionally French.42 At the same time,
the contest was also forward-looking. It was brought to the public through
‘cinema, this modern invention’; the winner was elected by popular vote, and
the result would ‘indicate the ideal of the man of tomorrow’.43 These modern
elements were not necessarily in conflict with the ideal of a provincial beauty.
As Shanny Peer and Stéphane Gerson have shown, from nineteenth century
‘cults of local memory’ to the 1937 World’s Fair, many observers and statesmen
saw provinces as the sources of ‘proper’ Frenchness where modernity could
36 M
de Waleffe, ‘L’Éugenisme et les tournois de beauté’, Le Journal, 23 Mar., 1930.
F12/12258, M de Waleffe, ‘Concours du meilleur mariage colonial’, dated ‘debout de
37 AN,
1936’.
38 Roberts, Civilization without Sexes, 69–73
39 G. Hébert, Muscle et beauté plastique: l’éducation physique feminine (Paris, 1919), 62–4;
Mme. Vriac-Lecot, Éducation féminine: pour ètre belle à tout age (Paris, 1929), 9.
40 De Waleffe, ‘The Most Beautiful Woman of France’, 399.
41 M. De Waleffe, Le Journal, 7 Jan. 1920.
42 M. de Waleffe, ‘A terrifying tournament of French beauty’, La France: An American
Magazine, July-August, 1921, 18.
43 M. de Waleffe, ‘Quelle est la plus belle femme de France,’ Le Journal, 15 Dec. 1919; ‘La Plus
Belle Femme de France,’ Le Journal, 7 Jan. 1920.
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75
be tamed.44 Finally, all of these criteria were supposed to produce a beauty
with ‘seductive charm’. This aspect was so important that de Waleffe, worried
that too large a proportion of women in the jury would result in the ‘selection
of somewhat cold types of academic beauty’, decided to hedge his bets. Only
one woman was included in the nineteen-person jury tasked with making the
initial cut.45
Third, de Waleffe saw the pageants as a way of evaluating the viability of
mixed marriages. Here the journalist’s opinions diverged most clearly from the
French mainstream.Throughout his career, de Waleffe made no secret of his support for racial mixing, whether between European or non-European races, if
properly controlled.46 Indeed, he made it clear in the very first contest that
Frenchwomen born to foreign parents would be allowed to compete, since
‘these mixtures of distinct blood [would] vitalize the race’ in need of repopulation after the losses of the Great War.47 This put him increasingly at odds with
eugenicists, medical hygienists and even immigration reformers in the 1930s,
yet in his own circles, the world of popular culture and media, captivated by
Josephine Baker and American jazz, these views might have been tolerated.48
When the results came in, however, it appeared the provincial, modest, fertile and French beauty queen that de Waleffe envisioned was not to be. The 49
women chosen by the jury ran against each other in groups of seven, with cinema-audiences electing one woman from each group to the final run-off (fig.1).
The results were striking. Five out of seven candidates had short hair, four had
flapper-like dresses, and all wore extensive makeup. Indeed, Lucienne Ginette,
Figure 1 “The Seven Laureates of the Contest for the Most Beautiful Woman in
France”, Le Journal, April 28, 1920.
44 S. Gerson, The Pride of Place: Local Memories and Politial Culture in Nineteenth Century
France (Ithaca, 2003), 4–7; S. Peer, France on Display: Peasants, Provincials, and Folklore in
the 1937 Paris World’s Fair (Albany, 1998).
45 M. De Waleffe, ‘The most beautiful woman of France’, La France: An American Magazine,
May 1920, 399.
46 De Waleffe, Quand Paris était un paradis, 451 and FN12/12258, ‘Concours du Meilleur
Mariage Colonial’, dated ‘debout de 1936’.
47 M. de Waleffe, ‘Comment on vote’, Le Journal, 19 Feb. 1920.
48 W. H. Schneider, Quantity and Quality, 208–230, Camiscioli, Reproducing the French
Race, 21–51, T. Stovall, Paris Noir: African American in the City of Light (Boston, 1996).
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the only candidate whose attire and hair-do suggested provincial origins (paradoxically, she was born in Paris), came sixth in the semi-finals. The clear winner of the contest was Agnès Souret, a 17-year old Bayonnaise who won nearly
200,000 votes in the semi-finals and 114,994 votes in the final, more than double
the votes of the runner-up in both rounds.49
Souret’s career as a beauty queen illustrates the conflicts of representation
between de Waleffe and his conservative allies looking for provincial beauty,
the needs of the newspaper, entertainment and fashion industries wanting to
capitalize on the Modern Girl phenomenon, and Souret herself, who was comfortable playing both parts, but ultimately sided with the relatively less constricting role of a modern entertainer. De Waleffe’s vision of Souret probably
resembled the photo which was published on the cover on Comoedia illustré (fig. 2), where Souret appeared in a park, surrounded by trees, and with
a house in classical style in the background, wearing a conservative dress
with a long apron. This vision, which accompanied de Waleffe’s review of the
contest, differed radically from the image that circulated during the contest,
adorned the pageant’s official album, and remains the best-known photo of
Souret to this day (fig. 3).There, Souret was draped in a strapless cabaret dress
that exposed more than it concealed. She sported a hairdo strongly resembling that of Mary Pickford, the Canadian movie star who in the same year
toured France alongside Douglas Fairbanks, and whose distinctive curls were
well known to French cinemagoers from films such as The Little American
or The Poor Little Rich Girl.50 Though Pickford was best known for playing children and young, family-loving girls, the costumers at Comoedia illustré originally fashioned Souret’s image as a hybrid between the best known
movie star of the day, and a sexy cabaret-dancer, leaving no doubt as to where
Souret’s future would lead.
