Abstract
Joseph Pujol, the ‘Pétomane’ performed to packed audiences at the Moulin Rouge in the early 1890s. By 1906 one of his contemporaries would remark that ‘this artist’s specialty was no longer in fashion’. When legal battles occurred between Pujol and the Moulin Rouge, newspaper commentaries were filled with hilarity that a man whose anus was the source of his income was now trying to gain a fortune from it. What might the spectacular anus of Pujol, and its pecuniary trials and tribulations, tell us about bodily imagination in late nineteenth-century France? Pujol’s idiosyncratic career has rarely been considered as an historical object; and when it has, the gaze has been light-hearted and filled with puns, much like those that surrounded him in his lifetime. But if the temptation to giggle is resisted for a moment, the Pétomane can teach us much about symbolic meanings that were ascribed to the anus in late nineteenth-century Paris.
No other nineteenth-century figure has managed to remain as legendary as Joseph Pujol, ‘le Pétomane’, without having become the object of sustained scholarly attention. Pujol’s career choice was possibly the silliest and most transient of any figure in the history of French public life, and so by definition he has not inspired either serious or sustained consideration by historians and cultural studies researchers. He made his career as a performer from a body part that was unacceptable even to discuss in most social situations in France at this time, let alone to spectacularise or vocalise; and indeed this remains so in most polite contexts of our own time as well. The anus has nonetheless clearly also been a most common body part referred to in European comedic cultures since the early modern era (Dundas, 1989). Never in recorded history, however, had any performer made a career of it as a musical and vocal instrument. Joseph Pujol was truly original.
Understanding the Pétomane phenomenon requires a number of contextual considerations. As Vanessa Schwarz, Charles Rearick, Mariel Oberthür and others have remarked, Paris in the last decade of the nineteenth-century became an unprecedented locus of concentrated entertainment, seeing a rapid burgeoning of cabarets, cafés-concerts, and music-halls (Schwarz, 1998; Rearick, 1985; Oberthür, 1984). Novelty became a primary attraction in the entertainment culture of the belle époque, and the Paris music-hall scene where Pujol made his name was particularly receptive to the unique oddity, spectacle and absurdity of the Pétomane act. The themes of class irreverence and bourgeois parody in Pujol’s act were indicative of a Parisian entertainment culture in which social elites subjected themselves to mockery in exchange for the titillation of the music-hall’s exotic blend of high and low culture; it provided extravagant spectacle coupled with an abundance of prostitutes, its decorations including shady characters of the Parisian urban poor (Oberthür, 1984).
France had long traditions of humour about the anus, excretion and flatulence. It is worth considering that longer history, not merely to make a standard historicist claim by referring to earlier antecedents. Such humour in nineteenth-century France itself explicitly referenced early modern literary examples – it was a historically self-conscious form of laughter. Flatulence humour also held a special appeal in a city where the foul odours of the sewers and the menace of urban sanitary diseases continued to stand in tension with public discourses about urban modernisation as the mark of civilisation. The sewers were glamorised as a middle-class tourist attraction, but they were also a genuine health concern, and the fowl odours of Paris were a sustained source of public dismay. This tension, in combination with the pre-established set of comedic tropes derived from earlier scatological literature, made flatulence and excremental matters ripe topics for Parisian laughter in the 1890s.
Both context and text are important to consider for an understanding the Pétomane. The significance of Pujol’s comedic appeal is teased out here, both through a close reading of the themes of his act and through the study of recorded responses to it, including the reception of Pujol’s performance among his contemporaries, and the subsequent representations of him by chroniclers of that period in the history of the Moulin Rouge. Class was a central theme both in Pujol’s humour and in receptions of him. The Pétomane at the Moulin Rouge made base things and lower-class buffoonery available for upper-middle-class laughter, while mocking bourgeois propriety itself. Such was the Pétomane phenomenon encoded along high and low culture lines, that in a fin-de-siècle show of snobbery the socialist deputy Louis Calvinhac could reference it in the statement that ‘Les applaudisseurs du pétomane ne peuvent apprécier ni connaître Molière’ (Calvinhac, 1896: 91). In the sociological terminology of Victor Turner and Mikhail Bakhtin, the Moulin Rouge indeed provided a ‘liminal’ space in which the polite classes could step outside convention and find momentary amusement in the seedier milieux of central Paris. The music-hall experience was ‘carnivalesque’ in its inversion of the class order: here the urban working class stood on stage above the high bourgeoisie, mocking its sensibilities and grotesquely parodying its propriety (Turner, 1969; Bakhtin, 1984). The Pétomane’s act did not endure long, since the Parisian audiences, as Charles Rearick has noted, ‘were hungry for novelty’ (Rearick, 1985: 75). But popular comedic texts continued to exploit Pujol’s example for many years afterwards, in forms neither restricted to the music-hall audience nor loyal to the thematic logic of the Pétomane’s original form.
