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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Reporting & Essays |
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History |
When Paris Met the Mahatma
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| A look back at Gandhi’s visit to the City of Light, 80 years ago this month, and the complex confrontation between his philosophy and European modernity |
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Published : 1 December 2011 |
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| The cover of the French news weekly L’Illustration from 19 September 1931 featuring a photo of Gandhi on a train in Paris’s Gare de Lyon.
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AGIC CITY WAS A LARGE DANCE HALL on Paris’s Left Bank, used over the decades for purposes as diverse as transvestite balls in the roaring 1920s and the storage of Jewish property confiscated by the fascist French government in the 1940s. It was seized by the Nazis and lavishly refurbished as a radio studio run by the Gestapo during the |
Occupation, and it was where French television broadcasting set up shop during the 1950s.
It was also the place where Mahatma Gandhi—on his way home from the Second Round Table Conference in London and en route to visit Romain Rolland in Geneva—made his only public appearance in Paris, on 5 December 1931, in the very same space where the celebrated Parisian drag queens Kymris and Monsieur Bertin once strutted their stuff.
According to contemporary newspaper accounts of the event, it was a strange evening. Patrons were ushered to their seats by girls “bizarrely uniformed in bright red skirts, leather boots, and wide leather belts from which hung cutlasses”, according to the journalist Robert Gauthier’s report in Le Temps. Gauthier observed that the “atmosphere, part circus, part dancing hall, the overheated room, the massive columns of red marble, the flashes of magnesium from here and there, and the floodlights ready to be lit into action were not on the same level as this leader of men.”
Further to the right, reporter Georges Suarez had a different take in L’Echo de Paris: “Mahatma Gandhi proves himself to be a great comic.... He appears crushed by his lamentable half-nakedness ... but, if his sandals are those of Mohamed, his little bathing suit does not conjure up Napoleon’s coat at Wagram.” According to Muriel Lester’s Entertaining Gandhi, an account of her travels with the Mahatma in Europe, Suarez was angry that he’d been denied a tête-à-tête interview with Gandhi earlier in the day after he snuck into the apartment where Gandhi was staying on Boulevard Raspail. He promised Lester he’d write nasty things about Gandhi if he wasn’t given access to the man, and he did.
By the time Gandhi arrived in France in 1931, he was an international celebrity. His 1930 Salt March had been widely covered by the foreign media—whose interest in the proceedings was mocked in a book-length satirical poem, called The Saint and Satan, published the same year:
At once the Press entire took up the chorus
And pestered every mile that lay before us;
The Press entire, becoming shrill and shriller,
Published each day some more exciting thriller;
They soon grew indiscreet and indiscreeter;
Sugar was sweet, but contraband salt was sweeter!
William L Shirer, then a correspondent with the Chicago Tribune, described the Salt March in his book, Gandhi: A Memoir, as “one of the strangest treks ever witnessed in India or in any other country. And it soon became one of the most reported, as dozens of Indian reporters joined the two or three local reporters who were in at the outset, followed by correspondents from all over the world.” United Press correspondent Webb Miller’s description of silent satyagrahis at the Dharasana Salt Works north of Bombay coming forward to be brutally whacked down by lathi-armed police was, according to Shirer, “flashed around the world—Miller’s graphic United Press dispatch was published in more than a thousand newspapers at home and abroad.”
In January 1931, Time magazine put Gandhi on its cover and named him Man of the Year. French newsreels had shown footage of the Salt March, which was also widely reported in the French press. When Gandhi landed in Marseilles on 11 September 1931 on his way to London, he was mobbed by reporters. In fact, the second supplemental volume of Gandhi’s Collected Works reproduces no fewer than seven press statements made by Gandhi in Marseilles—a city where he did not even pause long enough to spend the night—to the Daily Herald, the New York Times, the Bombay Chronicle, the Daily Mail, the Associated Press, the News Chronicle and Reuters. From the moment he arrived on European soil until his departure for Bombay from Italy, wherever Gandhi went, the press followed. Their dispatches, photos and films appeared around the world. By 1934, Cole Porter could write lyrics for his Broadway hit musical Anything Goes declaring, “You’re the top! You’re Mahatma Gandhi.”
After the excitement of Gandhi’s brief stop in Marseilles, French papers and newsreels were filled with images from London of the diminutive and scantily clad Gandhi speaking to crowds of cheering British workers, on his way to meet the king of England or seated next to a beaming Charlie Chaplin. Outside Magic City on the evening of his speech, there was pandemonium. Tickets had been given out judiciously, to a lucky 2,000 people, and a crowd of hundreds mobbed the entrance, hoping to get in, or simply to catch a glance of the famous Indian. Even journalists with tickets and press passes had trouble at the door: Le Figaro correspondent Gaëtan Sanvoisin, clearly a man not used to summary treatment, grumbled in his report about being hassled at the door, lamenting that the police were no help, as they were taking orders from “young men wearing blue-starred armbands”, apparently hired to help manage the crowd.
| COURTESY L’ ILLUSTRATION |
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A photograph of Gandhi at a Quaker meeting house in London during his 1931 trip. |
Inside, Gandhi was seated on the stage, accompanied by Madeleine Slade, whom he called Mirabehn—the daughter of a British rear-admiral and one of his most devoted disciples. He spoke in English, uttering a few sentences at a time, which were promptly translated into French. Press accounts from the right and the left were unanimous in their surprise at the apparently passive demeanour of the speaker, whose voice was described as “monotone” and who barely looked up at the audience while he spoke. Clearly, Gandhi was not as entertaining as the usual performers at Magic City, or perhaps his quiet delivery didn’t match his outsized reputation. Given that he had arrived from London earlier in the day by train and had already held two meetings—a lavish tea with the cream of Indian society in Paris and an informal meeting of “intellectuals” (in the words of Gandhi’s secretary, Mahadev Desai) at the tiny apartment of his hostess, Louise Guyiesse—he was probably exhausted.