That future was coloured by similar conflicts of representation, as her successful career in the entertainment industry clashed with journalistic narratives that tried to peg her as a provincial bourgeois girl way out of her depths.
Less than two months after being crowned Souret made her debut at the FolieBergères, and less than two years later, she had already appeared in a film, The
Lily of Mont-Saint Michel, to commercial and critical success.51 She became
the face of Madeleine & Madeleine, an haute-couture company that sponsored
all of her outfits, she attended events ranging from horse races to balls, and was
offered a tour of America by the Barnum company.52 While she left the stage in
49 ‘Les sept laureates du concours pour la plus belle femme de France’, Le Journal, 28 Apr.
1920; ‘Mlle Agnès Souret est proclamée la plus belle femme de France’, Le Journal, 11 May 1920.
50 ‘“Everywhere that Mary went” the crowds were sure to go. “Doug & Mary” conclude their
European tour.’ Newsreel footage, British Pathé. <http://www.britishpathe.com/video/fairbanksand-pickford-in-france/query/Douglas>, Last Accessed, 10 Oct. 2012. My thanks to Marysia
Jonsson for alerting me to this resemblance.
51 Advertisement in Le Matin, 20 June 1920, 4; ‘Tires of Reigning as Beauty Queen’, The New
York Times, 25 Nov. 1921, see also positive reviews in La Scène, 25 Feb. 1921, 8; La Scène, 26
Mar.1921, 5; La Scène, 2 Apr.1921, 8.
52 ‘Un incident au drags’, Le Gaulois, 26 July 1920; untitled note, Le Gaulois, 27 July 1921; De
Waleffe, Quand Paris était un paradis, 446.
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77
Figure 2 Agnès Souret on the cover of Comoedia llustré, July 1st, 1920.
1921, she continued appearing in film, and traveling on tours around the world
until her untimely death in 1928. Her appearances in the media suggest that
she was perfectly comfortable in her role as a celebrity, sending in brusque letters (signed, immodestly, ‘Agnès Souret, the Most Beautiful Woman in France’)
to Le Petit Parisien for misrepresenting her show at the Folies-Bergères, and
78
B e au t y a n d B i g B u s i n e s s
Figure 3 Agnès Souret on the cover of the official album of the contest. La Plus
Belle Femme de France: Album officiel du Concours de beauté (Paris: Comoedia
Illustré: 1920).
Aro Velmet
79
unexpectedly turning down an interview for La Scène in order to catch a train
for a tour of Tunisia.53
Time and again, however, de Waleffe and other journalists ignored her success and constructed a narrative of a bourgeois girl overstepping her boundaries. For de Waleffe, Souret was a timid 17-year old country girl – not even worth
naming – who had submitted her candidacy by writing to Le Journal, ‘Do you
think I have a chance?’54 Many newspapers emphasized her bourgeois roots –
her father was a country lawyer – conveniently leaving unmentioned the fact
that her mother was an actress, a fact that no doubt had some bearing on her
career choices.55 Her acting was retrospectively dismissed as lacking spark and
conviction.56 When she died of appendicitis in 1928, de Waleffe concluded that
‘the prettiest rose of France was also its most fragile’, and others added that
after spending a lifetime trying to ‘smile and please’, the rough world of showbusiness had cast her aside and the struggles of modern life had gotten the
best of her.57 Souret rejected her role as the fertile ideal for the nation. Instead,
she became the protagonist of a morality tale of class and gender, the likes of
which would be rehearsed time and again in the years to come.58
Why did de Waleffe fail in electing a provincial beauty? For some, the problem was the popular vote. ‘I am not sure that she is the Most Beautiful Woman
in France,’ wrote one journalist in Le Gaulois. ‘First, universal suffrage is bad
at evaluating beauty, as is the case, by the way with many other things. […] It
is oversensitive, too nervous, yet easily impressed, and, let’s add, not cultivated
enough to recognize true perfection.’59 If Le Gaulois thought that the winning
candidate did not represent cultivated beauty, then de Waleffe suggested that
the format of the cinema concealed the ‘natural’ beauty of a healthy, fertile
woman: ‘Under the dress, even if corsets were banned, one couldn’t prevent
the figure from overtaking the body’.60 The point was, ultimately, the same
though: the popular vote made the contest appear too popular, whereas what
de Waleffe was looking for was the ‘care and seriousness that is accorded to the
Olympiades for the selection and celebration of virile athletes.’61
Yet this explanation too does not suffice alone. Initially a long-haired,
‘Madonna-like’ beauty, Roberte Cusey, Miss France 1927, perfectly fit de
Waleffe’s beauty ideal, yet her career quickly deviated from the journalist’s
53 ‘Spectacles et concerts’, Le Petit Parisien, 12 Oct., 1920; ‘Nos Vedettes’, La Scène, 25 Feb.
1921, 10.
54 ‘Mlle Agnès Souret est proclamée la plus belle femme de France’, Le Journal, 11 May 1920.
55 ‘La Plus Belle Femme de France’, Le Gaulois, 14 May 1920; De Waleffe, ‘A Terrifying
Tournament of French Beauty’ 18; ‘Tires of Reigning as Beauty Queen’, The New York Times, 25
Nov. 1921.
