Monday 8 November 2010

Finding Anastasia


The female most associated with France is Marianne, the symbol of liberty, of freedom, of the republic and of revolution. But what I did not know, what I found out only recently, is that Marianne has a sister, altogether more censorious and far less interested in freedom. Her name is –can you guess? – Anastasia!

Anastasia, or rather Madame Anastasie, was brought to my attention here by Dominic, who came across a reference to her in the pages of Proust as a figure representing official censorship in France during the First World War. She appears specifically in Finding Time Again, the last volume of Remembrance of Things Past, where the line appears “I do hope the most-high and all-powerful Anastasia doesn't blue-pencil us!"

Dominic started the ball rolling; I decided to kick it further. The whole thing is quite intriguing – it intrigues me – because I can only take the story so far. It looks as if the original figure of Anastasia, armed with a large pair of sheers or scissors, was created sometime in the 1870s by the caricaturist André Gill specifically to represent the official censor, who counted political caricature high among his targets. The thing is none of the sources make it clear if Anastasia, the tight-lipped old maid, was already in existence in some form or other before Gill gave her a definite shape.

The obvious question is why Anastasia, why was the censor given that name? The short answer is that it’s impossible to say with any precision. The suggestions that do exist, self-referential and unanchored in any original source, are not wholly convincing. More than that, they are contradictory and fairly obscure.

It could refer to a Saint Anastasia who was martyred during the third century persecution of the Christians by the Emperor Decius. Amongst other things she is alleged to have had her tongue cut out. An article in Time Magazine published in December 1939 repeats the tongue story, but says that this was because she resisted the advances of the Emperor Valerian, who, interestingly enough, had been chosen as censor by the Senate after Decius revived the office.

The other possibility, the one favoured by the French sources, seems even more obscure. Anastasia is said to be based on Pope Anastasius I who, in condemning the work of Origen, the Alexandrian scholar and theologian, began a tradition of Christian censorship. It seems more obscure to me because it’s difficult to believe that this kind of rarefied debate would have impacted at all on the popular imagination, unlike virgins and tongues!

Though the Press Law of 1881, guaranteeing free expression, sent the old girl into a partial hibernation, she and her sheers got back to work after the outbreak of the First World War. That is to say that official censorship was once again given her unprepossessing shape by Le Canard enchaîné,- The Chained Duck -, a satirical magazine established in 1915, which attempted to escape the fatal cuts by using word games and other diversions, probably beyond the old lady’s comprehension! Interestingly she seems never to have been unduly concerned by adverse depictions of herself, which survived intact.

L’Ouevre, which also appeared in 1915 as a daily newspaper, was another publication that came under the gaze of Anastasia. Whole swathes of material were disallowed, to which the editor responded by publishing a single white space to the right of the masthead with the word Chut! (Shush!)

The Second World War brought the sheers back, but the censorship was considered so onerous that protests were even raised in the Chamber of Deputies. According to a Time report of March 1940, Leon Blum, leader of the Socialist Party and Prime Minister at the time of the pre-war Popular Front, said that Anastasia’s conduct showed “absolute incompetence” and “ridiculous ignorance.” The French, he continued, were even more starved of hard news than the Germans.

So, this is it, this is the story of the French Anastasia. She is now back in hibernation; she has been for years, perhaps for good. But when it comes to legends, and archetypes, and Anastasias one should never say never. :-)

36 comments:

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  3. I'm not quite sure where the Bourbons come in here. Anastasia, like Marianne, was a daughter of the republic! Is it possible to 'support' a regime lost far in time? I'm sure all I have said here is that the Bourbons were no worse than the Habsburgs or the Romanovs. The real problem is absolutist government.

    I don't believe the figure created by Gill was revived. There are other versions.

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  8. Adam, I simply can't take your subjective and wholly partisan view of history seriously, your hopeless intellectual confusion and your Manichaeism. Empirically your statements are also nonsense, as anyone with even the loosest understanding of European history will understand.

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  13. Is this where the term "nanny state" comes from? (I'm noticing the hat and demeanor.)

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  18. I'm not sure that is is the case Dame Anastasie is so much in hibernation as it is that she has swanned off to post-colonial and warmer climes; I get the distinct impression that she is still known by her name in those parts of West Africa, say, in which she still has influence (e.g. http://bit.ly/c95y8K).

    I suppose one shouldn't absolutely rule out her becoming a future mistress of the little man in the Elysée, once he has tired of the comparatively more moderate brand of exoticism that Mme Bruni offers. As traditionally she appears to be depicted as blind, the little man can seek to impress her with his fine diction and prose (which which he has won over so much of France....), and need not bother with the standing on shoeboxes thing.