‘Je suis un invisible corps …’
At the age of about ten years old in the late 1960s, on the Mediterranean just outside Toulon, Joseph Pujol (1857–1945), the son of a comfortable family of Catalan stonemasons, discovered something strange and disturbing about his rectum. Nothing could have been more revolutionary in the life of Pujol than the revelation of the peculiar capacity he appeared naturally to possess to draw water into his anus and expel it again at will. The same mechanism performed on dry land allowed air to be aspirated and expelled, providing a highly malleable anal voice. That discovery made the difference between the mundane peaceful existence of petit commerce provincial towards which he would otherwise have been demographically prone, and the utterly unique life he experienced instead – one of spectacle, laughter, bohemian sociability, fame and fortune in Paris and beyond. Joseph Pujol was not content to have a simple party trick; rather, as the son of a stonemason, or like the baker he would later become, he treated his unusual ability as the raw material to be crafted into something pleasing and profitable. He trained his sonic instrument just as others would train their vocal chords, and by the time he was a young adult he could produce a startling range of sounds, nuanced by tonal, timbre and dynamic variation, and animated by caricature and buffoonery. His sounds included (obviously) the imitation of every conceivable variety of flatulent noise, but his skills also permitted short and simple melodies; and the articulations of embouchure he developed allowed him to enunciate letters of the alphabet and imitate qualitatively specific sounds like that of fabric tearing or thunder rumbling. His subtle control of the release of air with different levels of muscular tension of his anal sphincter meant that he could vary the length and dynamic range of his sounds, producing dramatic vocal sighs, yawns and whimpers. He incorporated these skills into his general music-hall training (he also sang and played the trombone), and around 1880 he gave himself a stage name under which he began performing in Marseille, Bordeaux and Clermont-Ferrand (Nohain and Caradec, 2000 [1967]: 37). He was the Pétomane.
Of course, none of this will be new to anyone familiar with the history of French popular culture. In part the notoriety of the Pétomane derives from various cinematic representations of his life, such as the 1983 film by the Italian director Pasquale Festa Campanile, Il petomane, starring Ugo Tognazzi; or Steve Ochs’ 2005 film, Le Pétomane: parti avec le vent; or the Channel 4 documentary made about him in 1979 by Ian McNaughton of Monty Python fame. But in large part, the Pétomane’s late twentieth-century fame is due to the work of two theatre, music-hall and café-concert scholars whose study of Pujol has remained until now the only published work about him based on original archival research (Nohain and Caradec, 2000). One reason for the long hiatus in Pétomane scholarly research derives from the difficulty of accessing the archival materials to which Nohain and Caradec were privy. Those materials were once held in the Musée National des Arts et des Traditions populaires near the Bois-de-Boulogne in Paris, but the museum was closed to all public access in 2005.
The original 1967 biographical study of the Pétomane by the theatre historian François Caradec and the television producer Jean Nohain, as well as its various revised versions, is light-hearted in tone: ‘une histoire souriante – et documentée – du spectacle au temps des années folles, sur lesquelles soufflait … un vent (de folie)’ (Nohain and Caradec, 2000: back cover). It is full of flatulence puns made in the spirit, the authors suggest, of Pujol’s own humoristic appeal, and hence the most appropriate way to honour his memory. It was originally published by the always risqué Jean-Jacques Pauvert, best known for his re-edition of the works of the Marquis de Sade. (Pauvert stood trial in 1956 for publishing those works deemed ‘contraires aux bonnes mœurs’ under the law of 19 July 1939 (Brochier, 1967: 73).) The Nohain and Caradec volume was not so controversial, and passed into obscurity until it underwent something of a revival in the 1980s, and there have now been several French re-editions and foreign language translations of it produced since that time (Nohain and Caradec, 1996, 2000). A version of the Pétomane story, derived from Nohain and Caradec’s account, now features in every book in that curious new genre of popular cultural histories of excretion and flatulence (for example, Dawson 2010, 1999; Spinard, 1999; Feixas, 1996; Freixinos 1992). There is insufficient space here to discuss the details of Pujol’s unusual life except to sketch out the features of his successful if tumultuous career as a professional ‘fartiste’, in order to address the concerns at the heart of this article – his reception and uptake in comedy culture of late nineteenth-century France and the reasons for his acclaim in that particular time and place.
There is no doubt a significant genealogy of scatological art and literature that helps to contextualise the reception of Pujol in fin-de-siècle France, and which might arguably extend back to Rabelais or the medieval langue d’oïl fabliaux. The themes of mockery of class distinction, profit and intellectual property, and national and regional attributions of meaning to fart humour were readily deployable at the fin de siècle, in part because of the already long-established traditions of scatological political satire in France. Excretion, flatulence and anuses were often invoked to critique social relations of corruption, predation and exploitation. Many readers will recall, no doubt, the famous image from 1831 by the well-known caricature lithographer Honoré Daumier, captioned Gargantua in reference to Rabelais’s sixteenth-century scatological story of two giants, which Daumier referenced to critique the covertly non-egalitarian reign of Louis Philippe d’Orléans – the self-styled king of the masses under whom the haute bourgeoisie got richer and the urban working poor got considerably poorer. Daumier depicted the working class being gobbled up by the ‘poire’ and defecated out again as royal decrees, and of course spent time in jail for that image (see Figure 1).