56 ‘Les étoiles d’aujourd’hui’, Cinéa-ciné, 1 Apr. 1926, 22; ‘Beautés photogéniques’, Cinéa-ciné,
17 July 1924, 16–19.
57 De Waleffe, Quand Paris était un paradis, 446; ‘Agnès Souret’, Cyrano, 19 Sept. 1928, 19.
58 S. Maza, Violette Nozière: A Story of Murder in 1930s Paris (Berkeley, 2011), 28–47.
59 ‘La plus belle femme de France’, Le Gaulois, 14 May 1920.
60 De Waleffe, Quand Paris était un paradis, 446.
61 M.de Waleffe, ‘D’où nous viendra la plus belle femme d’Europe?’, Paris-Midi, 30 Jan. 1930.
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pronatalist plans.62 First came the compulsory tour around the Folie-Bergères
and the cinema. One year after being elected, she signed with ‘master perfumer Jean de Parys, inventor of the Crème Siamoise’ and started an ‘Institute
of Beauty’ at 34 rue Tronchet.63 By 1934 she had a boutique on 116 Champs
Élysees, which by contemporary standards was as much of a success as it is
today.64 Cusey, who was a model as much as designer had taken advantage of
the opening created by Coco Chanel a decade earlier, becoming a wealthy and
independent couturier whose works the masses both desired and could not
afford - the ultimate symbol of the Modern Girl.65
By 1930 it was clear that the beauty contests overall, irrespective of the particular aesthetics employed by the contestants at different times, were associated with the Modern Girl lifestyle. Nowhere was this clearer than in the
film Prix de Beauté which depicted the struggles of a fictional Miss France,
Lucienne. Not only did the central conflict of the film revolve around the struggles of a married woman turned into a celebrity, its protagonist Lucienne was
played by the quintessential ‘It’ girl, Louise Brooks.66 The French producers of
the movie not only chose to cast an American who barely spoke French as the
titular beauty queen, but also chose an actress largely seen as representative
of the values that de Waleffe was consistently working to dethrone. The plot
and casting choices made good business sense – the film had to compete with
increasingly popular Hollywood musicals, so producers were no doubt concerned with giving French viewers something comparable – but it is also telling that the story that seemed to most naturally transpose Hollywood tropes to
a French context was that of Miss France.
The trajectories of the early Misses and the story of the ‘Prix de Beauté’ suggest that the emerging international consumer economy was crucial in helping
Modern Girl aesthetics prevail over provincial ones. Indeed, the very forces
that helped de Waleffe popularize the contest – the American connection, the
power of the modernizing newspaper industry, and the support of the fashion
and entertainment industries – were the same forces that prevented him from
fixing his ideals of beauty on the women who participated in the pageants.
In addition to the American accent of the contest, made explicit by the change
of the title to Miss France, changes were afoot in the newspaper industry, on
which the contest relied for its funding. As traditional newspapers felt the competition from popular dailies such as Le Petit Parisien, many looked towards
American commercial practices to increase their sales numbers and boost
readership. Paris-Soir, which took over Miss France in 1930 became the fastest
growing newspaper in those years, partly from buying star journalists from
62 ‘Cheveux Courts et Cheveux Longs’, La Femme de France, 27 July 1927, 13.
‘Mme Robete Cusey fonde un Institut de Beauté’, Le Matin, 1 June 1928.
64 Advertisement, Les Amis des Champs-Élysees, Feb. 1932, 31.
65 V. Steele, Paris Fashion: A Cultural History (Oxford, 2006), 245–61.
66 A longer discussion of the film can be found in H. Grout, “Between Venus and Mercury:
The 1920s Beauty Contest in France and America “, French Culture, Politics & Society, 31 (2013),
47–68.
63 Aro Velmet
81
competitors, expanding its correspondents network and introducing opinion
columns, but equally by increasing the number of front page photographs and
sensational headlines.67 It is likely that Le Journal and l’Intransigeant were
sympathetic towards de Waleffe’s ideological vision – Le Journal was an artistic paper for the haute bourgeoisie, and the interest of its staff in athletic
events and competitions of hygiene leaves no doubt that many of its editorial
and administrative staff shared de Waleffe’s convictions regarding gender disruption and French decline.68 Still, at the end of the day, publications such as
Le Journal or Comoedia looked first after their commercial interests, and promoted the pageants with photos that sold well with the popular public, instead
of those that pleased a section of the male bourgeoisie.69
A further element that affected the development of de Waleffe’s project was
the changing nature of the fashion and entertainment industries. Ticket receipts
more than tripled in Parisian entertainment venues between 1920 and 1928,
and as commercial nightlife popularized, so did the celebrity culture. In music,
Josephine Baker and Mistinguett both had working class roots; the undisputed
queen of fashion, Coco Chanel, was the daughter of a laundrywoman and a
street vendor. Cinema screens were dominated by American actresses, seen
as more accessible than anything the theatres of Paris could produce.70 There
was now a market for popular entertainment and consumer fashion, and many
companies recognized that a popular market needed popular stars. Putting
their economic power behind Miss France meant that the Modern Girl image
of beauty queens was further magnified by their appearances on cosmetics
advertisements, music-hall stages and the silver screen.
The disparity between the provincial ideal Miss France was supposed to represent and urban style of the actual beauty queens did not go unnoticed by
either the female readership of beauty magazines, nor by de Waleffe and other
commentators. A minority of readers writing to the Femme de France scolded
Souret and Cusey for pursuing careers of their own instead of marrying like a
good bourgeois girl; most dreamed of a career like theirs, were jealous of their
successes, or contemplated participating at the contest themselves.71 Instead
of serving as cautionary tales, the post-election careers of Agnès Souret and
Roberte Cusey legitimized the idea of single female careers in the eyes of many
French readers.
