Wild Thing (eBook)

1: REVOLUTIONARY ROAD

Shortly after his first birthday, Paul Gauguin was bundled aboard a ship called the Albert, to sail some 12,000 miles from the French port of Le Havre to Peru. The year was 1849, and France was no place for outspoken radicals such as Gauguin’s parents. Charles-Louis Napoleon had become president of the French Republic and it didn’t take political genius to foresee that he would segue smoothly from the post of president to that of Emperor Napoleon III of France. Gauguin’s father, Clovis, was an anti-Bonapartist journalist determined to continue the republican fight from Peru, where he planned to start a newspaper on the back of an excellent connection: Simón Bolívar, who overthrew Spanish rule in much of South America and had Bolivia named after him, had been a family friend. Gauguin’s mother, Aline, was also a ‘person of danger’ on the list of the French Republic’s spies and secret police. Aline had not had much time recently to be a national danger. Two years previously, she had given birth to Gauguin’s elder sister Marie, and then Gauguin himself had come along. Her hands had been more than full of babies. But sometimes symbols adhere more firmly to particular names than to their recent activities and Aline Gauguin had inherited the symbolic mantle of firebrand feminist and proto-Communist from her mother Flora Tristan.

Karl Marx met and admired Flora Tristan, whose book advocating an international workers’ movement, L’Union ouvrière, was published four years before his own Communist Manifesto calling for the same. A statue of Flora stands in Paris, where she also has a square named after her, and a women’s refuge. She has become an icon of the French feminist movement and in 1984 she was honoured with a postage stamp. The philosopher Proudhon called her a genius, and the conservative French press of the time nicknamed her Madame la Colère, Madame Anger. To her grandson Paul Gauguin, she was a heroine; he described her as a beautiful socialist-anarchist bluestocking who probably never learned to cook, ardent and utterly adorable.1 By the time he was born, she had been dead four years, but there is no doubt that the example of her moral fearlessness spurred him on to wage his own stubborn political crusades.

Gauguin is chiefly known for his Polynesian paintings, the first European pictures to turn their back on the classical and neoclassical ideals on which the Western comprehension of beauty and culture was founded, to celebrate instead a different beauty: the beauty of an indigenous people and their culture. It is less well known that while Gauguin was creating the paintings that gave visual shape to this most enchanting and exotic Eden, he was infuriating Polynesia’s French colonial administrators by fighting for the native Polynesians’ rights against the injustices of their French colonial governors. In Tahiti, he started his own newspaper and wrote satirical articles for the magazine Les Guêpes (The Wasps), delivering sting after sting on the fat flank of the corrupt French administration that ruled over the colony, and lampooning them in merciless cartoons. But Gauguin’s political activism didn’t stop at journalism; he also acted as an advocate for Polynesians in the French colonial courts, demanding justice for them against the high-handed colonial administrators, the corpulent robots with idiotic faces, who governed them oppressively and taxed them mercilessly.

