On the 25th of February, 1894, Émile Henry, the Spanish-born French anarchist and son of a leader of the Paris Commune, walked into Gare Saint-Lazare and threw a bomb into Café Terminus, killing one and injuring seventeen others.[1] This action in a wave of anarchist violence across Paris was the backdrop for the arrest of Minna Appoline Schrader, better known as Minna Schrader de Nysot—or as Albert Cellarius writes for the periodical Gil Blas days after her arrest, “Mademoiselle de Nyzot, excuse me!, the queen of Montmartre models, who occupies a modest apartment at 41 rue Berthe”—on Good Friday of 1894.[2] A photograph, titled Schrader. Minna, Appoline. 19 ans, née à Paris XIe. Sculpteur. Association de malfaiteurs. 24/3/94 (fig. 1), was taken by Alphonse Bertillon the day after Schrader’s arrival at the police depot on the 23rd of March. A collection of these photographs (fig. 2) resides at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of an album of what the police record keeper and criminal photographer Bertillon called portrait parlé, or speaking portraits, featuring dozens of other suspected and confirmed anarchists.[3]
Born Wilhelmine Schrader on October 21st, 1875 to a German immigrant father who made umbrellas in Paris and seamstress mother, Minna was, alongside being a successful model, quite literally a character in Montmartre life.[4] Her dalliances with artists and writers were the inspiration of novels, particularly in the case of sculptor Pierre Félix Masseau who handed his love letter correspondence with Schrader to Jean de Tinan, who published Maîtress D’Esthetes in 1897, for which she models Ysolde, the artist character’s mistress.[5] As a model, she embodied the ideals of feminine beauty being “a blonde woman of twenty, with a superb complexion, [who] has posed for all the fashionable masters,” including Rodin and Forain.[6]
So beloved was she that local newspapers and periodicals decried Schrader’s detention. During her five-day stint in prison, Le Journal wrote: “Among the arrests made in recent days, we should note that of one of the most beautiful models in Montmartre, Minna Schrader de Nysot. We fear there may be some misunderstanding here, but we hope that Minna Schrader de Nysot will be returned without delay to the beloved studies of the artists for whom she is a favorite model.”[7] Jean Pauwels for Gil Blas wrote on the 30th of March, 1894 after interviewing Schrader in her home upon her release from prison that the publication was, “not in the habit of protesting against police measures taken against anarchists, but frankly, it must be recognized that, in this matter, [constable] Mr. Archer has committed a most regrettable excess of zeal.”[8]
Minna Schrader’s portrait parlé speaks volumes of her own zeal and character, though perhaps not in the way Bertillon imagined.[9] Bertillon, born 1853 to a medical family, was a police officer who designed his system of photographically documenting criminals alongside their anthropometrics to be uniform in pose for easy reference in the late 1880s.[10] Schrader does not gaze directly at his camera, literally turning her nose up at the lens and casting her eyes to the left with a great insouciance.[11] This is unusual as the Met’s collection of Bertillon mugshots which contains non-conforming duplicates that had been reshot to be straight-on and clearly exposed.[12] This makes Schrader’s portrait parlé unique for several reasons. Among the women in the Met’s collection of Bertillon mugshots from Paris in 1894, a majority of the mugshots of the women under 30 feature professions such as “couturière,” “brodeuse,” or “cuisineière” —seamstresses, embroiderers, and the occasional cook—who wear variations on the same silhouette of closed jackets with puffed sleeves and varying levels of embellishment, hair always tied back or removed from the face (figs. 4,5,6,7).[13]Schrader, by contrast, was listed as a “Sculpteur,” French for sculptor, and belonged to the bohemia of the Montmartre and not its long-residing class of laborers.[14] She wears what appears to be a dark-colored velvet jacket with large lapels and a puffed shoulder over a shirtwaist with a pleated front panel featuring small floral decorations along the front-center, which may be embroidered. Schrader’s hair, unlike that of her laborer counterparts (fig. 4,5,6) is loosely coiffed, tumbling down at the sides, flowing freely and around her face. Mr. Archer’s “excess of zeal” also played out sartorially in Schrader’s unlikely arrest, partially because of her own refusal to sign their search report: “The funniest thing was, they undressed me... Oh! How fortuitous. As I refused to sign the search report, not having a taste for such writing, one of the officers took my arm. Since I only half enjoyed this contact, I left my bathrobe in his arms.”[15] It is unclear if Schrader was wearing any sort of underwear beneath her robe or appeared nude as she might have for Rodin or one of the other ten artists who had left notes confiscated by the police along with an invitation to Easter Monday in the countryside, but either way, Schrader’s good humor about her denudation masks her own later grievances about being searched by men at the police station.[16]