67 C. Thogmartin, The National Daily Press of France (Vestavia Hills, 1998), 93, 122–4. For the
funding scheme of the contests: the collections AN 8AR 450–455.
68 AN, 8AR-451, ‘Organizations Sportives de Propagande pour 1’Année 1930’, internal memo,
no date; AN 8AR-444, ‘Concours de l’Hygiene’, newspaper clipping, 15 July 1924.
69 AN 8AR-444, ‘Album du concours de beauté des provinces de France’, correspondence.
70 For sales revenue, see S. M. Schulman, ‘The Celebrity Culture of Modern Nightlife: Music-hall,
Dance, and Jazz in Interwar Paris, 1918–1930’ (PhD, Brown University, 2000), 30–1; R. Jeanne, La
Beauté féminine: Les grandes vedettes de cinéma (Paris, 1930), 7.
71 See readers letters La Femme de France, 7 Nov. 1920, 6; La Femme de France, 26 Sept. 1920,
6; La Femme de France, 24 July 1921, 7; La Femme de France, 23 Oct. 1927, 13; La Femme de
France, 23 Sept. 1928, 14, La Femme de France, 29 Nov. 1931, 4.
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It is of little surprise that many commentators were concerned by the values the contest appeared to promote. ‘The winning models rarely correspond
to the classical canons of feminine beauty […] Is the modern taste indeed so
corrupt?’ asked one critic in Le Temps.72 ‘They all think of [cinema],’ wrote a
critic in Comoedia. ‘But before the supreme deception, how many compromising parades, how many perilous adventures!’73 Others went straight after de
Waleffe: ‘To kill the time between the two elections of the consumable Venus,
de Waleffe assumes other expertise which, no doubt, is designed equally to
showcase his virility: underwear for men, and the institution of an Academy
of Fashion.’74 For both conservative and liberal critics, the contest was fraught
with moral problems: it promoted the wrong kind of beauty, it incited wrong
sorts of dreams in the participants, and it was run by the wrong kind of man.
Changes had to be made.
These changes came about in 1930, when Paris-Soir took over sponsorship
of the expanding business, which now included an international beauty pageant, titled Miss Europe. It turned out that Soir wanted the contest, but without
the rhetoric. An editorial in the paper read:
The most heated partisans of the ‘contests of grace’ often say, with
all the solemnity that goes with these kinds of affirmations: ‘Beauty
pageants represent the best way for rebuilding a great race of
humanity! […]’ Let us make the point again: Amongst all the young
and beautiful girls, a jury of honest men will choose the one with
the most sparkling physical qualities, and who, at the same time,
exhibits a serious moral foundation. And we will tell to this young
lady: ‘Mademoiselle, because you are so pretty and so kind, we are
going to reward you with a trip to America. […]’ This is how we
understand the ‘profound significance’ of this beauty pageant.75
In case the point was not forceful enough, the Soir warned the entrants that
they should not expect the contest to be a springboard for a career in the
arts. The rules for applicants were also amended: the contestant could no
longer be married, their age was capped at 25, and they could not work in
the theatre, cinema or music hall.76 That the winner of this ‘trip to America’
would undertake the voyage with her mother was the final nail in the coffin of
female empowerment. The patronizing tone of the editorial made it clear that
while the newspaper had come to terms with the Modern Girl looks of most
contestants, it also did its best to disassociate that look from connotations of
72 ‘Beautés et beauté’, Le Temps, 10 Feb. 1930.
‘Elles veulent faire du cinéma’, Comoedia, 18 May 1928.
74 ‘Vénus et le brillant Belge’, La Volonté, 19 May 1928.
75 ‘Voici pourquoi “Le Soir” préside à l’élection d’une Miss France 1930’, Paris-Soir, 27 June
1930.
76 Paris-Soir, 1 July 1930.
73 Aro Velmet
83
independence and artistic success, thus restoring order to the gendered world
of interwar Paris.
IV
There was another spectre haunting Europe, however, and nowhere was it as
visible as France. Between the wars, immigration to France rose faster than
anywhere else in Europe, adding seven per cent to the country’s population
by 1931.77 Combined with anxieties regarding denatality and decline, the presence of both European and colonial immigrants incited bio-political concerns
around managing individual sexuality, limiting interracial mixing, and excluding racial others from Republican citizenship.78 De Waleffe had already raised
the problem of racial mixing in the early Miss France contests, but it took on a
new importance after 1929 when the journalist started Miss Europe, designed
to determine whether mixed-race unions or pride in racial purity would help
Europe escape the doldrums of decline. At Miss France d’Outre-Mer in 1937,
the problem was rephrased yet again, this time suggesting that controlled
racial mixing in the colonies would reinvigorate the French race in the way
that provincial girls in the metropole had failed to do.