Georges Besson (ed.) (1959) Daumier. Paris: Éditions Cercle d’Art, plate 1.
Rabelais underwent a considerable revival in France in the nineteenth century. In 1854 there was a new edition of La Vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel, illustrated with stunning detail and artistry by the graphic illustrator Gustave Doré (Rabelais, 1854). In 1873 there was a new collection of Rabelais-inspired flatulence poems by Léon Willem called Farce nouvelle et joyeuse du pet (Guerrand, 1997: 14). In the last years of the ancien régime, an anonymous author who was probably – by the estimation of the Bibliothèque Nationale – the publicist Alphonse Martainville, had published a little-known work called Merdiana, ou manuel des chieurs, a work of scatological comic satire that used humour about flatulence and excretion to make fun of aristocrats and foreign nationalities (Anon., 1803). The work was republished in 1803 and then again in 1870, with the relaxation of censorship that followed the demise of the Second Empire. Scatology, it seems, needed to be revivified in the late nineteenth century by drawing on earlier ‘carnivalesque’ cultural traditions. Like the Rabelaisian texts that were the object of Bakhtin’s analysis, nineteenth-century scatology indeed relied upon ‘a game in which “exalted” and “sacred” things were combined with images of the lower stratum’ (Bahktin, 1984: 192). While it may be generally problematic for historicist values to apply that term to examples of humour that fall outside the cultural context which Bakhtin was considering when he coined it (early modern urban society), in the case of the nineteenth-century scatological texts discussed above, the imaginative world of Rabelais was quite clearly and explicitly referenced.
But in the final 20 years or so the nineteenth century, there emerged some new possibilities for anal humour that contained elements not seen in previous scatological texts. While the earlier traditions may well help to explain how there might be a cultural space for the reception of the Pétomane in fin-de-siècle France, it is less clear how much they might be said to have caused Pujol to cultivate his peculiar talents. In fact, one of the striking discrepancies immediately apparent between Pujol’s own semiotic emphasis, and that which was attributed to him by external commentators and imitators, is the relative lack of excretory or scatological references in Pujol’s own imagination of his art. The jokes were certainly about flatulence, about social class and propriety, but they were never in fact about excrement or foul odours. Hence, while it is clear that some of the semiotic components of Pujol’s comedy and some of the reception discourses about him drew from earlier Rabelaisian precedents, the context of the long tradition of French scatological humour is perhaps less adequate as a singular explanation for the mentality of this peculiar individual than we might at first imagine.
Part of what enabled the Pétomane’s unusual career as a professional farter was undoubtedly the particular character of the venue in which he debuted in Paris. The Moulin Rouge was an elaborately constructed and decorated large-scale venue attracting a mix of low to upper-middle-class patrons, foreign bourgeois and provincial well-to-do tourists. It was launched by theatre entrepreneur Joseph Oller in 1889 as a dance-hall, and with its growing success it was established increasingly as a more grandiose music-hall theatre. Like other venues of a similar genre, it was located in Montmartre, in the entertainment centre of the city, and enjoyed a reputation of greater notoriety than the more numerous small local neighbourhood venues where patrons could consume alcohol and be entertained by musical performers, commonly known as cafés-concerts. However, in practice the performance style often varied little between the kinds of venue, and indeed many performers moved between them, trading the same acts each time (Moore Whiting, 1999: 28). Like the Moulin Rouge, the infamous Folies-Bergères underwent a similar transformation from even humbler origins to become a full scale music-hall in the 1890s, and indeed numerous caf’conc’ in the last decade of the century increasingly moved towards the English-style model of varied acts and lavish theatricality, in order to charge higher entrance fees and to attract a generally more well-to-do audience (Rearick,1985: 83).
There is no doubt that the lure for many upper-class gentlemen of venues such as the Moulin Rouge and the Chat Noir derived in part from the ambiguous possibilities they provided for alcohol consumption, entertainment and yet more salacious forms of leisure. Prostitution flourished in Montmartre in this era, and women were generally admitted free or at lower cost to music-hall venues. Belle époque entertainment was in general characterised by a remarkable degree of corporeal excess and histrionic gesture. Rae Beth Gordon notes that scatological humour was not uncommon in the café-concert style of venue, where frenzied singer-dancers, referred to as ‘épileptiques’, could also be found. Comparisons were sometimes made between the spectacle of theatrical dancers and the back-arching hysterics of the Salpêtrière (Gordon, 2009: 25). Another famous colleague of the Pétomane was Jeanne Wéber, ‘la Goulue’, who performed belly dancing with her voluptuous form, inspiring erotic fascination and disgust in a society where corpulence too was coming to hold a particular value associated with degeneration and sickly health, as Christopher Forth has noted of the fin-de-siècle debates around the Dreyfus Affair (Forth, 2004: 18–98). Gordon argues throughout her 2009 book, Dances With Darwin, that caf’-conc’ and music-hall culture was an important avenue for the spectacularisation of visions of hysteria, madness, primitiveness and degeneration that proliferated in scientific thinking in this period. These were places where one went to be titillated and entertained, but also confronted and shocked by performers prodding at issues of common social discomfort. Scatological humour featured with some regularity in these theatrical genres too. According to the popular literary newspaper, Gil Blas illustré, there was a can-can dancer at the Moulin Rouge named Mademoiselle Grille-d’Égout (Anon., 1891). And the librettist Georges Montorgueil complained that both scatological references and boob jokes were part of the standard fare of the cafés-concerts (Montorgueil, 1893: 8).