Importantly, the model’s state of undress during the Belle Époque in Paris was first and foremost regulated by her own choice, allowing the models like Schrader a sense of “professional modesty” that would have set her apart from other working women, such as prostitutes, and protected her reputation.[17] Writing to Gil Blas on the 30th of March, after her release, Schrader says she was, “measured (by men!) and where [she] was not even questioned or informed of the reason for … arrest,” with the transgression occurring not in the measuring itself, but in her implied shock by adding this was carried out by men unknown to her outside of the home where she was not in control of the context of this search.[18]
Schrader’s relationship to public nudity, however, was more complex. At the infamous 1893 Bal des Quat’z’Arts, Sarah Brown, a famous red-haired model who sat for Jules Lefebvre’s Lady Godiva (1890) and Georges Rochegrosse’s Les Derniers Jours de Babylone (1891), was carried into the event semi-nude by four nude male students acting as her slaves.[19] Alongside her as a lady-in-waiting was none other than Minna Schrader.[20] The Bal existed as a space outside the conventions of Paris society, opening with the communist hymn The Internationale in protest of the government, with contemporaries remarking on a lack of sexual predation on minimally clad women in attendance suggesting that this costumed frenzy of sexuality, dance, and costume transcended the guilt of morality and allowing female participants to step outside of its clutches freely for this singular moment.[21] Reflected back onto Schrader’s experience at the police depot, it seems reasonable to understand that nudity, not being a black and white moral experience, was for the model something she experienced on her own terms. Perhaps then her tousled hair and slightly rumpled habit captured by Bertillon reflect a lack of agency and not suggestive of Schrader’s character, despite her choice of stylish velvet.
So, where then do these anarchist ladies of Paris fit into a narrative of fashion for liberation—if at all? French counterculture and revolutionary political movements had come with their own stylistic inventions since the Revolution. Fads in dress and hairstyling, like the cotton dresses popular after the Reign of Terror and the “coiffure a la Titus,” or the mocking English term for the short cut, “coiffure a la victime,” were worn by the Merveilleuses and Incroyables, mimicking classical Greek imagery as a reflection of their own political awakening and adoption of progressive revolutionary beliefs.[22],[23] Regressively too, as Napoleon came to power in 1804, France’s new emperor introduced a new system of somber court dress inspired by military regalia designed to distinguish a new class of nobility from the rest of the French population, harkening back to the systems of sartorial control first formalized by Louis XIV.[24]
While these shifts in dress responded to mass political movements which generated their visual language from centralized themes and model figures, the anarchism of the 1880s and 90s in France was not comparable; Anarchist bombings during these two decades represent the first global terror campaigns perpetrated in the West against a rising tide of market capitalism and the plight of the industrial worker.[25] It is no wonder that across the portraits parlé held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection, the subjects consist almost entirely of working class individuals who were or were believed to be anarchists, dressed somewhat unremarkably in the workwear of their time. As a movement, anarchism of this era was driven by the act of doing, or the “propaganda by the deed,” whereby one’s actions—like firebombing a popular cafe—governed one’s mark on the world rather than if the right buttons were affixed to a man’s jacket, or the quantity of passementerie adorning a lady’s dress.[26] This is where Schrader’s bohemian non-adherence to the comings and goings of working class fashion places her slightly outside the vogues of the bourgeois and the labor-driven anarchist movement. Perhaps these suspected lady anarchists did not have the time to invest in a deviation from the workwear of the day, unlike the sculptor and model Schrader, whose apartment was filled with copies of Descartes, Gothe, Milton, Mallarmé, Solbaken, and Bjornson’s literature and whose face and body were immortalized by the likes of Rodin.[27] So too unclear is Schrader’s guilt or innocence of knowing anarchists, and so her status as being influenced by their ideology, and her clothing reflecting it, remains as mysterious as the woman captured by Bertillon in 1894.[28]
Notes
[1] John Merriman, “The Spectre of the Commune and French Anarchism in the 1890s,” The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism, June 23, 2018, 343–52, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75620-2_20. Henry’s father, Fortuné, had been a leader of the Paris Commune in 1871, the communist revolutionary government that controlled parts of Paris for two months. In self-imposed exile, he brought his son up influenced by his time as a communard, but did not directly instill that violence was the ultimate answer to political discourse.
[2] Albert Cellarius, “Une Perquisition Chez Un Modèle, P. 2/4,” Gil Blas (Augustin-Alexandre Dumont, March 27, 1894), https://www.retronews.fr/reader/526366db-5bf5-40de-b604-ec87347c19f4/1.