    The whole post-colonial intellectual and administrative legacy of France (and the distinctions and differences from that left by the British) is something that interests me: and I am increasingly inclined to think that the mid-20th centuries ideologies of post-colonialism, post-modernism, post-anything...are in large part French artifices designed to intellecutally and morally disarm any potential rivals they may have for global dominance...as, despite having largely invented them they pay little heed to them themselves. But that is a whole differnt debate...

    Anyhow, thanks for the mentions! :)

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  19. Russia, in every way, was far more absolutist than the the Bourbon state. There is simply no comparison between the life an death powers of, say, Henri IV and Ivan Grozny, or Louis XIV and Peter I, or latterly between Louis XVI and Catherine II. Also the French preserved a system of feudal courts or local parliaments that simply did not exist in Russia. But the point , the essential point, is that French actions were determined by French geography. There is absolutely no reason to suppose that the Romanovs or the Habsburgs would not have behaved in exactly the same way if they had been in Paris rather than the Bourbons. The French monarchy was not given a chance to evolve, though Louis XVI was in many ways the most liberal king the country ever had. As for Austria, you really should leave Vienna and travel south into the Balkans, particularly to the days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to see how 'liberal' the Habsburgs were. I recommend Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon here. I'm not even going to engage with the ridiculous point about Bourbon 'butchers'. Oh, but I might talk about the massacre of Novgorod, the destruction of the Streltsy, or the treatment of the Decembrists. Habsburg ambition was responsible for two of the great catastrophes of European history - the Thirty Years War, which had a considerable long term impact on the political and cultural development of Germany, and the First World War. Russia, given it's location, had less opportunity for self-aggrandisement, but the county's aggressive conduct towards the Turkish Empire was a source of major instability in Europe for much of the nineteenth century. Louis XIV's military adventures were disastrous for the French but less disastrous than Nicholas II's for Russia.

    Adam, I don't care whose cause you are a 'soldier' in - Russia, Serbia, feminism, homosexuals, socialists, communists, Ba'athists; I simply don't care, nor do I care for your hyperbole.

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  20. Jeremy, I hadn't considered that possibility! But 'nanny state' is really an English cultural expression because we are far more accustomed to nannies!

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  22. Dominic, the colonial impacy, yes, that's also something that I should have taken in to consideration. Thank you for the inspiration. :-)

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  25. Adam, please, please read more carefully. I did not say that you were a communist. The implication here is that you have defended and promoted communists amongst the other things I have mentioned, amongst your other causes. I said Louis XVI, not Louis XIV was a liberal king. Though Northern Germany was nominally part of the Holy Roman Empire it was not part of the Habsburg patrimony. It was the Emperor Ferdinand's ambition to rule the whole, as well as his ultra-Catholicism, that turned a minor conflict into a great tragedy, with lasting repercussions for Germany. Richelieu, a brilliant pragmatic man, no matter what his religious affiliations, intervened quite rightly to arrest Habsburg adventurism, a threat to France and to the rest of Europe. Oh, I see, it was aright for Russia to be an 'expansionist empire' but not for France? The actions of the Bourbons led to 1789 just as the actions of the Romanovs led to 1917. But to say that France 'regressed' under the Bourbons, when it was the most brilliant court in Europe, is not just rubbish, it's absolute rubbish.

    Adam, this is you all over, totally incapable of taking an objective view of history, full of shallow partisan enthusiasms, a bit of a liability for a scholar, I have to say. :-)

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  29. Read again what you have written. You said that the Austrians were simply trying to keep their holdings 'unified.' That is a total misreading of the politics of the Thirty Years War. Yes, yes, yes, the Edict of Fontainebleau was a retrograde move, but it cannot be taken in isolation, nor can the actions of France be seen abstracted away from other absolutist states, especially Russia, which saw one retrograde move after another. Even the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 was carried out on the worst possible basis. I'm not making excuses for Bourbon policy, merely challenging your absurd bias. If you presented a scholarly case against Thatcher I would answer in equally scholarly terms. I'm sorry if you think I'm traducing you; that is not my intention. I simply dislike the emotive way you have of looking at the past, your tendency to select heroes and villains. There simply needs to be more shades of grey in your mode of thought.

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  31. You are clearly not grasping the point about Austria and Habsburg ambition; the Empire had only survived as a delicate balancing act, one which they destroyed. As the argument is in danger of becoming circular I'm saying no more. Because Russian social policy was retrograde, especially under the last two Tsars, who effectively made revolution all but inevitable, if one can ever use the word 'inevitable' in history. Lord Stockton was part of the welfare consensus disease that came close to destroying post-war Britain, but that’s another matter altogether. :-)

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  34. Yes, Adam, all I was asking you to do was to extend the same powers of detached objectivity to France, not to view Bourbons through the lens of irrational prejudice. As for Super Mac I was being deliberately provocative!

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