A brief audio snippet from Gandhi’s speech at Magic City survives, in a newsreel produced by Pathé-Journal titled “Gandhi’s Visit to Paris”. In a firm voice, Gandhi declares, “It seems to me the world has become sick of blood-thirsty war. The world is disgusted with the lies and deceit that are the inevitable consequences of all war-like methods.” He pauses for his French translator, and as soon as the translation is finished, the audience erupts in applause. According to Robert Gauthier in Le Temps, this was all part of the staging: “Disarmament was the order of the day,” he sniffed, “and while propagandists distributed tracts and brochures among the audience, others passed along to Gandhi written questions which offered him the chance for easy applause.” Writing for the conservative Le Figaro, Sanvoisin was alarmed, rather than amused, by the sight of an Indian advocating independence from an imperial European power: Gandhi’s words, he warned his readers, “were nothing if not dangerous, and that is what the French public needs to know.”
Mahadev Desai transcribed some of the questions from the audience, as well as remarks Gandhi addressed to expatriate Indians. The questions ranged from whether independent India would put up trade barriers with France to why Gandhi no longer wore European clothes. Gandhi’s Collected Works contain a long, but incomplete, version of his full remarks at Magic City, which have been translated back into English on the basis of a French translation of his speech published in a January 1932 special issue of the magazine Régénération dedicated to Gandhi and India. The portion of the speech quoted in Le Figaro by Sanvoisin places the short surviving section recorded from the newsreel into the wider context that Gandhi gave it:
I tried to understand your great revolution, but I think that you want to address a greater message to the world because the Earth is tired of sanguinary wars. The universe is disgusted with the hypocrisies that are the necessary consequences of bellicose methods. The economic crisis which is tearing countries apart, not excepting the United States, is a consequence of the global conflagration, which we have been sufficiently mistaken to call the ‘Great War.’
Gandhi’s aim here is to relate the struggle of satyagraha in India with the larger economic and political crisis engulfing the world in 1931. His purpose in evoking the French revolution is to enlist his French audience as supporters of India’s cause. The next line of the speech, following the passage quoted above—naturally omitted from Sanvoisin’s report in Le Figaro—makes Gandhi’s mission clear: “Thus it seems to me that India’s struggle for independence is a movement in which every Frenchman and every Frenchwoman should take a direct interest.” Writing for a conservative newspaper, Sanvoisin had no interest in helping his readers see any connection between themselves and India’s struggle for independence from France’s imperial neighbour across the Channel.
It is important to carefully parse Gandhi’s words here, or at least Sanvoisin’s translation of his original words. Gandhi does not argue that economic crisis leads to war—as has been suggested, with hindsight, to explain the outbreak of World War II. He blames the aftermath of what “we have been sufficiently mistaken to call” the Great War for the worldwide Great Depression. What Gandhi exactly means by “the global conflagration” is not clear. On the surface, it seems to mean the violence of the first World War, and it certainly must mean that. But for Gandhi, the violence of war was the extension of the violence inherent in an exploitative economic system whose logic of consumption and capital accumulation made conflicts of all kinds inevitable. For Gandhi, that system—as pursued by Britain, France and the United States—was defined by relentless economic and imperial expansion, which he saw as the rotten core of Western modernity.
As he had so eloquently argued in his seminal 1909 tract Hind Swaraj, Gandhi sought India’s independence from both Britain and the system it represented. While London was the capital of a mode of civilisation where every value was calculated according to its potential for economic gain, Paris was the capital of the philosophical roots of Western modernity, the centre of the French Enlightenment. But the essence of that Enlightenment—a vision of human progress through technological innovation and the spread of knowledge based on a rational apprehension of reality—was precisely what Gandhi rejected.
Gandhi was well-acquainted with French Enlightenment thought, as he explained to his audience at Magic City in Paris: “In my spare time I tried to read works concerning France. I read, in parts, Rousseau and Voltaire.” In Marseilles, a few months earlier, he told a gathering of students who had invited him to speak, “I have learnt something of the traditions of your country and of the teachings of Rousseau and Victor Hugo.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire were among the contributors to the grandest project of the French Enlightenment, the 17-volume Encyclopédie edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert and published between 1751 and 1765, whose humble aim was to compile all the world’s knowledge.
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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Avinash
22 December 2011
01:27 AM
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Great article. One tiny error: Yanaon, or Yanam, is in Andhra Pradesh, not Bihar.
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boillot
18 December 2011
08:36 PM
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Excellent reading on this historical visit during historical times; Mira has provided us with so much detailed informations that we can easily imagine the ambiance of the period and she also clearly bring on the table philosophical arguments between modernity and non-violence which sound very much contemporary in the context of the crisis
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