[3] Jessica Helfand, “Alphonse Bertillon and the Troubling Pursuit of Human Metrics,” The MIT Press Reader (MIT, May 5, 2021), https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-troubling-pursuit-of-human-metrics/. These portrait parlé were designed to not only identify criminal and malcontents for future reference, but Bertillon engaged in a system on measuring their body parts other than height and weight—like the distance between a subject’s eyes—in an attempt to establish the general facial profile of a criminal.
[4] Dominique Petit, “SCHRADER Appoline, Wilhelmine ‘Mina’ [Dictionnaire Des Anarchistes] - Maitron,” Maitron.fr, 2022, https://maitron.fr/spip.php?article156838. This information is collated online from French labor historian Jean Maitron’s books, including the 1951 Dictionnaire Des Anarchistes.
[5] Stefan Heidemann, “A Symbolist Esthète. The Unknown Medallic Work of Pierre Félix Masseau, Known as Fix-Masseau (1869-1937),” Revue Numismatique 180 (2023): 356. https://sabaudia.bibli.fr/index.php?lvl=notice_display&id=100201. This article draws on biographical information in other scholarship to confirm Schrader’s birth date and the identity of her father, though the mother is not identified outside of Maitron’s brief note on her occupation.
[6] Cellarius, “Une Perquisition Chez Un Modèle, P. 2/4.” Her age is misrepresented in this article: Schrader was in fact 19 years old at the time of her arrest.
[7] Cellarius, “Une Perquisition Chez Un Modèle, P. 2/4.” Cellarius begins and ends his piece with a somewhat suggestive poem about Schrader. He writes, “When I have to take off my shirt / To pose for the artists, I turn as red as a cherry / And hide with both hands.”
[8] Jean Pauwels, “Les Anarchistes a Paris,” Gil Blas (Augustin-Alexandre Dumont, March 30, 1894), https://www.retronews.fr/reader/526366db-5bf5-40de-b604-ec87347c19f4/1. Pauwels wrote three days after Cellarius in Gil Blas on the 30th well after Schrader’s release. But the timeline is confusing if we do not remember that Good Friday, the 23rd of March, to the 27th when Cellarius obtains a quote from Schrader, consists of five individual days but four nights.Schrader would have seemingly then been released on the 27th, the 5th day of her imprisonment. Mr. Archer was the local police constable who led Schrader’s arrest.
[9] “Once upon a time, there was a little model who deserved the Montyon Prize. She posed with great zeal, so that no one would take her... chin,” wrote Cellarius at the beginning of his coverage of Schrader.
[10] Jessica Helfand, “Alphonse Bertillon and the Troubling Pursuit of Human Metrics.” By 1900, this system largely began to fail, since the links between appearance, genetics, and criminal propensity really could not be captured in the measurement of the chin or distance between the eyes. Helfand suggests he was the black sheep of his intellectual family who were in medicine, implying his application of what we could call pseudoscience was influenced by that background. See fig. 3.
[11] Small Head with Turned-Up Nose, a sculpture by Auguste Rodin for whom Schrader is known to have modelled, bears an amusing resemblance to the photograph’s pose and is currently held at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. French scholarship suggests Schrader was a potential model for this piece. See: French Sculpture Census, “Frenchsculpture.org: Object: Small Head with Turned-up Nose (Minna Schrader de Nyzot?) [Museum’s Title: Mask of a Woman with a Turned-up Nose] [916],” Frenchsculpture.org, 2015, https://www.frenchsculpture.org/index.php/Detail/objects/25622.
[12] Perhaps Minna Schrader did not pose enough of a risk to be reshot, as her arrest motive is not listed as “anarchiste”, but “association de malfaiteurs,” or criminal association.
[13] Clearly, this breakdown of professions could be incidental to the particularities of the Met’s collection of Bertillon’s work. However, fashion workers have long led labor movements across the globe and this profession represents one that women not working as prostitutes could participate in respectably. Further research would have to be carried out across these works and those held in other institutions to paint a broader picture of the involvement of fashion workers at this time, but looking into the suspected anarchist seamstresses of late 19th century Paris would be a logical next step from this paper.
[14] This gendering of the occupation is likely not significant given that specific professions often are gendered independently, like the feminine “poete” applied to male poets. But sculptor, or “sculptrice,” is used in French when referring to a female sculptor versus the masculine “sculpteur”. It may be that this wasn’t bothered with for the purpose of this record, or that perhaps the feminization of this form is more contemporary. Either way, this detail has little bearing on the interpretation of the work for the purpose of this paper, but further consultation should be sought for ongoing research.
[15] Cellarius, “Une Perquisition Chez Un Modèle, P. 2/4.”
[16] Cellarius, “Une Perquisition Chez Un Modèle, P. 2/4.” She goes on to say of the officers not confiscating her literature, “Perhaps it's because they didn't understand!"
