you need to commit a murder?”
I needed to commit a rape.”
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‘Félix Fénéon (1861-1944) was a French anarchist, editor, and art critic in Paris during the late 1800’s. Born in Turin, he moved to Paris at the age of 20 to work for the Ministry of Defense. He attended the Impressionist exhibition in 1886, later coining the term “Neo-Impressionism” to define the movement led by Georges Seurat. He was the first French publisher to publish James Joyce. In 1892, the French police searched his apartment, claiming him to be an active anarchist. That summer, along with other intellectuals and artists, Fénéon was placed on trial, a case which is now know as The Trial of the Thirty. Although the charges were dismissed, he was discharged from the Ministry of Defense. Despite the discharge the police didn’t believe in Fénéon’s innocence. Once the prefect told Mme Fénéon who came to complain that the police continued shadowing her husband, “Madam, I’m sorry to say this, but you’ve married a killer.'”
‘Decades before the rise of “flash fiction,” Félix Fénéon mastered the art of flash nonfiction in the 1,220 short items he wrote for a Paris newspaper in 1906. Collected and published in book form after his death, Fénéon’s miniature masterpieces of irony and suspense are a tour de force of Pointillist prose. From adultery, murder, revenge, and traffic accidents to tax collection, labor unrest, suicides, and the occasional well-deserved celebration, daily life in France a century ago was as unexpectedly comic and tragic as anywhere else. But only a cultural figure as central yet self-effacing as Fénéon — quiet dandy and secret anarchist, champion of Seurat and first publisher of Lautréamont, translator of Poe and Jane Austen — could have transformed newspaper hackwork into a modernist mosaic that captures the particular details of a place and an age with such exquisite timing and humor. Novels in Three Lines not only anticipates literary “ready-mades” like Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project and Andy Warhol’s a: a novel; it is a unique artifact from the golden age of the newspaper and a window into France in 1906 on the cusp of modernity.’ — from The Anarchist Encyclopedia
Scratching it with a hair-triggered revolver, Mr. Ed… B… removed the end of his nose, in the Vivienne police station.
Falling from a scaffolding at the same time as Mr. Dury, stone-mason, of Marseille, a stone crushed his skull.
Louis Lamarre had neither work nor lodging; but he did have a few coppers. he bought a quart of kerosene from a grocer in Saint Denis, and drank it.
A madwoman of Puechabon (Herault), Mrs. Bautiol, nee Herail, used a club to awaken her parents-in-law.
At finding her son Hyacinth, 69, hanged, Mrs. Ranvier, of Bussy-Saint-Georges, was so depressed she couldn’t cut the rope.
In Essoyes (Aube), Bernard, 25, bludeoned Mr. Dufert, who is 89, and stabbed his wife. He was jealous.
In Brest, thanks to a smoker’s carelessness, Miss Ledru, all done up in tulle, was badly burned on thighs and breasts.
In Djiajelli, a thirteen-year-old virgin, propositioned by a lewd rake of ten, did him in with three knife-blows.
Scissors in hand, Marie le Goeffic was playing on a swing. So that, falling, she punctured her abdomen. In Bretonneau.
Not finding his daughter of 19 austere enough, the Saint-Etienne jeweler Jallat killed her. He still, it is true, has eleven other children.
“What! all those children perched on my wall?” With eight shots, Mr. Olive, a Toulon property-owner made them scramble down, covered with blood.
Marie Jandeau, a handsome girl well known to many gentlemen of Toulon, suffocated in her room last night, on purpose.
A Nancy dishwasher, Vital Frerotte, recently returned from Lourdes forever cured of tuberculosis, died, on Sunday, by mistake.
Miss Verbeau did manage to hit Marie Champion, in the breast, but she burned her own eye, for a bowl of vitriol is not an accurate weapon.
M. Jonnart denied to the commission that the new tax plan was a scheme to make the budget’s ends meet.
A criminal virago, Mlle Tulle, was sentenced by the Rouen court to 10 years’ hard labor, while her lover got five.
Because of his poster opposing the strikebreakers, the students of Brest lycee hissed their teacher, M. Litalien, an aide to the mayor.
Nurse Elise Bachmann, whose day off was yesterday, put on a public display of insanity.
A complaint was sworn by the Persian physician Djai Khan against a compatriot who had stolen from him a tiara.