Gustave Geffroy, a journalist, art critic and founding member of the Académie Goncourt, reflected on the disturbing mixture of ‘spectacle’ and ‘ordure’ to be found in the cafés-concerts in an 1894 text ostensibly about the Moulin Rouge singer Yvette Guilbert which appeared in a booklet illustrated by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. As Bettina Knapp and Myra Chipman remarked, Guilbert’s songs were renowned for their exploration of the ‘degraded or morbid side of life’ (cited in Golden, 2000: 12). Geffroy’s text is a general excursus on the ambivalence of the music-halls and cafés-concerts, while Yvette Guilbert is represented only through Toulouse-Lautrec’s illustrations. Geffroy was careful not to denigrate the audience, whom he regarded with some pity for their desperation and alienation from modern life, leading them to seek comfort and pleasure, often to their detriment: ‘Il est certain que la répulsion peu être vive, que l’esprit peut gagner là un malaise, un effroi, un dégoût, une sorte de courbature morale dont il sera quelques temps à se défaire’ (Geffroy, 1894: 8). He described this genre of venue in terms of monstrosity, abjection, sludge and ill-health: ‘le monstre est vivace, et nul ne défendrait son insolente santé’, further speaking of ‘le bas-fond remué, la montée de ruisseau, la débâcle de fange’ (Geffroy, 1894: 11). Similarly, a new periodical of the quartiers of the Grandes Carrières, Clignancourt, Goutte d’Or and La Chapelle was established in 1892 with the self-proclaimed mission of cleaning up the reputation of the 18th arrondissement: ‘L’Aurore Montmartroise apparaît; Pour effacer le souvenir du pétomane’ (L’Aurore Montmartoise, 1893, title page).
Geffroy complained that venues such as the Moulin Rouge fostered class inequality, since five sous would get an entry, but if one actually wanted to hear or see anything, the better seats were more likely to cost five, six or seven francs (Geffroy, 1894: 10). It is also clear that for Geffroy abject references in musical theatre were a sign of something particularly French and inscribed in long cultural tradition (‘Ils font partie d’une lignée’), referring to the lewd corbels on Romanesque stone churches of the Middle Ages, and to the literature of Rabelais. In this tradition, according to Geffroy, the lower functions are embraced in styles of realist representation – ‘contrepoids … d’une cérébralité alerte’ – as a necessary balance to French intellectualism (Geffroy, 1894: 15).
The Pétomane was referred to explicitly in relation to this kind of view of popular musical theatre, not only during his own career, but some ten years after he had quit the Parisian stage. In an article entitled ‘Décadence’ in Le Courrier Français of 1906, Berthe Mariani chose to remind readers of the Pétomane to make a point about the decadent, foolish and abject qualities of popular theatre, even as many venues were by then losing ground to other styles of theatre and to the new entertainment technology of the cinema. ‘Cette génération des dégénérés’ needed ‘quelque chose de très bête ou de très sale – les deux réunis constituent le chic suprême. C’est ici le cas de reparler d’un homme qui fut assez fort pour établir sa fortune en prenant base la bêtise de ses contemporains’ (Mariani, 1906: 4–6).
Already in the 1870s, the new musical theatres, in Huysmans’s words, were ‘laid et … superbe, c’est d’un gout outrageux et exquis’ (Huysmans, 1879: 28). Music-halls and cafés-concerts had begun to appear in urban cultural life in Paris, Bordeaux, Marseille and other large towns since the mid 1860s, and were thus an established and appropriate milieu for the peculiar character of the Pétomane’s talents. Arguably, it may never have occurred to Pujol to package his capacities in such a fashion if he had not been exposed to the caf’-conc’ and music-hall scenes in the south of France in his youth. Joseph Pujol came from a family of five children, and of the others his sister Louise Pont was also a locally successful caf’-conc’ and music-hall singer. His brother Marius was also in the theatre, and both he and another brother Louis later collaborated with Joseph in his post-Pétomane theatre projects (Nohain and Caradec, 2000: 28).