[17] Lela Lovett Felter-Kerley, “FEMALE PUBLIC NUDITY in BELLE ÉPOQUE PARIS” (Gainesville: University of Florida, 2006): 65, https://ufdcimages.uflib.ufl.edu/UF/E0/01/48/84/00001/UFE0014884.pdf. What is interesting about this idea is the way it allows these women more berth when it comes to indulging in semi-sexual behavior because speculation about their affairs with artists was par for the course.
[18] Jean Pauwels, “Les Anarchistes a Paris.”
[19] So infamous was this ball that reports of the student protests which followed the incarceration of Sarah Brown for appearing nude and other attempts of the government to control art education that the subsequent protests, in which one student was killed, were reported on in local newspapers as far as Australia. See: Barrier Miner, “Students’ Riot in Paris. - LONDON, Monday Evening. - Barrier Miner (Broken Hill, NSW: 1888 - 1954) - 5 Jul 1893,” Trove (National Library of Australia, July 5, 1893), https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/44099528.
[20] Cellarius, “Une Perquisition Chez Un Modèle, P. 2/4.” Her participation is written about as common knowledge.
[21] Lela Lovett Felter-Kerley, “FEMALE PUBLIC NUDITY in BELLE ÉPOQUE PARIS:” 71-77.
[22] Paul Young, “Incroyable and Merveilleuse: The Politics of Fashion in Balzac’s Les Chouans,” Dix-Neuf 25, no. 1 (January 2, 2021): 3-5, https://doi.org/10.1080/14787318.2021.1886646.
[23] “‘The Ladies Who Turn up Their Hair Behind, a La Guillotine, Wish, No Doubt, to Impress Their Suitors...,’” The Times, September 9, 1796. This piece of writing from The Times second page from London was published on the same page that, 2 months later, announced that President Washington would not seek a third term, giving equal treatment to both events. See clip: Newspapers.com. “The Times, London, England 9 Nov 1796,” November 9, 1796. https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-times-the-times-london-england-9/111288/.
[24] Katell Le Bourhis and Charles-Otto Zieseniss, The Age of Napoleon: Costume from Revolution to Empire 1789-1815(New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1989): 213.
[25] Richard Jensen, “DAGGERS, RIFLES and DYNAMITE: ANARCHIST TERRORISM in NINETEENTH CENTURY EUROPE,” Terrorism and Political Violence 16, no. 1 (January 2004): 116–53, https://doi.org/10.1080/0954655049046. In this sense, global terrorism should be understood within the framework of “the Western world” rather than spanning the entire globe. This is not due to oversight in scholarship, but the particular reach of anarchist thought in the West in the late 19th century.
[26] John Merriman, The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-De-Siècle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016): 63.
[27] Jean Pauwels, “Les Anarchistes a Paris.”
[28] While Maitron reports that Schrader was previously arrested for shooting at a French industrialist sometime prior to her arrest on Good Friday, 1894, this account was not easily verifiable. If this is true, perhaps Schrader was more revolutionary that it seems, though additional speculation in Gil Blas about her “questionable” connections to police headquarters lends to her air of mystery and apocryphal tales that she was really working with the police. See: Petit and Cellarius.
Bibliography
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Heidemann, Stefan. “A Symbolist Esthète. The Unknown Medallic Work of Pierre Félix Masseau, Known as Fix-Masseau (1869-1937).” Revue Numismatique 180 (2023): 353–404. https://sabaudia.bibli.fr/index.php?lvl=notice_display&id=100201.
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Figure 1: Alphonse Bertillon, Schrader. Minna, Appoline. 19 ans, née à Paris XIe. Sculpteur. Association de malfaiteurs. 24/3/94, March 24, 1894. Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Figure 2: Alphonse Bertillon's Class on the Spoken Portrait (1911). Photographer unknown—appears in Helfand, Jessica. “Alphonse Bertillon and the Troubling Pursuit of Human Metrics,” from Face: A Visual Odyssey.
Figure 3: Alphonse Bertillon, Tableau synoptic des traits physionomiques: pour servir a l'étude du "portrait parlé.” French, ca. 1909.
Clockwise from top left, Figure 4: Adnet. Jeanne, Marie. Alphonsine (femme Quesnel). 22 ans, née à Argentan. Couturière. Anarchiste. 8/1/94. Figure 5: Borreman. Léontine, Eugénie. 23 ans, née à Paris le 25/12/70. Papetière. Anarchiste. 13/3/94. Figure 6: Pallaz (ou Pellaz). Péronne. 28 ans, née le 11/8/66 à Aix-les-Bains (Savoie). Cuisière. Anarchiste. 8/3/94. Figure 7: Loth. Clotilde, Caroline (femme Bossant). 43 ans, née à Valenciennes. Sans profession. Anarchiste. 27/4/94. All Alphonse Bertillon.