Miss Europe’s ideology stood on three pillars: racializing beauty, evaluating
interracial mixing, and restoring European unity. Like Miss France, de Waleffe
did considered the various contestants to represent the ‘pinnacle of their race,
symbol of their generation’.79 A comparison of different European races would
in turn allow social reformers to learn which environmental and social condition would be ‘most suitable for the magnificent flowering of the human
plant’.80 In a similarly eugenicist manner, de Waleffe suggested that comparing ‘creole’ American and ‘relatively pure’ European Misses at the final Miss
Universe contest in Galveston would help to determine whether ‘it is better to
marry [our children] in their own milieu, or to prefer crossing them with foreigners’.81 Finally, Miss Europe would foster peaceful communication between
European nations, thus providing the ‘first timid glimpse’ of Victor Hugo’s
vision of a United States of Europe ‘under the sign of beauty’.82
The racial politics of Miss Europe were shaped by the contest’s ad-hoc
organization which appeared to care about race only when it came to colonial
contests. Its jury and critics raised concerns over the extent to which contestants represented their region. They used cultural assimilation as a way of
explaining away the success of contestants whose skin colour differed from
77 C. Rosenberg, ‘Albert Sarraut and republican racial thought’, Race in France: Interdisciplinary
Perspectives on the Politics of Difference, eds H. Chapman & L. Frader (New York, 2004), 36.
78 Camiscioli, Reproducing the French Race, and Saada, Les Enfants de la colonie.
79 M. de Waleffe, ‘La Plus Belle Femme d’Europe sera désignée le 7 Février’, L’Intransigeant,
18 Dec. 1928.
80 M. de Waleffe, ‘À la recherché de la plus belle femme d’Europe’, Le Journal, 17 Dec. 1928.
81 Ibid.
82 M. de Waleffe, ‘La Plus Belle Femme d’Europe sera désignée le 7 Février’.
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B e au t y a n d B i g B u s i n e s s
the expected. Miss Hungary could be as ‘black as Josephine Baker’, and Miss
Lebanon would evoke ‘a type of “evolved” oriental’, without it impeding their
eligibility for the contest.83 Such arguments, particularly when made in the
field of entertainment, could potentially appease all but the most conservative of spectators, as mainstream conceptions of race emphasized the impact
of social and environmental factors on heredity, leaving the door open for a
dark-skinned Miss Europe.84 There was however, one set of exceptions: the
North African colonies. There, native women were forbidden from participating for what were simply called ‘obvious reasons’.85 One suspects this might
have been a decision enforced by the sponsoring colonial governments, or a
reflection of de Waleffe’s imperial or religious politics; the fact was that the
only time race played a role in determining eligibility for the Miss contests was
in the North African colonies.
Perhaps the biggest puzzle of Miss Europe was its move to North Africa – the
1936 pageant took place in Tunis, and moved to Constantine, Algeria the following year. The move was certainly ideologically convenient – it fitted with de
Waleffe’s continuous evocation of racial mixing, and it prefigured the creation
of Miss France d’Outre-Mer. In the case of Miss Europe, however, the development had less to do with de Waleffe’s fondness for the colonies, and more with
the profitability of the contests. The initiative came from the President of the
Permanent Committee of Festivities in Tunis, who saw the occasion as both a
propagandistic and economic opportunity. If Tunis could prove itself a benevolent host for journalists and beauties from thirteen countries, then this would
prove both the place of Tunisia in Europe, and reenergize the colony’s tourism, which had stalled during the Great Depression.86 In Constantine as well,
gestures were made towards the one hundredth anniversary of the French conquest of the city, but the real interest lay in raising the city from ‘the oblivion
into which the tourism crisis had thrown her.’87 Local and international companies quickly joined the fray: The Compagnie Générale Transatlantique, not
to mention local theatre companies, casinos and even olive oil producers all
wanted to sponsor the Misses, either by paying for their travel, offering a space
for the final gala or giving them a tour of their facilities.88
Although official pageants were out of reach for ‘native’ women, it was still
possible for some to participate in the surrounding beauty culture. Those
who could read French, could, of course, follow the newspaper coverage. The
Great Depression affected North African economies as badly as European ones,
83 De Waleffe, ‘La Plus Belle Femme d’Europe Sera Désignée le 7 Février’, ‘Miss Liban reine de
beauté’, Intransigeant, 3 Feb. 1931.
84 C. Rosenberg, ‘Albert Sarraut and Republican Racial Thought’, 36–54; Camiscioli,
Reproducing the French Race.
85 ‘L’élection de Miss Tunisie de 1936’, L’Afrique du Nord Illustrée, 25 Apr. 1936.
86 ‘L’Élection de “Miss Europe 1936” aura lieu en octobre à Tunis’, L’Afrique du Nord Illustrée,
15 Sept. 1935.
87 ‘Constantine: L’Élection de Miss Europe 1937’, L’Afrique du Nord Illustrée, 1 Nov. 1937.
88 Untitled, L’Afrique du Nord, 14 Nov. 1936; advertisement, Les Spectacles d’Alger, 20 Oct.
1937; ‘L’Élection de “Miss Europe 1936” aura lieu en octobre à Tunis’.