Pujol performed in small theatres and at private functions throughout the 1880s in towns throughout the south of France, and in 1890 he took his act to Paris. He was hired by Charles Zidler and performed every night in front of the elephant on the outdoor patio stage at the Moulin Rouge from 1892 to 1894, according to one contemporary fellow performer, earning more than any other artist employed there at the time (Pagnol, 1947: 73). His performance was widely reviewed and commented upon in a range of popular Parisian newspapers. Then he was embroiled in a series of legal battles – the first in 1894 when the Moulin Rouge led a successful court case against him for breach of contract when Pujol established his own theatre company called the Théâtre Pompadour; the second in 1898 when he unsuccessfully attempted a legal suit against the Moulin Rouge after they replaced him with a female fake-Pétomane, called la Femme-Pétomane, who imitated his act with the use of a bellows hidden under her skirt (Rearick, 1985: 75; Nohain and Caradec, 2000: 76). These court cases were highly publicised, leaving a significant corpus of media commentary on Pujol’s remarkable act and its range of meanings to Parisian society.
When we examine the press commentary about Pujol’s trials and tribulations, it is clear that a symbolic relation between money, social class and the anus was at play. Yvette Guilbert recounted that the Moulin Rouge poster about him read: ‘Tous les soirs, de 8 heures a 9 heures
Paris Qui Rit, 9 October 1892. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
A plagiarised story of 1893 called Le Ventomane by Grente-Dancourt referred to the juxtaposition of high class and low humour in terms reminiscent of Gustave Geffroy‘s claim about the functional necessity of scatology in French culture:
La noblesse des faubourgs et tout ce que Paris compte de notabilités littéraires, artistiques et mondaines ! (Gravement.) Le beau toujours attire les foules, et les plus blasés éprouvent, à de certaines heures, l’invincible besoin de se retremper dans l’idéal et de respirer un autre air que celui qu’ils respirent tous les jours! (Grente-Dancourt, 1893: 5)
Grente-Dancourt also used the Pétomane gag in a parody of the divine mystery of wind as evoked in John’s Gospel (3:8), joining irreverent anal humour to the mockery of Catholic faith. His Ventomane pamphlet begins: ‘Je suis un invisible corps, Qui de bas lieu tire mon être, Et je n’ose faire connaître, Ni qui je suis, ni d’où je sors’ (Grente-Dancourt, 1893: 5).
Satirical journalists found many things to say about the apparently endlessly amusing story of a man who not only could sing with his anus, but who made financial gain from it, and who fought to hold onto those earnings and to maximise them in a legal struggle. In June 1892 Le Courrier Français, one of the belle époque’s most widely read popular satirical newspapers, published a little poem about the Pétomane by Raoul Ponchon. It described the latest new craze surrounding to Pujol’s ability, relating it to matters of class distinction, and included a punch-line drawing together the symbolic association of the anus with money:
Cet homme peut à volonté, Péter, puer en société, Et cela hiver comme été; Chacun voulut voir ce prodige, Et toute la ville, vous dis-je, Fut comme prise de vertige, Et voilà que cet indigent, Qui croyait em–bêter les gens, Gagner en pétant d’argent. (Ponchon, 1892a: 1)
Later, as the various court cases were taking place, press journalists returned repeatedly to the amusing irony of the commodity of Pujol’s anus being fought over for so much money. The Pétomane was no longer, they laughed, ‘le seul artiste qui ne paie pas des droits d’auteur’.
An obvious place to look for an explanation of this type of humour at the fin de siècle is in the psychological account of that other great anal thinker in Europe at that time, Sigmund Freud. Class, money and excretion were symbolically linked in the civilised European mind, Freud argued in the 1908 article ‘Character Und Analerotik’ and in a number of other works around that time (Freud, 1995 [1908]: 295–7); but we know from his correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess that he had in fact thought about it as early as the 1890s (Freud and Fliess, 1986 [1897]: 226–9). Excretion, Freud claimed, is the bodily function that teaches the bourgeois child about monetary value. Excrement is the thing of lowest value while money or gold is the highest, therefore in the unconscious mind they are interchangeable, giving rise to expressions like the German Dukatenscheisser, or ‘shitter of ducats’, referring to a wealthy spendthrift. While it may seem like an obvious course of inquiry, then, to apply Freud’s theory to a study of scatological joking about class and profit, there is a different line of approach that might be used to bring intelligibility to the comparison. Freud does not appear ever to have mentioned the Pétomane in any of his professional writings or correspondence, though he did refer to other Moulin Rouge artists such as Yvette Guibert and Sarah Bernhardt whom he heard perform at other Parisian clubs while he was a student with Charcot at the Salpêtrière. The claim espoused here is not that the Pétomane necessarily influenced Freud’s thinking directly in the development of psychoanalytic theories of money and anality, but rather that there was a set of ready-made symbolic associations in late nineteenth-century European cultures to which Freud was exposed, and his ideas about anality and money, bodies and social class, thus belong in a popular imaginary that overlapped with the reception of Joseph Pujol.