A dozen hawkers who had been announcing news of a nonexistent anarchist bombing at the Madeleine have been arrested.
A certain madwoman arrested downtown falsely claimed to be nurse Elise Bachmann. The latter is perfectly sane.
On Place du Pantheon, a heated group of voters attempted to roast an effigy of M. Auffray, the losing candidate. They were dispersed.
Arrested in Saint-Germain for petty theft, Joël Guilbert drank sublimate. He was detoxified, but died yesterday of delirium tremens.
The photographer Joachim Berthoud could not get over the death of his wife. He killed himself in Fontanay-sous-Bois.
Reverend Andrieux, of Roannes, near Aurillac, whom a pitiless husband perforated Wednesday with two rifle shots, died last night.
In political disagreements, M. Begouen, journalist, and M. Bepmale, MP, had called one another “thief” and “liar.” They have reconciled.
In a café on Rue Fontaine, Vautour, Lenoir, and Atanis exchanged a few bullets regarding their wives, who were not present.
Women suckling their infants argued the workers’ cause to the director of the streetcar lines in Toulon. He was unmoved.
The Yodtzes, of Bezons, were somewhat burned in a fire from which they were rescued by two cuirassiers.
Ten years’ hard labor were given Tournour by the court in Nancy. The adolescent killed a traveler who employed him as guide.
No more briar pipes. Their makers, in Saint-Claude, have stopped work until they are paid better.
“If my candidate loses, I will kill myself,” M. Bellavoine, of Fresquienne, Seine-Inferieure, had declared. He killed himself.
A thunderstorm interrupted the celebration in Orléans in honor of Joan of Arc and the 477th anniversary of the defeat of the English.
In the course of a heated political discussion in Propriano, Corsica, two men were killed and two wounded.
In Bone, the courts and the bar have reestablished contact with the prison, now that the typhus outbreak there has been curbed.
Clash in the street between the municipal powers of Vendres, Herault, and the party of the opposition. Two constables were injured.
Despondent owing to the bankruptcy of one of his debtors, M. Arturo Ferretti, merchant of Bizerte, killed himself with a hunting rifle.
While thundering for the Republic, a 300-year-old cannon exploded in Chatou, but no one was hurt.
The charge of embezzlement against the management of the Toulon artillery amounts to nothing, according to the manager’s inquiry.
Scheid, of Dunkirk, fired three times at his wife. Since he missed every shot, he decided to aim at his mother-in-law, and connected.
Mme Vivant, of Argenteuil, failed to reckon with the ardor of Maheu, the laundry’s owner. He fished the desperate laundress from the Seine.
Finding her son, Hyacinthe, 69, hanged, Mme Ranvier, of Bussy-Saint-Georges, was so depressed she could not cut him down.
The fever, of military origin, that is raging in Rouillac, Charente, is getting worse and spreading. Preventative measures have been taken.
In the second arrondissement, 27 violations have been charged in three days against cabdrivers who demanded excessive tips up front.
Yesterday, in the streets of Paris, cars killed Mme Resche and M. P. Chaverrais and gravely wounded Mlle Fernande Tissedre.
At Toulouse, the finale of the bailliffs’ convention. Their duties, said a speaker, are “delicate, dangerous, and insufficiently compensated.”
Due to their ardor during audits and polls, some congregants and a voter have been sentenced, in Cholet and Saint-Girons.
The May Day celebration in Lorient was noisy, but not a hint of violence gave the slightest cause for police intervention.
During a scuffle in Grenoble, three demonstrators were arrested by the brigade, who were hissed by the crowd.
After finding a suspect device on his doorstep, Friquet, a printer in Aubusson, filed a complaint against persons unknown.
Sand and only that was the content of two suspect packages that yesterday morning alarmed Saint-Germain-en-Laye.
The recalled mayor of Montigny, his wife, and a member of the municipal council have been sentenced to prison for strike-related offenses.
D., of the 8th Colonial Regiment, Toulon, who incited inmates to riot in the correctional barracks, has been given 60 days in jail.
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Felix Feneon, art critic
‘As soon as Félix Fénéon appeared at the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition in 1886, at which Seurat’s La Grande Jatte was shown, he immediately estimated the historical importance of the new art technique. The future generations will remember 1886, because the age of Manet and Impressionism had come to its logical end and the age of Neo-Impressionism began, stated Félix Fénéon.