Gauguin credited his grandmother Flora Tristan not only for his own lifelong readiness to battle for the underdog, but also for his talent as a painter. No discernible artistic red thread ran down the family bloodline until Flora came along. Born in 1803, she was as sketchily educated as almost all girls were at the time, but Flora understood line, and had an exceptional eye for colour. This was a commercially valuable talent in the early decades of the nineteenth century when black-and-white prints and engravings drag-anchored the racy and influential stories they were meant to be illuminating in magazines and newspapers. Coloured-in images brought illustrations a step closer towards ‘realism’ and the excitement of immediacy. In 1819, aged fifteen, Flora was apprenticed to the French artist and printmaker André Chazal, who ran a commercial printing business and sold coloured prints of famous artworks. Chazal fell in love. She was seen as exotic, otherworldly. ‘She dressed simply. Her eyes were full of the fire of the East. One had only to see her curled up in her armchair like a snake to know she was of remote origin, the daughter of sunbeams and shadows.’2 They married, had three children, and became part of Paris’s pre-Impressionist artistic avant-garde whose leader Eugène Delacroix lived a couple of doors down from them in Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette. Life promised a satisfying bohemian existence, but Chazal was a violent man and an incurable gambler. The more money he lost, the more violent and unreasonable he became. When there was no money to pay the rent and feed the family he told Flora not once, but repeatedly, to go out on the street and get money by prostituting herself. This was insupportable. She left, and found a job as a shop assistant. At that time, French law recognised only the father’s rights to the children, but Flora fought for custody. On discovering that Chazal had sexually abused their daughter Aline (Gauguin’s mother), Flora brought charges of incest. She was awarded custody of Aline and she changed her own and her children’s surnames from Chazal to her maiden name, Tristan. Chazal now became obsessed. He made a detailed drawing of her tombstone. He bought a brace of pistols and spent the next four years stalking and harassing Flora and Aline, jumping out at them suddenly on the street, or materialising mysteriously at a nearby café table, stroking his pistols. Finally in September 1838, he tried to kill Flora, by shooting her. She survived, but the ball was lodged three centimetres from her heart, too close to be safely removed. It remained embedded in her breast for the rest of her life. Chazal was tried for attempted murder and sentenced to twenty years’ hard labour.

After this, one might imagine that Flora would be thrilled to retire into quiet domesticity. On the contrary. Her own struggles spurred her on to right the larger injustices of the world around her, which she identified as the problems of human exploitation and degradation engendered by the galloping success of the Industrial Revolution. Ideals to the fore, Flora put her daughter Aline into what Flora deemed was an excellent republican boarding school to ensure that she should never have to rely on a husband for a living but could make her way in the world. Flora took full advantage of the notoriety gained from her two sensational court cases to turn herself into an investigative writer and reporter, addressing the issues closest to her heart: equal education and equal remuneration for women, workers’ rights and universal suffrage. In 1840 she travelled to London, where she attended a secret meeting of the Chartists as they prepared to present their national petition to Parliament demanding universal suffrage.

Investigating England further, Flora found it ridiculous that under Queen Victoria, the government of Great Britain received ‘on its knees’ the orders of a woman, but would not allow women to watch its proceedings.3 Incensed, she disguised herself as a man to get into the Houses of Parliament, where she heard the Duke of Wellington, the hero who had defeated Napoleon, drawling out a lifeless speech, after which he stretched himself out to sprawl on a bench in an attitude that reminded her of a horse with its legs in the air.

At that time, the problem of prostitution in London was no better or worse than in any other great city, but it was in child prostitution that London really excelled. The Society for the Prevention of Juvenile Prostitution estimated that there were between thirteen and fourteen thousand girl- and boy-prostitutes between the ages of ten and thirteen, a number supported by police figures. Madame la Colère found it utterly incomprehensible that Queen Victoria, a monarch of her own sex, a wife and mother, could preside over such a situation. Once again, she dressed up to see for herself, this time in the finery of the profession, and was terrified by the violence of the men who approached her for sex, and the murderous threats of the weapon-wielding brothel-keepers and pimps who simply wanted her off their profitable patch. She visited many of the terrible brothels known as ‘finishes’ in the protective company of Mr Talbot, secretary of the Society for the Prevention of Juvenile Prostitution, who was presumably masquerading as her pimp. They spent long hours witnessing scenes of horror revealing the paying customers as far more interested in the sadistic humiliation of the poor enslaved creatures than anything that could even remotely be described as pleasurable or erotic. ‘Human beings cannot descend lower,’ she wrote, and concluded that within the unnatural and inhuman environment of the teeming, overcrowded city, brothels had become torture chambers within which human beings enacted terrible revenge on the violations of the principles of humanity.4 She named London ‘Monster City’ in her journal, and made the cutting observation that the British government possibly saw the annual loss of some ten thousand children to prostitution and resulting early death as a useful contribution to their Malthusian...