User:Josephine Boulangere

Josephine Boulangere

Following the artistic adventure of La Ruche, near by, the Bal Nègre acquired in the 1920's a great renown especially in the bohemian Paris and the Tout-Paris. It has become one of the symbolic places of the Roaring Twenties' Montparnasse.

In 1924, Jean Rézard des Wouves, caribbean candidate for the deputation, installed his campaign's headquarter at 33 rue Blomet, in the 15^e arrondissement de Paris, near Montparnasse. Former farm of the 19th century, this place had been reconverted into a wine seller before becoming a cabaret. To attract and withhold the lean audience to his political meetings, Jean Rézard, better of a musician than of a speaker, would play, with great success, music from his afro american origins on the piano.

The Roaring Twenties's generation was then greedy for entertainment with a musical background and dreaming of a new world in response to the suffering of the Great War. People would feel frantically passionate for the unrivaled cultures and the new aesthetics such as Surrealism, Dada, Jazz, or the Negro Art that culminate with the Colonial Exhibition in 1931.

The electoral meetings of the rue Blomet would spontaneously turn into musical and dancing evenings. More gifted for performing, Jean Rézard gave up on politics and instituted with the owner's blessing, an Auvergnat named Jouve, a regular bal. He renamed his establishment « The Colonial Bal », open tuesdays, thursdays, saturdays and sundays.

Robert Desnos, who lived a few yards away in the artists' workshops at the 45 rue Blomet, preferred the name « Bal Nègre » that had passed into posterity and ensured its promotion in an article published in the daily newspaper Commedia : «In one of the most romantic neighborhoods of Paris, where each carriage entrance conceals a garden and arbours, an oriental bal had settled. A true Bal Nègre where everything is negro, musicians like dancers : and where we can spend, on saturdays and on sundays, an evening far from the Parisian atmosphere, among the lively Martinicans and the dreamy Guadeloupean women. It's at the 33 rue Blomet, in a great hall adjoining the Jouve tobacco shop, hall where, for nearly half a century, weddings would follow electoral meetings. »

«That period, told the Martiniquan violin and clarinet player Ernest Léardée (1896-1988), future [[Biguine] king, Jean Rézard's successor, probably was the craziest I have lived. That bal was the capital's attraction point... and not a single foreigner would leave Paris without having spent at least a night in this unusual place.» Buses entirely filled with tourist did indeed flow, forcing Léardée and Jouve to institute a true and constant rolling between the groups of tourists and the attractions. The address had become so famous in Paris that we only had to tell the taxi driver «33...» for him to add « ... rue Blomet».

The artists of the Roaring Twenties would assiduously frequent the Bal Nègre to enjoy the exotic ambience : we could cross paths with Joséphine Baker, Maurice Chevalier, Mistinguett, Foujita, Kiki de Montparnasse accompanied by Man Ray or Alexander Calder. The writers Henry Miller, Ernest Hemingway, Francis Scott Fitzgerald would meet there, and so would Jean Cocteau, Paul Morand or Raymond Queneau. The painters Joan Miro, André Masson, Francis Picabia, Jules Pascin, Moise Kisling and Kees Van Dongen would accompany Robert Desnos and their surrealistic friends. The Prince of Wales, future Edward VIII escaped from an official ceremony to have fun and offered the musicians generous tips.

Sidney Bechet's clarinet and saxophone would sound in the ballroom that hosted personalities such as Jean-Paul Sartre et Simone de Beauvoir, Boris Vian, Albert Camus, Jacques Prévert or Mouloudji. They later made the cafés and caves of Saint-Germain-des-Prés legendary. Maurice Merleau-Ponty courted Juliette Greco there.

In La force de l'age (The Prime of Life), autobiography published in 1960, Simone de Beauvoir describes the evenings : « On Sunday evenings we would abandon the chic, if bitter, haunts of skepticism, and let ourselves be elated by the splendid animal zest of the Negroes of the Rue Blomet. We were very much in a minority, since at this time very few white people mingled with the colored crowd, and fewer, still risked dancing on the same : when set beside these sinuous Africans and shimmying West Indians, their stiffness was quite appealing, and they tried to shed it, they tended to look like cases of hysteria under hypnotism. I never shared the snobbish attitude of the Flore regulars, or imagined that I was participating in some grand African erotic mystery. But I enjoyed watching the dancers, and I drank rum punch, and what with the noise and the smoke and the fumes of alcohol, and the violent rhythms banged out by the orchestra, my mind would welcome quite dazed. Though this fog a sequence of handsome, laughing faces passed bye. My heart beat a little faster when the uproarious final quadrille burst upon us. This explosion of cheerful, festive bodies seemed to be closely bound up with my own urge to live. » In 1928, a famous news item made the headlines. Jane Weiler, a rich industrialist's daughter, killed her husband while returning from a night they had spent at this ballroom. The press didn't miss the occasion of using this case to stigmatize the life of easy pleasure that the worldly and the hight bourgeois society would lead. During Mrs Weiler's trial, the newspaper Detective printed the following headline: “Du Bal Nègre aux assises».

Place of everlasting parties, in 1929 Mado Anspach organized the memorable reception «Bal Ubu», Montparnasse's last great celebration : «There, [at the Bal Nègre], Montparnasse initiated herself to the biguine. Robert Desnos lived next door. An article in Comœdia launched the establishment. Youki came to the Bal Ubu disguised as a queen, wearing a dress with a train and long blond braids. Kiki lead the dancing, tireless and sloppy. The painter Foujita was dressed as a public girl. A barrel had been pierced and champaign was distributed per bottle ; that was in the spring of 1929 »

During the second World War, the Nazi occupiers forbade the Bal Nègre's activities. However, they resumed between 1945 and 1962 with other orchestras but without recovering its former aura and success. Gone back to being a simple café until 1989, this establishment then became a Jazz club, under the name of Saint-Louis Blues, and eventually closed down in 2006.

Many details about the Bal Nègre's story or Colonial, are given by the Martiniquan composer and conductor Ernest Léardée (1896-1988) in his autobiography « La biguine de l'Oncle Ben’s » (Uncle Ben's biguine - Jean-Pierre Meunier et Brigitte Léardée) published in 1989 by Carabeans Editions.

The Bal Nègre inspired many artists such as the painters Kees Van Dongen («Josephine Baker at the Bal Nègre») or Francis Picabia («Bal Nègre»), the draughtsman Paul Colin or the photographers Brassai and Elliot Herwitt. The filmmaker Jean Grémillon, in his movie La Petite Lise (1930), stages the Bal Nègre with its musicians and its dancers in their own role. In 1954, Jacques Becker films Jean Gabin et Jeanne Moreau there in his movie Touchez pas au grisbi.

An ambitious architectural and memorial rehabilitation project of this place, which has been threatened of disappearing, is implemented. It should allow the Bal Nègre to be reborn and to recover the spirit of its great age.

Notes

La Biguine de l'Oncle Ben's (Jean-Pierre Meunier et Brigitte Léardée) parue en 1989 aux Éditions Caribéennes.

• [1]
• Juliette Greco évoque ses souvenirs du Bal Nègre
• [2]
• "Biguine" par l'Orchestre du Bal Colonial de la rue Blomet. Frémeaux et Associés
• [3]
• Guillaume Cornut pour la réouverture du Bal Nègre à Paris

Voir aussi:

• La Vie quotidienne à Montparnasse à la grand époque 1905-1930 (Jean-Paul Crespelle) - Hachette.
• Le Bal Nègre de la rue Blomet, peintures et photos
• Le Journal des arts : « La future renaissance du Bal Nègre »