Aro Velmet
85
however, the urban population, which by 1930 was half-Muslim, nevertheless had enough disposable income to purchase at least some of the fashion
products that European companies aggressively advertised with endorsements
from a Miss France or Miss Europe.89 Others could participate in local beauty
pageants where the rules of the official contest did not apply. Some of these
contests had the support of de Waleffe: in Tunis, the organizers of Miss Europe
selected 14 young ‘pages’ from the local population to accompany the beauty
queens during their stay in Tunisia, a contest that according to local newspapers attracted ‘numerous and attentive assistance from sympathetic Tunisian
suburbs’.90 In Constantine, newspapers reported numerous unofficial pageants
– during the day of the official gala, competitions for local women included Miss
Tirailleurs, Miss Timbouctou, Miss 1837 and Miss 1900, in addition to dozens of
marches and smaller contests.91 The extent to which these reports were exaggerated is, of course, impossible to tell, but the existence of ad-hoc parades and
contests suggests that the language of the pageants – the language of modern
beauty products, cinema and spectacle – was familiar to the inhabitants of Tunis
and Constantine. On that assumption, year after year, companies would continue
to advertise beauty products through the Miss contests (fig. 4).92 Meanwhile, de
Waleffe used the opportunity to meet colonial governors, and further develop
his idea of evaluating ‘the real results of mixed marriages’.93 Driven by the commercial potential of the contests, the need for positive press in the colonies,
and de Waleffe’s interest in racial mixing, beauty pageants gained ground in the
colonies to the extent that in 1937, one metropolitan commentator called it ‘the
new colonial disease’.94
Returning to de Waleffe’s interest in mixed marriages, his shifting of attention to the colonies reflected a wider preoccupation in French 1930s hygienist
and popular discourse, where the colonies became a rediscovered source of
both fascination and perceived danger. Although the ‘primitiveness’ of ‘native’
women made them ineligible for the title of Miss Europe, that same ‘primitiveness’ made them an example of natural virility. George Hébert’s Muscle
et beauté plastique, offered a new role model for Frenchwomen concerned
with their looks – the ‘modern primitive beauty’.95 By retaining their ‘physical worth’ through the hardships of everyday existence, primitive beauties
retained their ‘virile qualities’, which Hébert compared to classical statues of
89 For urban demographics in the Maghreb, S. Amin, The Maghreb in the Modern World:
Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco (Middlesex, 1970), 33, for wage growth in the interwar era, 77–85;
for evidence of women consumers, P. Stearns, Consumerism in World History: The Global
Transformation of Desire (London, 2006), 118–19.
90 ‘En marge de l’éléction de Miss Europe 1936’, L’Afrique du Nord Illustrée, 19 Sept. 1936.
91 ‘Constantine: L’Élection de Miss Europe 1937’, L’Afrique du Nord Illustrée, 1 Nov. 1937.
92 For ads featuring the Misses, see L’Afrique du Nord Illustrée, 1 July 1933, 16; La Petite
Tunisie, 16 May 1931, 2; 8 Aug. 1931.
93 De Waleffe, Quand Paris était un paradis, 441.
94 ‘La ‘De Waleffite’ Sevit en Tunisie’, Annales Coloniales, 3 Sept. 1937.
95 Hébert, Muscle et beauté plastique, 12. For a detailed analysis of female physical culture
during the third republic see, M. L. Stewart, For Health and Beauty: Physical Culture for
Frenchwomen, 1880s-1930s (Baltimore, 2001) 35–9.
86
B e au t y a n d B i g B u s i n e s s
Figure 4 An advertisement for a facial cream using the image of Miss France 1931 in a
Tunisian newspaper. La Petite Tunisie, May 16, 1931.
Venus, the goddess of sex and fertility (fig. 5).96 By linking moral and physical
development and emphasizing collective development and reversing decline,
Hébertisme appealed both to the left and the right. It linked easily to primitivist discourses circulating in avant-garde art (among, for instance, the fauves,
the cubists, and the surrealists), in the jazz-music scene, and in political discourse, which had long ‘credited’ Africans with putting matter over mind.97
96 Hébert,
Muscle et beauté plastique, 35–6.
Remaking the Male Body, 34–6; S. Kalman, The Extreme Right in Interwar
France: The Faisceau and the Croix de Feu (London, 2008), 136.
97 Tumblety,
Aro Velmet
87
Figure 5 “Comparative study of an antique beauty with a primitive modern beauty”,
Muscle et Beauté plastique: L’Éducation physique feminine (Paris: Librarie
Vuibert, 1919).
At the same time, the colonies were often seen as the place where modernity,
particularly with regards to questions gender, could be tamed and harnessed.
Thus, for those who saw Frenchwomen as decadent, undersexed and ungendered, the colonies, just like the provinces, offered a natural, diverse and virile
environment where modernity – if properly controlled - could be introduced
on terms favourable for the health of civilization.
In the 1930s anxieties over racial health took on a new urgency. As birth rates
declined even further, the French were failing to bring home medals from elite
sporting events, and both the radical right and the Popular Front were using
athleticism to mobilize mass support, physical culture quickly became an official
public health issue.98 In 1936, the Popular Front government named Léo Lagrange
as the first Undersecretary for the Sports, Leisure and Physical Culture, tasked
with renovating public sports facilities, subsidizing vacation costs for working
families, and putting on contests to increase the popular interest in sports.99
98 Tumblety,
Remaking the Male Body, 14–15.
Livre d’or officiel de l’Exposition Internationale des Arts et des Techniques dans la vie
moderne (Paris, 1937), 146–7, Musée du Quai d’Orsay.
99 88
B e au t y a n d B i g B u s i n e s s
While resurgent anxieties over birth rates brought concerns over racial mixing back into the mainstream, de Waleffe, and many others in the cultural sphere
sought harness, rather than limit métissage.100 De Waleffe’s beliefs owed more
to ideas of physical culture than scientific racism and fit poorly with ideas of
biological inferiority structured around skin colour. His concerns about métissage had to do with its ‘moral’ results, rather than biological or aesthetic ones
– where he advocated controlled ‘selection of the species… which has been
completely abandoned amongst humans’.101 In 1936, he proposed to his friend,
Henri Bérenger, commissioner of the overseas section of the World’s Fair, a pageant of mixed-race women from the colonies – titled at Bérenger’s suggestion
Miss France d’Outre-Mer.