Pujol’s act was given a range of other meanings too. In September 1892 Eugène Fourier described Pujol in Gil Blas illustré as ‘Un type bien moderne, bien fin de siècle, celui-là, et qui mérite une étude particulière’ (Fourier, 1892). Ironic reference to Pujol as the representative of the truly Roman dimension of high French culture was common. An 1893 edition of Les Annales politiques et littéraires claimed ironically that Pujol must be descended from Roman patrician lineage because Saint Augustine had mentioned an emperor who could produce: ‘des sons nombreux par en bas de sorte qu’ils paraissent chanter de ce côté’. In the slightly more popular weekly Le Chat noir, Fransisque Sarcey remarked that his preference for a performance by the Pétomane over a concert by Saint Celia herself was a sign of ‘le goût inné de certaines plaisanteries de ma race’; and the race he claimed was that is of the Gaulois – the race of Rabelais (Sarcey, 1893).
Ethnicity recurred as a theme about his performances as well. The Pétomane spoke French with a strong accent – born in the 1850s and raised prior to the era of free, secular and compulsory education in France’s uniquely recognised national tongue, Catalan Occitan would undoubtedly have been his first language. In Le Courrier Français, Raoul Ponchon quipped: ‘Tous ces bruits – disons-le bien vite – Étaient des bruits sans fondement: Il soignait une laryngite, Dans le midi, tout simplement’ (Ponchon, 1892b: 79). ‘Dans le midi’ here held the double-entendre of ‘in the nether region’ as well as ‘in the south of France’. That theme appeared too in some of the imitator texts that appeared at the time. In 1896 another theatrical script called ‘Bistrouille Pétomane’ in the Chanson de poche, collection Bibi-Tapin: chanson et monologue curieux des cabarets de Paris, describes a narrative of two provincial soldiers, one with a heavy Marseille accent, who sneak into a Pétomane performance (Anon., 1896).
If Pujol was keen to prevent the theft of his act from imitators, he had little control over the substantial plagiarism of his ideas in the numerous comic scripts that circulated during the 1890s. Grente-Dancourt’s Le Ventomane clearly described the performance of Pujol: ‘Le Maître, qui s’est recueilli, s’incline légèrement, pose ses deux mains sur ses deux genoux, et, dans cette attitude dont le laisser-aller n’exclut ni la noblesse, ni la grâce, souriant, il ouvre le … la … hum ! … et commence’ (Grente-Dancourt, 1893: 6). In this version of the story though, the Ventomane’s finale occurs when he accidentally over-shoots, and exits the stage, it is implied, with a turd in his pants (Grente-Dancourt, 1893: 9). The word péter is left unspoken throughout the story, in a comic gesture of pudeur, and yet the scatological ending is far more grotesque than anything Pujol himself did on stage. Another 1893 script by a certain Humblot, called Pétomane par amour!, tells the story of a man who claims to owe his happiness to the Pétomane because when he, Zéphirin, and his fiancée Stéphanie hear the ‘fartist’ perform at the soirée of a wealthy and distinguished lady, Stéphanie promises to marry Zéphirin if only he will learn to do what the Pétomane does. So Zéphirin begs the Pétomane for lessons and after some sound advice from the virtuoso and after much practice, he is able to make a few simple sounds and is thereafter happily married (Humblot, 1893: 14–16).
The film-maker Marcel Pagnol, in a 1947 publication reflecting on laughter called Notes sur le rire, remarked that Pujol’s central theme was the outrageousness of farting in polite society. Flatulence is only funny, he argued, if it is a priest or a mayor who is caught doing it. That account of scatological humour is a fair statement about the timbre of the jokes made by Pujol himself. However, in other Pétomane-inspired texts of the fin de siècle, and in press commentaries about him, there are many examples of laughter about the flatulence of the peasant, the common soldier, the provincial, and especially the provincial–peasant–common soldier. The 1896 booklet ‘Bistrouille Pétomane’ suggested that theme, pitting a pair of clowning peasant soldiers against their sergeant, a figure of superior military and social status (Anon., 1896). One of the soldiers innocently imagines his own original innovation on the Pétomane act – instead of singing with this arse, he makes farting sounds with his mouth. This gets him into trouble with his sergeant, who appears from the orthography in the text to have a strong southern or perhaps Corsican accent, reprimanding him: ‘pourr incongruérrruité dé honorrrante à la face de vot’ supériorr!’ (Anon., 1896: 5). The sergeant threatens him so ferociously that he gives the soldier colic. In attempting to answer his sergeant in the same vocal farting language, he thus accidentally vomits excrement all over the officer before him (Anon., 1896: 6). In this also far more grotesque tale, class and ethnicity feature not in the usual Pétomane-style allusion to polite society and aristocracy, but as a sign of the resistance of the lower-class provincial in the face of his commanding officer. The question of which class farting made for the funniest joke was clearly also a matter of who was doing the laughing.
