Rue Laffitte

Arrondissement: 9

Numbers 1, 8, 16, 49

The view of the Sacré-Coeur being built above the Notre-Dame-de-Lorette church must have both annoyed and inspired the artistic and literary figures working on La Revue Blanche in the 1890s.

The street offers an extraordinary view, notes Hazan (WTP), of the Sacré-Coeur rising above the Notre-Dame-de-Lorette church. No better reason, perhaps for Fénéon to host at Number 1, the editorial offices of La Revue Blanche, the first Georges Seurat retrospective just a few months after the painter’s early death aged 32.

Toulouse-Lautrec was one of many leading artists who Feneon attracted to La Revue Blanche after becoming editor in 1895, just a year after he had been acquitted of an anarchist conspiracy to undertake a bombing campaign in Paris

Fénéon became La Revue Blanche’s editor in 1896 and committed it strongly to defending Dreyfus from 1897. He published many articles by Léon Blum, then a young lawyer who in his spare time reported on the trials taking place.

Fénéon, Zola, Proust, Sorel, Claude Monet, Emile Durkheim and Daniel Halévy were among the signatures organised from the offices of La Revue Blanche on 15 January 1898 to an early petition to reopen Drefyus’ trial.

No. 8 was the location of the picture gallery opened in 1863 by Alexandre Bernheim, who displayed the paintings of Gustave Courbet and Camille Corot, among others, and who was the organiser of Van Gogh’s first Parisan exhibition in 1901.

In 1872, after Courbet had spent 9 months in jail for his part in the Paris Commune, his work was rejected for display at that year’s Salon. The art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel then showed Courbet’s painting Fruits at the gallery he had opened at No. 16 in 1867.

Rejected by the Paris salon of 1872 Courbet’s Fruits that he painted in 1871-1872 while in jail, was exhibited by the dealer Durand-Ruel at No 16 Rue Laffitte.

In October 1906. after Marguerite Durand‘s La Fronde ceased publication in 1905, Jane Misme founded the weekly feminist 4-page journal, La Française: Journal de progrès féminin, whose offices were at No 49. It became the official outlet of the National Council of French Women (CNFF)

The feminist Jane Misme founded the journal in 1906. In 1909 it became the mouthpiece of the French Women’s Suffrage Union. Charlotte Bonnin‘s report on Equal Pay was published in it in 1929

Origins

The old street Rue d’Artois was renamed in 1897 after one of France’s most influential bankers, Jacques Lafitte (1767-1844). His first job was in the Perregaux Bank, whose international connections led it to become the bank of the French Revolution’s Committee of Public Security, and then financial advisers to Napoleon Bonaparte.

In 1814 Laffitte was asked to head up the Bank of France, which he did until 1820. In the July 1830 Revolution he was one of the most important figures aiming to thwart any move towards a new republic and instead to secure the crown for Louis-Philippe of the Orleans branch of the Bourbon family.

Laffitte became the president of the Chamber of Deputies which declared the throne vacant and that Louis-Philippe was the new king. Laffitte became both President of the governing council and minister of finance in November 1830. He lasted only until March 1831 when he resigned as it became clear that Louis-Philippe was going to try and maintain all the monarch’s power over government rather than move towards a parliamentary government system.

Jacques Laffitte the influential banker who believed a parliamentary system giving power to France’s new wealthy was needed rather than Bourbon and Orleans direct power.

PLACES