The proposal made its case by emphasizing the crisis of birthrates, particularly in comparison to Germany: ‘700,000 children a year against 1,200,000 in
Germany’.102 It suggested that marrying Frenchmen to the ‘prolific races’ of the
‘colonial empire of more than 60 million people’ would ‘remedy’ this problem,
but only if it first determined which races would produce the best offspring.
This position was a pragmatic marriage of the government’s position, according to which certain races were more likely to be assimilable than others, and
the progressive viewpoint, which did not differentiate between white and nonwhite races. By placing France’s future overseas with a remark that echoed Paul
Reynaud’s famous speech at the opening of the 1931 Colonial Exposition, de
Waleffe made an argument that was hard to refute.103 Whatever conclusions one
might draw from eugenic and hygienist sciences, France’s official position on
colonial peoples had for long proclaimed them assimilable, culturally distinctive,
and central to France’s development.
The final line-up of contestants represented Tonkin, Annam, Laos,
Cochinchine, Pondicherry, Madagascar, Sénegal, Gouadeloupe, Martinique,
Réunion, and Guyane.While the official guide to the World’s Fair simply defined
the project as ‘celebrating the almost always happy marriages between the
French and natives’, the contest’s racial politics painted a starker picture of
what the French considered appropriate.104 Miss Réunion, even though she
was ‘créole’, was disqualified for having perfectly white skin.105 North African
100 H. Neuville, ‘Peuples ou Races’, Encyclopédie Francaise, vii., pt 2, (Paris, 1936); The
Republic’s legal position on métissage remained one of cultural assimilation, exemplified by the
1928 law stipulating that an abandoned métis child would be deemed a French citizen if his
French ‘race’ could be culturally determined, see Saada, Les Enfants de la Colonie.
101 AN, FN12 12258, M. De Waleffe, ‘Exposé du Projet,’ 26 Apr. 1936.
102 AN, FN12 12258, ‘Concours du Meilleur Mariage Colonial, exposé du projet’, 15 Apr. 1936.
103 The phrase ‘60 million people of our colonial empire’ was brought to public discourse by
P. Reynaud, quoted in O. Wieviorka & C. Procasson (eds), La France du XXème siecle: documents
d’histoire (Paris, 2005), 306.
104 Ibid.
105 Whether Mlle Bénard was officially métisse or not is not clear. Most sources note that
she was disqualified because of her white skin, but refer to her either as créole or métisse,
suggesting that in this case, color may have mattered more than blood. P. Dupays, Voyages
autour du monde: Pavillons étrangers et pavillons coloniaux à l’Exposition de 1937 (Paris,
1938), 271.
Aro Velmet
89
colonies were entirely absent from the event, French West Africa was represented solely by Miss Sénégal, but no less than five contestants hailed from
Indochina. It seems that de Waleffe, who had limited time and money, decided
to concentrate his search on the Caribbean and Indochinese colonies, letting
other colonies select their representatives on a volunteer basis. This decision
should not be seen as accidental – Indochina in the 1930s was seen largely
as a ‘model colony’, successfully modernizing, constructing roads, and introducing French education across the colony. European representations of the
Modern Girl often had more than a touch of ‘Asianness’ to them and the aesthetic had made a considerable impact in East Asia, including Indochina, lending credence to the idea that it was there where colonial assimilation showed
most promise.106 While de Waleffe claimed to evaluate the potential of different colonies for regeneration evenly, his itinerary suggests that he already had
an answer in mind.
The official press of the World Fair did its best to portray the entrants as
representing both traditional stereotypes of colonial cultures and modern
sophistication. The guide to the Exposition emphasized the traditional outfits
of the Misses, alongside descriptions of the powerful West African guard and
the exotic sounds of the Antillais orchestra.107 By contrast, a commentator in
Le Journal remarked that most contestants knew how to marry ‘the charm
of their own racial type to a common, almost quasi-Parisian elegance’.108 The
overseas Misses were Parisian, but not quite; traditional, but with an urban
charm; evolved, but unambitious and docile – the perfect match for de Waleffe’s
project.
The women, yet again, had a different idea. Between the commentary, interviews with the misses presented a different picture, one of ambition, independence and frustration with restrictions of women’s careers. Miss Annam took
the opportunity to note how difficult it was for a woman to become a museum
conservator. Miss Madagascar, Miss Martinique, Miss Tonkin, Miss Gouadeloupe
and Miss Sénégal all expressed a desire either to stay in Paris or to move there
as soon as possible. Miss Guyane made fun of her traditional costume: ‘[This]
is amusing … because, chez nous, only old peasant ladies still wear it.’109 The
winner, Monique Casalan of Guadeloupe was not a quiet bourgeois girl, neither
a homemaker nor a modest secretary, but an artist, with interests in philosophy
and sport, and reportedly over a hundred interviews under her belt. While the
official guide had no trouble reconciling its own language of fragile and exotic
106 J. Hency, ‘Vietnamese New Women and the Fashioning of Modernity’, France and
“Indochina”: Cultural Representations, K. Robson & J. Yee (eds) (Lanham, 2005), 121–36;
P. Norindr, Phantasmatic Indochina: French Colonial Ideology in Architecture, Film, Literature
(Durham, NC, 1996); ‘The Modern Girl Around The World: Cosmetics Advertising and the Politics
of Race and Style’, Modern Girl Around the World, 25–55.