‘Un cas extraordinaire d’aspiration rectale et d’anus musical’
The Pétomane also attracted the curiosity of men of science, who asked to study his unusual physiology, and it is thanks to the work of the Bordelais doctor Marcel Baudoin, whose article entitled ‘Un cas extraordinaire d’aspiration rectale et d’anus musical’ was published in the journal La Semaine médicale in 1892, that we have a detailed medical observation of what exactly Pujol did with his body (Baudoin, 1892). Other studies of Pujol’s physical mechanism were conducted by doctors, firstly in Clermont-Ferrand in 1892 (Nohain and Caradec, 2000: 97), then in Paris, when he performed a demonstration for the Société d’anatomie et de physiologie at the Saint-André hospital (Baudoin, 1892: 145). Later, when Pujol returned to the south, a Toulouse doctor also examined him and wrote about it (Charpy, 1904). These accounts reveal a striking contrast between the physical reality of his skill and the production of meanings about his act. Pujol was not farting at all, in the sense that there were no intestinal gases released with the production of sounds by his anus. The air he expelled and used his sphincter muscles to make vibrate, much as we do with our vocal chords when we speak and sing, was fresh air he had anally ‘breathed in’ – as fresh at least as the air ever was in Paris in the 1890s.
François Caradec and Alain Weill note how the music-halls and cafés-concerts both tended to be highly topical genres in terms of their theatrical content. Musicians and dancers there relied considerably on their skill at improvisation – songs were often written and performed on the same day, and hence themes that circulated in public life, in everyday conversation, in newspapers, scandal and rumour tended to find their way onto the musical stage faster than in other kinds of theatre (Caradec and Weill, 2007). That topicality may help to explain why a performer could be so successful with an act that reminded audiences at once of the stinking Paris sewers, the incessant public debates about noxious gases of modern urban life, and the association of social class with filth and propriety. This is the other context to Pujol’s reception that is crucial for understanding how the humour of his performance operated. Many of the same newspapers that picked up on the Pétomane phenomenon were also, in that same period, often joking and complaining about the filth of the Seine and the stench of Parisian air which was the result of drainage problems around the départements along the river, and from the new crisis of an over-burdened sewerage system in need of yet more technological development than that than that undertaken by Haussmann under the Second Empire (Barnes, 2006).
A number of scholars have shown the extent to which France throughout the nineteenth century was gripped by concerns about sewerage management, urban disease and foul odours that resulted from the dramatic population increase across that century and its intensification in urban centres, especially Paris (Corbin, 1982; Vigarello, 1985; Reid, 1991; Kudlick, 1996; Guerrand, 2001; Barnes, 2006). In the first wave of this urban crisis during the 1830s there had emerged a common discourse that associated the working classes, prostitutes and the most poverty-stricken Parisians generally with filth, stench, disease and degeneration (Parent-Duchâtelet, 1837). Cleanliness came to be associated with class privilege (Vigarello, 1985: 199–206). Excrement thus stood for the lower classes, as in Daumier’s famous satirical image. That association was reinforced under the Second Empire when the newly technologised égoûts were first opened to the public, allowing the more privileged classes to step down for a moment into the bowels of Paris, assured of the odourlessness and tidiness of this latest sign of Haussmannian triumph over the masses and their abject waste (Reid, 1991: 47). The conquest of filth was hailed as a sign that French civilisation had attained perfection in the likeness of Rome before the fall (Mayer, 1867). And for a few decades, until the end of the summer of 1880, there was no apparent foul smell emanating from the sewerage system of Paris.
In the decade before Joseph Pujol brought his act to the Moulin Rouge, a new crisis of urban sanitation emerged in Paris, this one provoking sustained press commentary and political debate. The sewer tours had to be stopped, as the spectacle of an odourless and pristine interior of the conquered belly of Paris could no longer be provided. By that time, the old medical paradigm of miasma theory, according to which foul odours were taken as the causative sign of mysterious illness, had dwindled in response to the bacteriological research of Louis Pasteur, and most medical scientists now viewed odour as not necessarily nefarious to health (Corbin, 1982: 260). But as David Barnes has shown, that question remained a topic of widespread public debates and scepticism, since it was also clear that the ‘Great Stink of Paris’ coincided with new waves of cholera and typhoid, and was commonly complained about in political opposition (Barnes, 2006: 12–15). On 23 November 1884 the front page of the republican satirical newspaper Le Grelot showed a Dr Épatant devouring a choleric excreta in order to prove that it was not contagious, transforming it through digestion into a bouquet of fragrant violets (Figure 3). The bourgeois conquest of urban filth was implied in the sewer renovations of the Second Empire through the promotion of these achievements as the signs of a great civilisation; and this, in the context of longer nineteenth-century patterns of associating class privilege with propriety, now produced some easy targets for scatological republican satire and low-brow comedy. It was in the 1870s and 1880s that Émile Zola produced the social realist novels most peppered with scatological imagery referring to social class, capitalism and wealth, Le Ventre de Paris (1873), La Terre (1887) and others in the Rougon-Macquard series (Bellos, 1979: 35–8).
