#FlightyFridays — WSFH Talk: “Ce gentlemen rider du turf atmospheric" [sic]: Ballooning, Aristocratic Masculinity, and the Colonial Imaginary in Turn-of-the-Century France”

Today’s #FlightyFridays will be another presentation I recently gave at the most recent Western Society for French Historical Studies Conference, which took place in a pleasantly charming but dreadfully rainy Portland, ME, from November 1-3, 2018.

Two aristocrats who tried (and failed) to cross the Mediterranean aboard a balloon—Henri de La Vaulx (left) and Georges de Castillon de Saint-Victor (right).

La Vie au Grand Air, 20 October 1901, 615 (Gallica, BNF).

I was lucky enough to be part of a panel titled “Border Crossings: Aristocratic Masculinities at the Fin de Siècle,” chaired by Sally Charnow, from Hofstra University. H-France selected our panel to be recorded, and just released it as part of the H-France Salon, Vol. 10 (2018), Issue 14. I now have the pleasure of sharing it with you.

The paper I presented was titled “‘Ce gentlemen rider du turf atmospheric’ [sic]: Ballooning, Aristocratic Masculinity, and the Colonial Imaginary in Turn-of-the-Century France.” It incorporates some new research I’ve been doing that situates ballooning within the context of empire—focusing especially on how it served both as an adventurous practice for aristocrats to negotiate their anxieties concerning France’s crisis of masculinity following the Franco-Prussian War defeat and as a way for the French to imagine how to manage their growing imperial possessions.

Venita Datta (Wellesley College) followed with a paper that compared and contrasted the performances of masculinities in the American West by Theodore Roosevelt and the curious Marquis de Morès. It was then Elizabeth Everton’s (Concordia University) turn, and she told a winding, intriguing, and often hilarious story of a duel that never happened but that still caused the press to go into a frenzy. Catherine Clark (The Massachusetts Institute of Technology) presented a very pertinent comment that addressed how perhaps we should understand masculinity as central to the construction of modernity. The panel closed with some questions and a brief but insightful discussion about how many of the tropes that informed masculinity more than a century ago linger in the present—especially in the form of toxic masculinity. All of the videos are worth checking out.

The departure of La Vaulx and Castillon de Saint-Victor’s balloon from its hangar in the Isthme des Sablettes, near Toulon, during their first attempt to cross the Mediterranean.

La Vie au Grand Air, 20 October 1901, 615 (Gallica, BNF).

Here’s my presentation (links to the full panel below):

H-France Salon, Vol.

Border Crossings: Aristocratic Masculinities at the Fin de Siècle

Chair: Sally Charnow, Hofstra University

Patrick Luiz Sullivan de Oliveira, Princeton University

“Ce gentlemen rider du turf atmosphérique’ [sic]: Ballooning, Aristocratic Masculinity, the Colonial Imaginary in Turn-of-the-Century France”

Venita Datta,Wellesley College

“Aristocratic Masculinities on the Global Frontier: The Marquis de Morès and Theodore Roosevelt”

Elizabeth Everton, Concordia University

“Dueling at a Distance, 1901: Politics, Honor, Manhood, and Exile in the ‘Affaire Buffet-Déroulède’”

Catherine Clark, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Comment and Audience Questions

#FlightyFridays — Linda Hall Library Talk: "Whims of the Wind: The Balloon's Ascent, Decline, and Resurrection in France"

For today’s #FlightyFridays I figured I’d share a broader view of my research. Earlier this year I had the opportunity to present my work at the Linda Hall Library, a wonderful institution in Kansas City for anyone interested in the study of science, technology, and engineering (its “collection encompasses more than half a million monograph volumes and more than 48,000 journal titles”). I was a fellow there for three months, and came across some exciting finds in their Rare Books Collection, some of which are showcased in the presentation.

So, if you’re interested in understanding how the balloon went from being this exciting innovation in the late eighteenth century, to quickly becoming obsolete in the early nineteenth century, only to then be rediscovered as modern as the twentieth century approached, this is just the thing for you!

The video is also available in the Linda Hall Library’s Facebook Page.

#FlightyFridays — Henri Lachambre, Balloon Manufacturer

Manufacture d'aérostats de Vaugirard, fondée en 1875 (Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris).