107 ‘À 15 heures, election de Miss France d’Outre-Mer à l’ile des cygnes’, Programme quotidien
pour l’Éxposition Internationale Arts et Techniques, 23 July, Special Edition, 1937, BNF.
108 ‘La Gouadeloupe a l’honneur”‘ Le Journal, 29 July 1937.
109 ‘À 15 heures, election de Miss France d’Outre-Mer à l’ile des cygnes’, Programme quotidien
pour l’Éxposition Internationale Arts et Techniques, 23 July Special Edition, 1937, BNF.
90
B e au t y a n d B i g B u s i n e s s
beauty with the interviews which revealed that most of the entrants were anything but domestic, the popular press drew the inevitable conclusion: ‘The
only crucial thing separating the overseas Misses from all the European beauty
queens is this: They do not wish to appear in cinema. Not yet.’110 Perhaps they
were correct. Miss France d’Outre-Mer was much like Miss Europe and Miss
France in the earlier years of the thirties, in that the mass media paid little attention to the ideology behind the spectacle. Newspapers were more concerned
with the ambitions of the contestants, their costumes and hairstyles, and the
riot that erupted after the jury announced the audience of 15,000 people that its
final decision would be postponed by nearly a week. The intense debate of the
1920s had dissipated, replaced with an image of innocuous spectacle. For journalists, this might have been a convenient way to dismiss the contestants whose
attitude and pronouncements evaded the script of docile and traditional femininity, or to dismiss de Waleffe’s ideas of racial mixing, which both defied and
conformed to French racial thought. Yet for the beauty queens at the World’s
Fair, or at the preceding contests, as well as for the women who wrote letters to
magazines and newspapers, the Miss contests were a springboard for a career,
for celebrity status, for the lifestyle of a Modern Girl.
V
For de Waleffe, Miss France d’Outre-Mer was his final moment of fame. Miss
France and Miss Europe continued until the war, though nowhere near as popular as they were in the early 1930s. De Waleffe saw the end of the war, but
not the reconstruction, passing away in 1945. While national and international
beauty pageants were resurrected shortly after the war’s end to great celebration and equally great criticism, it was only in 2012 that the racial element was
reintroduced in the form of Miss Black France. This time, the purpose was to
counteract, not complement, the official contest, which was criticized for promoting an ideal of beauty that was uniquely white (only five black women had
ever been crowned, with the first becoming Miss France in 1993).111 As usual,
pundits and intellectuals criticized the contest for promoting ‘communitarian’
values and reifying racial identities.112 Yet ironically, as Maurice de Waleffe had
done more than 90 years earlier, the organizers of Miss Black France vindicated
their project by pointing to a threat of social disintegration: ‘Society provokes
these sorts of initiatives. These young women wish to show that they exist,
particularly during a period of elections, when the Front Nationale tries to pit
the French against each other.’113
Still, we should not reduce beauty contests solely to attempts at restoring a lost
social order, to symbols of national health, or avenues for female emancipation.
110 ‘Miss France d’Outre-Mer’, Le Figaro, 27 July, 1937.
‘Miss Black France, un concours de “beautés noires” qui fait polémique’, Le Monde, 27 Apr.
2012. My thanks to Stéphane Gerson for pointing me to this article.
112 Ibid.
113 Ibid.
111 Aro Velmet
91
They are complex areas of struggle, where discourses of femininity, national,
and racial health play themselves out among actors of varying economic and
social power. The history of Maurice de Waleffe and the Misses adds to discussions of interwar gender norms by highlighting the interplay between an
evolving consumer economy, discussions of the Modern Girl and racial mixing, played out in an international context. It shows us how discourses of gender and race were tied together through the rubric of ‘European decline’, and
‘racial regeneration’. These notions prescribed a hierarchy of qualities that
located the ideal of beauty in both the provinces and the colonies. The story
exposes the ‘tensions of Empire’ in the sphere of mass culture, by showing
how constructing and maintaining difference between colonizer and colonized
was undercut by an economy that targeted everyone capable of buying. The
distinction was further undermined by the paradox of a racial discourse that
drew on similar premises – assimilation and primitivism – but leading to conclusions that could portray ‘natives’ as irreducibly Other, or as the key to the
Republic’s regeneration.114 Finally, it shows us how consumer culture shaped
Miss France and enabled both bourgeois and working women to dream of lives
that offered greater latitudes in style, social behaviour and economic independence than those of ‘proper’ patriotic mothers. This dynamic leads us to ask, as
Kathy Peiss has done about the United States and Timothy Burke about South
Africa: instead of only generating false desires, policing hierarchical gender
norms, and embodying a male understanding of womanhood, did consumer
culture also offer ‘meaningful social and cultural choices’ for many women in
the French empire?115 This is not to discount the fact that the de-politicization
of the Miss contests in the 1930s and the dismissal of enterprising women as
misguided or overenthusiastic foreshadowed strategies that are employed even
today. Nor is this denying that the availability of cosmetics products soon
turned into a necessity as restrictive as prior gender norms. The paradox of the
Miss contests was made clear in 1937, when Maurice de Waleffe thought about
engineering the best colonial marriage, and the media industry on which he
depended joined the participants in electing the best potential movie star.
114 F. Cooper and A. L. Stoler, ‘Between metropole and colony: rethinking a research agenda’,
in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World eds idem (Berkeley, 1996), 1–58.
115 Peiss, Hope in a Jar 7–8, T. Burke, ‘The modern girl and commodity culture’, The Modern
Girl Around the World, 365–366, 368.