‘Neo-Impressionism was the term, introduced by him to denote the new movement, it showed on one hand its connection with Impressionism, which experimented with light and color, and on the other hand denoted the new style with its ‘conscious and scientific’ approach towards the problems of color and light. The ‘bull confusion’, so Fénéon called the reaction of the public to the unusual technique of Seurat, Signac and other Pointillists.
‘Actually he was the only critic who “proved capable of articulating an appreciation of Seurat’s picture, and the new method of painting it exemplified, in words notable for their objective tone.” (Hajo Düchting. Seurat. The Master of Pointillism.) Félix Fénéon defined to the public the idea that stood behind the new techniques,
‘“If one looks at any uniformly shaded area in Seurat’s Grande Jatte, one can find on every centimeter of it a swirling swarm of small dots which contains all the elements which comprise the color desired. Take that patch of lawn in the shade; most of the dots reflect the local colors of the grass, others, orange-colored and much scarcer, express the barely perceptible influence of the sun; occasional purple dots establish the complementary color of green; a cyanine blue, necessitated by an adjacent patch of lawn in full sunlight, becomes increasingly dense closer to the borderline, but beyond this line gradually loses in intensity… Juxtaposed on the canvas but yet distinct, the colors reunite on the retina: hence we have before us not a mixture of pigment colors but a mixture of variously colored rays of light.”
‘Fénéon’s love for art was absolute, and even formed his political tastes. The failure by the “bourgeois” society to understand the real artists, its admiration with commonplace hacks, ‘sugary masters of schools and academies’, and its accusation of new and fresh trends — all this was enough for Fénéon to justify the destruction of that society. Fénéon approved of Anarchistic propaganda, even its extreme forms, which called for action using bombs.’ — Jeanne Picq
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The Book
Novels in Three Lines
Felix Feneon
Translated and with an introduction by Lucy Sante
New York Review of Books (August 2007)
Novels in Three Lines collects more than a thousand items that appeared anonymously in the French newspaper Le Matin in 1906 — true stories of murder, mayhem, and everyday life presented with a ruthless economy that provokes laughter even as it shocks. This extraordinary trove, undiscovered until the 1940s and here translated for the first time into English, is the work of the mysterious Félix Fénéon. Dandy, anarchist, and critic of genius, the discoverer of Georges Seurat and the first French publisher of James Joyce, Fénéon carefully maintained his own anonymity, toiling for years as an obscure clerk in the French War Department. Novels in Three Lines is his secret chef-d’oeuvre, a work of strange and singular art that brings back the long-ago year of 1906 with the haunting immediacy of a photograph while looking forward to such disparate works as Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project and the Death and Disaster series of Andy Warhol.
‘Fénéon’s three-line news items, considered as a single work, represent a crucial if hitherto overlooked milestone in the history of modernism…. They are the poems and novels he never otherwise wrote, or at least did not publish or preserve. They demonstrate in miniature his epigrammatic flair, his exquisite timing, his pinpoint precision of language, his exceedingly dry humor, his calculated effrontery, his tenderness and cruelty, his contained outrage. His politics, his aesthetics, his curiosity and sympathy are all on view, albeit applied with tweezers and delineated with a single-hair brush. And they depict the France of 1906 in its full breadth, on a canvas of reduced scale but proportionate vastness. They might be considered Fénéon’s Human Comedy.’
