Mephistopheles and monkeys: rejuvenation, race, and sexuality in popular culture in interwar France.

 
Give back the passions unabated, 
    That deepest joy, alive with pain, 
Love's power and the strength of hatred, 
    Give back my youth to me again. 
--Goethe, Faust 
 
I've had enough, I swear it, of youth and of disheartening adventure. 
Yes, I want to see the winter. 
--Jean Rieux, Non, merci, Vorognonoff! 

IN 1929 FELICIEN CHAMPSAUR, a Rabelaisian author of much pulp fiction, published Nora, la guenon devenue femme (Nora the She-Monkey Becomes a Woman). The cover illustration of Champsaur's book featured a svelte black woman wearing nothing but a banana skirt, looking not unlike the African American entertainer Josephine Baker, who, just a few years earlier, had taken Paris by storm. Champsaur opened his novel with the image of a half-naked Nora, dancing with unbridled energy at the Folies-Bergere. At the end of the performance a celebrated politician, baffled by Nora's antics and appearance, queried a scientist in attendance: "Is she a woman or an animal?" The scientist replied, "Call her a she-monkey who became a woman, and you will be correct." (1) Indeed, Nora was a "she-monkey" who had become a woman: she was born of a union between a man and a monkey. When the monkey Nora was two years of age scientists implanted into her the ovaries of a Russian ex-princess and the pineal gland of a man. To the delight and expectations of scientists, Nora evolved into a brown-skinned woman--symbolically, Josephine Baker.

Champsaur's novel deserves attention if only for its bizarre, unreal, racist parody of Baker. To study Champsaur's racism would certainly contribute to our understanding of the contours of the interwar French mentality. Perhaps, though, a more expansive contribution to historical scholarship can be made. The cultural historian Robert Darnton has claimed that when we examine a document "where it is most opaque, we may be able to unravel an alien system of meaning." (2) Champsaur's novel truly opens to us an alien world of interwar beliefs and anxieties not only about race but also about rejuvenation and sexuality.

In fact, Champsaur's roman a clef is an exaggerated, fictive account of the real Serge Voronoff (1866-1951) and his actual medical experiments in France in the 1920s. Voronoff, a naturalized Russian Jewish emigre, invented and practiced a method of rejuvenation by grafting monkey testicles into the scrotum of senile, often impotent, men. His patients, he claimed, regained their youthful vigor in more ways than one. Voronoff was an international celebrity, training numerous doctors and having his scientific studies translated into several languages. Holding a post at the College de France, Voronoff was a serious, albeit controversial, scientist who attempted to advance science but who practiced weird medicine, even by contemporary standards.

Scholars have turned their attention to the rejuvenation movement in recent years, and its place in the development of modern medical science is well understood. (3) However, the cultural meanings that nonscientists invested in such scientific achievements have not been adequately examined. In this essay I argue that in French popular culture--newspapers, literature, and iconography--writers and artists represented rejuvenation by using a literary metaphor: the Faustian myth. When Voronoff's experiments made Faust's quest for a long life and perpetual sensual pleasure an ostensible reality for all, the popular media of the day celebrated but ultimately rejected the practice. This rejection demonstrated a conservative approach to the human life cycle, insisting that people should gracefully accept the consequences of aging. The response also reflected a fear of racialized sexuality and miscegenation, since monkeys were closely associated with blacks in the social imagination of the interwar French.

The annual fall meeting of the Congres francais de chirurgie was not typically fodder for sensational news coverage, let alone international attention. Indeed, few could have expected any popular response at all to Serge Voronoff's October 7, 1919, research paper on rejuvenating farm animals, namely, rams and goats. Voronoff had been experimenting for a couple of years on barnyard animals, grafting the testicles of young animals into old ones and observing the results. At the surgical congress he announced that his method was efficacious: "interstitial glands," that is, testicular glands, were shown to make an old ram young again, improving health and vigor and lengthening life expectancy. What caught the imagination of all, though, was the idea that this work could be extended to humans. Le Petit Parisien, a popular daily, reported on October 8 that "the entire human race would profit from the success of Mr. Voronoff's projects, since he is able to obtain as brilliant results in operating on old men and grafting into them a monkey gland.... If their insertion into our system, under the scalpel of Dr. Voronoff, gives back to our tired organisms youth and vigor, long live the interstitial glands!" (4)

In 1919 Voronoff had not yet experimented on humans, although others had done so in the United States, before the war and to little fanfare. (5) But 1919 was clearly not like any other year: less than a year after the guns of war fell silent Europe was exhausted, physically and morally. The Great War had cost millions of lives for no tangible purpose. Lands were devastated, treasuries were emptied, and the flu was taking new lives every day. But there was peace, precarious though it was. And with peace people danced, sang, and tenuously began to exhibit the joie de vivre of both the emerging cult of youth and the excesses that would give the 1920s its sobriquet: "les annees folles," the crazy years. Voronoff's announcement, literally locating the fountain of youth in the gonads, resonated with those who were too aged to enjoy the peace. Or did it?