Le Grelot, 23 November 1884. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
Although Pujol was not actually releasing any intestinal gasses when he produced the novel range of tones and timbres that his highly trained sphincter muscles had cultivated, public perceptions of him appeared to have unanimously imagined the sounds to represent genuine flatulent odour. That was probably less because the truth was unknown than because the view of him as farting enabled his example to inspire endless riffs on scatological themes – themes derived from those longer French literary and satirical traditions into which the Pétomane’s act could be semiotically inscribed. He was, after all, producing fart-like sounds with his anus. Pujol’s performance suggested actual flatulence too, insofar as a part of his act included imitating the farts of various personae, ‘the young maiden’ for whom he squeezed out a dainty whining sound, ‘the mother-in-law’ for whom he ripped out a bombastic honk in that long tradition of mother-in-law humour that poked fun at both feminine pudeur and at matriarchal familial power. But Pujol also imitated other kinds of sounds – human voices, canon-fire and thunder-claps – and using a small tube which he inserted into his rectum, and which protruded through a hole in his trousers, he blew out candles from a distance away, smoked cigarettes, and channelled a concentrated stream of air into various musical instruments with his anus, so producing simple melodies on them. Though his stage name suggested the action of his body was péter, in fact, the idea that he might be releasing intestinal gas or foul odour was not referenced at all in the spectrum of meanings that he himself appears to have designated in relation to his anal sound range. Most typically, he played upon the idea of his anus as a kind of mouth, and his lower intestine as a lung-like bellows, which was in fact a more accurate representation of the mechanism by which he performed his sonic feats. He mocked the conventions of polite society and the gendered pretention of propriety and poked fun at political figures. From everyone else’s point of view, however, the Pétomane was farting. No one could smell anything, but they loved to joke about it nonetheless.
The renowned early twentieth-century songwriter Vincent Scotto in his retrospective Souvenirs de Paris published just after World War Two remarked that when he visited the Pétomane in Marseilles just before the war, he found him still keen to perform: ‘il ne songeait qu’à remonter sur quelque scene’. But the time of Pétomania had passed, Scotto claimed: ‘la mode n’était plus vraiment à la spécialité de cet artiste’ (Sotto, cited in Nohain and Caradec, 2000: 9). Neither Sotto nor Nohain and Caradec ventured any opinion about why the Pétomane, who was so funny to late nineteenth-century audiences, was not longer so in the interwar period. But the claim that the Pétomane moment had passed some time in the early twentieth century appears to correspond to the conclusion drawn by the small number of Pétomane historical commentators, who are more inclined to speculate on what might have changed. Marcel Pagnol suggested that a fart joker could be funny enough to make a career out of his act at the fin de siècle, but not in the aftermath of trench warfare and gas attacks, and even less so in the aftermath of the Nazi occupation that had left French people humourless on the whole, and certainly ill-inclined towards any such frivolous form of laughter (Pagnol, 1947: 92). But the Pétomane was himself barely interested in the notion of his anal sounds as odorous gas: nor was that the reality of his feats. He cultivated a more complex set of virtuoso skills than he has generally been given credit for, and his own humour was far more focused on class parody, caricature, absurdity and light-hearted buffoonery than on any attempt to reference the common Parisian social concerns about odour and anal filth which his performance often prompted in the minds of others.
It is more likely that the Pétomane phenomenon passed from vogue because it was unique to a particular moment in the history of French musical theatre. In its early years the Moulin Rouge thrived on novelty and hired new acts regularly to feed a burgeoning public hunger for the new. Pujol’s routine was so successful that it spurned multiple uptakes in comedic texts such as the ‘Bistrouille Pétomane’, and those of Grente-Dencourt and Humblot, and even the occasional imitator. These copies possibly contributed to the Pétomane becoming too familiar to shock any more. But after 1900 the Moulin Rouge also underwent major renovation and was transformed into a far more conventional music-hall catering increasingly to wealthy foreign and provincial tourists, and less to the middle and upper-middle class of Paris (Rearick, 1985: 95).
If the Pétomane was only à la mode in Paris for a decade or so, this may also be because imitating his highly unconventional virtuosity was no simple feat. He was highly skilled in techniques that were unlikely for anyone to cultivate so seriously given their cultural attribution of absurdity and non-respectability. Becoming a Pétomane required a particular physical propensity that may not be within everyone’s grasp. As the Dr Baudoin who examined Pujol’s physiology wrote: ‘il n’y a aucune observation analogue dans les annales de la science’ (Baudoin, 1892: 144). To be a Pétomane also required genuine commitment to musical and performance training of no ordinary kind. It required a courageous, eccentric and original enough personality to pursue the most absurd and outrageous form of musicality with sufficient determination to become a virtuoso of it. Perhaps above all, it also required the music-hall genre of venue as it stood just before the end of the nineteenth century. It is clearly not the case that a successful Pétomane-style performer would be unviable in any other context, as the more recent example of Britain’s guest-show performer Mr Methane suggests (Dawson, 1999: 38). But stinking Paris at the fin de siècle, with its polluted Seine and choleric crisis, its abandoned sewer tours and its cultural associations with mud, swamp and excrement, with its bohemian urban celebration of decadence and its Third Republic blossoming of political critique and class subversion, was certainly a more fertile ground for a Pétomane than any other time–space nexus either before or after.