— From the Introduction by Lucy Sante
More
Life story
Félix Fénéon: The Anarchist and the Avant-Garde
Paris rend hommage à Félix Fénéon
Sur les traces de l’insaisissable Félix Fénéon
Félix Fénéon: anarchist and aesthetic visionary
Félix Fénéon @ Twitter
Art, anarchism & Félix Fénéon
Félix Fénéon Teaches You How To Write
Still more
Félix Fénéon: The Anarchist and the Avant-Garde
Art Critic Felix Feneon honoured at the Orangerie
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p.s. Hey. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi. Oh, I guess it depends on what you mean by ‘type’. I find him fascinating, but I’m not, like, sexually attracted to him or anything? Condolences about the Scottish match. What do I know about futbol, but isn’t Brazil one of the monster teams? But monsters fall, god knows. ** Carsten, Hi, No, I don’t think what’s extraordinary about RP is more discernible to gay people than straight people. A lot of the people I know who are big RP fans are also big fans of Kurt Cobain, so maybe there’s a crossover there? I never got the appeal of Mickey Rourke, except maybe in ‘Rumble Fish’. I hope Germany got beat. Maybe it’s a French thing, but everyone here seems to especially want Germany to crash out. You can swim in designated places in the Seine. And, because of the heatwave’s severity, they have unprecedentedly opened a section of the Canal St. Martin for swimming. I think that’s where everyone’s flocking. ** Joshua, Hi, Joshua. Good to see you. I assume you’ve watched ‘My Own Private River’. If not, it’s imbedded in the post and very highly recommended. Often amazing outtake footage from ‘Idaho’. I’m friends with Ann Magnuson who co-starred in ‘Jimmy Reardon’ with RP and made out with him in one scene. One time I asked her what that was like, and she looked at me with horror that I would ask her such a thing and said, ‘He was a child!’. And I was, like, ‘Dude, you’re the one who made out with him’. Here, me, at the moment … I’m just trying to live through a brutal heatwave that Paris is dealing with right now. Otherwise, writing, film stuff, the usual. I love when people write about my work through an analytical/social commentary lens. They’re the ones who get all the complications I put in there. I’m glad you’re able to at least chip away at your music. Stay cool. ** Bill, Oh, right, the new Araki opened Frameline this year, I think? Cool that it hit your mark. Thanks, the heat is insane, worst in recorded history and all of that. ** Laura, Hi. Oh, cool, I’m happy that Lou Christie’s weirdo finessed stuff made it through. In every photo I’ve seen of igloos, the inhabitants are still wrapped in multi-layered clothes inside, so it can’t be that warm? But I don’t know, obvs. Prompt? It’s too hot here to think in such a way. Uh, Félix Fénéon is your prompt. ** Steve, I was tentatively assigned to interview RP about his band for Spin Magazine not long before he died. I’ll see if I can find those two films. Very interesting! ** Adem Berbic, Alight! It sounds like a total success in the way that a thing like that could be a success. Congrats!! ‘Book people’ sometimes need a while to catch up on something brand new, especially when its beginning involves a cool event. That’s they call them book people. Give them time. Many have tried to explode the screaming conflict between the literary and the social. It’s a slow build, I think. My friends and I did that with Beyond Baroque back in the early 80s, but it happened in increments and took a while. Word of mouth is a gradual accruer. Hang in there. Nothing like having one’s first book published to cement the writer identity in one’s head. That’s where life really begins even? ** jay, Hi. I’m slow cooking but still alive relatively speaking. Having had a number of people who were very important to me die young, and experiencing their plans and hopes and everything truncated like that, the effect is pretty intense. Love back to you. Just put the love in the refrigerator for a while before you experience it. ** laura w, Hi. Oh, let me think about that question re: movie adaptation > book when my brain isn’t being microwaved. I’m sure there are lots of examples. With mediocre novels dominating the list. Like I was saying up above, watch ‘My Own Private River’ if you haven’t. It was in the post, and it’s on youtube. If you find an evil book, clue me in. My weekend was spent hiding in my shitty air-conditioning. Not much to report about. xo. ** Uday, Enjoy the mountains. You have most of a whole week to do so. That sounds so yummy, even the snake bite. Well, maybe not the snake bite. ** HaRpEr //, I did survive the weekend so to speak. But starting today is when it gets really scary. All bets are off. I love baroque psychedelic pop, as I’m sure you know. The Left Banke! Even ‘Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake’. Everyone, HaRpEr // passes along a link to a video of River Phoenix interviewing hustlers as research for his ‘Idaho’ role, if you’re interested. Here. Whoa, amazing, the final tweaking and polishing! ** Alice, Hi. It’s so boring to keep saying but the insane heatwave is causing everything not to be very good at the moment. But I’m still upright. Beautiful ‘SbM’ story, thank you! You’re in Brussels. I assume you’re too north to get caught in our hell. Mm, I think my favorite Shyamalan is ‘Unbreakable’, except for the very ending which I remember thinking didn’t work, but I need to look again. Whatever you do today, it will seem utterly glorious to me. ** Right. Do you guys know the work of the French proto-minimalist writer, anarchist, and art critic Félix Fénéon? If not, the blog has you covered today. See you tomorrow.
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