Henri Lachambre was perhaps the most reputable balloon manufacturer at turn of the century. From his atelier in Vaugirard (a neighborhood in the outskirts of nineteenth-century Paris) he built balloons for individuals and governments all over the world. Among his customers were the United States Army Signal Corps, the Swede S.A. André (who perished in an ill-fated balloon expedition to the North Pole in 1897), and the Brazilian aeronaut Alberto Santos-Dumont (discussed in the previous #FlightyFridays).

Like most people involved in the business of aeronautics at the time, Lachambre was a passeur who shifted between the worlds of "serious science" and of "frivolous amusement"—something expressed in the whimsical cover to his sales catalog. At the center, donning Lacahmbre's name, we have a standard balloon that scientific-minded aeronauts used to explore the upper reaches of the atmosphere and wealthy Aéro-Club de France members used to make their fashionable ascents. Surrounding that balloon are numerous humorous balloons in the shape of elephants, jockeys, pierrots, devils, and more—the kind of stuff we might see at at the Thanksgiving Macy's Parade, but smaller. In short, whether you were a wealthy aristocrat looking for a new sport, an aspiring man of science with a sense for adventure, or someone wanting to add some spice to your local quartier party, you could find something in Lachambre's catalog.

#FlightyFridays – The Celebrity of Alberto Santos-Dumont

This Friday, prompted by Alberto Santos-Dumont's birthday, I decided to start sharing some of my research on Twitter through a new feature: #FlightyFridays. The gist is that I'd offer readers some interesting images with some short commentary to contextualize what they're seeing. I've decided to also expand #FlightyFridays into a blog, which I hope will serve as a more permanent record. Remember, if you'd like to see a larger version of the image, just click on it! 

Alberto Santos-Dumont was born on July 20, 1873, in Brazil. Although most Brazilians would disagree, Santos-Dumont did not invent the airplane. Nor was he the first to fly one. Where Santos-Dumont did excel was in lighter-than-air flight. His Parisian ascents aboard balloons and dirigibles were critical in popularizing the idea of a world permeated by flight in a time where people were still very skeptical of its possibility.

La Vie au grand air, 19 June 1903 (Gallica, BNF).

"Le petit Santos," as Parisians affectionately called him, skillfully worked with the press to become the first global aeronaut celebrity. Huge crowds gathered to watch his flights, and the mass illustrated, which was just coming to its own, eagerly depicted these events on its pages. The cover of the sports periodical La Vie au grand air shows a crowd gathering around Santos-Dumont after he landed on of his dirigibles in Longchamp.

 

La Vie au grand air, 8 December, 1901 (Gallica, BNF).

Santos-Dumont's fame was such that during a 1901 toy contest, the most popular toys were based on his dirigibles. La Vie au grand air provided its readers with a photo of the numerous toys at display in the 1901 Concours Lepine's "Santos-Dumont corner."

Author’s collection.

Santos-Dumont's aircrafts and image also stamped all types of advertisements, like this Will’s Cigarettes trading card, which I snagged at a marché aux puces in Paris. As such, the commodification of Santos-Dumont anticipated Lindbergh Fever by a couple of decades, and set the tone for the ways in which aviators would be made into celebrities in the following years.

Santos-Dumont's fame reached its peak in late 1901, when he won the Deutsch Prize offered to the first person to take off from the Aéro-Club de France's park in Saint-Cloud, circle around the Eiffel Tower, and return within a strict time limit. There was controversy as to whether he succeeded, but popular pressure forced the Aéro-Club to grant him the prize. The feat not only made Santos-Dumont "the hero of the hour," it also helped solidify Paris's status as the global capital of aeronautics. After all, the event also made the connection between aviation and the Eiffel Tower real (it is worth noting that the tower had been pitched as a kind of aeronautical laboratory when it was proposed in the late 1880s). Photos of Santos-Dumont going around the Eiffel Tower circulated the world, and one was even used by Eiffel in a book he published to defend the tower’s utility

In short, the way the press covered Santos-Dumont's feats helped crystalize Paris's global image as a spectacular center of technological cosmopolitanism—as the "capital of modernity." This illustration from the New York Herald, a newspaper that followed Santos-Dumont closely and helped spread his fame in the United States and amongst elites in Europe, conveys this in a wonderful fashion.

New York Herald, 24 June 1900 (Firestone Library, Princeton University).