Richard Thompson, Phillip Denis Cate, and Mary Weaver Chapin,  Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre (1)

The Culture of Montmartre

The critique of decadence -- drawing attention to  society's class divisions, moral  corruption,  and sexual  exploitation -- came from various quarters. Conservative forces might use  it to condemn modernity in relation to  the  superior  values of  the  past. while  the left  used  it to  promote its own  radical agenda. 3 The republic reacted  defensively. with  moralizing propriety allied t o a degree of censorship . This collided  with Lautrec's own areas  of operation. Songs  performed in  the  cafes -concerts were  controlled. Yvette Guilbert being obliged to drop a verse  about lesbians from Maurice Donnay's song '"Eros Vanne'" (Clapped-out Cupid), while the song sheet Lautrec designed  included that very allusion 4 In  1896. Writing in the  establishment  Revue des deux mondes Maurice Talmeyr accused contemporary posters of being a corrupting influence, typically modern  and decadent in their feverish commercialism  and lack  of  respect for women. religion, and authority, calling for them to  promote more elevated values. 5  In  riposte. it was argued that the recent proliferation of the  multicolored poster  was a lively  counter to  the  regime's stuffiness;  hitherto the  Parisian  street had  been "straight,  regular, chaste. and republican. "6

Henri Toulouse-Lautrec's Illustration for the song "Eros Exhausted," c.1894

The  decadent critique was central to  the "Montmartre" culture of cabarets, illustrated periodicals,  and popular song within which   Lautrec's work developed and  to which  it contributed. The easing of the  censorship laws in  1881 gave scope for  the  younger generation's perception of  the  bourgeois  republic as corrupt and  venal, stuffy and hypocritical. During the early 1880s Montmartre rapidly developed into the locale where such  anti-establishment attitudes were stridently voiced.  There were a number of reasons why Montmartre. rather than some other quartier, nurtured this  subculture.  Its history of  independence counted; it  had  only  become officially incorporated into the administration of  Paris in  1860,  and  its  record in  the Commune gave it a whiff of danger.7   Its lower slopes, nearer the  city center, already housed the  studios of  important artists such as Degas, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, and  Gustave Moreau, and  alongside  the studios was an infrastructure of  models, dealers in artists' materials, and so  on. Toward the top  of  the Montmartre hill, "the butte," rents were  cheaper for younger artists because it was a more proletarian district.  and the  combination of  low life  and low cost suited  Lauttrec and his  peers.  Finally, Montmartre already had  its  vernacular entertainments:  working­class  bars and  dance halls. And as a porous Frontier where there was seepage between the  smarter classes of central Paris and the proletariat of  the  outer suburbs. where the two might meet in  the  commerce of  leisure and prostitution, it was a habitat where the egalitarian rhetoric of  the Third  Republic came under scrutiny. Class mixture was less  an  expression  of  fraternity than nervous,  temporary cross-quartier tourism, less  an  expression or  equality than evidence of  the  hypocrisy and exploitation of much social exchange.   In any  event. Montmartre was the ideal  terrain for  the  development of  up-to-the-minute  cultural forms.